whether it’s clients or talent, if you build a better business culture, you’ll get better results.
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with liz farr
the disruptors
as shareholder and president of boomer consulting, sandra wiley has been speaking with firm owners and leaders for nearly three decades and clearly sees the need for change in the profession.
“the business model that was built before cannot be the business model that you have going forward. it simply doesn’t work,” wiley said. “now, we’re still living in the old business model,” and we have to get out of it.
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when she does exit interviews to find out why people are leaving a firm, she said they all say it’s because of the hours. they need to find more balance in their lives, and they need to work less. while accountants do have government-imposed deadlines for tax returns, there are ways to reduce hours, wiley explained. we can do extensions to spread the work out over time and people, and we can outsource. most importantly, we can be more selective in the clients we work with. “we don’t have to work with every client we’ve ever worked with,” wiley said.
instead of growing for growth’s sake, grow for profit’s sake. wiley suggested cutting out some clients you shouldn’t have and trimming some of the fat in your own firm. even though revenue would be lower, “you could cut your hours, keep your best clients, and your profit would actually be higher,” wiley said.
succession in a firm may mean that the older partners need to stop doing things the way that they’ve always done them. the younger people who aspire to be partners want to do things differently, based on people she spoke to. “the younger partners wanted to price differently. they wanted to bill differently. they wanted to market differently. they wanted to have more steady hours. they were willing to take less money in order to have a better work and life balance,” wiley explained. instead of reflexively saying no, leaders should try to see how these new ideas could work.
10 more takeaways from sandra wiley
- three things she tells firms all the time:
- be very mindful of the culture you are building. if people feel like they have a purpose and like the people around them and that there is a career path for them, they will stay.
- identify new positions in your firm that people can grow into or you can hire into.
- hire differently. expand the group of schools you are recruiting from. consider hiring from two-year community colleges, not just four-year universities.
- consider hiring for culture fit, then figure out what they can do for your firm.
- upskill your team members sooner. no one wants to sit at the lowest tier of a firm for four or five years before being promoted to manager, especially when no one has taught them how to manage others. start them immediately on business development and managing client work.
- work together as one firm with one vision. establish processes that are efficient and that everyone in the firm uses. even the partners who have been doing things their own way for years need to adopt the new standard processes.
- many firms are still working with the very first client they ever worked with. but as the firm grows, you need a different, higher level of clients. don’t feel guilty about letting your early clients go if you want a different business.
- teach your people leadership and communication skills so that the next group of leaders is good at those skills before they have to do it.
- if you don’t have a specialty or niche yet, look to your people and consider the professions or parts of businesses they have a passion for. or look at the future to see what might be new so you can be on the front side of it.
- change leadership – not change management – is a new skill we need to develop. change management means you’re managing something that’s happening to you. change leadership means you’re going to manage it before it even happens.
- accounting firm leaders need to market the profession differently. not everyone wants to be a partner with the big house and fancy car, especially if that means they have no life.
- it’s not age that determines whether you are willing to change, but whether you have what carol dweck calls a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.
more about sandra wiley
sandra is a leader in the accounting profession with a passion for helping firms grow, adapt and thrive. she is regularly recognized by accounting today as one of the 100 most influential people in accounting as a result of her expertise in leadership, management, collaboration, culture building, talent and training. wiley focuses her expertise on clients in the areas of strategic planning, facilitation and teaching. her role includes serving as co-director of many boomer communities, which include the boomer managing partner circle, the boomer talent circle, the boomer technology circles and the boomer business transformation circle. her years of experience and influence as a management and strategic planning consultant make her a sought-after resource among the best and brightest firms in the country. wiley is a co-developer of the boomer certified consultant program and facilitates
regional and on-site sessions throughout the country. she is also a founding member of
the cpa consultant’s alliance. she can be reached at sandra.wiley@boomer.com.
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. my guest today is sandra wiley, shareholder and president of boomer consulting. how are you doing today, sandra?
sandra wiley 00:20
liz, i am great. and i am so happy to be here. and thank you for asking me to be here today.
liz farr 00:27
well, it’s just a pleasure. you know, it was really nice meeting you to ensure success a while back. and just to let you know, i never thought that i would be in a conversation with someone like you.
sandra wiley 00:42
well, thank you.
liz farr 00:43
yeah, well, let’s get started. now, accounting talent in the us, and around the world has been scarce for years. covid made it worse. what are your ideas on how to make things better?
sandra wiley 01:01
first and foremost, i would say that, yeah, we’ve always had been in a talent war for many years. that i think is there’s no question that the last 2021 and 22 have made it super challenging. it’s not, you can call it all different kinds of things. i don’t particularly agree with some of the things that are out there that are being said, but there’s no question that if you want to go out and put an advertisement out for a senior tax manager, and the amount of resumes you get today are going to be much smaller than they were two or three years ago. i think there’s a lot of things that are making that. so i think we have less people graduating in accounting, i think that we have, there’s a lot of opportunity for accountants out there, or people with accounting backgrounds today, whether that’s going to an innovative tech company, or a client that we’ve been working with for years, or what i have seen that was what has been surprising, is going completely to something different. i met one young lady who went back to school and she became a professor, i’ve met another woman who became a paraprofessional, in a law firm. so there’s lots of opportunity out there. so but there’s no question that, you know, there are lots of changes happening, how do you make it better? gosh, i will tell you, the first one, i have like three things that i tell firms all the time. one is be very mindful of the culture that you are building, and really work on your culture, if people love you. and people feel like they have a purpose for what they’re doing. if people feel like they liked the people around them, and there is a career path for them, not necessarily to partner, but a career path, they will stay. but that might mean you have to change your culture. and, and that’s somebody said one time, well, your culture just is what it is. yes, but you can work on it, and you can make it better. so culture, i think is number one. i would also say identify new positions within the firm, where people can either grow to or you can hire into. so we see a lot of people that are hiring project managers today. no, that’s not an administrative assistant. that is someone who truly manages big projects for you in the audit department in the tax department in the consulting department, that their background is not accounting, it is in project management. how do i manage big projects for a company? so i think that’s, you know, that’s just one position, but look at those different positions. oh, kaz is blowing up right now. right. so you can find lots of people who would like to be bookkeepers, one of the most fascinating things i saw was was a firm that decided they really wanted to go after more bookkeeping and outsourced cfo work. and so they, they found people that were coming out of a community college and accounting, i’m getting their two year degree and not their four year yet. and they were hiring them. and then they were helping them to go back and get their next two years. so they were it was almost like a second internship program. but for people in a two year college now, some people will look at me today and say, are you kidding? we don’t want those people that are just in two year colleges. let me tell you, there’s some brilliant people that are in those two year colleges that didn’t have the money or the means or maybe even the confidence to try and go on for their four year degree and we can do that for them. so new positions, and then gosh, i think we got to hire differently. if you’ve only gone to certain colleges, you gotta go to more. and i have seen so many people that have not such a great story but a story for you. and i was working with a firm within their area of the world, there were three black universities. and i said, have you been looking there? have you been recruiting there? well, no, we tried that years ago, and we got somebody out there and they just didn’t work. okay, so years ago, you tried to hire somebody, and that one person now that bit out of three universities didn’t work. so united, it’s not gonna try any of them. oh, come on. now they’re back to recruiting in those schools. they didn’t prove their diversity, they have improved their hiring rates, and they’re doing better. think about how to do things differently, you cannot do the way they always have been. and you and i, i bet have seen this before. but outsourcing, you know, that is become a part of how to make things better in your firm. and you know, it was here years ago, and then it went away. and everybody kind of see it didn’t work. today is a norm that is in cpa firms out there. so those are just a few things, but i think they’re important things. are you seeing something about the same lists or is seen about? have you heard about all those?
liz farr 06:08
yeah, yeah, i’ve talked to a lot of people who are being really creative in who they hire. some of them are not even looking for people with an accounting degree or any experience in accounting, but they’re finding people with the right attitude, who are eager to learn and teaching them. there’s that adage, you can teach the skills, but you can’t heart you can’t do the attitude.
sandra wiley 06:39
i think that’s true. you know, sometimes, especially so for years, i’ve helped with hiring. and i tell people all the time, if you meet somebody in an interview that really fits your culture, you go, wow, this is this person’s amazing. hire them. if you find two or three, while you’re looking, hire everyone and then fit your culture, you will figure out what they can do for the firm. now, you may have to be a little bit more flexible in how you use them. because you might find somebody to your point, i’ve heard of a lot of people hiring people that are in finance or in wealth management. so you might hire them thinking, well, maybe we can slot them into tax or audit, and then you find out wow, they’d be a great consultant. let’s put them in, let’s put them in the consulting realm. so you might have to change it up a little bit. but yeah, there’s no question that hiring people that are different than we used to or that different than we’re used to doing is a big thing right now. and i think it’s working fabulously, we will be a better firm because of it.
liz farr 07:44
um, no question. yeah, yeah, that is absolutely true. and the last firm i worked at, our receptionist was a communications major. and on her own, she took a couple little online accounting classes, discovered she liked it. and within six months, i had her helping out doing tax returns. awesome,
sandra wiley 08:10
that’s awesome. and the fact that she was a communications specialist, that will help her with the relationships with her clients, right. so you know, you know, that can’t hurt anything. that’s another. so that’s interesting. i was just talking to a firm out of atlanta the other day, and they said that they had hired a communication specialist, that’s their entire job, anything that needs to be communicated, they give it to her. and then she decides who needs to learn about it, how they, how they should learn about it is an email or text or a newsletter. but all communications goes through that, because what they were finding is they were missing out, like if i, if i got something, and i needed to have communication sent out, i would miss somebody or i would not send it in a way that they wanted to hear it. so they got a communication specialist that does all of that for them, which i thought was brilliant. so there are lots of new positions. don’t let yourself be stuck in the way it’s always been done. i think that’s an important part of it.
liz farr 09:16
yeah, and that’s it’s a good segue into my next question, which is about some of the changes that we’re seeing in how firms are organized in their business model. can you talk about data a little bit? yeah, we, again,
sandra wiley 09:35
i’m sure that anybody who’s read accounting today or anything by bloomberg consulting, you know, that we believe that the business model that was built before cannot be the business model that you have going forward. it simply doesn’t work. now, we’re still living in the old business model. i mean, the reality is, most of the firms we work with, are still working there, but they all have strategy. on how to get out of that. so when i think about the strategies for change, i would be remiss if i didn’t say, reduction of hours, we have got to find a way to reduce the number of hours that people are working. and we’ve got to figure out a way that phil, that we can spread that compression of work over the entire year instead of just being busy at certain times of the year. now, when i say that, i know that some of the listeners are gonna say, do you know what we do here, because the government tells us when some of our impressions are. and that is true, to a certain extent. but it’s also true that we can do extensions. and it is also true that we don’t have to work with every client we’ve ever worked with. and it is also true, that we can work people differently and hire outsourcers for certain times of the year. so there are ways to spread out the number of hours that your full time people are working, we just have to let ourselves figure it out. and i don’t think we’re spending enough time figuring it out. so i think that reduction of hours is huge. and if you ask most people that i know, so i just did exit interviews for firms, in every one of them every 100%. if i asked them, why did you leave? the first answer might be well, because i got more salary, or the hours would be better, or i was just trying to do something that was different than what i’ve always done. good. give me the third reason. so gets keep asking them. why are you leaving? why are you leaving? why are you leaving, by the fourth time, by the time i asked them the fourth time or before, they’ll say, well, it’s because i’ve got to find more balance in my life, that i’ve got to have got to work less. and so they never complain about the money they’re making. they know that they’re making good money in most cpa firms today. right? they do not like the number of hours they’re working. so we have got to figure that little puzzle out. and if, if it was one thing, then i could just tell you why i’m here, we’d all be happy, we’d all be happy. but it’s not one thing, it’s probably 40 things, you got to look out within your firm, to help drive down those hours. but you got to keep your profit and your revenue up. and so it’s not as easy as just changing one thing. so that’s the first thing i would tell you. second thing, when i think about changes, to move to that new business model is we’ve got to upskill our team, the way that we’ve always done it is you bring them in, they work for so many years, at the lowest level of the firm just doing the work. and then we finally move them into a manager position where they should be managing other people and still doing some of the work and then ultimately be a partner. first of all, there’s not as many people who want to be partners anymore. so that doesn’t work. people that you bring in are smart, they do not want to sit at that lowest level of the firm, or the entry level of the firm for four to five years. they just don’t want to do it. so and when they get to be managers, nobody’s taught them how to be a manager, you know, it’s like, so that’s a problem. so i think we have to upskill the team much faster, i think we have to get them used to business development, the minute they walk through the door, i think we’ve got to have them managing client work, the minute that they walk through the door, and when i say that people are gonna go, they can’t they don’t even know the client yet, then we’ve got to let them know, as a client, we’ve got to we’ve got to give them a higher level work faster, which means we’ve got to train them differently. so upskilling, the team i think is super important. and then new processes. we have to have processes that are one way workflow that are efficient, and that everybody in the firm uses. yes, even some partners. yes, i do. i’m saying i think in my mind, if somebody was listening to this, one of the things that they would say, well, some partner out there would be going yeah, but i’ve been doing this way i didn’t do it for 100 years. so i’m not going to change well. yeah, even you have to change so. so the new processes, i think are very important that lives right back to that reduction of hours, too. if we can make our processes better, we can do more work in less time. so that would be great. and my last thing here is, you know, you don’t have to work with everyone. you just don’t. you have a great client base. everybody out there has a great client base. every one of them has the people that they they were the very first people they ever worked with the very first client they ever had. and you are different now you do not have to do the same clients anymore. so that is a tough one. i think that’s the hardest one everyone i’ve talked about but if you want a different business model, you have to have a different stable of clients that you’re working with. and they have to be at a higher level. and they have and you can’t let yourself feel guilty that you’re going to let some of the other ones go. it’s the only way that works. so i think those four things are the things i would say are. how do you change the business model? there, you start there; the rest will come.
liz farr 15:23
yeah, and i really agree with you about the need for upskilling talent. it would have been so helpful. i know, to everybody and all the firms i’ve worked and to have some kind of leadership training. yep. yeah.
sandra wiley 15:41
isn’t it funny though, that so i, i can tell stories all day long. as you can tell, i’ve done this longer than i want to now than i even think about but years ago, i did a cert, i did a session at a association. and it was on leadership development. and i was talking about what leaders need to learn and what managers need to learn in order to lead a firm. and there was a gentleman in the front row. and i heard him say, oh, that’s a bunch of bull. i said, okay. and i should have probably just gone on, but i stopped and i said, i hear you. why do you say that? and he goes, well, nobody ever taught me those things. i’m a partner. and nobody, all the things that you just took me through and all the things you just told me about. i never have been trained on those. and i said, okay, then give yourself a great, how good are you at that? i mean, are you good at delegation? are you good at communication? are you good at writing business letters? and he goes, well, no. i just kind of laughed and said, well, what we want is our next group of leaders to be good at that before they have to do it. that’s what we want. and he said, okay, i get it. and that’s our truth. right? our truth is, some of us just had alerted us to the moment. what was really fun and for them to have those skills now, so that we don’t have to teach them over and over again, or that or that they know them before they’re before they’re ready. so yeah, i love the leadership training piece. i think that’s so
liz farr 17:20
yeah. and it’s something that has been so neglected. yes, barry. yeah. now, what about gross? do firms even really need to grow? we hear that all the time that that we need to grow. but i’m not sure that that’s true?
sandra wiley 17:39
well, i would tell you, so i’m sure you’ve heard the same thing i’ve heard before, which is if you’re not growing, you know, you’re dying. right? if you’re not growing, you’re dying. now, i will tell you that i think it depends on the firm. so i know that in this in this venue that we’re on today, we might have some small firms and some really large firms. and i think that if you are a small to midsize firm, and you’re saying to yourself, we just have to grow all the time, no matter what, you also might back yourself into a corner, where you have so much work to do that there’s no way to get it done. and now you can’t hire the right people. and you’re not trimming the weeds as you go, right. you’re not letting go some of the old stuff, and you’re not letting in the bigger stuff. so i’d say, of course, people want to grow, but you got to grow smart, you can’t just grow to be growing, can’t grow to grow for growth’s sake, if you’re not growing the right pieces of your business, if you’re not growing the right niches, then you’ve got a problem. if you have if you’re not really looking at growing differently, than maybe you were at the beginning. so when you first start a practice, if there’s people out there right now listening is the is your first practice, you don’t have any clients, then yeah, you’re probably going to take anything you can get, and then yes, you need to grow. but if you’ve got an established practice, and you’re taking a look at your people, let’s pretend you could cut your hours, keep your best clients, your profit would actually be higher. and the amount of revenue would be lower than what you’re making today. i would take that deal. right now, i would take that deal. but then that just means you got to let go some you can’t just keep doing what you’ve always done and expect different results, you have to do something which is trimming out some of the fat that you have right. now on the other hand, the larger you get. so if you’re looking at a large regional firm, in order to continue to grow your practice, i’d still say the same thing. you got to let go some of the maybe the lower weeds that you have and let go some of the clients that maybe you shouldn’t be working with anymore, but in order for you to continue adding people adding niches adding wealth management and adding calves, whatever it is, you’re probably going to have to keep growing, the larger you get, the more important that is. so i do think it’s different for different firms but but i would tell you, i don’t think it’s growth for growth’s sake, i think it’s growth for profit sake. that’s what you need to watch for.
liz farr 20:13
and you mentioned something about growing specific niches. and i’m a big believer in in that. how, what advice would you give a firm who is looking at developing a niche? and how would they go about finding the right one, and growing in that way.
sandra wiley 20:41
so maybe start with where you are today. so first of all, figure out which niches you have, that you’re really doing well, and what we think a lot of times is, oh, well, i know what my niches are. and then when you actually dig down in the numbers, and you start looking at how many clients you have in that area, and how much revenue you’re bringing in, and how profitable that work is, you really find out that some of the niches you have, you shouldn’t have, and you should let go of them. on the other hand, you also will find the ones that you go, wow, that’s a, that’s a small business, it’s a great niche for us, we want to make sure we do that, or dental practice, gosh, we have a million dental practices, we should really just be doubling down on those. the way to do that is to really figure out what you have today. and then maybe let go some of the ones that aren’t really your they’re not your specialty. they’re just a niche. so and now, on the other hand, if you’re looking for so what should we go after, let’s pretend you don’t have enough niches, you just aren’t specialized in anywhere, i would look first at the passion that the people in the office have, i think the way you grow a niche is that there’s somebody that really has a passion for a certain part of the business and or for a certain profession that you want to go after. so go there first. secondly, what does if you look down the road, if you look at the future, and you think about what what is it that’s going to be new and upcoming, if you can be on the front side of some of the new things that are coming out, that can be a really good niche to get to be a specialty cannabis. think about cannabis right now, for the firms that were on the front edge of that, who said, you know, we really want to understand the business, we want to understand the owners, we want to understand how the how the financials work, and we will become a specialist in that area. they’re doing great right now. right? no matter what state they’re in, they’re doing great. if you’re kind of just now going, hmm, maybe we should get into cannabis, you’re behind the eight ball, right? you’re kind of behind on getting in there. so if you can have somebody that seeing the future for you, that can tell you, hey, this is something you need to explore. and if somebody’s got some passion there go after that that would be important. so i hope that helps a little bit. it’s, you know, finding a niche is not easy. but it’s a lot of it is about your passion. and a lot of it is about the need within your community wherever you live.
liz farr 23:15
or the global community if you were the globe.
sandra wiley 23:20
you’re right. yeah, because we’re not restricted by borders anymore. are we? no.
liz farr 23:26
we are truly a we are truly a global community at this point. so absolutely. yeah. yeah. now, now, it used to be that to be a good accountant, you had to keep the fasb regs in your head and the tax code in your head. and you had to be really good with the 10 key. what are the skills that accountants need to be successful today and in the future?
sandra wiley 23:55
gosh, this was such a great question when you were talking about, you know, what we might talk about today? this was a question that i thought about a lot after i saw it. and i thought, you know, all of those are probably still true. i mean, let’s face it, if we’re going to be an accountant, people come to us for a very specific skill set that we might have. but also really believe that when you look at the new skills that we have to develop, and that we have to dive into and learn change leadership, i think it’s not change management, i management means that you’re managing something that’s happening to you. change leadership means i’m going to manage it even before it happens. i’m going to be i’m going to really understand what is happening in my profession and my world and my community. and i’m going to lead my people through change because it’s gonna happen. it happens all the time. probably happened to us more in the past that we think but the reality is i think they have to really understand how to lead people through change. and a part of that is process improvement. so we’ll go back to that process piece that i was talking about earlier, they have to be willing to say to themselves, no matter what size firm you’re in, we are not going to be these little silos anymore and work individually, we are going to work as one firm with one vision. and we are our processes are going to reflect that we’re all going to do it the same. we’re not going to have individual little entrepreneurs out there doing it their way, we’re really going to all work together. so process improvement. this is a buzzword i know but innovation, i think that true leaders in our firms today have to understand innovation have to understand innovative practices. and i think that ties really closely with technology. it’s not all technology, but it is partially technology. and they have to they don’t have to this is an old saying that they do not know have to know how to build the watch, they just have to know how to tell time, right? they have to understand that innovation is going to happen, new technologies are going to come along that are going to make us better. and they have to be willing to say okay, all of my people here, figure it out for me and i will use it. but no enough, as a leader of the firm that you’re going to let innovation happen. and then we’ll go back to that c word that you were talking about earlier, liz. and that’s communication. if they’re not great communicators, they are going to be dead as a leader in a firm. so if i were an accountant today, if i were one of the young accountants coming out of school today, i would get a degree in entrepreneurship, in sales, like a secondary degree in communication and marketing. because what i would be looking for is i will need to learn skills that will allow me to run my business more efficiently and effectively than ever before. i have to know some of that big business acumen change leadership, process management, innovation, communication, that’s got to be a part of their schooling, it’s got to be a part of their education. so all of those i think are truly important for you to be successful.
liz farr 27:13
and those are all things that were not part of my accounting degree, not even the slightest.
sandra wiley 27:19
i don’t think they were anybody’s right.
liz farr 27:22
no, you know, there, there are a few programs out there that are putting in a communication piece. yes. but what is still really lacking at the universities is teaching these kids to use technology. i mean, yes, it’s important to understand the paper and pencil and how that flows. but it’s a technology world, you’ve got to learn how bank feeds work and api’s and how to connect tech together. yeah, and how it also media,
sandra wiley 28:05
right? think about social media. you know, i mean, i still need senior people, not just partners, but seniors, people in the firm, that don’t have linkedin, that don’t even know what twitter is, i just want to go, oh, my gosh, that is where the world is doing business today. and you have to email you don’t have to know everything about and you don’t have to post every day. but you have to know enough to understand that that’s an important communication tool. so you’re right. and technology is another piece. so this was interesting was i was i went to a university one time, i was going to give a speech to their accounting seniors in accounting class. and one of the young men said, yeah, they said, so how important really is business development. i said, well, if you’re gonna go into a business where you’re just an accountant, right, or just a bookkeeper, probably not so much. but if you’re gonna go into a public accounting firm, then it’s extremely important. and he said, well, here at our university, we have a sales minor. and he said, i asked about going into that, and i was counseled not to do it, because it wouldn’t really help me. so my next stop was at the dean’s office. and i said, so i’m curious. they had this amazing business development minor, where they went out and actually did it was like debate, so they can have contests against other people who are selling and learning how to have that tone and have the right cadence for how to do how to make a sale. and they had discouraged all of their accounting majors from doing that, because they didn’t think it would help them. i said, you really need to go hang out with some public accountants because they would kill for people. they would hire them in an instant if they know how to not only do the accounting side of the world, but also the business development side of the world. and they i think things have changed since then. but man, that just kills me. those kinds of things just kill me.
liz farr 30:20
so that’s, that’s wild, that is just completely wild. yeah, it is crazy. and, you know, and it, it’s just indicative of how far removed academia is, from the reality of public accounting.
sandra wiley 30:38
so, so true. which i think is so sad, because how can we? how can we cast the poll out? right? how can we cast something to pull some people into accounting, when we’re not making it attractive at all? academically, right? i just think that’s so sad. and i it’s such an exciting profession. and i don’t understand why we don’t have more people going into it today. although i do think it you know, if you get your sexy on, if you want to say it that way, you go to other things, right? you got to wear the television. so right now, there’s a plethora of different doctors out there, because of what’s been you know, what they watch on tv, what you hear about that, that’s gonna net you a lot of money and all of that, even though it’s a long runway, i’m getting their degree. but that’s, that’s a big one right now. and then they’re looking for tech. i mean, i do think there are people going into technology, but they’re looking at to go into more of the like the, you know, california big companies that are innovative and new go to ces every year. and, you know, you see all the different innovations that are out there. that’s where they’re, that’s what’s being you know, because it’s the cool thing right now, accounting is not the cool thing. and so somehow, we’ve got to market ourselves better. because it was interesting. one of the guys i used to work with, he was a partner at a firm. and he said, i don’t understand why everybody doesn’t want to be what i didn’t want to do what i do be a partner in a firm, i said, okay, think about how you’re marketing it. you talk about how many hours you work, you talk about how you’ve been married three times, you talk about how you don’t know your children very well. but you drive a cool car, and you have a really big house. now you think that the big house and big car, or the cool cars gonna say, oh, look, well, that’s what i want, what they’re looking at is my life. that’s not the life i want. right? you got it, we’re gonna market it differently. and, and that means we’ve got we, as leaders of the firm have to figure out how to market ourselves differently, because that’s who they’re watching. they may not say a word. but that’s where they’re watching. and if they see you work every single day, all day long. all they’re going to say is not me, not me. so there’s a lot of work to be done in that area, too.
liz farr 33:06
so yeah, and it’s not just marketing. it’s not just presenting the image that this is what it will be like, but it is actually demonstrating those things. yes, that’s much more important.
sandra wiley 33:25
i agree completely, completely.
liz farr 33:29
yeah. now, we’ve talked about things that accountants are doing. but what do you think accountants should stop doing immediately?
sandra wiley 33:43
well, we’ve already probably talked about a few things. but the first thing that came to mind when you asked me that question was, well then stop doing trying to do things the way you’ve always done them. i just recently did some coaching with a firm, and it was to partner firm. so there’s two partners. and then there were about four shooting stars or rising stars that were really amazing. and then they have, you know, a few others in the firm before that were and they all wanted to start to transition to becoming partners so that the two kind of elder statesman could let go, right. and i wish i had taken a ticker and written down how many times those to elder statesman to current partner said, but that’s not the way we did it. but that’s not how we did it. but they don’t do it the way we do. and i just, you know, you want to reach through the zoom line and like, smack them on the head or something, say stop that. the younger partners wanted to price differently. they wanted to build differently. they wanted to market differently. they wanted to have more steady hours. they wanted to they were willing to take less money in order to have a better work and life balance. so there was so much of what they wanted to do now, fundamentally, they were super grateful for the people who had built the firm before them. yeah, that didn’t mean they wanted to do it the same way they had always done it. and and the two partners that were, you know, succession, they were out right as they were going to try to be out, they could not feel they couldn’t feel the same way, they wouldn’t let themselves intellectually go there. and all they could see was, that’s never gonna work. and that was hard. so i guess the first thing i would tell anybody out there is, stop trying to do things the way that you’ve always done them, even if you don’t understand it right away, take a step back and say, okay, then tell me how that would work. let’s let’s go through and figure out, let’s make it let’s see how we can make that work. so we’re going to price differently, we’re going to get rid of the billable hours, which by the way, i have seen very few firms actually do this, and pieces of the firm have, but not the whole firm ship, but get rid of the billable time and really just go to either value pricing or fixed fee pricing. the truth is, you can do that you can do that today. now you can do it, how many firms are doing it not very many as because it’s just not the way they’ve always done it. and they haven’t been able to figure out their new kpis that will allow them to track progress without having those billable hours. that’s that’s the problem. right? so i was lucky enough to be the leader of a emerging leader group. and we would give them projects to work on. one of the projects was if i took away billable time, what would you have to do to track progress? what kpis would you put into place? and their first response was, oh, my gosh, i have no idea. but then after a couple of hours with them, i let them do some research. i let them talk it out. i let them talk about the systems they had the technology they had. they came up with 35 kpis that they could track to see if they could if they were really making progress. it can be done now have any of those firms completely gone that direction? not yet. however, all of those firms have tried it in certain pockets. so audit seems to be a place where they can they’re they’re feeling more comfortable about that. in kas client accounting services or client advisory services, they’re feeling more comfortable their tax, they haven’t quite okay, i haven’t quite cracked the code yet. but you know, what, if we’re making progress, that’s good for me. i’m happy with that. so yeah, get rid of that old. i can’t do it that way. that would be a big one.
liz farr 37:59
that really is huge. and the world is changing. you know, we don’t we don’t talk on the phone the way that we used to. just simple things like that. consuming movies, we don’t have to go to the movie theater. we can look on our phone. you know, there’s so many ways that the world is changing.
sandra wiley 38:21
you know, isn’t it funny? i don’t. we were on a cruise not long ago, my husband and i. and i said, you know, i feel sorry for anybody who’s not really phone savvy these days, right? technology savvy. everything we did was on our phone, everything. i mean, checking in, going on excursions, how we paid for things, everything was on our phone. and we took cash we started, we went home with the same amount of cash we left with,
liz farr 38:52
wow, even the chips?
sandra wiley 38:54
so the chips, but you know that we were doing in the shuttle buses and things. then they had a big sign up that said, you can venmo me a chip. this is awesome. so that’s what i was. but i was thinking myself, if you’re not technology savvy, if you’re not willing to make that change, i don’t even know how you would have taken the trip. it would have been excruciating. so it would have been terrible.
liz farr 39:18
yeah, yeah. well, the world world is really changing, is it? so i’m sure you talk to a lot of clients, a lot of firm leaders about all the things that they need to do to change. but what are the things that keep them from changing? what are the blocks?
sandra wiley 39:41
that’s an interesting one. so i know some people have probably heard about this before i probably even read about it that mindset. and carol dweck wrote this amazing book on mindset. and i will say for me personally, it was a hard book to get through because it’s more like a textbook. like college textbook, but what she says is absolutely true. you can choose to have a mindset that is growth and big picture and innovation, or you can choose to be stuck. and i fear that even without knowing it, a lot of people out there are stuck in that fixed mindset instead of the growth mindset. so i think that’s a block, there’s no question that that’s a block that, that i think people need to explore themselves, and then really try to make themselves move out of that. that old school thinking i was telling you about, i think that’s a huge block. i think there are more, there’s more of that going on, then we know or that we think that we know, i think there are some leaders out there that say, no, no, that’s not me, they can do whatever they want. but when it comes right down to making the change, they revert back. and then the last one is people just not wanting to change before they leave the firm, we have a whole lot of baby boomers right now that are getting ready to exit their firms. and what, what we’ve done is we’ve tied their compensation to that, that book of business or that revenue for what the firm is making today. so if they can grow that revenue a lot, before they leave, then that affects their thereby right? and so they don’t want to change anything that might potentially make the revenue go down. that would be that would be a problem, right? so they want to stay with what they know works. so i know that there are a lot of firms that once you get within, i don’t know, three, five years of when you leave, you can’t be involved in any of the decision making, they actually asked you to leave the meeting. so you don’t go to strategic planning, you really step back, i have other firms say you can be there, the decisions will be made by the younger team, it will not be made by you, you have to just be there so that you can support it. now, not everybody’s like that. i don’t want anybody to think, oh my gosh, every partner you meet that’s over the age of 60 acts like that, because they don’t, i don’t think any of those things have anything to do with age. i think everything has to do with your mindset. because i have met 20 year olds that have a very fixed mindset. and i have met 70 year olds that are on a completely innovative, entrepreneurial, big picture growth mindset. so i think it has to do with how you decide to think it has nothing to do with age.
liz farr 42:31
i would agree with you there. i would completely agree with you. you know, i used to work with a firm leader who was very entrepreneurial. he even while he was a partner at this firm, even while he was managing director, he always had other businesses going on on the side. yeah. and he was on the board of every not for profit in town. it seemed like,
sandra wiley 43:00
that’s interesting. that’s very cool. well, i don’t remember if you and i talked about this when we talked last time, but the the one that statistic i saw one time was the great the biggest number of entrepreneurs today is people that are age 65 and above. they’re starting new businesses. and i think that some of them still have that all of the entrepreneurs have that still, that that thing firing in their brain, like what else could i do? and they figured they figured i shut the door on this career, but i’m starting this other career. and it’s pretty exciting for them. they already have business acumen they know lots of people, they are connected. so you know what, what you have to watch for are those people that have fixed mindsets that really don’t want to leave the firm. and they don’t want anything to change before they go. that’s a problem. that’s all and that’s a blocker.
liz farr 44:01
yeah, that that really is. now i want you to put on your crystal get out your crystal ball and think about the future. right now kaz client accounting services client advisory services that’s big. what do you think the next big thing will be?
sandra wiley 44:22
you know, i i think that i’m not quite sure how that visual have have your people visualize this, but the people that are listening, but i am most ccpa firms being like the cpa firm being the hub. and then kaz was the first thing that really popped to the top because we it makes sense in a cpa firm. and so kaz is a somos like a tentacle off of that. right. so cass can be doesn’t mean it has to be a different part of the firm or a different company. but i think that was the first thing i think wealth management is another thing that could be another technical that is part of a cpa firm, and maybe a marketing company or a business development company could be another technical, i think that will be another one, i think what you’re going to find is different firms will have different, like, offshoots from what they’re doing. but i think we’re going to be a more full service accounting company, rather than just doing tax audit and some consulting, you’re gonna come to an accounting firm to do everything, you’re gonna come to us for wealth management advice, and you’re gonna come to us and, gosh, you know, my husband just passed away, what do i do? okay, we have all of the resources, you need to take care of you, i come to you and say, i’ve got a new business i just launched, and i have another business, i’m gonna get ready to launch, okay, yes, a small business, we can do your strategic planning, we can help you with your talent, we can help you with recruiting, i think what you’re going to see is that really good firms out there are going to find a way to grow, but not just in the same way we always have in tax and audit, it will be in lots of areas, marketing, human resources, i met several firms in the last couple of years that have started new consulting practices, but they’re doing strategic planning. they’re doing human resource planning, they’re doing recruiting for other firms and other companies. so they’re becoming more full service to help businesses thrive. and i think that is going to be huge. but we gotta get, we gotta get the basic business model under control. first, you can’t just plug and play those those kinds of businesses in our model.
liz farr 46:40
no, no, no, it won’t know. and i think that’s going to be exciting. and i’ve talked to even controllers in industry, who are beginning to take a more holistic view of their businesses, the the organizations they work in. so i think
sandra wiley 47:01
that’s a great way to put it, liz, i think that holistic view is going to be really exciting, really affecting. it really is.
liz farr 47:07
and i think that’s a perfect way to end our conversation. thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. now, if listeners want to connect with you, where’s the best place to find you?
sandra wiley 47:27
i think i would start with email, you know, you can always email me sandra.wiley@boomer.com. so that would probably be one way. linkedin. i would love to have you join me on linkedin, which was it’s just look for sandra wiley there and you’ll find me. and then of course, our website boomer.com. i think any one of those three, i would love to see you. now. i will also tell you, i’m on twitter. i don’t do as much interaction with people on twitter as i do on linkedin. but if you’d like to follow me on twitter, i would love to see you there too.
liz farr 47:59
thank you so much. and you have a wonderful, wonderful day, sandra.