kill the billable hour, embrace remote work, stay flexible, get social, says pasha malik of thyor.
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with richard rothstein
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twitter and linkedin are the go-to resources for finding new talent at the mclean, va.-based thyor group of companies, founder and ceo pasha malik tells richard rothstein for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间.
but he has much more to say about fixing the accounting business to make it more competitive for attracting the best people. in fact, his group of companies may be a model of the next-generation cpa firm, offering through various entities outsourced cfo services, tax planning, technology consulting, and venture capital advisory services.
the business was launched as virtual with a far-flung remote workforce, and remains so today, giving it a headstart on other firms still making the transition. meanwhile, malik plays the role of ceo, cfo-for-hire, tax advisor, strategist, data scientist, startup advisor, wealth adviser adventure capitalist.
educated in cambridge and london, malik traveled the world in public accounting, from bdo in singapore to pb mares in washington, d.c., before launching thyor.
transcript
richard rothstein
can you tell me a little bit about your firm and what you guys do?
pasha malik
yeah. so thyor is, is kind of like an overarching consulting firm, that i co-founded. i will lead the practice side and the client relationship side. we have an accounting and cfo and tax side of the business, but we have a technology and data science arm. because we found that as accountants, we come across a lot of valuable data that gets looked over. so that was an opportunity for us to branch out and bring a lot more, be a lot more modern firm bringing more technology into our solutions. and we’re seeing a lot of that with, especially our mid-sized business lines, where they’re getting a lot of valuable advice from us that they can take action on. it’s something that we’re still working on with small business clients, because this is data science, and is a pretty expensive offering. so we’re still working on bringing the price point down, so it’s more accessible to a lot more people and businesses.
richard rothstein
it makes sense that, as accountants, you see, a lot of the data points are important for business. so it makes sense to bring a data science approach to that. that’s really cool. so how are you handling recruiting for specifically accountants, but also people in your data science side, before covid?
pasha malik
so we’ve always been 100 percent, remote team. but we still had offices, and we use places as we work all around the us to be our hubs, where we would have conference calls, client meetings, in-person meetings, whatever we needed to do. but when it came to hiring, it was mostly through professional recruiting firms, because we found better, more experienced talent, more experienced accountants, and data scientists to work with. it was also better for us to actually have a conversation with those potential recruits to understand what they’re looking for, and also understand how they think how they solve problems, how they approach them. because for us, it’s a lot about when clients come to us, they don’t say they want an accountant or what our x or y or z, they tell us what the problem is, and they want a solution to it. so we have to figure out a solution for it. so we are at the core of it, we need really good problem solvers, who understand everything, not everything, but to a great deal about the client’s industry, which market they operate in. where they want to be, what are the challenges, what industry challenges there are, so it will be a little more forward-thinking will be more entrepreneurial thinking? i’m sure you know, like, as accountants, we come across this habit of falling into the status quo where we stop thinking in an entrepreneurial way for the good of the clients, businesses were more thinking about from a compliance centric mindset, which is, i’m sure works for some clients, but in this dynamic age and dynamic market, we need very forward-thinking entrepreneurial mindsets and be very aggressive about what solutions you’re creating for the clients.
richard rothstein
so you got that way through recruitment firms? were there any particular channels you’re using to generate applicants? i mean, it really just the recruitment firms. were there any others that were of note?
pasha malik
linkedin and twitter’s really well for us. i personally hang out a lot on twitter and linkedin. there’s a lot of really in-depth conversations that are happening in those circles. twitter more so. so when you’re having those conversations and you’re in that circle or sphere or bubble, i should say, you kind of have a lot bigger network. beyond what your region is. so for example, in my circle on the data science side. so the accountants on twitter, if i need to hire an accountant, say for an expert in partnership taxes for real estate funds, for example. in my conversations with other accountants on twitter, i’ll reach out to them and ask them if they know of anyone, and quite often you will, they will know, those people have used the best networks that you can get because they know how much knowledge somebody has.
richard rothstein
that’s great. so do you find that those work better than recruiters or and you’re just not able to kind of scale it super well? or is it just when you need somebody that you’re having trouble with a recruiter?
pasha malik
it’s a mix. i wouldn’t say one is better than the other. because recruitment is all about spreading your net. the wider your net, the more the odds are, the better, the better recruits you might get. but i think for recruiters, it’s also how well they understand what you’re looking for. quite often i’ve come across, they don’t really understand and to give you a general list of candidates that they just want you to go through. sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. so for us, quite often, when we’re looking for someone, we have certain projects in the pipeline, and we know what we need for that. and so we have a very specific requirement of what skills are we looking for in the next person? so that usually happens that usually is, is what’s better on twitter, i guess. but on linkedin, we have a pretty wide network on linkedin too. so for me, i’ve been pretty lucky in that sense. before covid, i was participating in a lot of networking events, a lot of masterminds, interacting with a lot of other friends and partners. i didn’t really have much of a problem in recruitment. i think the problem more for me more was finding the right problem-solving candidates. especially in the dc area, there’s a lot of candidates who are more from the compliance in the government mindset. you find a lot of really creative, entrepreneurial accountants or data scientists who are more in the on the west coast, as most of them get picked up by startups or like big tech firms.
richard rothstein
do you think that you focus on more problem solving and more entrepreneurial versus the focus on compliance? do you think that’s something that more firms should look to?
pasha malik
i think it matters what the firm’s business model is. i know, for our business model, we are very heavily focused on problem-solving strategy work, a lot of planning work, a lot of like solution-driven work, like value creation, and compliance is extremely necessary. don’t get me wrong, compliance is necessary. but i think there’s a big trend of commoditization of compliance work, where you see a lot of accountants especially going into compliance work. and even when they do when they start the careers that a lot of these firms, they are siloed into compliance work. and very few get to get the opportunity to experience really great work when they’re doing strategy or planning work. i think it’s more from a very early stage, i’m seeing this a lot more with new candidates who have more awareness, especially with good mentorship, that when they go join the new firms, they are more vocal about what they want. and they’re more demanding of the firm’s career development process. but for people who have been in that system for a really long time, i think a lot of them either give up and just take on compliance work because that’s where they think the career is. it’s hard for them to do a pivot later in life, even though i think they should, i mean, they have a really good knowledge base on compliance, you need to know the compliance worked in order to do the strategy work, and it doesn’t work without that.
richard rothstein
i actually haven’t really heard of another accounting firm that had a data science side. how did that kind of affect how long people stay with your company?
pasha malik
so far, we haven’t seen turnover in that sense. we haven’t really. we have a really good work-life balance. we have three-day weekends. everybody has the complete flexibility that they want in terms of setting their own hours. we’re more concerned with project delivery, meeting the deadlines, that kind of stuff. we don’t do billable hours, when we’re picking up new clients and new projects, once we figured out what the structure of the project is, and what the pricing and costing are going to be, we’re pretty transparent about that with our team. the team that’s going to be working on it, we tell them, okay, this is what we’re charging the client, this is how much our fees gonna be. this is how much the resource and our requirements are going to be. can you fit this in? and how would you fit this in, show us your schedule, let us know that it works for you or not? so that the flexibility that we provide everybody in our team to pick their own projects, it’s something that’s a really big plus for a lot of them. because they can, if they’re feeling like they really want to be challenged and want to work on exciting stuff, we have that it some days or some weeks or months, they’re feeling like, i’m not in that mindset, they just want to do like, low-level challenging work. that’s why do we have that work also. so we love we allow them that flexibility. but the majority of our team is very dynamic. so we don’t really have that problem of somebody taking a backseat, like everybody’s like, yeah, we want this, we want this. it’s more about whether their work-life balance fits into it.
richard rothstein
you said you were remote from day one, that you make sure you have a good work-life balance. i mean, has anything changed for you guys? you know, since covid? i mean, it sounds like you guys were pretty well set up for the challenges.
pasha malik
in some way? yes, it is. yes, we were ready for those challenges. but i think what a lot of us didn’t, didn’t really plan for or ask or understand was how much when people are like stuck at homes, with their family commitments, 24-7 while they have to work, that is a whole new set of challenges that probably nobody even thought of. previously, in that setup people, for example, we did have kids, their kids are off at school or daycare. so, they’re not really worried about it because they can even stay at home and work or be at a remote work location like we work and work from there. now we work is not an option, they have to stay home and work because a lot of places are still under lockdown. they have to take care of their families, they can’t expose their families to the risk of going up by going out. so that 24-7, with the kids with family, sometimes even extended family who’s come back come home to stay, or a lot of them are actually staying with their parents because the parents are in delhi and they need care. so i think that dynamic has put a little more pressure on a lot of them. where they feel like there is one continuous kind of like workload, whether it’s work-related or not. that doesn’t give them a chance to de-stress. so i think that’s, that’s a challenge that we as a firm has not been able to solve, but we’ve been more flexible and understanding where somebody is having certain issues or challenges with what they’re dealing with in the personal we give them a certain break. we tell them okay, take one or two days off. and let’s circle back again. so we’ve been more understanding of that part. and so it’s been a challenge, but i think those problems are going to continue being a challenge because i don’t know if we really can solve those problems for our team.
richard rothstein
that’s honest. that is probably a big problem that i don’t know how you solve that problem for people. what do you expect their recruiting situation to look for look like a year from now?
pasha malik
i personally think that we’re going to be doing a lot more hiring. we have some before joining trainees, we did quite a lot of hiring because we had a lot of projects in the pipeline. quite a few of those projects didn’t come through, they got suspended because of what happened in joining training because they were not as good. so we’re hoping they’re going to kickstart again in 2021. once things normalize whatever that means. we will be doing a lot of recruiting in 2021. but i guess the biggest challenge in 2021 would be a lot of the potential clients that we came across with some whose businesses suffered extensively. we worked with quite a few clients who had bankruptcies, or were close to bankruptcy didn’t file for one, but they were in pretty dire situations. so restructuring those businesses to more embrace the challenge in the more prepared for what the new economy is going to look like. and the new market is going to look like, i think we did a lot of work for our existing clients, were we starting in march, in april, we started restructuring the business and told them, if you’re going to not only succeed but thrive in this new dynamic, we need to change the way you do things. so the ones that embrace it, they’ve been doing pretty well, the ones that did not, the majority of them have had a pretty hard time. but i think that changing that mindset of the founders and the business owners, is still gonna be a challenge. making them understand that the economy has changed the way our society functions has changed. and while things may return to normalization, when vaccinations are maybe the majority is vaccinated, but it’s still gonna be a big challenge to get the clients to do or customers to do doing things the way they used to.
richard rothstein
finally, what advice do you have for other firms that are looking to hire these days?
pasha malik
most of them are, from my own experiences when i used to work for other firms, i know every, especially the new newer generation, that the new recruits that we have, they absolutely hate the concept of billable hours. i know, even my, my spot departments that i used to work with when i was at consulting firms, even they did not like the concept of billable hours. but that’s how they were trained. and that was just the mindset that they had. so i think that concept needs to be thrown away, we really need to change the way our firms function in terms of how to value our resources, especially our human resources. that intellectual capital is something that needs to be valued in a much different way than on an hourly basis.
the second part would be to allow more flexibility. i think remote work should be the norm. we’ve built our firm on remote work, work culture. i’m always telling people to have a person in my team who actually lives in works from bali. and he often sends me a picture of him sitting on the beach with a laptop in his lap and a beer bottle in his hand. and he sends me a picture and captions it: rough commute. one thing that this year has told us is that every work can be done remotely. there is no need for our two-hour-long conference meetings. and i think that mindset needs to be changed.
and flexibility. i think flexibility is the one key thing that really needs to be incorporated more into our firm’s business models. allow people to take the lead in developing their own careers take their own direction, and make them more proactive. the sooner that happens, the more and allow them to make mistakes because the more the ones they make the mistakes, they learn from it and they’ll grow more. somebody who hasn’t made a mistake. they’re not really growing. they haven’t really done anything. that’s care. that’s like, challenging enough to make a mistake.
richard rothstein
awesome. that’s great advice.