rely on your professional network for answers you don’t know. plus 13 key takeaways.
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the disruptors
with liz farr
nancy mcclelland never intended to start a firm, but after leaving a toxic work environment, she took on a few part-time gigs. because she’d never worked at a cpa firm, she built it “the way it made sense” without bumping up against the traditions of “this is how it should be done.”
more podcasts and videos: alan whitman: stop accepting the status quo | sean duncan: discover your own genius | ingrid edstrom: true wealth is not financial | caleb jenkins: firm growth requires owners to shift roles | chris hervochon: be the leader you want to work for | ira rosenbloom: don’t merge for the money | adam lean: get out of the accountant’s trap | geraldine carter: charging more is better for your clients | vimal bava: when working smarter, not harder, is the only option |
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the name of her firm – the dancing accountant – reflects her passion for dancing and membership in several dance troupes, including one where she wears miniskirts and go-go boots. sharing that passion with her clients means putting herself “out there” and having faith that her clients respect her work as an accountant. “and you hope that they don’t laugh too hard at your dancing or that they’re not disappointed to find out that you’re just doing silly, fun stuff.”
her firm name also serves as a litmus test for potential clients. potential clients “have already passed a bar, where they have said, ‘oh, that sounds like somebody i’d like to work with,’” she says. “and so it ends up attracting the folks that we’re more likely to want to work with.”
while mcclelland’s firm is fully remote, the clients are “hyper-local” to the logan square neighborhood of chicago where she lives. they offer the full arc of services to their clients, which includes bookkeeping, accounting, and tax, plus additional services “that accountants don’t normally get involved in,” such as hr issues, expansions, or product mix to provide different pieces of the puzzle to keep their clients healthy. “i want them to ask me first,” mcclelland says. “and if i don’t have the answer, that’s ok. i can reach out to my amazing network and find somebody who will know the answer.”
13 more takeaways
- with the right cloud systems in place, your clients may not even notice that your team is remote.
- co-working sessions on zoom can help with accountability and availability to answer questions.
- the best hires for a remote team are those who are already comfortable working remotely.
- to be a better leader, remember that you need your team more than they need you. treat them with the respect they deserve.
- surround yourself with kind, funny people that you genuinely like.
- leadership is about caring: caring for your clients, your team members, your colleagues, small businesses, and the accounting industry.
- the new generation of accountants isn’t like the older ones. we’re fun, we’re colorful, and we’re helpful. the machines do the drudgery work for us, leaving personal relationships for us to handle.
- consider writing a blog post with the answer when more than one client asks a question.
- build a culture of trust, openness and honesty. be open with your team about your weaknesses.
- paid happy hours with cocktail kits, snacks, and deep conversations help keep remote team members connected.
- you do you. there are many ways that firms can grow. downsize. right size. focus on a niche. offer deep comprehensive services to a few clients.
- don’t take the advice du jour. not every firm needs to grow. not every firm owner needs to stop working in the firm so they can work on the firm. don’t compare yourself to other firms if that’s not what you want to do.
- don’t say yes to every demand from clients. get comfortable saying, “that’s not what we do,” and “this is how we do it.” give yourself permission to say, “i’m not going to do this anymore.”
more about nancy mcclelland
with her cpa firm, the dancing accountant, nancy has been on a lifelong mission to support small businesses and their communities – as well as educate the professionals who serve them. known for her fun, personal and direct style, it’s no surprise she insists that the future of accounting is built on relationships. she’s working on creating an “ask me anything” community for bookkeepers who want to learn more about preparing tax-ready books, collaborating with cpas, booking complex accounting transactions, and breaking into advisory services – reach out to her to join the beta group and help shape its future! named one of the top 100 proadvisors by insightful accountant, as well as one of ignition’s top 50 women in accounting, she writes an award-winning blog with insights and resources for business owners and accounting professionals and is an engaging speaker… and 60’s go-go dancer!
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr
nancy, can you tell listeners a bit about your firm, where you’re located, what you do, what kind of clients you serve, and how you came to be in those kinds of roles?
nancy mcclelland
sure, i’d be happy to share. i want to mention before i get started, though, that i am a huge fan of your work. and it is a real honor to be invited here into this space. so thank you, again. our firm is called the dancing accountant, and our client niche is hyper-local to the neighborhood in chicago where i’ve lived for almost 25 years, logan square. and our clients are, these are the restaurants where we eat. these are the stores where we shop, the folks we hire for professional services, right? like even actually, our local farmers market is a client. and the local chamber of commerce is a client of ours. the chamber of commerce, actually they co hosted a 21st birthday party for our firm a couple of years ago and the whole neighborhood came out to celebrate i mean, it was just yeah, it was magical. so, we offer our clients what we think of as the full arc of services. and that’s bookkeeping, accounting, tax, and advisory. we have very personal relationships with our clients. they know we’re truly dedicated to their success. and that comes from a deep-seated belief that vibrant communities. they come from having a healthy small business, and we truly believe this. and they know that they get that we really care about them. that’s how i started it. oh, my gosh, it was totally an accident. i did not. i did not set out to become a cpa firm. that was a total accident. i had left a really toxic work environment as the accounting supervisor of a nonprofit. and i just took on some part-time gigs while i was planning our wedding. and 23 years later, here we are.
liz farr
you just never know. yeah,
nancy mcclelland
i ever, i think.
liz farr
i think a lot of accountants end up in that situation where they just kind of follow what’s next and what’s next. and then all of a sudden they look around go. hmm, i got that firm.
nancy mcclelland
this is what i just described me perfectly. that is exactly what happened. and i don’t think that that’s just accountants, you know, to your point. we were talking earlier before we started recording about how you hope this podcast finds people outside of the accounting profession as well. i think that this is a really common way that people end up starting their firms. i will tell you, had you asked me if i wanted to start a cpa firm, i would have said no, it was definitely i’m glad that it happened by accident because i would never have done it on purpose.
liz farr
yeah. and i think that because you never intended to create a cpa firm that also gave you the permission to create something that’s not like the traditional cpa firms.
nancy mcclelland
absolutely. um, as a matter of fact, i not having come up in the industry. i you know, i didn’t know what how i was supposed to do it. and that has been, you know, in some ways that’s been a negative for us, but in in many ways, some of which i’m sure we’ll talk about today. it was just the greatest blessing because it’s you know that the title of your podcast is the disruptors? right? i sometimes you don’t know, we’re disrupting when we’re just doing it the way that makes sense to us without having that external. this is how it should be done.
liz farr
absolutely. now, your firm name is the dancing account, which is a nod to your passion for dance. now, how does putting your passion out there so directly impact the way your clients interact with you?
nancy mcclelland
that is such a great question. it happens before they become clients actually. you know, a client by the way, i don’t know if you know, this client gave us that name, the dancing countin. we didn’t even come up with that. yeah, we were nancy mcclelland llc. very exciting sounding name really outside of the box. there. right. and, and i actually had dance in it. and a few really fun trips. you mentioned the jains in particular. and, you know, like, these boots are made for walking kind of thing. and there one day, there was a one of my pro bono clients also in the neighborhood unity park, they were having an event at the park where we were teaching little kids how to go go dance. and here i show up in full costume miniskirt, tall boots, etc. and not one but two clients were actually picnicking with their kids. and high walk up. and she said, look, kids, it’s the dancing accountant. and i think i put through the dba paperwork the next day, it was definitely within a week. it was just, it was just perfect. um, have you read? what’s your hand by john garrett? i’m sure you know of it. well, i don’t know if you know this. but i was actually the first ever guest on his podcast back when it was really an apple podcast. yeah, his very first guest. and we talked about this, this, this, how does it affect the relationship with your clients. and while i was talking with him, i realized something that i hadn’t previously realized about the name of our company. it’s actually a litmus test for potential clients. it keeps away the people who think, oh, the dancing, accountant. that’s silly. that’s what is that i don’t want to work with somebody who’s that doesn’t sound professional, or that doesn’t sound whatever they might think. it keeps them away. it it makes it so that the people who are reaching out, have already passed a bar, where they have said, oh, that sounds like somebody i’d like to work with. and so it ends up attracting to us folks that we’re more likely to want to work with. so that has actually worked out really well. and way in a way that i i wouldn’t have been able to anticipate. it has been scary for me at times. because, you know, i the types of dancing i do. it’s it’s, you know, i’m not a ballet dancer. i’m wearing crazy costumes. i mean, one of the groups is, is the 1960s go go dance troupe. i also danced with fabulous ladies of fitness, which does ironic ad style jazzercise for you know groups of people. i mean, we actually got to perform at chicago summer dance when you’re and i i led gloria by laura branigan and you know, to have 400 people dancing with you when you’re doing this, like silly tongue in cheek fun stuff. i mean, it’s a joy. but there are clients in that audience, you know, and another one of the groups that i danced with the chicago chorus girls, is an amazing, wonderful group. but again, silly fun costumes. for years, i danced with clamor and lace, which is a glam marching band, all about the sequins and the gold and the you know, and they actually performed at my 21st anniversary party, and i performed with them. so that is that is something where you just have to take a deep breath and put yourself out there and you know that your clients know that you’re great at what you do. and you hope that they don’t laugh too hard at your dancing or that they’re not disappointed to find out that you’re just doing silly, fun stuff. you know.
liz farr
i think that makes it more human. that really does. and it certainly impacts the way that you operate your firm and encourages life, work life balance or really more work life integration. how does that really impact your firm?
nancy mcclelland
well i’m really glad that you, you change the word balance to integration. because i will tell you something i don’t have is work life balance, my work takes up way more of my time than the rest of my life does and, and it does for most people claiming that there is ever a way to really balance those things. you know, i, i know there’s some people out there that who have who have done it, that’s not me, i don’t want to i love my work. but integration is key. work life balance is one of our biggest challenges. but meaningful, remote flexible work is something i have read over and over and over is what the kind of the kind of people i want working with me, that’s what is moving them the most meaningful because we’re taking care of these small businesses and the communities that they are contributing to remote of course, i know we’ll talk about that plenty because our firm is, is 100% remote. even though we are also hyperlocal. and flexible work, you know, we’ve got people who have kids and and hobbies and, and challenges in life and they need to be able to put those first and to put their work second. so that really is integration. we’ve been addressing this the past few years by right sizing and trying to get my work you know, reined in a little bit so that i have the same or closer to the same flexibility that our the rest of our team members do. but holding up our hobbies and passions for each other and celebrating them. like dancing for me like we were talking about painting and textiles for julie. horse shows for kendra sarah as a jewelry maker. i mean, like there’s, everybody’s got their thing i could go i could list it for all of our team members, because i know all of our team members, hobbies, it’s something we talk about, at our paid happy hours. you know, it’s a huge part of who we are as people. and it’s just as important that our clients see us as human beings to your point from earlier and vice versa. i just i can’t think of anything more important than that.
liz farr
so too, and it’s such so, so refreshing compared to the accountants that i worked with who were like, oh, well, i have to duck out early and i gotta i got a sneak out. don’t want boss to know in our lives.
when i hear your stories of how you came up. i watched the podcast with scotty scarano and i just felt it in a hit now you know, he’s what did he call himself an elder millennial? i think, you know, he’s on the younger end of things than you and i are. yeah, but i could hear him just saying why what like what purpose does that serve? where does that get anybody and i couldn’t agree more my heart like really breaks for you when i when i especially when you said pantyhose oh my goodness forget that. i worked at a place where we were pantyhose and i was like well, you know technically i’m a consultant so you can’t enforce that rule.
nancy mcclelland
just talk about it. torture mechanism
liz farr
yeah, you know, i i do have you know, distant memories. i’ve seen them i’ve i’ve
nancy mcclelland
ptsd.
liz farr
yeah, you know, i do remember one of my co workers getting sent home because she was wearing these little flip flops now. they weren’t like your drugstore flip flops, but they were designer flip flops with with pretty embroidered straps, and leather insoles. but she still had to go home and change.
nancy mcclelland
and i’m, i’m amazed she came back, liz, to be honest. i’m amazed.
liz farr
yeah, she shouldn’t have. now as you mentioned, you’re dedicated to working with small businesses, which i think is really cool. and you serve these clients at a very deep level. now, and you mentioned that you provide an arc of services, can you can you explain how that all works?
nancy mcclelland
well, we joke that the arc of services includes both therapy and marriage counseling. and i joke that i should have gotten a psychology degree instead of a masters in accounting.
well, as i was saying earlier, in retrospect, you know, i realized i was really lucky that i didn’t come up through a traditional cpa firm, all of my jobs were in house. and without the exposure to how it was supposed to be done, people getting sent home for wearing fur wearing flip flops or not wearing pantyhose or whatever. you know, the way it was supposed to be done was more than just company culture, it was keeping those things separate, like we are, we are a cpa firm, therefore we do audit, and then our tax department is over there, those are those people. i mean, i realized some of that is because of rules of separation, you know, that which is important with consulting, but we don’t perform audit work. right. so and it just made sense, to me that the best service that we could provide to our clients would be that which was informed by like all of these different pieces of the puzzle. and since we specialize in small businesses in the neighborhood that we live in, in chicago, and we can keep them healthy in part by having information about everything they’re up to, we know what they’re up to, we know what the local chamber is up to, we know what programs are going on. we know what local laws they have to comply with, as i mentioned, it’s chicago, we have a lot of local laws that they have to comply with, some of which are just ludicrous. and mutually exclusive. i mean, like, it’s stunning. and that’s one of the reasons we decided to to really be hyperlocal about not just our community, but you know, in our, in our city, we’ve got a lot of really specific laws. and so it just made sense to us that we were going to provide better service to them. if we were doing all of these things. we want to be their go to consultant when they have a question about their business. we don’t just want to do their compliance work. when they say i am not sure how to handle this hr issue when they say i am not sure how to handle it really like anything out there, like a product mix is a great example of something that accountants don’t normally get involved in or, or expansions, expanding physically the business or expanding their scope of services, i want them to ask me first. and if i don’t have the answer, that’s okay. i can reach out to my amazing network and find them somebody who will know the answer. but a lot of the times you know, folks, they go to their lawyer for this, and they go to their hr person for that. and they go to all these different places, i want them to come to me first because it’s stunning how often you will find out that somebody made a decision with their lawyer and they didn’t involve you and and you’re like, whoa, hey, that totally goes against the operating agreement, or that totally goes against their entity type or? yeah, so again, i feel really lucky that i didn’t know i wasn’t supposed to do that. and of course, now it’s like, does your right now everybody’s going oh, ah, i mean, we were doing cast before cast was not just before it was cool. like before anybody came up with the acronym for client accounting and advisory services, like that was just what made sense to us. i’m not saying that was like, all perfect and wonderful. and we knew from the beginning, i mean, like, we did end up with some people who were 1040 only. and through the years, we had to get rid of them. having worked at a theological seminary, i started out with a lot of folks who were ministers, and we were doing their taxes, you know, and eventually, over time, i had to say, that’s not what i want to be doing. and we had to let them go and transition them to somebody else. but, but yeah, at this point, they’re very few and far between, you know, 95% of our client base are the small businesses that we are also performing these other services for, and we don’t, we don’t do taxes for anybody else.
liz farr
that’s great. i mean, and it really removes a lot of the headaches of last minute bookkeeping.
nancy mcclelland
oh, gosh, oh, i can’t even tell you. i, you know, it is so important. i’m also i should point out not that this is a surprise to you, or any of the listeners that i’m a stickler about about taxes, right? like we don’t wave our hand and say, oh, it’s fine. we won’t do the taxes until we’ve done a thorough year end review and we have a whole process with a checklist that the junior bookkeepers will go through and then it goes to a final review by our senior bookkeeper, and we just deal with all of the issues so that by the time it’s going into the tax return, somebody was made some comment about, like, how we were undercharging, i get, i get really annoyed. and everybody’s always telling me, we should be value pricing. and we’re not charging enough. i’m like, hey, our mission is to help small businesses, i don’t want to price myself out of helping the people i’m passionate about helping. and so they they’ll mention how affordable art or tax prices are. and i’m like, we’re, we’re at the point in which we’re doing their taxes. we’re literally putting numbers into a system there. because we know that those numbers are good. we don’t at that point, we’re not, we’re not asking questions about how many of their meals were at restaurants in 2020, and 2021. because it’s 100%, instead of like, that’s done before it gets to the tax team. and so it’s one of the ways that we can keep their books, like make sure that their books have integrity, that they can use them for real time, business, managerial decisions, and not just for the compliance work of tax prep, right. so we’re, the client is getting better service, and we have an easier time with taxes. it’s a win win.
liz farr
and that’s so important, because so many business owners if they don’t have their books up to date, they’re really just looking at their bank balance. and, and going, wow, well, i’ve got 10,000 in my account today. i can afford to buy that thing. and they forget, well, payroll is due in two days. yeah. and now i’m overdrawn.
nancy mcclelland
absolutely, absolutely. i think that the emphasis on advisory that i hear about so much these days is scares a lot of bookkeepers away from offering that because they think it means it has to be tax planning, or it has to be kpis. it can be those things, obviously the zillion different types of advisory out there. but just like basic cashflow, i mean, there’s nobody better suited to do that. then a bookkeeper. that’s especially i mean, we don’t manage ap, but most of my bookkeeping colleagues do. and, you know, what an amazing position to be in to be able to see that far out into the future, if you’re scheduling their ap for them. i mean, that’s just a really, i think of a rich area where one of the many as you know, i’m really passionate about education, not just with my team and with my clients, but my colleagues and my my bookkeeping colleagues in particular. and, and i think that that’s a great example, what what you just said about why keeping the books up to date actually can help with those real time managerial decisions, especially if you have the support of a bookkeeper.
liz farr
yeah. yeah. and now you just mentioned education. and that’s the next thing i want to talk about is your award winning blog. and, and i love it. you know, as a writer, i’m thrilled when i find other accountants who can write oh, and i really like is that it’s not just click beatty, seo optimized da, to just get eyeballs there. but you really go into depth to educate the clients and you go into enough depth, that it’s a resource for other accountants, also, which is just marvelous. now, tell me, how did you get started with all of that?
nancy mcclelland
i’m about to cry, i am so touched that is just the kind of, you know, okay, first of all, before we get talked about my blog, let me just say, for you, of all people, who’s writing i have admired for so much of my career to say that you love my blog, and that you can see that it’s not self serving, but like truly a resource. and that just makes my heart swell. thank you so much for saying that. that’s, i’m taking that home with me. that’s just beautiful. honestly, you know, it got started. because i wanted a way to save interesting articles and my thoughts on them. somewhere that was easily searchable. that was really like just for my own reference. and my husband mark, who’s a software developer and a sci fi author, check out his book upload, there’s a plug. he suggested that i start a blog similar to his own, because he does a software developer so he’s like, oh, i have to i want to remember how i saw problem, i’m gonna need to come back to it at some point. and so he would write up a blog post on it for himself to search. he’s also really active on stackoverflow, and things like that. but that was kind of like, where he scrolled away his stuff. and i was like, sure that whatever works for you, you know, you’re the one who’s going to have to maintain it behind the scenes and build it and whatever. um, and so that’s what i started doing. 10 years ago, this november will be our 10th anniversary for the blog. thank you. and, and then i realized that when i had something important to share with all my clients, like if more than one client asked me the same question, or if i had something like there’s a new chicago tax or, or rule or something that i want to make sure everybody knew about, that it was probably something that other small business owners would find useful as well. so i started writing those types of things in blog format, and then sharing them with clients through like a shorter email. that’d be like a too long didn’t read kind of email, and then it’d be like, if you want more information, here’s this post. it wasn’t until i hope this makes you laugh. it wasn’t until years later. like i never once looked at metrics, because it wasn’t for other people so much like it was just like, i’m doing this thing and somebody else happens to find it great. i never once optimized for seo, i didn’t know what seo meant. and years later, my husband was like to realize you’re getting like 5000 views a month and your most popular post has like 20,000 views. and i was like, wait, other people are using to wait, what are you talking about? and it turns out that the majority of my readers find us via searches, they’re searching for this specific thing. and the rules for issuing a 1099. that’s a really popular post of ours, accountable plans for s corpse. that’s another really popular postcard. it’s like really, just like, i wanted to remember the rules for these things. so i wrote them. and i was shocked. sometimes we’re the only ones providing information on a particular topic, or to your point from earlier, we’re the only ones providing in depth information on a topic again, because i’m writing for me. so i ended up with great seo, just like organically. and it was one of those. i use the analogy, you know that that phrase dance like nobody’s watching? yeah, well, like, write, like, nobody’s gonna read it worked for me. and it was really gratifying to find out that they liked what they saw. i mean, i’m sure that you’re an amazing writer, i’m sure that happens to you sometimes as well, like when you write from the heart, about something that has value to you, and it ends up being appreciated by others. like, it’s just amazing. it’s just an amazing experience. so then what happened was msn reached out to me to ask if i would be a contributor to their microsoft start program. and it was really a fascinating experience, because a single article of mine on microsoft start can have easily like 40,000 views. but those come from being featured on that microsoft start page, they’re actually really hard to find by searching. so it’s a completely different, i don’t know if it’s a different audience or not a suspect it is. because when people come to my blog, at the dancing accountant.com, they are usually getting there because they’re trying to look up information on a topic. and when people find me via my msn column, they something pops up, a headline pops up on their microsoft start page, and they click on it. and so i’ll have over time, a lot of views on a given article on my blog. but on msn, it’ll be like a day or two, and then silence again. so it’s really it’s having the combo of both the blog and the msn column really does serve a dual purpose. you asked though, here’s the embarrassing part. okay. you asked how it has paid off so far, and i haven’t i have to say i’m still working on that part. and i would love any advice that you or your listeners have. for me. it is such a passion project that i’ve honestly i’ve never properly monetized it. i’m fiercely protective of its integrity, and its ease of use and and you know, so you get ads and stuff in there or flash and things on the pages are distracting. it’s just harder. i’ve tried doing paid guest posts, like people frequently reached out asking if they can pay me to have a guest post on our blog. i tried it a couple times, you know it, they’re just awful. like they’re, it takes longer to edit than to just have written something from scratch. and they’re just even the folks who aren’t selling anything. it’s it’s just not i haven’t enjoyed it. so i just, we just don’t do that. all the books that are out there about blogging, they’re about driving people to something that you sell. right. and we haven’t been accepting new clients for years, literally years. so, you know, like, i don’t have anything to sell with it. and i don’t want to monetize it with ads, because that’s cluttery. and i don’t want people to pay me for posts, because then it doesn’t have integrity. i don’t know, you know, maybe it’ll be a really good way to promote the upcoming membership program. i think i mentioned to earlier, i’m going to be launching a membership program for bookkeepers who want to ask a cpa questions about complex accounting issues, or no sort of by definition, you can’t ask your own clients, tax preparer, because it like undermines your credibility with them. or if you think they’re not doing something aboveboard, you know, and you want to talk to someone about it, and there’s so many, there’s so many things in this area. and that’s, that’s where my true passion is right now. maybe i’ll be able to use the blog to like, promote that membership program. i mean, i do have a tip jar on there, at the request, actually, the bookkeeping buds, which is a professional bookkeeping association, that i’m a member of a huge fan, they really relied on it during the pandemic, and they asked me to please put a tip jar on there, because we would like to pay you for this. it was really lovely. yeah, didn’t occur to me for a second. i’m terrible at selling myself like that. so and i use all of the funds that come in through the tip jar to help pro bono clients. so that’s a win win, also, i mean, ideally, i guess, you know, i would like to find a couple of sponsors, and parlay the posts into like a newsletter with referral links, like kate johnson does. she, she’s, i mean, her newsletters i just think are huge. i don’t know if you know, kate johnson, from bookkeeping side, hustle, she’s such a gem, and her newsletter is a real resource. and then she’s got referral links in it, so she can make money off of it. but you know, like, pays for the time and effort that goes into providing all of this great information. so i think that would be i’d love to emulate that approach. but yeah, i’m and you would think that the msdn article like that that column would be a big moneymaker. but like, it is stunning how little they pay, like my best article ever earned about like $120 or something. yeah, it doesn’t come close to the amount of time i spend working on it. i mean, generally i’m getting like less than 20 bucks that article. i found that people who write for online aggregators like msn, they’re doing it for the referral traffic. but of course, without having anything to sell on my website, i’m back to the initial problem that we’re just talking about. so i but i’m going to set all that stuff aside because you know, as well as i do, that are lots of non monetary ways that this kind of thing pays off, right? like just the ability to help others at such a scale. that’s immensely rewarding. the appreciation for my peers is so heartwarming, cindy schrader from bookkeeping buds and a bunch of the other buds. they even nominated me for scottie, scarano’s accounting high bracket. they nominated the blog write that and the, you know, you have to think when you nominate, i know when you nominate you’re supposed to enter like why you’re nominating. and cindy said that she’ll do a google search on a particular topic. and my blog is like the first one that comes up. she’s like, oh, of course, nancy already answered that question. i also love i love being able to lift up colleagues who are doing great things and link to their site. so i’ll often talk about like alicia katz pollock’s amazing quickbooks online education hector garcia’s right tool oh my gosh. keeper and and relay and other. rc reports a favorite of mine like tools that i use that helped me a ton. i love to just like lift up what other people are doing the things that have been helpful for me. and you know, of course it lends credibility as a thought leader. it has led to a few paid writing gigs. it’s probably affected my chances when being selected for speaking engagements. i don’t know. but yeah, i was. i love tips and get paid to do what i love because good writing, as you know, is so undervalued in our culture, even though it’s desperately needed. so anybody has ideas? find me on linkedin or through the blog.
liz farr
well, you know, i love that you’re not trying to do it to bring in more business, that you’re just doing it as a genuine desire to share. and i think that really, that really shows.
nancy mcclelland
i’m so proud. thank you. and, yeah, and because i’ve studied seo. but what i concluded eventually is that the search volumes for accounting subjects are so small, that most of the tools that you would use to measure traffic or how popular a topic is don’t even register.
liz farr
that’s fascinating.
nancy mcclelland
i’m so glad to know that. i did it, right. yeah.
liz farr
and so, you know, when i have done some seo type projects, and i wonder, well, where on earth? are they getting these really awkwardly phrased key words and phrases that i need to include? and do they not understand how seo really works? that it’s not the exact phrase that’s required, but it’s the the concepts behind that phrase? and if you have that concept, that’s good enough?
nancy mcclelland
i think. so i haven’t studied this yet. but i think that what you’re saying resonates because one of the rules that i have for myself when i’m writing is that it needs to be my voice. it needs to be conversational. if i re read out loud to myself a sentence that i’ve written and it doesn’t sound like i would talk, then it’s not it shouldn’t be in there. it should be rewritten. and i, so i might talk the way that people search, right, like you’re saying, it’s not the exact words, it’s the concept. and yeah, it’s coming at it from different angles that that that that fits. i like that. thank you.
liz farr
yeah, yeah. well, best best of luck to both of us in finding ways to to make more money writing and doing the things that we love more. now, that kind of switch topics here a little bit, you mentioned that your firm is remote. and not only is it remote, but you know you your home is in chicago, but you spend winters in mexico, where it’s sunny. and what what are the biggest advantages of having an own remote team?
nancy mcclelland
well, there are many, it’s actually hard for me to think of disadvantages. and i’m stunned when i read all of this return to work crap that traditional cpa firms are doing. i think giving folks the option is a great idea. my folks don’t have that option. because we don’t have an office. and it’s always been like that. so this nobody came on board and has to get like used to a different way of being. you. you mentioned mexico, i mean that that was a happy accident. years ago, i had a team member who was moving away, and we were lamenting how sad it was that she like, oh, that’s too bad. we love working together and you’re so good at what you do too bad, we won’t be able to work together anymore. i heard myself say that out loud. and i was like, what? why are we doing this? this makes no sense. like she didn’t even meet with clients in person. she met with me on my patio every week or two. but we and we would just do it by zoom. if, you know, we couldn’t if that didn’t work out. so like we already had the tools. so we mostly because we mostly had cloud systems in place already. we really only had to make a few tweaks. and then after we’d been doing that for a while, i mean like really nobody noticed. it was astonishing. like there was it. it felt like this big thing and then it wasn’t a big thing. nobody even noticed that she moved out of state. nobody except for me and her and we didn’t care. so like it was great. um two years later, a beloved colleague, julie, who i mentioned earlier, she sold her tax practice and she wanted to move to an artist colony. and she knew that i had a remote firm. and so she reached out to see if she could work for me part time. and that’s how i ended up getting another tax reparent the practice another cpa in the practice, and i just i kept meeting amazing bookkeepers who ran their own practices who had extra capacity. and i really, you know, they wanted to work on a team and get mentorship and like cross train. and since we were remotely like this was possible, in a way it wouldn’t have been otherwise, you know, people from montana, and upstate new york, right, like, we’re iowa, we’re there. we’re all over the place. and so what ended up happening was, i have seasonal affective disorder, which is just a wretched problem when we’re in chicago during tax season. so my husband suggested spending three weeks after the march 15 deadline in mexico. so still working 12 hour days, seven days a week, you know, like the usual tax season grinder, at least what the tax season grind used to look like. it’s not quite like that anymore. still hard is not. it’s not 12 and seven anymore. it’s more like, like nine and seven. that’s good. so yeah, so it’s still working these crazy hours, but it was in the sun. and what happened was, the pandemic broke out, while we were on one of these work retreats, because his job is remote as well as software developer. he does android work. and we three weeks with to carry on bags turned into 16 months. yeah, yeah, we just kept not going home. and then like, maybe this will blow over next month, maybe next month, maybe next month, 16 months went by. and so now we come here every january for four and a half months, we finally bought a place, it works great. it gives me the energy that i need to like really dig in and be there for clients in a way that i could not otherwise i am so much less annoyed with people than i used to be. and i can keep in touch with them and give them status updates. because i’m not just scrambling to do the next thing. i can say, hey, you know, you’re at this point in the process. and it’s going to be a couple of weeks from here. and if you haven’t heard from me about that, check it you know, like i’m just less angry all the time. and a lot of that has to do with the fact that i literally sit in my pool with my laptop on the edge of the pool. normally, when i do a podcast or interview, i like to have my beautiful patio behind me. but we actually have a contractor here today. so it was too noisy. so instead of got my beautiful mexican artwork here. but yeah, so our clients learned really fast during the pandemic that we’ve got their backs, like it does not matter where we are. we’ve got their backs, the first couple months of pandemic i did all of our work. that was like pandemic financial relief related for free. i had twice a week, i would have open three office hours not just for our clients, but for their friends who also ran their own businesses or were freelancers. and they could come and they could ask questions about ppp and erc. eidl and rf and the whole alphabet soup of financial relief, right, like so they know we’ve got their backs. it’s like a non issue. i didn’t give them enough credit beforehand. i presume they would never be cool with it. and i did not give them enough credit. and that was on me. so anyway, as we’re having an all remote team. yeah, it’s really you asked, like, what’s so great about it? like, everything’s great about it. i i have trouble answering the opposite question. like what are the what are the challenges and the drawbacks? i know that building and maintaining company culture can be really hard in a remote environment, because i read a lot about that. it really hasn’t been for us. it hasn’t like we have paid happy hours, rice and cocktail kits and snack packs to everyone. and we hang out and we trade stories and we brainstorm. and sometimes i’ll send out a survey ahead of time but the survey it’s not always about work stuff. sometimes it’s like, who’s your favorite client and why who’s your least favorite client and why and you know, what changes did you like about what we did for tax season this year? and what what things do you think that we can do to improve it, but some of them are like, you know, if you could be any animal, what would it be and why or you know, we talked about hobbies. i’ll ask questions about their favorite charity, like i like all sorts of thing. and so we hang out right, we trade stories we brainstorm. and we also have just lots of paid time on zoom calls. that’s just social in nature. so we’ll all get together to talk with one of my, my colleagues on the team. and, and first, it’s just like, how are you? what’s going on? how’s your husband’s, you know, job going? or what about your kids? you know, the horse? show or what about, you know, ali, our admin has got two little kids at home, you know, like a year apart. and so to learn toddlers like, oh, okay, how, how’s that going?
nancy mcclelland
right? like, we taught, how are you? but how are you really? and you know, that’s, that’s like what you would expect in the break room or grabbing coffee just catching up. and i think that when we switch to zoom, we forget that part. it’s like, okay, we’re here in a meeting. how’s the weather? okay, great. and then we just that it, no, it’s not like that we talk with each other. and we also have a culture that like, encourages reaching out to ask questions, or we this even better, we co work. this was something that sarah came up with, who is just an amazing human being. she just likes to she’ll, she’ll text or email and she’ll be like, i’m here on zoom. i’m just working on a project. and i want like, accountability, and anybody wants to join me can join me. and so you’re like, oh, yeah, i’m working on a project. it’s kind of hard to like force myself sit down and work on it. and so i will jump on a zoom and be like, hey, what are you working on? what are you working on, we used to do this in bookkeeping buds during the pandemic, and then you both mute yourself, and you go to work. and every once in a while, there’ll be like a win or something like that. and you take yourself off mute and say, hi, every once in a while you forget somebody else’s there, and they take themselves off mute, you jump, you know, like, and from that came this really neat idea that kendra, our senior accountant came up with where she’s just like, she has a co working session, just booked every week with each of the junior accountants. and they don’t have to have questions about anything, they can just come in work, and they work together. and if they do have questions about something, that’s the perfect time to, like, do office hours. it’s great. i mean, like, it’s, it’s tighter than in the office, it is tighter than it would be if we were in an office because of this kind of stuff. i have literally never even met sarah, or megan, in person. never. yeah. and which is amazing to me, because like, i adore these people, like i love them. truly, as human beings. i’ve never met them in person. so i don’t know, i know. it’s supposed to be really hard. it’s not hard for us. i think you just have to care a lot. i mean, i send out text to funny photos or life events or celebrations or whatever i just say hi. really, i mentioned john garrett before it really subscribe to his philosophy that what’s your end? like see the person behind? the worker there? i can’t remember his exact tagline. but i mean, i think the pitfalls, the strat when we have struggled, the pitfalls come when you have team members that aren’t in a good position to work remotely. you know, i talked about ali, you know, she after she had her second kid, she just couldn’t focus on working from home. and she needed in person adult interaction. and so like, in late january, she was like, i can’t do this anymore. i’m like, i’m sorry. what? like you just got back from maternity leave, and it’s tax season. and what do you mean, you can’t do this anymore. she’s like, i, i need adult interaction. and so what she ended up doing was she went out, she got a part time bartending job, just like a you know, at an event space. and we transitioned her bookkeeping stuff to a new bookkeeper that we hired, and she’s still just doing our admin stuff. and that’s just like way more manageable for her. she she pointed out that she doesn’t have a passion for accounting, like other members of the team. like that is not her thing. and i will take that a step further to say that everyone else naturally reaches out to each other and to clients to set up a zoom, but she’s introverted. and so that was just like, not as comfortable for her. she’s also on an evening schedule because she’s a stay at home mom, and she waits until her husband gets home and he takes care of the kids and then she switches so like this was this was definitely a lesson to me to hire folks who are already comfortable working remotely and she was for years and years and years and then she had her second kid and it just was too much and i i felt like i was checking in and up to be like, how’s it going? how’s it going? how’s it going? but she was feeling overwhelmed and didn’t feel like she, she she felt like she had to, like hold that on her shoulders until it was like too much to hold on her shoulder. so like, it doesn’t always go perfectly. but i mean, she’s still with our team. we still love her. she’s, you know, so i think it’s important to hire for a remote team. but if you do, it’s just not that hard.
liz farr
yeah, and i’ve heard the same sentiment from a lot of other people i’ve had on the podcast, that if you do it with intention, and you hire the person, not necessarily the skill set, or the experience level. yeah, but that person? oh, because they always say, the skills you can train for you can teach those but the personality, you’re just kind of stuck with that.
nancy mcclelland
yeah, absolutely. i mean, i, i, it we actually worked that into by we i’m actually referring to me at this point, i worked that into my hiring process. i normally say we because we’re such a team. and i just really feel like that’s important language. but we weren’t in our hiring process, we when we are hiring, we actually you we have really specific instructions that they have to follow in order to apply, and we discard everything that comes in, where they didn’t follow those exact instructions. and, you know, it’s just like a test, they have to pass that they don’t know they’re that they’re taking. and one of the pieces of that puzzle is to tell us, when they email us their, their resume, in the body of the email, they have to tell us about who they are as a person, i want to know about their hobbies. and i want to know about their families, i want to know about their pets is actually number one. first, we want to know about your pets, because we all are really big animal lovers. and i like hiring other animal lovers because they think it says something about a human being. i mean, honestly, i rarely even look at the resume if i’m not engaged by them as a human. and actually, in written form, because so much of our internal communication is via keeper or email, and we’re writing to each other. so i want to know that the person can communicate with me about who they are as a human being in written language. so to go back to the point that you were making, hiring the person.
liz farr
right. and, you know, and what i’m getting from you, and what you’re talking about is that you’re, you’ve created a team that really magnifies that can help you magnify who you are and who they are. yes, and that’s, that’s a really different kind of leader than the kinds that i grew up with. now, we’re kind of at a tipping point now between the old type of leader who is very, you know, top down very hierarchical, to a new kind of leadership that’s more collaborative and more humane. and you certainly exemplify that. what’s your passion for dance and hiring the people and caring about the person? and what advice do you have for leaders who want to be better leaders?
nancy mcclelland
you know, i,i have to say, i, i don’t understand why i’m different. i don’t get it. i am regularly surprised, genuinely surprised that everybody isn’t like this. because the only thing that i am doing is caring. i care about my clients. i care about my team members, i care about my colleagues, i care about small businesses, i care about the industry. just like take a deep breath and remember why you are doing this. so if you do if you care, if you genuine i mean if you if you ask yourself that question while you’re doing it, and it’s for the money, you’re okay, fine, you go read somebody else’s leadership book. but if you ask yourself that question, and you say, no, i’m doing it because and you’ve got something meaningful and tangible that is like a wake up in the morning that grabs you right, then my advice for being a better leader is you need your team even more than they need you. so act like treat them with the respect they deserve. right like, act like you care act like they matter. similarly, you spend a lot of time at work, surround yourself with kind, funny people that you genuinely like. you, you have to actually like them. i made a terrible mistake years ago. i hired somebody who men she’s like talented as could possibly be. and i could see in her, like, she, she needs to be a bookkeeper. like she’s, i need she needs to do this. and i want to teach her how to do this. and man, she’s like, one of the most efficient, accurate, like bookkeepers i’ve ever met in my life. but you know, she wasn’t nice. she didn’t like us. she didn’t like i didn’t get sent. she liked the clients, like she liked the work. and when she ended up leaving, and i saw everybody’s shoulders kind of relax. because she wasn’t around anymore. that made me realize i, that was where i created the we only hire people we like i actually had sarah asked me about this when i was hiring recently for a junior bookkeeper position. i asked if she would evaluate the two finalists, the two can final candidates. and she was like, okay, but i need to check in with you first. you told me when i joined, that you only hire people you’d like to work with? do both of these candidates meet that requirement? and i was like, bless your heart. yes, absolutely. i would be 100% happy to work with both of these people. like these are people i want in on my team. i just want you to evaluate whether they can do a review of the financial statements, right? like we’re talking about the technical thing here. and we’re talking about learning style and training style. that’s what i want you to look at. and i love that she that she brought that back to me. so yeah, work with people you like that is advice that i have for leaders who want to be better leaders. similarly, all of these are so related, right? you can’t help people get the most out of their work, if you don’t know them. so you have to care to go back to my first point, you have to genuinely actually care about them as human beings. and when we do, like i said, it’s part of our hiring process. it’s these are the very first things that we do before we will even consider somebody. so it feels less it feels so weird to me to be giving this advice, because i’m just like, i’m sorry, if you have to give somebody the advice that they should care about the human beings around them.
liz farr
well, believe it or not, there are people who need that. i have worked with a few people. i’m not going to name names, but all right. they, they didn’t seem to really like people. and yeah, the wrong business. and no, you know what, look, let’s be fair for a second. let’s let’s, let’s rewind. we’re talking about an era where being an accountant was not about being a people person, right, that has changed. people say all the time. oh, you’re at all like other accountants. i’ve met. and i’m like, really, because i’m like, most of the other accounts i’ve met, you know, we’re fun. oh my gosh, that the party that like qb connect and scaling new heights, cheese, oh, pete, like we have a blast. we are fun people. we are colorful, we are helpful. we’re dedicated. we care. i mean, that but people still have this like old fashioned notion of an accountant. like, you didn’t have to talk to people, you were green eyeshade, and you had your adding machine. and you were heads down in a ledger. and it is not like that anymore. the machines do that part for us. the machines have taken away the drudgery people get worried about being replaced by ai and i’m like, bring it on. i don’t want to have to do the drudgery. i want to do the personal relationship stuff. and i love that. so i do think that it’s fair to say that while i am sure that there are plenty of firms out there that are still like this, which is just sad. and you know, it is changing and that’s partially because that what accountants do is changing. really, it is changing so much and and i think we can both be grateful that it is changing, because it’s a lot more fun. yeah, this version of accounting is a lot more fun.
nancy mcclelland
it’s funny, my my father actually is a, a chartered financial analyst cfa, and he thought i was going to be so bored going into accounting, he just thought i was gonna be so bored. he even he thought he was a cfa, and he is a very eccentric person, and he thought i was gonna be bored. and i’m just like, yeah, no, i’ve never heard that. i’m never bored.
liz farr
now, you clearly in your firm, you do a lot of things differently than the traditional firm, you know, it may not seem that way to you. and, and also, because we both run around in these circles of people who were doing things differently. but what are some of the things that your firm does, that you wish other firms would also do?
nancy mcclelland
um, gosh, i mean, i, i feel like i’m just on rewind here, you know, over and over and over again, but like, we care, it’s not just me caring about them. it is not just me caring about them. we care about each other. and i think building a culture of trust, openness, and honesty and vulnerability admit, when you suck at something, oh, my god. i can’t remember who said this. it might have been, it might have been jason stats, who was just like, be open with your team about where your weaknesses are? because i promise you they already know what your weaknesses are. so just didn’t midnight, you know it too. right. so i just think that that’s, that’s probably the biggest thing our firm does differently. also, from a more technical perspective. i mentioned earlier that we do a financial review, not not a review, like audit review compilation, so not review with a capital r but but it’s pretty thorough. i mean, like, i would say, if we were not actually providing attestation services, but we’re doing the behind the scenes work that we would have done. and we do that on every single client’s books before we file that tax return. that is something that i don’t see enough cpa firms doing i see tax returns going out the door that and i hear this from my bookkeeping, i have a lot of bookkeepers who come to me for consultations. and, and, like, they say that these other cpa firms are tax preparers, you know, not just cpas will they’ll take a pdf of the financial statements and they will like just enter those numbers in and not even pay any attention if there’s like, i don’t know negative accounts payable or those that weird thing that quickbooks does it when you opening balance equity.
liz farr
oh, god opening balance equity, i hate that.
nancy mcclelland
i hate that a bit. it shouldn’t be there. and i get i get why quickbooks is trying to stick it there. the other one is the is the unapplied cash payments, when the when you switch from cash to accrual, and it’s got to put it somewhere but like that, it means there’s a problem underneath it that needs to be sorted. and you can’t just put that as like a line on a tax return. you can’t have done that before until julie was just like that, you know, and then we like got better at it. because i listen to the people around me because i want things to be better. so that is one thing that we do we are thorough about that year end financial review. it’s a very important part of our process. we educate we educate internally, we, we don’t say this is how it’s done as a matter of fact, to our to our fault. like as a fault. we didn’t have good sops in place for a really long time. and too much of it was living in my head. and so that’s something we’ve been working on for the past few years. there’s a negative about not coming up within a cpa firm, right is that i didn’t know some of the some of the good things that i needed to know also and i had to make mistakes and figure it out. but but we don’t just point to the sop and say follow this procedure. we teach them why we’re doing this procedure. we give them feedback so they can understand and develop and you know they want meaningful. i mean remote work is important and flexible works important but they want meaningful work to and they want to be engaged. and i think we are very good at doing those things. so those are some things that, that our firm does that i wish other firms would do also, i wish other firms would would have social events with our clients as well, like we do on occasion. so you know, it’s not just internally, it’s externally.
liz farr
but it was our own all great things. and i wish that the firm leaders that i’d worked with it done more of those now, and you talk about sops, now, one firm i was at had five tax partners. and if you asked each of those five partners how to deal with something, you might get answers for how to do it, that isn’t, that is not good that it was insane. it was completely insane.
nancy mcclelland
sarah was the one i keep bringing her up, she was the one who actually, here’s an example of something our firm does that i don’t see other firms doing and what a huge benefit it had to us is sarah, who’s a junior bookkeeper, and she also runs her own for most of my most of my team. not everybody, but most of my team also are running their own firms. and so they’re, i’m they’re working for me part time. and it’s, it’s wonderful, because we get to learn from the things that, you know, for example, they might implement technology in their firm that it turns out would be a really good solution for us, and vice versa. and so, sarah runs her own firm, she, i had a procedure written out for the financial review, and she said, you know, what would be really helpful for me? actually, no, she didn’t even say that. she went and did it. and then and then said, to meet, you know, what i have done, that was helpful for me was i turned this into a checklist, instead of a procedure, and i put it into excel instead. and i did this and it occurred to me, it might be helpful for other people. and i was like, this is amazing. and we looked at it together, and decided to like, flesh it out and make it bigger and put a lot more effort into it. and she did. and she turned it, she just was such a she just spearheaded this whole thing. and then showed it to me, i’m like, this is amazing. these are the few things that i would i would change. let’s roll it out to the team, will you be will you give a presentation on it, and we had a zoom where she walked everybody through it, you know, listening, giving her the permission, the unstated constant, always permission to make things better for herself, for us to share. i mean, that is, you know, kendra’s idea about doing the co working sessions every week with the junior bookkeepers. you know, julie, oh, my god, julie has just been a wealth of knowledge. ali keeps me on track. i mean, they’re just every single one of them is just a joy in so many ways, but that is a great example of, you know, when you don’t want there to be five different answers, you want there to be one answer. and the person who’s best suited to do that is not the person with the answer, but the person with the questions.
liz farr
yes, absolutely. that makes so much sense.
nancy mcclelland
i think so too. yeah.
liz farr
now, now, what i found sometimes is that it’s not what you keep doing that makes the most impact. but it’s what you stop doing. it’s not so much changes, the things you add on, but the things you stop doing. yeah. what are some examples of things that your firms stop doing that have been very impactful?
nancy mcclelland
oh, wow, i have an answer for you right off the bat on that one. that one’s an easy one. stop growing. stop growing. and i’m going to give you another stop that helps me stop grow. stop taking the advice du jour because that is how we grew too much and too fast. that was where we made the giant mistake. right? so i’ll give you an example. right now. the advice du jour is firm leaders need to be working on the firm, not in the firm. everybody’s saying this everywhere. like it’s just all over social media and webinars and okay, i get it. i get it. there are some good lessons to be learned by taking a look at what you’re doing and asking whether you really need to be doing x, y or z or whether those can be delegated, or automated or, you know, transitioned in some way or another. i get it. there’s a lot of good stuff there. but you know what? you do you? i love teaching. i love teaching our team. i love teaching our clients. of course my next big thing is to teach other bookkeepers about leveling up their books so they can collaborate with cpas and provide advisory services. i love being in the firm. i love doing work in the firm that keeps me engaged so that i can continue to teach. i’ve thrown that new rule out, right, like come up with your goals and your dreams. and yeah, you know, sometimes you have to do something you don’t like in order to find out you don’t like it. you know, it, it should be okay to switch gears, like you say, to have impact to stop doing something. well, years ago, i had not learned at this very valuable lesson about not just taking the advice, digital error. and about 10 years ago, i’m trying to remember exactly. it was about 10 years ago, i made the mistake of listening to the grow, grow, grow mentality, this was very big 10 you remember that whole time period, it was very much about scaling. and i truly wished i could go back in time, and change that, like i am still digging out of it. i really am i i was at a conference about 10 years ago, and this total jerk i’m not gonna mention his name, because i’m sure you know him. his probably still around. company got acquired, but he’s still around somewhere. she just like gave me the hardest time that i was like, no, we’re trying to stay intentionally small because i really like having personal relationships with my clients. he was like, that’s stupid. like, this guy just did. now 10 years later, nancy would be like, oh, you did not. and i would have had a different reaction. but back then i wasn’t as sure of myself. and i hadn’t made the mistakes. yeah. and remember, i didn’t come up through cpa firms. so like, i didn’t know what i was doing. that was right. and i didn’t know what i was doing. that was wrong. i didn’t know how to evaluate that stuff. so this guy who’s got all this background and whatever, it tells me that what i’m doing is stupid. and i’m like, well, gosh, i guess i am being stupid. and everybody kept saying you’re leaving money on the table, you’re leaving money on the table, you’re leaving money on the table? well, what everybody is saying now they’re saying right size or downsize or have a niche or provide deep comprehensive offerings, you know, scoped to your smaller number of clients rather than having a lot of clients like you there are so many different ways to grow. that aren’t the grow grow, grow scale, be bigger, be bigger than it was 10 years ago, but i you know, i was listening to the advice to shore i didn’t know that lesson yet. and i didn’t. i made it i made terrible mistakes. so many i made more mistakes than probably successes. but hey, we’re still here. so i mean, like keila hill-trawick, you know, she’s got that grow enough advice. i just love that grow too enough. and, and you probably will grow until you get to be a little bit bigger than you want to be, like, scale it back. but to your point, as long as you make it okay to stop doing what you’re doing and switch gears and not feel stuck, or trapped. i felt stuck and trapped so many times and bless my husband’s heart mark is such an angel. he was like, this is your firm. right? are you stuck? like are you really stuck? is there anything you’re doing? you couldn’t just stop doing and it gave me that permission? right to switch gears to stop growing to work in the firm, not just on the firm to do whatever the the desire is, and to that end, stop comparing yourself with others. you will there’s a wonderful my favorite poem is desiderata by max ermine. and it says if you compare yourself with others, you will become vain or bitter. right? like i don’t want either of those. i don’t want either of those. and it is hard. it’s hard not to compare ourselves with others. i listened to you know, i watch my my podcasts and i listen to the advice and i read the socials and it is very hard because we think we’re not enough. but these are these are our firms. we get to make decisions we have agency. stop comparing yourself with others. stop taking the advice to shore. if growth is not what you want to do. don’t do that. if working in on if it’s not what you want to do. don’t do that. this is yours. this is your baby.
liz farr
yeah. and i think that it is so easy for people to just kind of get carried away with what they think they should be doing.
nancy mcclelland
yeah. oh, it’s so true. it’s so true. i am. we’re all we all do. this is so natural. this is it’s just part of being human. i’m doing a panel. i’ve come up came up with this idea for a panel years ago that i’m so excited to finally have the opportunity for it bridging the gap this year are you going to be at randy crabtree is bridging the gap. wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. so you’ll you’ll maybe you’ll get to attend. it is about it’s about taking our accounting superheroes, like the biggest stars in our industry, and having them remove their masks, and show us who they really are and talk about their struggles. vulnerability can be a strength, especially if we’re all being vulnerable. and we’re all talking about our struggles. and we’re all admitting what we do not have figured out yet. it’s going to be it’s going to be hector garcia and dawn brolin and nayo carter gray. who like star power? yeah, no, i mean, like, some people, but but what happens is that we look, we compare ourselves with others, we look at their successes, no buddies posting about, like, i feel alone and scared. and i don’t know how to handle this thing. like, that’s not what we post about on social we post, not because we’re trying to hide it either. it’s because we naturally shared the good things, right? so we see other people’s successes, and we compare ourselves and we say, i’m not doing enough. i’m not good enough. i’m making mistakes. i’m stuck. and, you know, that’s, if we’re all vulnerable. if we’re all being honest, we can really help each other get out of that trap.
liz farr
absolutely. it’s such a trap, too. now, we’ve already talked about a few of them mistakes you made in in operating your firm. do you have another hour from from hiring somebody who you didn’t like to trying to grow? do you have some any other examples of really valuable mistakes? valuable in terms of what you learned from them?
nancy mcclelland
yeah. well, we talked about the sops, you know, i didn’t have those. we talked about growing too much too fast. you know, we didn’t have we didn’t have engagement letters. i still bill hourly. and that’s something that we we haven’t quite made the switch to. and that’s really gotten me into a bunch of a bunch of problems that, you know, i still digging out of it. it’s so many mistakes, so many mistakes. i’d say something that is a mistake that that i have been able to rectify that. wow, did we learn so much and was sort of good, but horrible, horrible experience? is over diversifying. instead of saying, that’s not what we do. i mentioned that we get we have really personal relationships with our clients, right? i mean, we really love the heck out of them. and i have two former clients that we cared about deeply that needed assistance that was really way outside of our comfort zone. we didn’t know how to do the things, but they just kept asking, please, please, please, i need you. i need you. yeah, and one of them was during the pandemic too. so like, right, what are you going to do? and so like in both of those clients, we said yes. and you know, we weren’t very good at it. and in the case of one of them, you know, we made a mistake that ended up costing a lot of money financially ended up costing, you know, the relationship with a client, who couldn’t, couldn’t see, but she had pushed us into something that wasn’t what we do. and and she shouldn’t have. and, and we shouldn’t have said yes, i mean, i can’t put that on her. and with the other client. he wanted us to keep doing what we were doing, and we were hating it. we were hating it. and then he only got mad at us. when i was like, okay, this person who’s been doing this highly specialized thing that we only do for you because you’re the only person like in the world that needs this thing done. she is leaving and i need to transition it somebody else and i wanted to charge him to transition it to somebody else, because i didn’t feel like that should be something that we paid for like we normally would. we all know how to do bank reconciliations, and we all know, you know, reconciled w two, and w three to the profit loss or the financial statements so late. this was not that this was something that we really only did for him. and he was pissed that we would bring that up, like, why should i have to pay for that? that’s your responsibility, you run that firm. and i was like, whew, he did not realize he just got himself voted off the island. and but i care so much about the clients that i worked really, really, really, really, really hard to find somebody who would do this for him. she was going to charge him more, though. and so what did he do? he said, well, for x dollars a month, i could hire my own in house office manager. and i said to him, like, do you think we’ve been doing office management work? oh, it’s like, great, you can start her in two weeks. because i am out. like that was i was so mad. now. of course, we ended up, you know, helping him fully with the transition, because we care more about his books than he does. but yeah, yeah, those are really horrible mistakes, like, you still comfortable saying, that’s not what we do. this is how we do it. and that’s hard when you’re younger. and you just like don’t know yet what you’re going to fall in love with. and you do have to say yes to a bunch of stuff that and then to the point that you were making earlier than stop, like feel permission to say no, i don’t want to do this anymore, find somebody to transition it to. there are lots of amazing networks on there and mentioned bookkeeping bugs, there’s realize there’s roundtable labs thrival, like there’s so many amazing networks out there, you can find somebody else who does do that thing. and then you can give all those clients to that person or that firm. you can, you know, you can stop. so you do have to maybe over diversify a little bit at first to find what you love. but then give yourself the permission to say i’m not going to do this anymore. find somebody else to offer up to your clients, like i have found somebody else for you. they don’t have to take that person. but it’s that’s, i think, a really lovely thing that you can do. it also maintains a really positive reputation. but at a certain point, once you know where your value is, stick with it. don’t be me. don’t make that mistake. don’t don’t go oh, well, you know, the client has been so lovely to us and their friend and they’re, yeah, that no, no, i should have really said, that’s not what we do. because i ended up getting my feelings hurt on on the one hand, the person who was like i could get an office manager for that. and in the other case, i actually, you know, i actually ended up with a financial loss as a result. yeah, it was tough. it was really hard.
liz farr
those are the mistakes that you won’t do again, now that you’ve learned, you learn. now, now, you have just been a absolute wellspring of wonderful advice and ideas for firm owners. do you have any other advice for firm owners who want to create better firms?
nancy mcclelland
yeah, hit rewind right now. and listen to the last hour over again and take really good notes. yeah, i mean, just in summary, like care about your team and your clients. be sincere, vulnerable and open. and a favorite quote of mine that my therapist shared with me that i think it’s so important. if you give yourself permission to shine. others around, you will feel like it’s okay for them, too.
liz farr
that is so perfect. and quite the opposite of what i experienced in public accounting. not so much. the the shining? no, no, but this has been just so amazing to talk to you, nancy. such a pleasure for me. again, i can’t thank you enough. it’s such an honor to be here with you. yeah,
nancy mcclelland
well, it’s an honor to be able to do this kind of work with people like you.
liz farr
so now if listeners want to connect with you, what’s the best place to find you?
nancy mcclelland
well on social media, linkedin is is definitely my thing. i love linkedin. so please follow me there. that is where i post the random thoughts that come up in the middle of the night or the, i got annoyed with somebody who emailed me about something, and i copied and pasted my response to them in linkedin so that everybody can see that. there there are there. it’s not just you, it’s not just happening to you. and i also share a lot of my when i have an msn article that like i really want people to see, i’ll normally share it to linkedin. and i love commenting on other people’s linkedin posts as well, i met a lot of really great people through there. also, as we talked about before the dancing accountant.com. there’s, there’s a page on there discount.com/blog. that is, that is the award winning blog, could also follow me on msn, you can subscribe to my column. there’s also a section though, on the dancing hound.com. that’s for presentations and podcasts and stuff like this goes there. so that’s a good way to sort of, you know, if you like what you’ve heard here, and you want to hear more, that’s a good place. it also lists my upcoming speaking presentations like it’s scaling new heights, i will be speaking about the tax ready bookkeeper, which is yeah, i’m really excited. i’m super excited about this because i am, i’m so passionate about people really like leveling up their their game as far as bookkeeping is concerned. and it’s a it’s a three way win. i know you already know this, but i just gotta tell you about this. so what i want to start this upcoming membership, subscription support and education service for bookkeepers like an ask the cpa thing, i haven’t figured out all the details yet. but i have a little beta group of folks, if you want in on the beta group, you should shoot me an email at nancy evidencing accountant.com. but the the idea here is that if you can make your books just like perfect and wonderful to hand off to a tax preparer, they will love you for it ever, for ever. and they will send you so much more work. if you learn how to collaborate with them to communicate with them. it doesn’t just work when when like you have helped out this extremely exhausted, stressed person during the hardest time of year. and they will reward you by sending people back your way because they want more books that are like that. but it’s such a three way win because the client ends up with nothing gets stuck in the cracks. and really the bookkeeper is so well positioned for things like reasonable compensation throughout the course of the year or doing cash flow advisory like you were talking about earlier. those are things that a bookkeeper is better positioned to do than a once a year tax accountant. right? so the tax ready bookkeeper is just going to be about how can you get started? like what are the most foundational things that you can you know that that you can outlay in order to move in that direction. and then a few months later, hopefully i’ll be i’ll be starting a monthly subscription support service, which, which will be great, because, you know, i’ve loved my blog for so many years has been about leveraging that reach to help small business owners first through teaching entrepreneurs and then realizing that if i teach the bookkeepers, then they’re helping their clients, right? like i’m super scaling up the number of small businesses that i can help that way. it’s so yeah, they’re, i’m really excited about this, these next steps. i’m super excited about collaborating with other people in this space so that i’m filling in the gaps as opposed to duplicating anything else that’s out there. so i’m really excited about lifting up what they have to offer. for example, mariette martinez just got a whole course on tax ready books that i’m a big fan of that i think that everybody should take. and so i’m hoping to collaborate with her. just a lot of a lot of really great stuff. but i want to create a safe place where you can ask a knowledgeable, experienced cpa questions. and so like that, that’s my next big thing. so keep an eye out on linkedin and on the dancing accountant.com for both of those things.