the disruptors: geni whitehouse shows how to shift from a focus on mere data to priceless wisdom.
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with liz farr
for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
covid showed us that we can do more than traditional services and that we can respond to change even when we don’t have all the information, cpa geni whitehouse tells liz farr in an exclusive interview for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间.
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covid has given the profession the opportunity to impact clients in a very real way, and clients now see accountants in a very different light, says whitehouse long an evangelist in the profession for progressive practices and innovation.
so, today, she says, there’s a real opportunity to do more for fewer clients and to make more money. ask yourself: “how can i do the stuff i’m good at, and work less, but have a bigger impact?”
more takeaways from whitehouse
- if we jump in with the spreadsheet, we may not be aligning the tactic with the overall strategy for the business. instead, take the time to understand how the problem arose, and work on it from the source.
- business analytics are where we’re going to be playing a bigger role in the future. our clients are swimming in an ocean of data from different systems and they need our help to shift from data to wisdom. clients will start demanding help with data analytics, and if we don’t do it, they’re going to find external consultants, who may not understand the transaction flow of accounting.
- accountants should stop billing by the hour. we are limiting our prosperity by tying it to how long it takes us to do things. the better we get, the less money we make. price becomes far less of an issue when we can establish unique knowledge and resources for clients.
- no one can understand the value of something they don’t understand. first, we need to educate our clients around numbers and make them easy to grasp, more entertaining, not boring, and less scary. we also need to understand the metrics that business owners look at every day so we can give them relevant and timely insights.
geni whitehouse, cpa divides her time between working as a winery consultant at brotemarkle, davis & co in the napa valley, teaching advisory skills via her newest venture theimpactfuladvisor.com, and writing, speaking and tweeting at evenanerd.com.
her mission in life is to make boring subjects interesting and she is seldom at a loss for topics.
she is a regular keynote presenter at cpa and technology conferences around the country and has been named a top 100 influencer by accounting today, one of 25 thought leaders in accounting, and one of the 25 most powerful women in accounting by cpa practice advisor. she was a member of the tedxnapavalley organizing committee and was the first speaker at their inaugural event.
she is a co-founder of solve services, a remote bookkeeping business for the wine industry and is the author of “how to make a boring subject interesting: 52 ways even a nerd can be heard.”
transcript
liz farr: welcome to account disruptor conversations. i’m your host, liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, and my guest today, we are really lucky. we’ve got geni whitehouse who is the countess of communications for a fortunate group of businesses. how are you doing today, geni?
geni whitehouse: i’m doing great, liz. thank you for having me here. it’s exciting.
liz: great to have you here. now, we’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s jump in. now, accounting talent has been really scarce for a long time. we’ve been seeing reports about that in the journal of accountancy for over a decade, and covid made that worse. what are your ideas on how to make things better? what have you seen firms do successfully?
geni: that’s a tough question. i think we’re all really struggling right now. i have both a bookkeeping business and an employee in a cpa firm here in the napa valley, working with wineries. we’ve been trying to hire the same third-year seasoned tax professional since i started at the firm in 2007. people aren’t staying in the profession, i don’t think. i think they get to that level and move into something else. they go into corporate or do something else. i think the opportunities are ripe right now for people to start their own business.
many people, if you talk to people in school and i do some teaching at local universities, and when you ask the students in school right now what they want to do, they all want to start their own business. it’s a challenge for those of us trying to get them to come and work in a cpa firm or accounting firm, or even a bookkeeping firm for that matter, they all want to do it themselves. that’s part of the challenge. i think, in general, as a profession, we need to start raising the bar on the way that we teach young folks and the things that we show them about what we can do as accountants and how you can leverage a knowledgeable language of business in a myriad of different ways.
they don’t all involve filling out a tax return or doing an audit. i think that education is still primarily focused on the traditional service aspects of accounting. i think until we start making what we do sound more fun and interesting and impactful, which is what i believe, people want to do. they want to do something that.
i know you’ve done tax returns in your day. part of the bummer of that job is you … money or you get a refund and either case, it’s not very thrilling to that person. refunds are more thrilling than owing money, but it just hasn’t changed their lives in any way and hasn’t impacted what they’re trying to do in their business. i think we have to be more relevant to attract the right people.
liz: yes, i agree with you completely. i remember having to give somebody a tax return and say, “oh, you owe something in the six figures so–
geni: it’s awful.
liz: yes.
geni: then i don’t know about you, but i would lose sleep for days worrying about that client who i knew couldn’t pay it, and i didn’t have really anything to do to help them at that point. i just handed them, stood over how terrible the news was, but i didn’t have tools in my toolkit to really make a difference. now i know some things that i can do to help them fund cash flow, for example, and improve their cash flow and that stuff, but back when i was doing tax, i really didn’t have those skills.
liz: i think that those skills are becoming more and more important in our role as trying to help small businesses and to help people achieve their goals, that’s what accounting really should be for.
geni: that’s right, and i think that’s why people are drawn to. if you talk to accountants, “why did they do this?” it’s because they wanted to make a difference for small businesses. most of us, we saw a business owner, we had some connection to it and we wanted to be able to make lives better for people. a lot of the frustration we’re seeing now is that we can’t do enough or people don’t have the right skills, and so a lot of people are trying to gather them now which i think is great, and i think that the tide has turned finally.
liz: finally. well, speaking of things not really changing until recently, the business model for accounting firms really haven’t changed much, you bill by the hour and you provide commodity, services, tax return, and audit, bookkeeping maybe. we’re beginning to see firms move away from the old ways of doing businesses. what are some of the changes that you’re seeing in the firms that you work with?
geni: well, i think the automation has driven a lot of the innovation that we’re seeing in the profession. i don’t think we’ve had a choice. we’ve had to change things because back when i started, i started in 1982 at deloitte, we were the go-to for technology decisions. in ’82, the technology was mainframes. we were still using mainframes in those days, but our clients would look to us before they change their accounting software, for example, so we used to be the go-to for those kinds of decisions.
what we saw with the cloud applications is really a shift. the clients would implement something on their own or with somebody that wasn’t a cpa or an accountant, and then they would come to us for the traditional services, so we weren’t involved at all in the technology decisions and we were missing opportunities to really counsel them into how to set things up correctly and all of that. we followed our clients in that regard versus what we were supposed to be doing, i believe, which is leading them into new things. we got into technology without really wanting to do so and so now we’re trying to leverage the technology in helping them improve their businesses.
that’s requiring us to have new skills because now i’ve got a client on cloud accounting software and they’re looking at stuff in a much more frequent basis in a much more proactive way. they want us to counsel them more. if we don’t know what to say, then we’re going to go out and look for those skills and it’s going to be because the clients are demanding us to do so.
i think the technology has forced us finally to get out of our comfort zone more than we used to and also, covid has done that too. covid really showed us that we can do more than traditional service and that we can also respond to change even when we don’t have all the info, like the tax law changes came out, we didn’t know how they were going to be implemented, but we had to advise clients on what to do with employees.
i think covid gave us a real opportunity to see that we could those clients in a very real way, and they saw us in a different light as a result. now it’s time to leverage that ability and keep doing that with clients.
liz: you made a really good point that covid really helped. i was on another call yesterday where somebody said that we came through the pandemic and we came out better and stronger than before. i think as rough as it was on accountants, they really learned to be more resilient and more proactive and to be more comfortable with technology.
geni: well, i think many people also took the time to really consider what mattered. i think the whole fear and the loss of loved ones and the uncertainty about revenue streams and clients and everything else made us really, for the first time, stop and think, “is this really what i want to be doing? do i want to be working with clients who don’t appreciate and pay me and do i want to have the deadline crunch? do i want to fall dead in my chair at some point from overwork and stress?”
i think people finally did some things that they’d been thinking they should do for a long time, because they didn’t have time to deal with the difficult clients, the people who wouldn’t pay and all of that. they really had to focus on where they could have the most successful impact on those clients and who they could help and who would appreciate it because they only had so many hours in a day so that was good. the focus that covid brought to us, i think was a definite positive.
liz: yes. i think you’re right. now, everybody wants to grow their firm or well, some people want to grow their firms, some don’t. how do firms grow? are there different strategies for solo practices or multi-partner practices?
geni: i don’t know that everybody wants to grow. i think most people want to improve their practice in some way or another. i think they’re very different goals based on where you are in your own evolution as a person and where you are in your life stage. i think there are a lot of older practitioners who are really struggling to keep up with all the technology that’s changing. they’re considering what their exit strategy is. i think most people, again, as a result of the focus that we had and also the just overwork that most people experienced, are really taking a second low look at what a firm they want to be.
i think they’re focusing on their why in a way that they didn’t before. again, there’s a real opportunity to do more for fewer clients and make more money and i think that’s what people are really looking at now. how can i do the stuff that i’m really good at the stuff that’s adding value for the clients and work less, but have a bigger, i keep using the word impact because, to me, that that’s what really became clear to me, that why people wanted to be advisors, why we became accountants was to make a difference in the lives of people. i think that became a bigger priority for many folks during the pandemic.
liz: i agree. i really like what you’re saying about finding your why and creating the kind of firm that you want to being intentional about it.
geni: yes. it’s one of the things we did in our own firm was we rechecked the why and we also did it with clients. we said, “this is what you said was your reason for being? what stories came out of covid that actually supported who you said you wanted to be and what stories came out that made you rethink some of the aspects of who you thought you wanted to be?” this is an opportunity for you to revisit that and make changes to the business based on what you learned. i think it was really good for that as well.
liz: i think just having that initial conversation about what it is you want to accomplish, that is something that so many firms just don’t do at all. i was never encouraged to do that.
geni: that’s the whole reason i have that. i started my fourth business, the impactful advisor, which is to teach accountants how to deliver advisory services. i’m using a methodology that i didn’t create created by edi osborne and mentor plus, i know you think you know her, liz. the whole premise of that is, well, we first have to understand where these people want to go before we can jump in and create the spreadsheet.
what we normally do is jump in, it’s like that– there’s a little video clip called it’s not about the nail, which is about how when women have a problem, men go to solving it. well, all of us as accountants function that way. as soon as we hear a problem, we jump into the spreadsheet and the solution, and the tactical thing that we can dig into. what we need to do to really help them is not just focus on that symptom, the nail, but step back and figure out, how did it get there? what else can we do to make sure that you don’t walk under things where nails are, whatever it is?
we need to explore more of the environment around that so that we can prevent that problem from reoccurring. it’s a step back, take a moment, really listen to that client, and ask them questions that expose different aspects of the business so you can become more of an implementer, more of a partner in helping them do whatever they’re trying to do. if we just jump into the spreadsheet and figure out how to improve the pricing of a particular product or compensate an employee or do some of those things that we do, we may not be aligning that tactic with the overall strategy of the business. i think that’s a big mistake for us.
liz: that is so true. i wish more accountants would take that kind of approach to align tactics and strategy.
geni: well, we haven’t been schooled in it. it’s a big shift for us. that’s the first part of what we try and is this mindset shift. when i first found these tools in 2004, that’s the part that really resonated with me. the way we do things and telling people how to solve their problem is not really the best way to help them. our role should be to ask different questions and that’s what therapists do and that’s really what we are. numbers healers. i do live in california, liz. we got to get the woo woo thing covered in here really quickly.
liz: that’s right. sprinkle it in with the grits.
geni: [chuckles] we need to explain that i’m not from california. i’m from south carolina and grits are a big part of my, as our basset hounds as you see behind me, a part of my being.
liz: well, i knew we had to get grits into the conversation.
geni: i appreciate it.
liz: now, you mentioned a framework that you learned back in 2004. what other skills do accountants need to be successful today and in the future?
geni: well, i think we need to have an awareness of technology. that goes without saying. technology is no longer a separate thing. it’s part of everything that we do. it’s part of our practice, part of our clients’ lives. it’s part of our clients’ pains and suffering. we need to know what exists. we don’t necessarily need to have to be experts at using every tool that comes out but i think we need to know that there are automations that can be applied in client businesses to make a difference.
we need to be informed enough to direct them towards something that can help them improve their process flow. i think we need to be far better communicators. we need to be able to communicate both verbally and in writing better than we do. when you speak in normal english, not in code like we do most of the time. i think we just really have to have better people skills than we tend to have as a profession. listen with empathy. we teach this communication skills and behavioral styles and that understanding that people come at things differently, has made a huge difference in the way that i approach different people.
i think that’s a base level of training that everybody in any program should have in college, understanding that people have different ways of wanting to be communicated with, and different ways of receiving information. i would say communication skills and technology awareness, even if not depth of knowledge, but at least understanding that automation can really make an impact all over the business, make a difference in process flows.
liz: technology’s going to become such a big part of our world that i don’t think accountants can hide from it anymore.
geni: i think it already has. i don’t see how you can do it. i also think, liz, that business analytics are where we’re going to be playing a big role in the future. bringing data from different systems together, we’re doing a lot of that in our practice right now. many of our clients are struggling to get a view across all these disconnected applications that they have. one of the roles that we’re playing is bringing in tools that do that for them that aggregate their data, and then helping them get insights from that.
it’s really the shift from data to wisdom, i call it or data to insights, where we can play a really huge role because if you talk to clients, that’s where the pain is right now. they’ve got tons of data. we have plenty of that stuff, but we can’t figure out what to look at and make sense if at all. we can be the interpreters for those insights that are buried in all that data.
liz: it’s going to take more than an excel spreadsheet to see those kinds of relationships.
geni: yes. some of these visualization tools that are out there are amazing. there’s stuff like tableau, there’s power bi, and we’ve got to know that they exist and also have, i think, connections to people that are experts at those tools that we can leverage in our client solutions. i’ve done and spend a lot of time doing that in wine industry, finding people that can help get the insights out.
liz: that’s great. now, what should accountants stop doing immediately?
geni: billing by the hour.
liz: [laughs]
geni: i’m the wrong person to ask about the details of how you do that. ed kless and ron baker are the experts that trashing the timesheets in the billable hour. we are so limiting our ability to prosper by tying our value to how long it takes us to do something. the first time i heard ed kless and ed kless and i worked together at sage for a while, and he’s always been my hero. he’s a brilliant genius as is ron baker. one of the things that he said is when we say, when you guys, i don’t think ed was ever a cpa and a firm but he knows what we were doing, when you guys say you bill by the hour, you don’t.
what we do is we write down our hours, and i was a partner in a firm when i left, and i would get my hours and i would look at him, i go, “that took too long. i’m too slow.” i would write down my thing every time. i was not billing by the hour. i was value billing, but only in a downward direction. my value was set by my own perception of the lack of work that i delivered on something.
i always felt like i took longer than i should take for anything that i did. i was tracking the hours, but i was never billing based on what i did. that’s ridiculous. we’re not really ever billing by the hour. we know that we’re writing things down for clients. the fact that we’re doing write downs and only doing value in one direction, and it’s a perception that we have that’s typically wrong, it’s bad. if we’re going to do value billing, let’s do it in the other direction. it’s not billing, it’s pricing. we should be pricing for value.
what i was doing was billing for value based on my own internal low-value perception. we need to go to some other way of pricing for the work that we do because as automation makes us more efficient, our hours go down, and everybody’s heard the same story. if we’re just billing by the hours, the better we get, the less money we make and that’s totally counterintuitive.
we spend a lot of time, especially on the advisory side, most of our fees are fixed. they’re value-priced at a set fee. that’s how we run it. we don’t get arguments about those fees as much because we’re doing work that’s very focused on a particular industry, the wine industry. we also have expertise that’s unique because of the technology stuff that we do and some other things. the price becomes far less of an issue when you can establish unique knowledge and resources for clients.
liz: because i think that the resistance to a higher price goes way down when you can really see that you’re getting something more than just a piece of paper with some numbers on it.
geni: that’s right. nobody can appreciate value of something they don’t understand. that became clear to me is, again, i told you, i’m from south carolina, so when i moved to wine country to napa from atlanta, georgia, i moved into california, and i went to my first winery visit. i had a winemaker show me some wine if they do the story about the wine thing. the winemaker described all of the scientific stuff about malolactic fermentation and all this stuff that i don’t know what the heck is talking about.
it was like a light bulb went off for me. i was like, “i’m not going to buy something that i can’t understand, and neither are my clients.” i do the same thing with the terminology and the section 179 and 263(a) and bla bla bla bla, and the bonus depreciation and in lifo.
all the terminology that i use around the work that i do reduces the value because it becomes more and more mysterious. in order for me to want to raise the value, i have to first educate my clients on what the heck it is that i’m talking about. i think that’s a big opportunity for us as a profession. it’s something i’ve been working on for a long time, trying to make numbers relevant to clients and easy to grasp, and more entertaining and not boring.
liz: making that interesting and not boring is challenging.
geni: i do it with all kinds of things. i use a case study called le cou rouge winery, which is redneck in french. i teach case studies, i teach wineries about accounting using that sample southern winery, and i make them laugh. i’m also trying to make it okay for me to not know the wine industry. i created a story around basically my own southernness that gave me permission to be who i was but also, gave them an environment they could laugh at while working through scenarios that are true to their own businesses.
those are the kinds of things we need to think about, how can i break this stuff down and make it, give it a wrapper that’s not scary so that i can get people in there to understand this magic of numbers because the numbers are critical to their success, and yet most people don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. we don’t get appreciated for our value as a result of that.
liz: yes, i completely agree. ever since i started in accounting, now i came to accounting late in life, it was not until about 2001 that i started working at an hr block. since then, even that short period of time, things have changed a lot in accounting, but they’re still not changing very quickly. what are the blocks to change that you’ve seen?
geni: if you look at the traditional accountants, accountants who are more mature, let’s say, i’ve been in this profession for a while, most of us were drawn to accounting because it was a technical field. it didn’t require people skills. it required heavy technical skills, and those are people who we drew into the profession. those people are still in leadership seats and know how to do things a particular way and so it’s hard to get them to change.
now, there are many people who are trying, to move the needle who are older. some of us have been trying to fight this battle for a long time but the traditional people are still in those chairs and still can’t see the opportunities from making shifts and it’s also a huge thing to move everything about the way you practice when you’ve got it systematized in every single document and checklist and, a process that you have in your firm. it takes a lot to make a shift in a different direction but the good news is that young people are coming in with completely different mindsets and, with technology as a part of what they do.
they’re pushing from the bottom as they come into firms and you’re seeing pressure between those younger people and the people at the top to try to figure out how to work together and when people can’t figure it out, the young people just go and start their own thing and do it however they want to and you’re seeing a lot of those firms that are being very successful. the firms that don’t make this shift and don’t change and don’t start embracing more opportunities are just going to evaporate eventually and that’s what you’re seeing, they’re struggling to figure it out.
nobody wants to buy one of those old-school firms and many of those are at the point where the owner wants to retire and then nobody wants to buy them and so the clients are going away and they’re just evaporating, which is a horrible thing. if you spent your whole life building something, and now there’s no value left in it, but there’s a lot of merger and acquisition activity because firms can’t invest enough to grow in a different direction so you’re seeing a lot of that right now, a lot of merger activity and you’re also seeing some of these young firms acquiring other firms who have unique focuses on different practice areas and being very successful in doing it because they’ve leveraged technology in a very powerful way.
liz: yes. it’s so much easier to start an accounting firm on your own these days than it was even just 20 years ago. you don’t need a server. you don’t need to think quite as much on– it’s so much more
geni: it’s accessible. it’s understandable. there’s free training available on everything. there are apps that solve every problem that you run across. there’s even bot keep and tools that can automate some of that stuff that you didn’t want to do anyway and then you really are free to do the high-value stuff, to look at the numbers and make sense of them. well, the only thing i would say about that is sometimes you need the experience of working across businesses before you can really provide that insight.
i think it takes, a little bit of time to investment to understand how businesses work and to understand the relationship between some of those numbers. you can get that knowledge by diving in there and working with a couple of clients and using some of these dashboard tools like fathom and some of the other ones that are out there that can let you see how the numbers are connected to each other.
liz: i think that really is the key, is to be curious about how the numbers work, not just trying to get that trial balance into the tax software so that you can put the numbers in the right places but understanding that, well, when the cost of goods sold went up then their profit went down. why is that cost of goods sold going up? is it sourcing, are they having problems? what is going on?
geni: well, i think that’s one of the benefits of getting into client accounting services, to having a bookkeeping or client account, whatever you want to call it, but working through the transactional business is where some of those insights come from. that’s a great opportunity for us to really go from the transaction level all the way up to the strategic insights. i think that’s a great thing that we’re doing that now. that firms are bringing those practices back. we had and we had them and called them write-up, back in the day, and now we’re doing it in a way that leads to higher value stuff. i think that’s a great endorsement for what’s possible in firms and that there’s new opportunities coming as a result of that.
liz: well, we just talked about the possibilities of cas and how that can really help business owners. what do you think will be the next big thing?
geni: i think it’s analytics. i think you’re seeing that already. you see the acquisitions of firms that have analytic staffing or capabilities by accounting firms. deloitte has this deloitte digital arm that does different stuff, the stuff you would never think that deloitte would do. they’re expanding in new areas and i think that we’re going to see that across the profession and the analytic skills, particularly, non-cpas who know how to manipulate data between all these systems and then know how to organize it in a visual presentation tool of some kind.
because those presentation tools have gotten so good and easy to use, it’s really going to be about making sure that you understand the process is behind the data that you’re looking at. it’s one of the challenges we have. we’ve worked with folks that have database skills, and we bring them into a winery environment, and because they don’t understand what’s going on with the transactions, they don’t spot the mess is in the data.
they don’t know accounting principles and the cutoff times and all those things. that they end up creating reports that don’t make sense in this because they’re missing that process understanding. the combination though of having an accountant who gets what’s going on in the transactional flow, and somebody who can manipulate the data can result in a huge win for the analytic solution that you put together.
i think, again, clients are going to start demanding help with that and if we don’t do it, they’re going to find external consultants who do, and what’ll end up happening is the data won’t then match what’s in the financial statements.
then what’s going to happen with that is that the financial statements will become irrelevant because the operational stuff is what these owners care about, not that we have a gaap financial statement over here, that doesn’t match anything.
liz: i’ve seen that with subscription businesses, that there are new ideas for presenting the income statement that make more sense for subscription-based business, than just the regular gaap financials, which don’t make any sense at all.
geni: yes, one of the questions we ask owners is, what do you look at daily to see if you’re on track, and it’s never we go into quickbooks and open up the financial statements, or we go into whatever application now or intuit or interact or netsuite, or whatever they have, it’s never going to the financials that look at it, it’s i go to this thing, this operational thing, my point of sale system, or my manufacturing process system, or my crm solution, or something else that’s not in the accounting application, to find out how we’re doing, or maybe to go to google analytics to see what’s happened.
if we’re not looking at those systems as their accountant, then we’re missing the critical insights that they care about, and instead, we’re giving them all this financial statement-based stuff that’s old and irrelevant to most of the owners and to their teams.
liz: how useful is a set of audited financials that you get six months after year end?
geni: what do you do with it, you put it in the drawer, mail it to the banker, then you’re done. the useful stuff is the forecast and planning that you did six months before that, and when you’re trying to figure out how to adjust the business, and then it’s the decisions you’re making every single day with data that’s not even in the financials. that’s our challenge. liz, you and i need to go out and fix it.
liz: well, i don’t think we’re going to fix it today. i don’t think so and i got a cat who’s telling me that she needs something fixed too.
geni: yes, sounds like it.
liz: well, i think we’re going to leave it at that now that we can’t fix the world today. i want to thank you so much for your time, geni.
geni: my pleasure.
liz: if people want to reach out to you, where can they find you?
geni: the place to start is at theimpactfuladvisor.com, that’s my website for the advisory training. i have my email there on my signature line, geni, g-e-n-i, @theimpactfuladvisor. you can find me– i’m evenanerd on twitter, and instagram, and linkedin, and a bunch of places. i have another business called even a nerd can be heard and that’s evenanerd.com. you can find me on linkedin, reach out, and connect.
liz: all right. well, thank you so much, geni, and you have a wonderful day.
geni: you too. thanks so much, liz.