the real problem blocking new business models.
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gear up for growth
with jean caragher
for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
a shift towards a corporate business model with a ceo at the helm is necessary for sustainability and growth,” says mark koziel, president and ceo of allinial global, appearing on gear up for growth, a new show hosted by jean caragher, president of capstone marketing, and powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间.
gear up for growth is tailored specifically for public accounting firms with up to 100 team members looking to expand their practices intelligently and efficiently. each episode focuses on a topic crucial for accounting firms aiming for smart growth in today’s competitive landscape. find more episodes here, including:
- joey havens: the role culture plays in firm growth | gear up for growth
- allan koltin: how small firms can thrive against pe-powered competitors | gear up for growth
follow jean caragher on 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 here. | get her best-selling handbook, the 90-day marketing plan for cpa firms, here | and watch for jean caragher’s other show, capstone conversations, with leading growth strategists from the nation’s most dynamic firms, also available on 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
“every partner that’s nearer that retirement age is trying to beat their compensation from the year before so that their deferred comp is as maximized as it can be,” explains koziel, “and that goes directly against what the firm needs to do to transform for the future.”
these partners are making personal decisions, not firm decisions. transforming a firm’s business model requires a change in mindset, focusing less on an individual’s goals and more on what the firm can achieve as a team.
other highlights include:
- learn about the first step to transform your firm’s business model.
- hear about the client coordinator role and its contribution to your firm’s business model.
- find out how to set up a board to set your firm’s strategic direction.
- discover different strategies to replace employees who leave your firm.
more about mark koziel
mark koziel became president and ceo of allinial global in august 2020 after 14 years with the aicpa. in addition to leading a team of 27 staff members, he is responsible for strategic planning, financial performance, and the association’s overall growth and success. from beginning his career at a large local accounting firm in buffalo, n.y., to his tenure as executive vice president of firm services at the aicpa, koziel has been a leader and consistent advocate for cpa firms. well-known and highly regarded within the profession, he has appeared among the top 10 of accounting today’s top 100 most influential people and has been named to the international accounting bulletin global accounting power 50 list.
transcript
jean: hello, and thank you for tuning in to “gear up for growth” powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. i’m jean caragher, president of capstone marketing and your host. our guest today is mark koziel, the president and ceo at allinial global, the second-largest accounting firm association in the world. he has held that role for nearly four years. prior to that, mark spent 14 years in various roles at the aicpa. in total, he has worked in the accounting profession for over 30 years and has a wealth of knowledge and experience in knowing what works and what doesn’t work in cpa firms. mark, thank you for joining me today to discuss this particularly relevant topic for our listeners, “transforming the cpa firm business model.”
mark: thanks for having me, jean. you said that 30 years, and i remember you used to making fun of those that i thought were too old at 30 years, so here i am.
jean: i saw you make a little grimace as i said that, and i did kind of chuckle myself as well because i can hardly believe, you know, the time that i’ve spent in this profession too, which, yeah, it’s been quite an experience, for sure. so, let me start off with our topic here, “transforming the cpa firm business model.” what role do you feel that covid has had in focusing on the need for a new business model for cpa firms?
mark: i think it was an acceleration, not a game-changer. so, all the things that we are talking about today that firms are doing, should have done, they were happening at a fast pace before that. so, you know, i took allinial job in the middle of covid, so that was a little weird. but when i was at aicpa and out talking to firms, we’re talking about the fact that you should be hiring people anywhere. it wasn’t a geographic thing anymore. and this whole idea of hybrid and remote work and all these different things, firms just didn’t get it right back then, and then covid forced them into doing that. there have been some firms that have seen people come back in the office, other firms who were not back in the office. and so we do have this hybrid profession today that was already down a path before covid and covid made us get there quicker.
jean: right. yeah. there’s nothing like a pandemic to really get us to think of what’s possible in what we do, right?
mark: right.
jean: yeah. because clearly, this was an issue way before covid. and you’re right, i think that clarified things because on a dime, you know, people and computers went home and set up their desktops, and off they went.
mark: that’s right.
jean: right? so, let’s think about partners and firms and they understand that they need to do something with their business model, they need to make a change of some sort. what is the first step? how do they make that first move to start this change?
mark: i get a lot of calls about this, you know, many from our member firms, but i even get firms, old friends of firms that are not part of allinial global. we have a lot of discussion around this and i think you have to look at the dynamic of everything that’s happening around us right now. and i’ll say that’s the one thing that covid did slow down. covid slowed down private equity coming into the profession because it didn’t happen in the u.s. until a couple of years ago. there already was a firm in the uk that was private equity-backed. in fact, they’re another member of allinial. i like to think allinial has the most number of private equity-backed firms just based on the number of markets that i know that we have them in. so, that got slowed down a little bit. so, for only focusing on the u.s. market, now that private equity is here and you’ve seen some significant news articles around this, that, you know, everyone said when the first one happened, it’s a fad, it’ll never continue. when the second one happened, they said, “yeah, it’s still less than a handful, it’ll never continue.”
now we have some big players with grant thornton, baker tilly, all taking private equity and joining in the hunt for that. and so you have to wonder what the dynamic of the firms are gonna look like going forward. and every firm seems to be trying to go through some level of transformation, right? so, who was it? ey with they’re gonna split off advisory from audit and, you know, all these things that actually have been talked about as audit regulatory in the uk, especially, or in europe, i should say more so, that they wanted to have audit-only firms and they talked about that increasing audit quality. so, you know, the conversation has been around for a while. but if i were to specifically look at a firm and let’s say the sweet spot, any firm between $10 million and up, you know, it’s about the corporate model, right?
and i’ve said to our member firms time and again, and it happened probably two-plus years ago in our global forum that we had in vegas, right? that was probably our first large conference after covid. and i was up there and i don’t know if it was in a matter of frustration or what, but i was talking about the partnership model and i just said, “look, the partnership model is dead. it’s not dying. it’s dead.” and we can’t operate that way. and we can’t because, you know, this idea of, you know, the dangling carrot for the future and this constant re-churning of people and we need that pyramid model and the ponzi scheme that i need five people beneath me so that one of them could pay me out when i get to the other side and they need five people behind them to make sure that this thing continues to work.
what happens when the people don’t show up and ai becomes more prevalent and all the things that we’re doing in a firm? are we managing people? are managing partners there to manage partners? no, because partners can’t be managed. so, it’s having a ceo role. and we can go into a lot of governance-related items that we see as being necessary to say that i wanna be independent.
jean: right. yeah. and we will cover some of that as well. but in addition to the governance, so, you know, the partners, you’re sitting around the table and they also need to look at their business strategy and the people they have, you know, their talent pool and what services are they offering and how are they using technology they need? so, does it start around the table and having discussions on these important topics to figure out what their current situation is?
mark: if we don’t get the governance model fixed, all of those other strategies and alignment of the firm become more difficult. if i have to go as a managing partner or ceo and get every partner’s vote strategically where the firm is going, i am gonna get very differing opinions around that. and nothing against those partners that are nearer to retirement, as i’m starting to get closer to that age than the partner entry-level age. but it is this idea that the way we built the firm is my buyout, my retirement, my safety net is dependent on me earning as much as i possibly can in the next however many years before i retire because firms have the best 3 of 5, 5 of 7, 7 to 10. i don’t care what the formula is. every partner that’s nearer that retirement age is trying to beat their compensation from the year before so that their deferred comp is as maximized as it can be. and that goes directly against what the firm needs to do to transform for the future. and so those become personal decisions, not firm decisions. so, to sit around and have a strategy discussion, we could have it all day long, but we’re gonna have very differing opinions. and we gotta get down to those first.
jean: right. okay. so, this is so interesting because i was gonna mention that quote from you about the partner model is dead and you beat me to it, which is fine, but i’m gonna kind of skip around a little bit more than i thought i would with these questions because of what you just said. so, do you feel that one of the goals of transforming a firm’s business model is to change the mindset for more of an individual to a team, less about an individual’s goals and more about what the firm can achieve together?
mark: it has to be. absolutely. and i think, and i even had this in practice when i was there was these little fiefdoms no matter how you tried to break them down, they were always there. this is my client, right? and i grew up in the audit department, and so i’d go out and i’d sell a new client and i’d have a client go out, talk to him, small business owner, “yep. we’re gonna do review and a tax return. and it’s a little messy, so we’re gonna have a little cleanup upfront. so, this is what it’s gonna be.” and so say to the client, “okay, client, it’s gonna be 30,000 bucks.” great. okay, good. we get to the engagement. i come back to the office and, you know, my colleague in the tax department then says, “how’d you do?” i said, “great. we got the client.” they said, “well, what’s the fee breakdown?” i said, “well, they’re willing to pay us $30,000 and they say that, you know, $29,000 is deserving of what i do and 1,000 bucks for you. how’s that sound?” and we go from there.
and then, you know, it’s that client ownership thing. and yet the value to that client probably was a little more on the tax side, although i did act in an advisory role to the client in a lot of how we talked about their business, but still, that tax was still big value to that and try and understand that. and so, you know, i talk a lot to our member firms today that the business structure of a firm in the past was geography. we’re gonna hang our shingle in this market, then we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna find a bunch of audit clients because that’s what we do, or audit and tax or whatever the services are that we have around the table at that point in time. and so we’re gonna sell these services. and then after a while, well, you know what? we kind of figured out that we have a particular industry niche because we’re doing not-for-profits, we’re doing construction, whatever it is. and so we now have this kind of concentration a little bit. we’ll hope that we get more out of that, but, you know, we’ll say that we have specialties and we’re gonna put as many of those as we can on our website, even though we only do one, yep, we’re an expert in it. and so, you know, all that ends up on the website.
and so the way that the… this is a really large firm thing and this is a really small firm, micro-firm thing that it has gone from geography, service industry to industry upfront, client coordination, and then at the bottom becomes the service lines, right? now, client coordination piece is somebody who has this expertise in the industry who can go out and talk to the client about all things, wants, needs, wishes, the whole nine yards, and then they come back and they put the service team together based on the service needs of that client, all of them, not just, “well, no, this is an audit client, we’re gonna focus on them being an audit client.” and i think that that, and you see this in client accounting services in the smallest of firms. so, i do client accounting and i go to market with this and i live in florida, but i decided that, you know, craft breweries are my specialty. i have a friend who does that and that’s all he does, right? but now he does them nationally. and so they’re figuring out that it’s not geography, it is industry niche and how powerful that could be. and with data and ai becoming such a big part of what we’re going to be, having that industry expertise and having access to data and data analytics is gonna be even a bigger part of who we are.
jean: right. so, i was gonna ask you also about the client coordinator role, which you just described for us a bit, but do you view that as a marketing or sales role or is that someone that works with the clients once they’re onboarded?
mark: it could be both. i see it as a business development, yeah, but i think it’s somebody, like i said, i mean, if i’m in healthcare and i have a client who had a healthcare administrator who just really knew the business, knew all of the ins and outs of the different alliances and different hospital groups and had all their friends around that, i wanna hire them as my business developer. they don’t need to know how to do an audit. they just need to know that they need to have an audit done and where’s all this other advisory work gonna come from? they’re not gonna have that vested interest in a particular service niche and, therefore, they could go out to that client and sell it better than somebody who grew up on just one of the pillars of the many services that we provide.
jean: right. right. i love that idea. let’s step back again with one of the challenges, of course, and this all comes down to the leadership of the firm, right? because there has to be the need there and the recognition that something different needs to change, and i would think that comes from the managing partner, but we know in changing this business model, you’re not just changing the title of the managing partner to ceo. there’s a lot more that goes into it. can you speak a bit perhaps about the qualities that you see in the managing partner transitioning to ceo of the firms you’ve seen? do you see any common traits or styles that have been successful?
mark: it is in leadership. there’s still some level of, and maybe even more so, of inclusiveness, collaboration, but in a different way, that we’re gonna let people know, but we may not necessarily ask for votes, right? it’s keeping people informed. it’s making it about it being a board decision, not a ceo decision, not coming down to one person doing it all, but we’re gonna have the right board in place and this is where we’re gonna develop the strategy. and how we put the board together is gonna matter on how we wanna be in the future as well.
but i think that all of this… and then so when we create the board, and there’s just some of the mistakes i’ve seen firms make is, “okay. we’re gonna create a board now so we don’t have to have a meeting of all the partners deciding if we’re gonna have beef or chicken at the holiday party. it’s gonna be a set number of partners that are gonna do that.” and then the other piece of that, and this is again, where it’s gotta get fixed in the governance model, it’s not every department that has a seat on that board. the board is very strategic in who’s on it based on what we wanna drive for the future of the firm. and so it’s not a reserved seat for audit, reserved seat for tax, reserved seat for tech, blah, blah, blah, right? it is setting up a board that is going to set the strategic direction of the firm and not have that influence of i gotta protect my department.
jean: so, then it could be someone representing technology or someone representing hr…
mark: could be.
jean: …along the controls?
mark: yeah. and it may be a partner that oversees it. i’m not saying it has to be the hr person because you’re gonna have potentially a coo. depending on the size of the firm, you’re gonna have a coo, you’re gonna have some of these other pieces that are there, but it is making sure that those things are talked about in a very real way at this strategy table.
jean: with the good of the firm in mind, not an individual’s goal in mind.
mark: completely. one of the things that i found that is just a really good philosophy, a couple of years ago, i did a panel discussion at digital cpa for cpa.com and it was about this idea of outsourcing, offshoring in a way, or just capacity building. and this is the thing that i don’t talk about staffing in a vacuum, i don’t talk about offshoring in a vacuum, and i don’t talk about technology in a vacuum. all three of those pieces is satisfying capacity. and one of our firms, or two of our firms, talked a lot about the fact that when they look at a process or they’ve lost a person, right? and a lot of firms, especially in smaller firms, “this person is leaving the firm. oh, my god, what are we gonna do?” well, after i get done crying, now i’m gonna say, “how are we gonna replace that person? we have to go out and find another body. let’s go find another body, because that was a body that did something, we have to replace that with another body.”
and these firms said, “well, no, that’s not necessarily what i need to be thinking about. i need to be thinking about if i’ve lost that person and they did a particular process, can that process be automated 100%? and if it can’t be automated 100%, can i automate a portion of it and then offshore a portion of it or outsource a portion of it, whatever terminology you wanna use? and if i can’t do that, can i outsource or offshore 100% of it? if i can’t do that, now i have a hiring decision i have to make, but that is last decision out of the decision tree, not the first.”
jean: right. right. interesting. okay. have you seen partners that either are transitioning to this new model or thinking about it, is there a concern on the part of partners that they are losing some of their authority or…oh, what’s the right word? they’re standing within the firm?
mark: yeah, i think there’s some of that. the problem with that is, and it’s about value, right? so, firm value, i gotta maintain firm value, i gotta maintain my comp level at the comp level that it’s at for all of that. and if my comp continues to go up, i have greater authority inside the firm, which is what really makes it a challenge to try and change it, right?
jean: right, of course.
mark: but there’s nobody behind you to take it over, and this is what they’re all keep saying, is, “i look behind me, there’s nobody there. now what?” and it’s because the model we’ve created isn’t going to be sustainable well into the future, so the question has to be, “do i wanna be a sustainable firm, and how am i gonna make that happen?”
jean: okay. see, that’s the magic question. so, that goes back to, you know, do i want my firm or our firm to continue to be independent, or are we just going to, you know, set ourselves up to be acquired by another firm?
mark: yeah. and what’s interesting in any of that, and we’ve had a lot of conversation, and there are people who have opinions on pe, not pe. like i said, we have a number of firms that are pe. it’s worked well for them so far. we have other firms, i mean, the announcement of bdo creating an esop. i know there’s a number of those that are out there. but also setting up a phantom stock plan to be able to say that, “okay. we’re gonna set up this phantom stock plan and we’re gonna take the valuation of the firm out of this deferred comp system and into a phantom stock plan so that we can pay our partners differently, but those partners sitting around the table today, they have to be willing to make that sacrifice to make it happen. and if they start that, they can start, you know, giving shares, small percentages of shares, even the entry-level staff that are coming in. so, if you don’t wanna do an esop, set up the phantom stock plan, peel back on the deferred comp plan because that’s what’s gonna hold us back.”
and what’s interesting to me is, and i’ve had these conversations with firms and partners, and partners who are nearing that retirement age, and saying, “well, i don’t wanna shift it now because i’m the one who’s gonna be most affected by it.” well, if you set it up today, you can still get paid the same way. you can get that figured out so that you’re not really hurting anybody along the way, but the biggest problem we have is the amount of debt accumulated by our retired partners. and so i’ll say to a firm, “you know what? go out to the bank and take out a loan and wipe out the retired partner obligation. just get rid of it so you can start brand-spanking new with what you have.” and they’re like, “no, no, no. we can’t do that. the firm doesn’t like taking on debt.”
i said, “wait a minute. you already have debt. your creditors are the retired partners, so don’t think you don’t have debt. it’s just not on your balance sheet.” i said, “you’re like the federal government. federal government, the social security obligation lives in a footnote, not on the balance sheet.” i said, “and firms now are all of a sudden doing the same thing.” and so if we could fix that and get that off our backs. and even these are big conversations strategically to be able to have with young professionals to say, “we don’t want you working here for 20 years for now the right to give us money to become a partner for the right to work another 20 years to get that money back plus a little bit.”
jean: right, right. it helps you get your money back too.
mark: we understand that model doesn’t work. and this is why everybody else is selling out. we’ve got a plan to be independent forever, and this is how we’re gonna put that in place.
jean: because that goes at the other end too, because, of course, i was gonna mention that there are fewer students entering the accounting curriculum, there’s fewer entering the profession, fewer getting their cpa license. so, the public accounting profession is in a crisis related to its people, so firms thinking differently like this, whether it’s pe funding or esops or the phantom stock option you were just mentioning, that has to be a no-brainer when it comes to recruiting and retention and rewarding your people a lot sooner than they normally are in the traditional structure.
mark: it gets better, but, you know, we have as a profession, and this has been for a… i think this has actually gotten worse. when you take a look at the starting salaries inside the profession, they have not kept up with the amount of growth in the director partner salaries for sure, but more so to other majors. i had a study, i showed this to our member firms last year that the national association of colleges and universities, i forgot what the study’s called, but when you looked at the average starting salary of those coming out with a bachelor’s or master’s in accounting versus those coming out with a finance degree or a computer science degree or a data analytics degree or even a marketing degree.
jean: even marketing.
mark: they were all higher than the accounting degree on average. and we used to be the pride and joy. we’re stable. there’s no doubt. we are a stable profession, always have been. there will be more jobs available in accounting than finance, but not by much. as you looked at the percentage of placements, finance is definitely catching up and this isn’t new. our ceo of our australian firm, they’re bentleys, and he actually grew up a banking guy, right? so, he and i are about the same age, so he came out right around ’90, ’91, and he had a dual major in finance and accounting, and this is in australia. and so he’s now recruiting. and he had a couple of offers from a couple of local firms, and then he had three banking offers, and the banking offers were three times what the cpa firms were offering him, right? so, where’d he go?
jean: of course, he went to banking.
mark: and then tells me he didn’t touch his first client in banking till well after six months of pure training. so, think about the fact that even in accounting, we say you gotta learn as you go, we’re gonna give you a week, two weeks of training, and then we’re throwing you out in the field because that’s where you’re gonna get the experience, and yet the banks are paying more, and they’re not chargeable until well six months into it. and i guarantee you, he wasn’t filling out a timesheet saying that that was the value of production inside what the bank did. and i think, you know, all of these things are just, the business model is hampered by a little bit of everything.
jean: oh, gosh, it totally is such an interesting story, right? let’s just touch on for a minute the impact that a new business model can have on the services that a firm offers that it’s, i don’t wanna say getting away from the audit and tax, but it’s focusing more on the advisory and something we’ve been talking about for decades, right, about the accountants being true, like, trusted advisors. there’s a lot more emphasis on that now and a lot more that we read about and hear about. so, give me your take on the impact changing a business model has on services provided.
mark: so, you know, first of all, i am incredibly bullish on our traditional services is what i call them, right? so, when you think about audit and tax, audit, i think first and foremost, with the cpa brand, the cas around the world, cpas around the world, we are, i keep saying this, level of trust and being the trusted advisor. the reason we can say we’re a trusted advisor, and by the way, the pandemic and ppp proved this to us is i sat in the aicpa and we were working on trying to get our firms ready on ppp. all of their clients were calling and there was no doubt we were the trusted advisor during that pandemic. and so when you think about that, that all stems from the fact that we do have this audit as a function of who we are, and that develops a level of trust to the marketplace that gives us permission to do everything else, including tax, right? tax, we don’t own it, we are not the ones who… there’s no law that says that you have to have a cpa to do your taxes, but there is a law that says that an audit has to be done by a cpa, and the stock engagements now.
and so the profession has grown into all these advisory services because of the trust in the marketplace, and i don’t ever wanna see that go away. i think we need to hold onto that tight. and i do think our audit clients can get better based on the information. and so a lot of conversations with firms, and this goes back, again, well before the pandemic, and i used to talk a lot about client accounting as client accounting was growing into something different. and so we talk a lot to our member firms about client accounting, we have groups set up for it, we’re working on pricing around it to help them think about creating their own three tiers of pricing, to move up into the advisory space, all these things. and so i talked to a firm and especially as an association of independent firms, all of our firms are on their own, they’re not on the same systems, they can peer-review each other inside of associations because they are that disconnected versus some of the larger networks.
and so because of that, so i’m talking to a firm, and this goes back probably six, seven years, well before the pandemic. and i do a professional update presentation as part of aicpa, i start talking about client accounting and how client accounting can be such this growth opportunity for firms. and again, that’s another thing we had permission to do. it’s kind of what we grew up with. client accounting in the day was ebenezer scrooge just counting the coins, right? and so it’s been around for hundreds of years, but now here we are with technology, thinking about it differently and how can we interact with our clients differently?
and so i had this firm and i said, you know, “with client accounting services, we have just such these great opportunities.” the ceo comes up to me after and he says, “i had this exact thing.” he said, “i had a not-for-profit client, was a complete dog of an audit. i mean, never ready, always a mess. we could never make money at that audit.” and he said, “we finally sat down with them and said, ‘look, you’re trying to hire a cfo on a controller’s budget, worse yet more like a bookkeeper’s budget, but you need cfo-level help inside some of the things that you’re doing. you know what? hire us, we’ll do all of your client accounting and then you can go out and get another audit from the duty audit.'”
and so he says, “you know what? we’re making four times the fees that we’re making on doing the audit.” and i’m like, “well, but that’s not a bad thing.” i said, “well, wait a minute.” i said, “so, who got the audit? you’re in this association.” this is well before i’m in the association again. i said, “you’re in this association over here. did you refer that audit to one of the other firms?” and he’s like, “well, no. they just went out into the local marketplace.” i’m like, “but why wouldn’t you?” i said, “you just created the perfect audit. the next auditor coming in can charge the same fee and it’ll actually be profitable because it’s the right audit. and so why wouldn’t you do that?” and part of that collaboration or whatever else.
and i think if you just take that not-for-profit example and they’re not doing the client accounting on that, but they’re also doing all of this audit work for not-for-profits too and some of them are sophisticated enough to not outsource or doing it internally, now they have all this data and they’ve gotten smarter inside of not-for-profits and they can provide compensation surveys and they can provide, you know, benchmarking kpis for not-for-profits. this is how your profit and loss statement. i was statement of financial position. i forgot all my not-for-profit terms. i haven’t audited one in forever. but all of these things, statement of activities, that’s it. i’m sorry, i should know this. i have one for our not-for-profit association that i live in.
anyway, i think there’s all these opportunities around the services. and when you think about, this is the other piece of it that i find incredibly interesting when we start to talk about client accounting services, there’s a lot of firms, my firm back 25 years ago, we had a technology arm that they would go in and they would implement accounting systems. right? and we sold acpac at the time and we’d go into a client and say, “hire us because acpac is great, mass 90 is terrible, and dynamics is awful.” and just bash on the other ones. and then they all got bought by sage, so now sage owns everybody. so, that type of service is gone, but we’re still doing evaluations and technology implementation.
but if you think of that same nonprofit example that i gave you and said, “okay.” imagine that nonprofit came to the firm and said, “our technology is terrible. our people can’t run it.” and then our technology person goes in and sells them another technology. but guess what? people can’t seem to run that one either. why? because they’re in over their head. and all the automation in the world is never gonna get them to where they need to be. the right answer was us taking over the client accounting. and so if we had that business development person that went walking into that healthcare business, the not-for-profit, whatever, and said, “tell me your problem.” “i can’t get the accounting information i need. that’s my problem.” it’s not, “i need a new accounting system. i need a new cfo that i can’t afford.” it is, “i can’t get the accounting information. the board is frustrated with us not being ready.” and now all of a sudden that’s a different conversation. they can come back and they can decide on what’s gonna be the best implementation. and that becomes incredibly client-focused.
jean: right, absolutely. i think that’s the key right there, just the ability for the firm to be more client-focused past what you’re calling the traditional services and adding in that client coordinator role. so, for my marketing background, i mean, this is really driving and promoting niche marketing and having that depth of expertise so that it’s more than just the compliance. it’s really understanding how that organization or how that business runs and then what the firm can do to help them with the challenges they have.
mark: right.
jean: right? okay. last question, bonus question. what is your preferred grill for cookouts?
mark: you know that’s my jam.
jean: well, i do. well, i remember a conversation but i want you to tell our listeners here because you’re very particular about your grills.
mark: i have three currently. i use my kamado joe the most only based on size. i do have a gas grill by my joe also, and then i have a big green egg upstairs. i started on a big green egg when it was about smoking. and then when we moved, i ended up selling the egg and i’m like, “i want a kamado joe because it’s got all the accessories.” but there’s just certain things to the joe that i liked the egg a little bit better and i would go back to it in a heartbeat if i didn’t have this big red beast sitting down here currently that i will cook into the ground.
jean: oh, my gosh. well, then you must really enjoy your grilling and time outside.
mark: i do. i do. and, you know, i’m in north carolina. the weather is beautiful. we’re in the mountains. so, we have nice seasons and it’s the ability to do it 24/7. it’s great.
jean: i understand. well, mark, thank you for your time today. i appreciate it so much. it’s always enlightening talking to you. and thanks to everyone for tuning into “gear up for growth.” please join us next time when we focus on another crucial topic important for accounting firms aiming for smart growth in today’s competitive landscape. i’ll see you then.