Track 2: Cultivating Culture for Optimum Firm Growth

Transcription:

Randy Crabtree (00:08):

Thanks everybody for being here today. We are talking about, oh really, this is what I'm doing? No. Are we talking about cultivating culture for optimum firm growth? We're actually going to talk about culture and how it affects everything. I wish I could see you, but these lights are really, really bright, so I believe you're out there. Elisha warned me ahead of time and wasn't that panel awesome this morning? I mean, come on, come on. That was great. They did an awesome job and one of the things they did bring in often is culture, how important culture is. So we're going to talk about that there. I'm not going to read all that. I'm very fortunate. I get to do a lot of things in this profession and I love this profession, this profession's awesome. It's done great things for me and I try to give back any way I can.

(01:02):

I talk about things that I think are important for the profession. Hopefully you believe they're important too. Hopefully you get something out of it. That's the goal here, but honestly, I enjoy it. So hopefully you do too. I want to point out one thing because we're at a conference today, right? Everybody knows that. Okay, we're at the conference today. I'm part of an organization called the Accounting Cornerstone Foundation Accounting. Anybody hear of it? All right, nice. Accounting Cornerstone Foundation is an organization that gives scholarships for individuals to attend their very first accounting conference. That's a culture builder. To me, conferences have been unbelievably important in my life, and so if we can send people to a conference that they don't have an opportunity to do it on their own, we do that. So I just wanted to point that out. That's probably the one thing on there.

(01:52):

Well, can I brag a second? I was top 100 most influential people in the county in this last year. Sorry, I can't help myself, so I'll do one more brag here in a second. So I apologize for that. What are we learning today? We're learning about culture, the importance of culture, why we should care about culture. We're going to talk about culture tools. I'm going to say culture a lot. I'm going to say passion a lot too, most likely, and we're going to talk about people. I think too often we probably, and sorry, I'll probably pace as we go, but too often as a profession, and we heard it this morning, it's very easy for us to be client-centric. It's easy when we start for sure. Clients are the most important thing. Clients don't matter honestly, clients are all over. You can get clients. What matters is the people.

(02:44):

And creating a culture is a place where you're going to attract people, you're going to retain people, you're going to have fun. They're going to feel appreciated. They're going to just enjoy. You're going to bring joy to accounting like Kristen Keats likes to say. And so that's why culture is so important. But we're going to talk about the Ps. We have to develop a plan to put the right people, processes, pricing, products in place. I don't know who wrote this, I didn't to achieve your goals. And so those are some of the things we'll talk about. I'll go on tangents. We probably won't go to everything. I like getting into stories. I'll try to speed it up. Last brag, I told you one more brag.

(03:28):

Trier's, our company. We are a specialty tax firm. For the last two years, we've been listed as one of the fastest growing privately held companies in the US by Inc. Magazine. I brag on that because of the people I work with and the people we support, which is the accounting profession. But I also want you to know that because I think this doesn't happen without the culture that we've put in place. This doesn't happen. There's no way we get to the point we are now without culture. So culture somebody, this is be like a Bob Newhart thing. Every time I say culture, you have to drink. So we don't have any alcohol though, huh? I guess tonight.

(04:07):

All right, so building that culture for sustained growth. This is the firm growth forum. We're going to talk about growth. I'm going to weave growth in here, but culture is the most important thing. Culture fuels growth. It's not the client base, it's not any of that. It's the culture that does this. And culture in my mind is ground zero for everything. Without culture, we can be successful. We can build something that's never going to be the thing of our dreams. Like you heard this morning, people are building the firm of their dreams, what they want, not what somebody else wants for them. Culture, I believe is a base for that. I'm really, I was going to say I'm really important. That's not what I was saying. I amuse myself too. I'm really, I get to go out and talk about mental health, which Amber does as well.

(05:01):

And Amber said her here, everybody needs to talk to her at some point. Mental health and burnout in the profession. I get to go and do this and I talk about that and things we can do and how we can solve it and how we can be better and work less, make more, be more profitable, all this stuff. And then I started thinking about it. So what's really the key to all that? Where is ground zero to avoid burnout? And I kept coming back to culture. Culture is the thing. And so I started getting really passionate about culture then, because if we build the right culture, everything else falls in place. When I started thinking about culture, I was like, well, what is culture? How do you define culture? I can't. I just can't. I can see it. I know it's good. I know it works. I can look at it and say, yeah, that's a good culture, but how do you define what a good culture is? So my friend and I chat, GPT, we were talking one day and we were going back and forth for about four hours and I wanted to, I'm passionate about culture drink.

(06:07):

So we were going back and forth for a half a day and I wanted one sentence and I couldn't find anything. And finally what we came up with, my buddy and I came up with weak cultures, rely on rules. While strong cultures rely on relationships, I like this. Doesn't mean you have to. This is where I go right now. The cultures are relationships. We build a good culture. We're building good relationships with the people we work with, with our client base. We want to have clients we enjoy working with. As Elisha told us this morning, and even the ones we do enjoy, but they don't fit our mold, we don't work with them because that's going to hurt our culture. And so I told Elisha I'd talk about her a few times today. She didn't ask me to that. I just love everything she does, so I can't help myself.

(06:55):

But think about that. Weak cultures are built on rules. What are we as a profession? We're all about rules. I mean, everything we do is a rule. I mean there's tax rules. I do tax. I don't do accounting and auditing and all that, but I know there's things that are rules. There is that accounting gap, other things that are rules. And so it's easy for us to rely on rules. It's simple. This is us, this is what we do. But when we do that, I think it's too easy to forget about the relationship, the people part, the reality of that we're not working with machines, although Karen to Liz, it won't be long. Machines will be doing our job and she's probably right, but at this point, and we do need to be nice to the machines. They will take over if we're not. And so we have to build the relationships.

(07:49):

Relationships is where everything starts. And I have another definition of culture in here. Culture definition to me is completely evolving. I learned from you all the time. If you have another definition afterwards, you want to talk about, I love to hear what culture means to you and what your definition of culture is, because believe me, it'll be in the next presentation then. Alright, so what is culture? I decide. Let's at least try to see what other people say. Culture is. What is the definition of culture in the business standpoint? And I'm going to read this, I hate reading slides, but I'm going to do it. Culture is the collective behavior, values and beliefs that shape how a company operates. I think that's good. I don't like the definition, but I think that says what culture is. That's putting us in a position to do what we want.

(08:38):

A healthy culture is vital for employees wellbeing and employees wellbeing, again, they're number one clients. There's so many clients out there, you don't need to deal with a client that's a pain in the butt because you can replace them in an instant. You can't. As we heard this morning, as Aaron said, Aaron, right? I got the name right, okay. It said, you find a good person, you hire my philosophy too. Culture is about the people you find. Alright, I'm already on tangents, but that's all right. I'm having fun. Hopefully you are. So it's about the people. I personally, if there's a good person and they want to come work with us, the role will find them or they'll find the role. You don't have to be defined by a job title or letters after your name or your experience. Are you good? Are you a good person?

(09:28):

Okay, great. Then we can figure out what's going to happen. I'll have some stories about that as well. So employees wellbeing is important. Leadership qualities with, oh, there's Miguel. Nice. He's got a good culture too. We can talk about that. Leadership qualities, what's important, how do you be a good leader? Culture just doesn't happen. It just doesn't. You just don't sit back and it's like, okay, hey, yeah, this culture thing is nice. How did that happen? It's intentional. You have to be purposeful. I think I got that right about cultivating the culture. You have to have an idea. And let me tell you where this came in my life. First story, the story alert. So I decided after two other short careers that I should have been a CPA. And so after a year of being a computer programmer, I didn't like it. I can't sit at the desk that long.

(10:24):

Yeah, so I became a CPA because tax seasons you never sit at your desk. But then I went into sales for a year and I was terrible at it, but I had this bright idea. I had, Hey, remember that one accounting class I had in undergrad? I really, really liked that. How come I didn't take anymore? And all of a sudden it was just like I need to be a CPA. It just out of nowhere, I have to be a CPA if there was no other choice. And I quit my job, went back to school full time, got enough hours to take the CPA exam and went into public accounting. The goal immediate was four years I'm going to work for, believe me, there's a point to the story. Four years after working for someone else, I'm going to start my own firm. That was the goal.

(11:05):

I don't set goals. That's probably one of the only goals I ever set as a company. We set goals. There's other people that love goals and processes and procedures. I don't, I hate KPIs and all that stuff, but you need that person and then you got to find that right person for that place, that role, that thing within the company. Back to the story. So I decided I wanted to be a CPA, went to work for a firm, small firm because I'm going to start my own firm. I need to know everything. Somebody that allowed me to do audit, which I hate and tax, which I love and everything else in between. And it was a great organization, small two partners, they're awesome people. And after two years it was like, okay, I got to go work for somewhere else. I got to find out if what I'm doing here is correct, I got to go find out of how other people do this.

(11:52):

So I went to this other firm in Chicago. That's where I live. You couldn't tell how I said Chicago, could you that I live in Chicago. So I went to Chicago and work into Chicago. There was red flags pretty early on in this firm, small firm, three partners, all family members. I'm sure Aaron, I mean he doesn't work with all family members. They had a lot of family members. This was father and two son partners, two sons were fine managing partner. The father just was not little micromanaging, little big micromanager for me. And I just couldn't deal with that. And it came to a head one day. I started there maybe in October. I'm in January and this is where culture comes for me. I was there in January and he and I were out in audit six o'clock at night. We finished it. It was six blocks from the office. I start walking back to the office. He hails a cab. He says, where are you going? I said, I'm going to walk back. He looked at me and he goes, get in the effing cab now.

(12:53):

Like what the heck just happened? I was in a daze and I'm sure you've all dealt with worse than this. I've heard stories, but for me this was, I couldn't deal with it. So I finished the day up at the office, went home, talked to my wife. Hopefully I did. I'm sure I did. And I discussed, what am I going to do? I can't work for this guy. Came up with a plan, went back to the office the next morning, organized my files, wrote notes on 'em all. Had a nice orderly desk, which I never do. Had a nice orderly desk. Walked out at lunch, got on a train, went home, called one of the other partners and said, Hey, just so you know, I can't deal with your dad. I'm not coming back. He seemed to understand and no job. That same day I called the old firm I was with and I said, Hey, I just want to let you guys know I get emotional a lot.

(13:50):

I very well could get emotional with this. I just want to let you know I left that other firm immediate. You want to come back here? It gives me goosebumps right now. I'll be there tomorrow. That felt, I felt valued. I felt important. I felt like it was somebody that really wanted me there and valued what I offered for them. And right then and there, I decided when I have my own firm, that was still the goal. When I have my own firm, I'm going to have not rules, but I'm going to have things in place to define our culture. We're going to simple things. Honestly, I don't want have people come in on the weekend during tax season. Well, that's what we did. I did the stupid thing and I worked Saturdays and Sundays, which is stupid, but I didn't want other people to do that.

(14:43):

And so I started making all these ideas, this is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to create a culture. This is how we're going to value the people. This is how people are going to enjoy being here. And I did that. I wasn't good at it. I did it wrong, but at least I started thinking through that process. I had that firm for 16 years. I sold that in oh six. And at the same time I had a real estate development firm where our culture there was drinking beer and we were really good at it, but there was more of a comradery there. And that's the point. The drinking beer, sure. But we were hanging out together. We were having fun. We were enjoying everybody's company and it was an exciting business to be in. And in 2006, I sold my accounting firm to concentrate on the real estate development firm.

(15:26):

And then the real estate development firm got sold five months later. And I didn't expect that. I wasn't thinking that was going to happen. And then I had no job. And that's where Trier came out of. And Trier, we really dug into culture. Culture has to be the thing. And from day one, we honestly hired good people. Like I said, I am way off script here. Good people, like I said. And we honestly, I look back, I said we probably could have done anything. We picked specialty techs, but we had good people. We had things in place. We were able to do this. We could have decided we were going to be a, I don't even know, a consultant on loans for dentist office. I mean anything because we had the right people in place. So that's important. So as a leader though, back to leader, intentional has to be intentional as a leader, you have to be vulnerable.

(16:17):

I'll share stories all the time of me not knowing something. Me being, me being, I mean when I talk about mental health, I tell people I am a mental illness survivor. That one gets me. I'm a mental illness survivor and I am. We won't go into that story now. It's well passed now. But being vulnerable, letting people know it's okay to share that you're going through something, you've gone through something because everybody always thinks, and Elisha talked about this morning that, hey, other people have issues, other people have dealt with this. And so if you can do that, that just creates a culture where people feel they can be open, be empathetic and compassion. Somebody said compassion this morning. I thought, yeah, that's another thing I need to put in there. Empathetic be what are they dealing with? What are they going through? Even if they're not telling me, I want to think about that and then be transparent.

(17:05):

I'll probably talk about these a little bit as we go, assuming that I don't run out of time, which I will, but be transparent. That's important. We as a company took us a long time to do this. So believe me, a lot of false starts a lot of mistakes and that was really hard for me to do this at first, but just starting to share all the financial numbers with everybody we work with. It's important. It's unbelievable how invested everybody gets when they know what's going on, the good times and the bad times. We've had some really good times. We're actually going through a little bit of a bad time. I just preface that a lot. We are going through a bad time. We chewed through $3 million in cash in the first quarter of this year because of those things that IRS is doing, some things that Congress is doing or not doing.

(17:51):

And so we're open about that. We're letting people know, be transparent. They rally around it. They all feel like this is their business because of the culture that we've built. It's essential for wellbeing. It's essential for retaining employees. If you build a culture that people feel respected, feel valued, feel like they're important, feel like they make a difference in the company, they're not going to go 17 years in business. We're at 70 people now. I think the number is seven people in 17 years have voluntarily left. I think that's a pretty good retention rate. That's why I think cultures behind that because the culture we built is good. Seven people in 17 years. Does that sound good? Does anybody think it sounds good? I do. I wasn't. You didn't need that. I just want raise of hands would've been fine. But to me, so what's the benefit? And we're going to talk about growth. You can grow pretty well if you don't lose people. You grow just from the standpoint you can grow the bottom line, the cost to replace one person, 50 to 200% of their salary to replace them. That's a big deal. Now there's some people we've asked to help them to be successful elsewhere.

(19:04):

We've had a few of that, but not a lot of those either. We have a, I don't know if this is the way to say it, but our culture, part of it is, at least we say this internally, tell me if this sounds bad. We have a no jerk policy when we hire somebody. There's no jerks allowed you cause any friction, any, we don't deal with office politics or anything like that. So we're actually pretty quick to part ways. If we see anything like that, there's one red flag, there's going to be a lot more. And so that's a culture killer. If you can stop that before it's spreads, it's like a disease that's important because one person talks and then they start getting the other people riled up and start killing the culture. So employee retention, engagement, client satisfaction, employees are happy, clients are happy. This is where clients come in now we've made employees happy, they're enjoying it. Now we get client satisfaction and overall performance. Performance doesn't mean I'm going to put in a hundred hours a week. Performance just means we're more efficient, we're getting more done, we're enjoying what we're doing and that happens. So those are some of the essentials for growth.

(20:14):

Positive culture is that just, I kind of said this though, the values, the goals, but this is an important one. Promote inclusivity and diversity. I said it right, nice promote that because this is a mistake. We did not do this from day one. The first 10 employees that we hired probably were clones of me and there's no way you can be successful if you have clones of me right now, I'll tell you, if everybody in your company was me, you'd go nowhere. And that's kind of what we did. And so as we got intentional about hiring, making sure, and when I say diversity, it's everything. It's where somebody grew up. It's their beliefs, their education, their values, whatever. It's everything you think about. Diversity is extremely important. And so we started to get more intentional about that. And what happened was, I'll give you the short version of this, and I think it's laid, it is right here. Actually, Clifton Strengths Finders, anybody who've done this, Clifton StrengthsFinder. This was really awesome deal. This to me, this was a culture builder.

(21:27):

We do two events a year. I didn't even say this at the beginning. We're a remote company. It's 70 people and we're remote around the country and every time I present on things, culture or whatever, well you can't do that in a remote company. How do you do that? You can't create a culture, believe me, you can. Again, these are the things we do that I think have done it. But we did the Clifton strengths finder and I would suggest everybody do this. One of our retreats, which we do two a year and everybody goes to treat, everybody stays at the hotel during the retreat time because everybody wants to hang out together. Sorry. There was an inside joke there and when we were there, we did the Cliftons ranks finder. The first time we did it, boom, everybody found out what you were. I was an influencer accounting today. Got it. Right.

(22:26):

But you had the doers, the Get Crap done group. You had the influencers, you had the strategic thinkers and you had the relationship builders. Well, we really didn't know what that meant that first time. So six months later we had someone come out and they did a session with us and at the end of it, what they did, and this is so impactful, so meaningful, it's like I can't even describe what this meant to me. At the end of that session, learning all about their personalities and their strengths, not weaknesses. The strength find is not about weaknesses. You don't have any weaknesses. You just have things that are stronger than another. Boom, every group went to a corner of the room and then we talked amongst ourself and what do we do? How do we help others? How do they help us? And then we looked and this is where I got the clone of me thing. If everybody was over there with me, we got nothing. I need these people, this group, we have no revenue without the Get Crap Done group. What is it called? Does somebody actually know what it's called? We're going to go with Get Crap Done Group.

(23:32):

Without the Strategic Thinkers, what's new services? What are we going to do? How are we going to be more efficient? And without the relationship builders, there was nothing. We didn't have a company without that. And seeing the diversity in that, even within each group, there's diversity in the root, but then this was amazing. And so that right there, I can't stress enough of doing something like that with your teams because it'll stick with me that forever and honestly, half the time I talk about it, I cry. It was just such an emotional experience. So doing that, focusing on strengths, not weaknesses, allowing people to find their role, like I said, and then encouraging ideas. Another culture builder I think is allowing people to make decisions that affect the company, not just allowing leadership to make decisions. And so here's an example of I think a culture builder.

(24:27):

Yeah, we're never going to get through this whole presentation, but we're having fun. I am so, all right. I hate saying this word because they're such a bad connotation or these words, but employee retention credit, when that came out, I got addicted to it immediately. We've been around forever, but especially tax firm R&D tax credit, they came out, it's like, I got to learn more about this. It was an amazing program until people screwed it up. And now I'm afraid those people that screwed it up are trying to go screw up R&D tax credits as well. So be careful because I think some of these mills might be going towards that. In fact, Miguel, I think you've said that to me today too, didn't you? Yeah, I think that's a problem. And so when a RC came out, I learned everything within two months.

(25:10):

I was educating people on it and my plan was, let's just outsource this service to someone else. We don't have the, I hate this word but bandwidth to do it, but a new person in our company was there six months, probably less. He said, Randy, no, no, we got to do this. We have to do this as a service. I'm like, I don't do anything, so if you want to get this done, you can run the program. He said, I'll do it over the weekend he set up a credit model. Within a week we were able to start promoting this service. I don't know the numbers, but let's say over a three year period there's 35 million in revenue. That's because he felt open to come to me and say, we have to do this. And he and people have great ideas. You create a culture where people feel they can share their ideas.

(25:59):

That's what happened to me. That's so cool. Encouraging people to find their roles is another thing that is in culture. He came in as a salesperson, ends up his role is running new service projects. We now have renewable energy tax credits and he got passionate about that and now he's running that. And without him and another gentleman that came in, we wouldn't have that service, but they were so passionate about it, we got to do this as well. So amazing things come out of if you create an environmental culture where people feel they can share their ideas and then people make your firm, obviously you get the point of that already.

(26:40):

Make a positive culture. Different people obviously make it richer. Have fun. We have fun. Those company outings we do twice a year. It's a little bit of education on what we're doing, talking about the company itself. But other than that, it's team building. It's just we're hanging out, we're having fun. We're maybe doing a charitable building, bikes for kids type of thing, that kind of stuff. But we always have fun. And then make sure you focus on strengths. Don't like, Hey, you're not good at this. Get better. No, no, you're really good at this. Why don't we give you more of that to do instead of you need to get better at this. I'm not good at this because I hate it. Why would I do this? I'm not going to do an audit. I don't like that. I'm not going to do taxes either.

(27:27):

I don't like that anymore. I like speaking. I'm going to do that, so I'm going to concentrate on what I enjoy. And then that hopefully you can find that intersection between your passion and your skills. And when you do that, I mean I'm living, I can't imagine the life that I have right now. It's just unbelievable because I decided seven years ago, I'm not going to be a managing partner anymore. It's just a role that I couldn't take on anymore. I wasn't passionate about it. I didn't enjoy it, but I didn't know what I was going to do. Allowing people to decide what they want to do creates a culture that you're just going to get so much out of. We made the change. Andy who started Trier with me became managing partner. I floundered for a couple years. I was still dealing with some mental issues.

(28:15):

I had a stroke 10 years ago. I'll give you the short story. 10 stroke 10 years ago and after that stroke, I struggled mentally for a while and I was still at that point struggling, but in my mind, my identity was managing partner. If I'm not managing partner, when am I? That did not define me at all. And that's what we got to stop thinking. Are we defined by our job title? We're not because too often we think that about the people we're working with and at the time, I've got this later, but the bottom line is that change and to becoming a managing partner, he's a geek in my mind from a process procedure, KPI, all that stuff he loves. To me, I don't like that, but he loves that and we needed that at the leadership level. I was the, Hey, I love everybody and let's just have fun.

(28:59):

And that didn't get us very far. We were probably 1.7 million at that time, which is a decent company. Six years later we were 20 million because he got in the right role, I got in the right role and then we started realizing we should make sure everybody else finds the role that suits them. So focus on strengths, not weaknesses. Let's talk about some tools that you can do. One thing I want to talk about is I think it's important to have a culture code. And I'm guessing not anybody does. Does anybody in here have a culture code? Anytime I ask, I don't think I've ever seen a hand go up and I don't expect a hand to go up any culture codes. I think you should define it. It's not set in stone. It changes. It's evolving. I want mine to evolve all the time. This was another four hour session with my friend on the computer chat, GPT.

(29:51):

We went back and forth and let's define our culture code. I would give inputs like this is what I want. This is what I think people need. This is why people important. So I'm going to read this real quick. Our purpose is to create a welcoming environment where individuals feel valued. I've said that a hundred times. Valued, supported, and free to express their ideas as they join. This is a little corny, join our team of friends, but I truly feel like everybody I work with all 69 other people, our friends, every time we get together as a group, I cry. I get so emotional because they're just such amazing people. And so I really look at, we should call it a family, not a group of friends. But then maybe it sounds cultish or something. So we won't do that. We'll stick with friends. We strive to cultivate the culture of inclusivity and acceptance.

(30:34):

I said inclusivity. Again, that's three times now in this session where everyone can be their authentic selves without fear of judgment. So many people are one thing at the office and another thing at home and they don't bring their home person to the office. And I think that's so important to integrate both. We believe in recognizing and rewarding the contributions of each team member. More of we prioritize work-life balance. It's not mythical, it's real. You can do it work-life balance is a real thing. And provide flexibility for individual to live their lives on their own terms.

Audience Member  (31:08):

Life work, balance

Randy Crabtree (31:09):

Life, work balance. Okay, we're going to change it. See, I learn every time we do this, remind me that we're going to change that to life work balance. Alright, I'm going to talk to chat and we'll see if there's even a better term. We empower our employees to integrate their professional and personal aspiration seamlessly. Furthermore, we encourage and celebrate pursuing passions within both within their organization and beyond. We support individuals in exploring new roles or even making significant career transitions. Transitions. I told you we lost seven people in 17 years. The last two people, we lost one guy. Awesome. I keep saying guy. We do have a lot of women too. And I'll talk about Haley in a second. Actually, he I think has an engineering degree. He had a law degree. He was working with us 35 years old I'm guessing, and decided he wanted to go to medical school.

(32:08):

We celebrated that. That's huge. Yeah, we're losing a great employee, but we celebrate and he felt comfortable because of our culture of telling us six months ahead of time, Hey, I just want to let you know this is going to happen. I want you to have time to plan and prepare for me leaving. That's pretty awesome. And then when it came time to go to medical school, he actually said, you know what? I have extra time. Is it okay if I work? Yes, it's definitely okay. So that's one person we lost. But we celebrate the fact that he's following his passion. Passion. I want to say that a hundred times today. He's following his passion. Another individual lawyer. Too many lawyers obviously on our staff it sounds like. Where's Terrell? We probably need his help with dealing with all these lawyers. But he decided he wanted to go teach in law school.

(33:04):

What did we do? Yeah, we're sad. He's leaving. Celebrate it. That's his fallenness passion. That's what he wants to do. And so making career transitions, we support that our commitment lies and foster an environment where people can flourish and follow their dreams. Whether they lie within our company or extend beyond it. That's our code. It's an evolving thing. Every time I do this, I ask for people for advice after we're done here today, I tell people in the company, this is just something that my friend and I wrote and we can change it later. So they can always add to this or adjust it. But I think it's important. I think you need to do that. You know what the last slide we talked about integrating your outside the work passions inside of the office. I'm assuming, I'm hoping a lot of people know John Garrett.

(33:49):

I see a show of hands. Alright, if you don't know John Garrett, have you never read his book? Shame on You. You have to John's book, what's your and is all about the importance of passions outside of work passions and celebrating people's outside of work passions. We do that constantly. We on calls people, we have team calls actually on teams. Team calls on teams. That's redundant. Somebody at the end of those calls gets to share 10 or 15 minutes about themselves. We want to learn about them. We want to know who they are, what they do, what they love, what their passions are. Without that, I wouldn't know that our head of marketing is an unbelievable artists that has artwork in galleries and museums. I went and learned that one of our project managers used to race motorcycles. I wouldn have learned that one of our business development people plays the fiddle in a band. All these things you learn about people is so amazing. And so that's what John's book is about is allowing people to be their authentic self. One last, can we adjust this time so I get an extra 15 minutes?

(34:59):

We've got 15 minutes to go. One of the things I want to put on this slide, this is unbelievable. I don't want you to have a goal of this, but I want you to start with 40 seconds. And I'm guessing a lot of you do this already. There's some study out there, and I can't remember John told me this, but there's a study out there that shows that all it takes is 40 seconds of true interaction with somebody you work with for them to feel a positive impact, a sense of belonging and valued. So instead of getting the F in cab, it could be, Hey Randy, yeah, no, you should walk to the office because I know you really like exercising this. Or someone comes in the office Monday morning and Liz comes in and I know Liz went for a hike that weekend. They were going to go up in the mountains and I go to Liz, Hey Liz, how was that hike?

(35:55):

Tell me about it. I really want to know how things went and did you enjoy it? And would you recommend it? Having that true interaction, 40 seconds makes somebody feel valued and belong. That's all it takes. Now the goal is not to hit your clock and okay, 40 seconds is up. Sorry I got to go to the office. But just be intentional about communicating with the people you work with. That affects the culture positively. We already talked about boundaries this morning. It's so important. You can't let clients, you let clients run your firm. The culture is killed immediately. There is no culture because the culture is now whatever the clients say the culture should be. So don't do that. They talked about this morning, that panel was unbelievable. They talked though about setting boundaries. That setting time don't be on 24 7. All those things affect a positive culture.

(36:50):

These tools we talked about a little bit already. I do want to bring up that retreat we talked about. We do it twice a year. That has such an impact on culture. And then people ask, well how much does that cost? Costs 150,000 every time we do it or whatever the numbers are. Remember, I don't really look at numbers or anything, don't do what I do, but know that the people at the firm do the right thing. So if that helps a culture and that helps us not lose anybody. I mean we've saved so much money by spending that money. It's unbelievable by creating that culture. So do that. Have regular feedback mechanisms. Allow people to share anything they want with you. And a lot of times, and I think I owe you some information on this, but we allow people to share what's going on.

(37:49):

If they're dealing with something anonymous, you can do anonymous surveys, just finding out what's going on. Just because I think the culture's good doesn't mean you all think the culture's good. And so what are we doing wrong? We want to know that it's not just all rah rah, look at us. We're great. Everything's awesome. No, it's awesome because you're here and it's awesome because you have ideas and share those ideas. And if you're not comfortable sharing those ideas directly to anybody, let's do it anonymous and we can find out if there's things we're doing wrong. So team building activities, all that is important.

(38:21):

Self-care promoting self-care. We promote this. You can't expect people to sit at their desk eight hours a day even. You can't. It's not a thing. Your brain doesn't work, it doesn't work on that nonstop stress of need to work, work, work, work, work. You actually are more productive if you take time off. And don't believe me. You can look up some am. You may know. Am I right? Yes. See, she's really smart. What's that? Neuroscience. Neuroscience. So look up some neuroscience. The more rest you give your brain, the more productive you're going to be. So take walks on my, we promote and I live this. My calendar shows 10:00 AM 2:00 PM walk. It's on the calendar. That's what I do because it's 15 minutes. But you do it. I tell everybody that all the time in the business because you want to set an example, you don't want to set the example of sending the email at five in the morning so you do the right way.

(39:26):

You don't want to set example of emailing on the weekends. So you set the example of, Hey, I'm taking time off. You need to take time off too. We have unlimited PTO. We almost often have to force people to use it. Like no, no, no, you use it, that's fine, don't save it. Whatever. There's time you take it. You know what you need to get done, you get it done. That's another thing we can talk about is billable hours. Those are awful. But we could talk about, I think I actually have it in here. So there's some promote self-care. Those are things that you can do. I'm not going to read through the list. I think all have access to this. Is there an app where this is on? I should know that Danielle, sorry that I said that I should know that there's an app, but I'm sure it's on the app.

(40:15):

Foster a positive culture. Give spaces where people can go and relax and don't judge people if they're in the relaxation room. Encourage people to go do that. Encourage them to talk to how much innovation probably happens when people are in, we don't have halls but we're on teams are on the teams call and they're just talking and the things they come up with. I mean that's not wasted time. That's how we have two new service lines that we didn't have four years ago because people talk about and they gets passionate about and they, so that develops a culture. That develops growth. That hits the bottom line.

(40:51):

Alright, this is the last section. I'm actually not bad on time. Look at that. I could have went into more stories and I started getting nervous. We're going to run out of time. We're going to add more stories here in a minute then. So there's a seven cylinder growth engine. You have to have a name for something. So this is just seven things. That's a pretty fancy name, isn't it? Seven cylinder. That'd be a terrible car, wouldn't it? I mean I think you need an even number of cylinders, but we're going to have a seven cylinder growth engine. This is how we grew. This is things that we did. This is how we went from 1.7 million to 20 million in a six year timeframe. One because we got me out of the way. And that's important. Honestly. It is important. It is important to allow, and I've said this multiple times, people to define their own role and I thought my role was managing partner and I probably was hurting in the culture.

(41:44):

I probably was because I was not setting this up for success. I was setting up, like I said before for fun, but success wasn't there when Andy, he can be the bad guy and he's not. He's a good guy. But he can be the guy that you still have to have accountability. I know I sound like I'm, oh hey, let me dovey. Everything's good. There's still accountability there. People still have to get their job done, but we don't have a problem with that. People do their work. So what are these things that we did? I told you we talk about time ditch time tracking, even if you don't bill by the hour. Oh, I get so passionate about this. Time tracking is such a waste of time. I mean honestly, how much time does somebody take tracking time? Even if it's 5% of their time, which I wouldn't be surprised if it is.

(42:31):

How much more productive can you be if you're not doing that? And then whether you hear from people, well, how am I going to know if I'm profitable if I don't track time, even if I'm billing by the hour? How am I going to know if I'm profitable? We're all smart people. There's ways to figure this out. The bottom line, look at the bottom line each week or each month or whatever you want to do. Your accountants, you probably have good financial statements. Believe me, I didn't when I did my own books, but I am telling you to do what, right? Not what I do. So look at the bottom line. AI out there. I win. Who's here? I've talked to her. My mind just blank. Her name Ellen talked about. She said they're trying to work things in like that where they can determine productivity on a job without having to track time.

(43:18):

So Dick's time tracking. It's just so negative. Anybody love time tracking? Do you think anybody that works with you love time tracking? Everybody hates it. That's a culture killer right there. It is. And I know there's some things maybe you have to, maybe there's a special project. You have to, I just say do everything you possibly can to get rid of time tracking. In my opinion, that's the biggest culture killer that we have is tracking time. Now there's others, but I like to at least make a statement. That's the biggest one we have. Alright, so how do you bill instead? Well, Ron Baker's here tomorrow. I think he's going to be talking about subscription pricing. I think that's a great opportunity. They talked about subscription pricing this morning. I think that's awesome. What have we done from day one? It's value billing. I think with tax it's easier to value Bill.

(44:07):

We're all tax credits. It's really easy for us to value Bill because we know what we've saved clients. But value billing is so important and as we everybody's converting into advisory, everybody's doing this as you're converting to advisory, you can build in the value to that a lot. You can show what the value is, especially on the tax end, but other ends of things as well. So value bills, subscription pricing is probably even more important for a lot of firms. But those are the types of things we need to do. I'll tell you the people that I've talked to, there's a bug. The people that I've talked to that have done that transition profitability has gone through the roof. You've probably seen that, right? Elisha, we have a friend, Don Brolin, who also did that. Kristen did that.

(44:58):

I'm sure many of you who's subscription pricing in here? Okay, that's look at this and profitability go up when this happened. Alright, everybody there? We have a hundred percent. Yes. That went up. So look at subscription pricing. I think that's so important. Virtual people don't want to be in the office all the time. I have, I do this presentation and there's somebody that looks like me, 60 plus been in the business for a while and they say, well, how can we be a virtual organization? How can I train any, I don't know whose voice this is, but how can I train anybody if they're not in the office? How am I going to train them to be able to communicate with a client? And I'm like, that's not going to happen anymore. The new generation of business owners don't want that. Your new employees don't want that.

(45:52):

Why do you think it's, and I'm guessing a lot of you are virtual or at least partially virtual. Why do you want to have an office space? People don't want that. That's going to be a positive thing. Yes, it's important to get together. It's important to do things whether it's remote activities or in-person activities. But consider become a virtual. Every single firm that I've ever talked to that has done it, it has been a positive impact. Three minutes. So my buddy Josh Lance, who unfortunately passed away last year had such an impact on my life because he was one of the first people I interviewed on the unique CPA podcast, which I'm sure you all subscribe to and listen to. Thank you. I appreciate it. And everything that I'm talking about right now, he did. And one of the things that, I mean they value bill, they subscription price.

(46:41):

They were virtual, no time tracking. And what he told me was, we probably can charge three to four times what someone else does on the same project because of everything we instilled because we're a niche practice. That's another one important one, which I'm unfortunately not going to get to if I don't hurry. That's important. And so they did all that in unbelievably profitable business. Be transparent. We talked about this. That is so important. You have to do this. You have to be transparent. We do a quarterly state of the union and this last one we talked about the, hey, we ate through $3 million in cash in the first quarter. Be transparent. Let people know that it's most likely going to come in in the third and fourth quarters. But it's tough right now. Don't hide that. Let people railing around what you're doing. Redefine roles.

(47:35):

Allow people to do that. We've already mentioned it, but I think it's so important. Learn from your clients. We are a sally industry, same as last year. We do this all the time. Hey, this is how it's always been done 80 years ago, remember we were doing this 80 years ago this way. Why? Damn, we're still doing it now. This is so great. It's worked for 80 years. Look at other industries, see what they're doing. That creates a culture. That creates firm growth. Two of my friends, Kenji, Komodo, and Matthew May Acuity have built a really nice firm by looking at ways that their clients were doing things and integrating that into their business. They looked at outbound sales. Hey, their clients had outbound sales, they had an inside sales team, they have an inside sales team. Now as accounting firms, as partners, we don't have to be the one who generating revenue.

(48:23):

So things like that that they were looking at. Look at what your clients are doing because there's a lot of innovation in other industries that we're not even thinking about because we live in a Sally world in our profession. And then grow smarter, not harder culture. Obviously we set this stage in place. We have a culture now define our growth. Our growth can be we want to work four hours a day and we want to raise our kids at the same time. That's a growth strategy. Growth can be bottom line growth. We don't necessarily have to increase top line. There's so many ways we can be more efficient. If we don't live in a Sally world, that is going to increase the bottom line. So look at that. Define what your growth is. Niche is one of the biggest things you can do, I think to develop a growth.

(49:09):

And we heard that this morning as well. If you develop concentrate on one industry, it is just so much easier to show your passion to your clients and then grow smarter, not harder. We've had false starts on things and we learn from that. Don't be afraid to make mistakes because mistakes only make you better in the long run. And that's it. The bottom line is culture is the place to start. Culture is everything. In my mind, I think we're living proof of that because pretty profitable firm except for the first three months of this year. And we're all in my mind, we're all living the lives we want to live. And that's what the culture creates. So thank you very much for being here today.