if you don’t enjoy it, stop doing it.
subscribe to 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 podcasts anywhere: apple, google, spotify, iheart, deezer, amazon music and audible, player fm, audacy, gaana (india), and boomplay (africa).
the disruptors 
with liz farr
chad davis has found success not by chasing the usual markers of success but by building a firm that supports him in doing the things he enjoys and in pursuing the things he finds interesting. in 2013, he and josh zweig founded liveca, one of the first fully remote firms in canada, and since 2018, chad and his family have been living in an rv, roaming from california to nova scotia.
more: erik solbakken: yes, you can work less and make more | donny shimamoto: future firm growth requires a mindshift | jennifer wilson: empower young workers to build the firm everyone loves | mike whitmire: re-think your hiring and training practices | hector garcia: success strategies of a quickbooks youtube superstar | blake oliver: why tax work yearns to be free| private equity explodes in u.k. | brannon poe: the status quo must go | accounting nerds, unlock your super powers | disruptor: jason statts shakes up the status quo | think small to think big with matt wilkinson | when financial statements go extinct with corey schmidt | can geraldine carter save accountants from themselves? | re-inventing accounting with tyler anderson
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.
while liveca has grown to over 100 team members, chad doesn’t believe that every firm needs to grow just to grow. “why is growth always, you know, the sexy thing that people want to work towards?” he asked. instead, his focus has been on creating a firm where people can pursue the work and learning opportunities that align with their definitions of success.
davis: “i think that we’re so lucky as accountants now to have this infinite canvas in front of us in order to do whatever we want.”
with so many different possibilities available for accountants, davis recommends getting rid of the things you don’t enjoy and bringing in more of those things that bring joy to firm owners and team members. with that in mind, davis has started a no-code development team to build software for clients, including a project aimed at solving the accounting staffing issue.
that project is an accounting job board where firm owners and job seekers can find each other. “put yourself in the position of a job seeker. everything from the job posting to your website should showcase what you believe in,” davis said.
eight more takeaways from chad davis
- liveca has been offering prospective hires trial workdays for about a decade. prospective new hires come in virtually for several days where they meet three to five team members and get an idea of the kinds of work they’ll be doing and a taste of the culture.
- consider a dedicated support team of maybe 15% of your total headcount. these are people who can perform quality assurance, pick up the slack for busy teams, or work on innovation. this can help you make an eight-hour workday a reality for the entire team. this can be expensive, but is a huge boost to morale. don’t use it as a dumping ground, but take the time to carefully plan the work for the next month or two.
- growth shouldn’t always be the sexy thing you work towards. having the same net income but having the time to do what’s important to you can be just as fulfilling.
- grow towards the right kinds of customers and the right kinds of work instead of growing for the sake of growing.
- accountants today have an infinite canvas of opportunities for fulfilling work, from tax to bookkeeping to systems work to consulting and salt instead of focusing on the standard grind of work. the cost of acquiring new skills is low today, so offering the opportunities within your firm allows people the freedom to try new things.
- learn whatever aligns with your definition of success.
- don’t model your firm on what has been successful for another firm. that other firm may look superficially similar to yours, but is almost certainly very different.
- sprinkle in more of the work that gives you joy, and get rid of the work that does not.
more about chad davis
when chad davis and his business partner, josh zweig, first founded their tech-focused accounting firm in 2013, they didn’t anticipate where it would take them: smack dab in the middle of a cloud accounting revolution catalyzed by a global pandemic. since those early days, liveca has grown to more than 100 all-remote employees. liveca has been on the forefront of innovation:
-
-
- first xero platinum partner in canada
- first remote cpa firm in canada
- first remote cpa firm in canada to sign off on a student becoming a cpa
-
today, chad leads liveca’s four-person nocode development team, building apps for his firm and its clients, including a job board designed to attract forward-thinking cpas. this free job board allows firm owners and can post jobs, and candidates can search postings. chad also partners with jason staats on the automation town podcast.
since 2018, chad has been living in an rv with his wife, kids and dogs.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr 00:03
welcome to accounting 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 is chad davis, co founder and partner at live.ca up in canada. welcome to the show, chad.
chad davis 00:20
thanks, liz, where are you recording from today?
liz farr 00:23
i’m recording from just south of albuquerque, new mexico. and you?
chad davis 00:29
i’m in del mar california for a couple of weeks. so it’s nice and sunny and loving the southern california weather here this time of year. i’ve always wanted to go over to the petrified forest. my dad took me there when i was a little kid. and i think this time through we’re going to be going through in roughly april, mid april. so is that a good time to go? or is a bad time to go?
liz farr 00:55
april should be pretty good. you know, it won’t be too hot there yet. so it should be reasonable.
chad davis 01:02
good. i’ll let you know how it goes.
liz farr 01:04
okay, great. well, we’ve got a lot to cover. so let’s get started. now accounting talent in the us and all around the world has been scarce for years covid made it worse. what are some ideas that you have on how to make things better? and what have you seen firms do successfully?
chad davis 01:28
i have no idea what firms should definitely do. but i know that it would be really nice to put people …put yourself in the position of of a job seeker. and everything from the copy of the job ad to how your website showcases what you really believe in is pretty important stuff. and a lot of firms are taking that as table stakes now, which is good to see. because maybe over the last few decades, it was more of a hey, you’re lucky to work for me type of attitude. whereas now it’s a we’re lucky to have you as well. and here’s in here’s why. so more and more more equal footing maybe than it was in decades past. one of the things that i really appreciate that we do for the people that consider working with us is something called trial workdays. and those trial work days are our way of giving them access, an opportunity to the people that they will be working with, and also the type of work that they’ll be working with as well. so it gives them a paid few days where they come in virtually, and meet with about five to eight different people gives them a really good sense of not the culture completely, but the idea of like a subset of the types of people that are here, and gives them a chance to really assess it something that’s outside of an hr department, or an owner trying to convince somebody to work with you. and that’s worked pretty well for us for the last decade.
liz farr 03:03
i really liked that idea. yeah, and i and i kind of wish that i’ve had that opportunity with the firms that i’ve worked at. and actually, honestly, in every job that i’ve had,
chad davis 03:18
it’s, it’s tough, you still, you know, might miss somebody that maybe doesn’t pre qualify as well. and there’s always, you know, inherent biases like that, that can really hurt you. so i wouldn’t say it’s a perfect solution by any means. but as long as you recognize that one person shouldn’t be in charge of the entire methodology, and you should keep iterating on what’s working and what isn’t working. i think that’s where the real magic comes in not just necessarily having the structure to begin with.
liz farr 03:53
i like that idea. now, until recently, the business model for accounting firms hadn’t really changed much for decades. and and a lot of firms are still going with hourly billing. but we are beginning to see a few firms adopt different business models and different organizational structures. what are some changes that you personally have seen yourself?
chad davis 04:24
personally, i’ve seen a few different ones, some some work really well. and this goes against conventional thinking about the billable hour, but some of the most profitable firms that i’ve been lucky enough to see behind the scenes of track their time, and i don’t want this to be, you know, a very time pro time tracking or anti time tracking, but i could see different firms being pushed in either direction. and yeah, we track time in our firm for certain things but it has no bearing on price, necessarily, so it’s more for. again, this probably will turn into a debate about time tracking if we get too far into it. but it absolutely helps us based on compared to when we didn’t, so we’ll leave it at that. but i’d say one of the things that i’m noticing that’s less controversial, is the idea of dedicated support. what i mean by dedicated support is not your manager, being who you go to help with, and maybe not someone who’s on the same team as you for coverage, but really, truly dedicated support teams that can pick up slack, work on qa, work on innovation, and all the things that you’d expect that someone who isn’t in charge of a deliverable on a timed basis, every month, quarter or a year. so i kind of really liked that. and, you know, full transparency, we’ve done this as well. and i’ve seen huge boosts to morale, but it does cost money in order to staff those. so, you know, depending on if you’re a solo, or small person, you know, a few person firm or, or even 10, or 20, it might, might be harder, but in the bigger ones, you know, 50 100 200 400,000, like those dedicated support teams could really make a difference in people’s ability to work a normal eight hour day. so like that.
liz farr 06:37
wow. and a normal eight hour day, i’m all in favor of that for accounting firms. and, and just to clarify that, i’m not really opposed to time tracking, if it’s used as an internal metric, because i’ve heard of a lot of firms use it that way so that they can use it to allocate talent appropriately. and to make sure that a given clients work isn’t taking a lot longer than anticipated. so for that i have no problems. but when it’s used as a sledgehammer, that people need to put in a certain number of billable hours. or you have to stay within the billable hour budget for a particular project. that’s where i think it becomes sort of a meaningless metric, because it’s not correct. it’s not reliable, and it’s not useful at all.
chad davis 07:47
i agree with you there.
liz farr 07:49
yeah. and and i love the idea of the dedicated support teams. but i would agree with you, that would be kind of expensive to have.
chad davis 08:04
yeah, like, we didn’t have it for a very long time. we recently just went over the 100 person mark in the firm. and i think we wouldn’t have been able to get there. if we didn’t have the notion of support teams, a lot of a lot of the last 10 to 15 hires have been to make sure that those are the feeders to the rest of the rest of the company. so it’s yeah, it’s definitely something that’s calculated and important to think about before you introduce it.
liz farr 08:32
so with a 100, member team, how big is your support team?
chad davis 08:38
i should know this number, but it’s probably six plus three plus, or somewhere in the 15 person range.
liz farr 08:50
so that’s a substantial amount. that’s about 15. that’s 15% of your math. yeah, people.
chad davis 08:57
yeah. but if you think about it as a, as a feeder into the team, and like where you learn and how you get to, you know, how you get exposed to different procedures and different ways that people work and help harmonize that amongst the team. it’s, it’s, you know, it’s quite a quite makes a lot of sense.
liz farr 09:18
it does kind of make sense. so does somebody then help out with tax for little bit or with the bookkeeping or with the other services do they rotate through…
chad davis 09:30
tax is a good example. so we have a customer service support team. there’s four or five of these teams now. and this the customer service support team for tax will take on work if a specific team is inundated or can’t meet a specific deadline. so they plan a month ahead, make sure that all of the information is transferred properly. there’s a full review that happens before the work starts. and then it just kind of works. i think if you treat it as a dumping ground, that does not allow for a conducive eight hour workday for anybody. so lots of planning lots of learning. we’re not perfect by any means. but we’re definitely trying to learn from what doesn’t work. and planning is really important in this case.
liz farr 10:19
yeah. well, kudos to you for trying to hold it as a as a eight hour work day. because i don’t believe i ever experienced that in public accounting, except during the offseason when there was nothing to do. but i still had to show up for eight hours of …i don’t know, what can i do?
chad davis 10:45
i heard heard that in the states. now. it’s a 12 month long tax year.
liz farr 10:51
well, fortunately, i got out of tax before any of that really happened. my last tax season…last tax returns were in 2017. in october, and so i have not done any tax return. but my own since then.
chad davis 11:12
you’re a visionary. three, you said you saw it, you saw things going to poopoo three years ahead.
liz farr 11:18
i think it was just luck. you know, i didn’t have to deal with a lot of the trump tax reform and a lot of the other chaos that happened during the pandemic. so i consider myself quite lucky. but i didn’t i didn’t plan it that way. just that’s how it worked out.
chad davis 11:38
for you. it’s good to see you have some peace now.
liz farr 11:41
yes, yes. now, now, what about growth? what? what are some strategies for growing a firm?
chad davis 11:51
don’t grow if you don’t want to? but seriously, i mean, why is growth always, you know, the sexy thing that people want to work towards? i probably just as happy if it was, you know, the same amount of net income are less, and i got to do the things that were important to me. so i think if those people that are starting their firms, they want to grow, great, like go grow, there’s lots of ways to do it. we live in this world now where it’s really hard to find an accountant, as a consumer and as a company. so growing is the hard part. the hard part is finding the right customers that work for you specifically, and doing the types of works that you want to do. yeah, not a not a fan for growth for the sake of growth, but growth with care and cowen’s are good at calculating growth. but just the right types of customers feels like amore popular way of growing these days.
liz farr 12:56
i agree with you completely. you know, there were there were so many times when i got projects, and i thought, why on earth did we say yes to this client? this is a train wreck. why are we doing this? this is too much work. we don’t have the resources and we don’t have the expertise to do this. so
chad davis 13:24
it was like a communication issue, too.
liz farr 13:28
well, yeah, there was some of that, some of that, but we won’t go there right now. better that we don’t. now, it used to be that accountants had to keep the tax regulations in the accounting regulations. and there had to be really good with the 10-key. what are the skills that accountants need to be successful today?
chad davis 13:55
i don’t even own a 10-key.
liz farr 14:00
do we even know what a 10-key is?
chad davis 14:00
i’m looking at my desk thinking. i just have the numbers across across the top of the qwerty keyboard that i use sometimes and i have a trackpad for the apple, not really a mouse. am i a bad accountant? probably.
liz farr
well, i’m, i’m the same. i’m the same as you.
chad davis
if, yeah, it specifically what were you referring to sort of what’s what skills are interesting to have now? or what skills do you think they should have?
liz farr 14:35
what skills do you think they should have?
chad davis 14:37
well, i have no idea. i think that we’re so lucky as accountants now to have this like infinite canvas in front of us in order to do whatever we want. so it’s tax or bookkeeping or systems work, or consulting or sales tax salt, like there’s just so much opportunity to do whatever you want. that if people would put more emphasis on that than maybe just the standard grind, there, there could be just so much more opportunity. so i think that’s what we’re trying to do with our firm is allow for more opportunities within the firm. and if for any reason we can’t give somebody something that they want, then we can be really honest about it. and then they can find that somewhere else. so that’s why you know, the support teams exist. that’s why new departments are popping up. that’s why there’s new management structures for people that want to learn more about management than necessarily tax returns. there’s dedicated advanced tax teams. so i think that’s that’s one argument for growth is that if you wanted to provide these opportunities for cpas, to or accountants or non accountants to work in a firm and get exposure to a whole bunch of stuff, we’re in a really good time for that, because the cost of acquiring any type of knowledge is very low now. and it’s really just the time that’s the most expensive piece deciding where to put it.
liz farr 16:14
right. you know, people in my generation–i have a few more gray hairs than you do, chad–would say that technology know-how is really important these days. but i would say that that’s maybe less of a concern, because the younger generation is coming up. already digital native, they’ve been using ipads and laptops and iphones for so long that technology isn’t quite as big of a hurdle as it used to be. would you agree with that?
chad davis 16:59
yes. but also, i think that people define success differently over each generation. and every decade that goes by. i know, when i was going through school, it was professional, professional, professional, right? finish the cpa, get a job, do your thing. now, it just seems more like everyone, not everyone, most people are thinking about their personal lives as more important than than work, which is cool to see. because to your point of like, what should people be learning, i don’t know, learn whatever aligns with your definition of success. and for me, to kind of think of it in two ways that the professional success is related to providing opportunities for others, and getting like working that normal workweek. but the personal success is to have more freedom of time to be able to keep traveling. we’re four years in right now. and by the time this drops, maybe five, just getting…and, yeah, and just having that freedom to explore and to be with the kids and to drive around the country. i mean, that’s, that’s how i would define success. so i’m learning more about batteries and solar setups, and, you know, water management than i am about taxes or any type of technology. so teach their own right.
liz farr 18:30
well, that’s that’s a really good, good approach. it shouldn’t just be about the work. but work should fit into your life as an interesting and fulfilling part.
chad davis 18:48
is that how you got into writing?
liz farr 18:51
i would say yes, yeah. i realized that i was good at it. and i enjoyed doing it. i didn’t get a big thrill out of putting numbers in boxes, on tax returns or in financial statements. and as i discovered, being an accountant who can write is a pretty rare skill, pretty rare combination. so i have no problems finding more work than i can reasonably get done.
chad davis 19:33
and there’s no reason to hire a support team or anybody else on that team. you’re just you’re content with where things are at. so let it be.
liz farr 19:42
yeah, i don’t really want to be a manager. so i’m quite happy to just do this thing on my own.
chad davis 19:50
fantastic.
liz farr 19:51
now, now, we’ve talked about the things that accountants could do to improve their lives. what are some things that accountants should stop doing immediately?
chad davis 20:07
can we just get them live off live off of that last line we talked about and maybe stop doing the things that are that don’t align with how they determine their own success. so it could be working long hours could be working, the job that they’re in, could be learning things that aren’t in the area of accounting or tax that they want to be better at. i’d like people to see more of a individual approach to this kind of thing versus an overarching statement for the whole profession. just cool seeing people do well on their own terms.
liz farr 20:50
i think you’re right, i think you’re onto something there. now, accountants, many of them know that they need to do things differently in order to create a firm that they like, and that satisfies them professionally. but so many of them are caught in up in the old business models, a traditional firm. what do you think are some of the barriers that keep them from creating a firm like yours? or from creating a firm like that would bring them joy?
chad davis 21:33
oh, that’s a that’s a better question probably like to get joy out of it. because i think that’s the problem is that people try to model firms of other people’s firms. and the more people you talk to, and you really look behind the scenes, it’s like a deck of cards, which factorial different ways of, of running an internal accounting firm? and on the surface? while it might seem like it’s very similar, right, big name, lots of people, lots of processes can almost guarantee it’s not. and it’s hard to say that one firm is better than the other, it shouldn’t happen. so the joy question i really like because what is joy, except for getting rid of the things that you don’t want to do and adding things that you do want to do? so sprinkling in a little bit of the things you want to do on a more frequent basis. sounds like a good idea. just trying to think about examples in our firm of how we’ve done that. and i can think of like, i can’t speak for anybody else. but for me, personally, i was really getting interested in the idea of building software for customers. and i had no idea if and how that would work. but i think the joy was learning how maybe what to do. and then when you start thinking about, like, oh, maybe we could put in a development team in the firm, that would give some accountants opportunities to work on the software side of the company, and more than just, you know, consulting on software that already exists in the market, but like truly building it out for them. and, like, that’s really interesting to me. so that’s my joy. that’s what i’m really happy that we that we put in place last year. and yeah, there’s countless of other ways that people can can do that themselves. but adding new services seems like a good way.
liz farr 23:37
i am i’m really, i’m refreshed by your approach, chad, because so many firms feel like so many firm owners feel like they’re, they’re bound by these rails that keep them constrained. but yet, you’re branching into something that most firms would be terrified to do, which is developing software.
chad davis 24:04
yeah, it’s not pretty software. let’s be honest.
liz farr 24:09
but that’s okay. yeah. okay. you know, i know my first work processing program i use was wordstar on ams dos environment. so i have done i’ve worked in my share of ugly softwares.
chad davis 24:31
trying to think back to my first one, and it was either to the wordperfect or correl. 123 it’s one of those two, forget they they were around the same time, probably really 90s this was this was before that. yes, i know. we’re in star was mid 80s, right? no, late 70s. it’s gotta be late 70s
liz farr 24:54
oh, we’re still using it. the university of wisconsin biochemistry department was still using that in 1989 or so.
chad davis 25:08
okay, liz, we’re googling, googling live on a podcast. here we go. wow, release date 1978. and it was dominating the market up until the mid 80s. and the last stable release was 1999.
liz farr 25:25
that would sound about right. yeah, it worked. got the job done.
chad davis 25:33
good.
liz farr 25:36
now, client accounting services is kind of a big thing in the us and client cas can mean plan accounting services or client advisory services. that’s a big thing in the us right now. what do you think is the next big thing besides creating software for your clients?
chad davis 26:02
and besides, calling it bookkeeping, and just accounting in general, feels like a funny term. what do you think is next, i don’t know, who am i to say that? let the market decide it’ll be fun, like the next five or 10 years will look completely different than the last five or 10, this pandemic has changed how we do work, how we think about work. just thinking about like some friends who have done something different in the last little while, and sorry for doing this on the fly. but it feels like the rise of the specialist cpa is more prevalent now. and it’s a lot easier to become a, like a master of your craft in one area. so whether it’s sales tax on the east coast, or storage, or e commerce cpas, or real estate cpas or cannabis cpas. and really doesn’t matter, it just matters, that there’s something that you’re really good at and really known for. and, you know, coming from a country that has the population of roughly california. you know, in canada, it’s nice to have special cpas. but it’s not necessary to get business and to do good work. but in the us, i can imagine that those specialists will have lots of competition, even in their specialist markets, just given the number of people that exist. and if you’re going across state or the state, it could be could be even larger. so i just love seeing stories of people that pick something that’s just so random, but they’re so good at it. and they build these systems and procedures up, and they’re just known for it. so that’d be kind of cool to see that happen over the next five or 10 years where you pick something that you really enjoy, or you think it’d be good at could be two different things and, and run with it.
liz farr 28:00
thank you bring up a really good point about the need to specialize and how important that is in a big market like the us.
chad davis 28:11
i mean, you can get pretty bored pretty quickly. you could be in a market where there’s another pandemic related to storage lockers, and all of a sudden, you’re out of business because they’re illegal. i don’t know like it, there’s a lot of risk to but yeah, i’ve never been on the, you know, you must niche to be successful route. i just, i just find it very, like calming. and it’s just nice to see when people just own a space and they’re just so good at it. personally, as from a risk perspective, i would probably do a couple that were completely unrelated to try to hedge my bets a bit, but who knows?
liz farr 28:54
well, that’s kind of when i’ve done with my writing business, that i’ve specialized in accounting. i only work with accountants. and i really prefer to work with the thought leaders in accounting, the ones who are doing things a little bit differently than the way that it’s been done for generations.
chad davis 29:17
what kind of writing work do you do for accountants?
liz farr 29:22
um, i do a lot of i do some blog posts. i do some editing of books. i also ghost write books. that’s the main work i do right now. right now i’m currently working on three books.
chad davis 29:46
and so you’re saying you’re busy.
liz farr 29:49
i’m very, very busy. one one book is on auditing. it’s almost done. another is aimed at accountants on the corporate side. so this is all about developing procedures and operations for the whole company. and this is this is for large companies. this is for companies with a headcount of maybe 500. and the third book is on retirement and tax strategies. so i’m working on a lot of very different ideas.
chad davis 30:33
that’s awesome. if people wanted to get in touch with you, how would they do that?
liz farr 30:40
they would probably find me on my website, farr communications. but i would caution people that if you send in an inquiry that way, then i may not respond. and i may just say, great, can i connect you to another accountant i know who writes
chad davis 31:04
there ya go. don’t forget to charge that referral fee.
liz farr 31:08
of course, well, that’s a given. well, chad, it’s been great having you on here. and i think this has been just a breath of fresh air. you are so calm, compared to many of the highly stressed accountants in the us right now. it’s been great talking to you. now, if people want to connect with you, what’s the best way to find you?
chad davis 31:38
i post really like silly, weird things on twitter. so @chaddavis is where that’s at. and there’s a link there to some some rv photos too. so completely, not accounting related. i probably should do a better job and twitter but having fun.
liz farr 31:58
alright, well, thanks very much. great having you on, chad.
chad davis 32:03
see you later.
disruptors: nicole davis & jw davis show how to create your own pipeline
change your business model, change your life.
the disruptors
with liz farr