mike maksymiw: be the leader you wish you had | the disruptors

if no one’s complaining that your fees are too high, your fees are too low. 

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the disruptors
with liz farr

mike maksymiw, the leader of aprio firm alliance, hates charge hours as a primary performance metric. he even left a firm where he was a partner because of a dispute over charge hours. although he exceeded his revenue goals by a healthy margin, he was penalized because he got the work done in fewer hours.

join liz farr at the linkedin 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 group | more liz farr | follow liz farr on the disruptors wherever you get your podcasts: apple, google/youtube, spotify, iheart, deezer, amazon music, audible, player fm, audacy, rss. | more podcasts and videos: terrell turner: build a solid business showing up as yourself | kelly mann: be the bull in the china shop | alicia katz pollock: create a human-centric business |  nancy mcclelland: be the one your clients ask first |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 |

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“the main thing i was supposed to do, i was doing,” he tells liz farr in this episode of the disruptors. and if he hadn’t been meeting his revenue goals, that deficit in hours would have been something to remedy.  “so i don’t want people to think there’s no place for these metrics. we need to put them in the right order that makes sense for running a business.”

 

“the value to the client has nothing to do with charge hours,” maksymiw says. if a client pays an annual fee as part of a package of services, “now it’s our job to see how fast we can get it done, right? so we can use more of our time to have conversations with them.”

today, he’s in charge of aprio firm alliance, a paid membership community of peer firm owners who support each other in creating better businesses. the magic of community arises in peer meetings where members discuss current problems and how different members have solved those problems. by marrying parts of solutions that have worked for others, “we get this third idea that we never would have thought of on our own, but because we had the conversation, someone pieced it together,” maksymiw recalls.

maksymiw wants firm owners to think in terms of what’s possible and understand that we humans have invented the world we live in, just as luca pacioli invented double-entry bookkeeping. “why can’t we invent something else?” he asks. what if we take a step back and ask, “if i was starting an accounting firm, how would i do it?” how do we create a firm where we’re working a normal number of hours?

he’s delighted that “the people that are hanging out their own shingles are treating the entire profession with a sense of humanity themselves.” accountants now “realize that they don’t need everybody to work with them or to gel with them and that they’ll find the right group of humans to work with and work for,” he says. “there are people all over the country doing things really weird and interesting.”

21 more takeaways

1. charge hours are nothing more than a capacity metric. they are not a way to evaluate employees or the value your clients receive.
2. don’t evaluate employees on charge hours. you’re asking superstars to regress to a mean that’s below them. the reward for those superstars is more work.
3. check in with team members at regular intervals to ensure they’re on track to finish within the budgeted time. if they finish early, let them take time off.
4. you’re not charging enough if no one is complaining about your fees.
5. the biggest difference between big and small firms is the number of minds you must change to move changes forward. the process takes too long for big firms, and you’ll need to make an even bigger change by the time you get an agreement.
6. instead of asking for permission, do it anyway and ask for forgiveness.
7. accountants are terrible businesspeople because we care too much about our clients to the detriment of running our own businesses. we don’t realize the punishments we inflict on ourselves until it’s too late.
8. accountants need to normalize that we need to take care of ourselves. we can’t run full speed for 12 hours a day, 52 weeks a year.
9. use some of the work that could be automated as a training ground to teach new people how to do the work.
10. young people have had the technology and constant change their entire lives. they don’t have a career mindset because nothing in their world has been the same for any five-year stretch. the jobs they will have in the future don’t exist now.
11. older accountants don’t want to change because they’re comfortable with the money they’re currently making. however, they may be eradicating the value of what they built. no one will want to buy into the current structure, where only the partner at the top makes significant money.
12. firm owners need to balance the risk of reinvesting profits to try something new against the risk of doing nothing. trying something new may result in creating a valuable firm that may be the survivor in your community or that someone else will want.
13. when your team pulls together with all-hands-on-deck extra effort to get a big lucrative project done, reward them with something amazing. let them choose what the reward is.
14. it’s important to have friends in the profession that you can lean on and be vulnerable with.
15. the only secret sauce to running an accounting firm is to treat your people really well. they’ll take care of the clients and each other. people will want to work there. your team will believe you when you make decisions that are in the best interest of the company.
16. treating people poorly as retaliation for their behavior rarely works. if you make a team member’s life terrible, that person will quit and will easily find a new job.
17. be the leader you wish you’d had. then, you’ll be a leader to the people looking up to you. model your behavior after what you wish someone else did for you.
18. quitting a job or getting fired from a job isn’t a failure. sometimes, it’s a misalignment of where you belong and what they’re looking for.
19. build a network. first, they’ll help you find jobs. second, they’ll tell you what it’s like when you change.
20. believe in yourself and show up as your authentic self. your career will skyrocket, and your relationships will get deeper and broader. people see through all the masks you put on.
21. kick the “should” out of what you think you should be. what would an accounting leader look like if you could be yourself? what if you could run a firm that cared about the people inside at a human level?

more about mike maksymiw

mike maksymiw is the leader of aprio firm alliance, where future-oriented firms convene to discuss challenges and solutions for running their firms. members share resources, ideas, successes & failures, receive coaching, and have peer group roundtables to move toward being future-oriented firms. he left his job as a partner at a cpa firm to pursue his goal of disrupting the areas of the profession that don’t make sense. he is a tireless advocate for value vs. time, family initiatives, inclusion & belonging, work/life harmony, and challenging the historical norms the accounting profession clings to.

he is a past chair of the ctcpa board of directors, a 2010 alumnus of the aicpa leadership academy, a past member of the aicpa women’s initiatives executive committee, and has served on various other task forces / committees at the ctcpa and aicpa.

he and his wife jen have two daughters, sofia (19) and julia (17). the family enjoys traveling and has set a goal to see all fifty states (32 so far). mike played baseball for 25 years and was even invited to a tryout with the cincinnati reds. he and jen enjoy running, having completed several marathons and a bunch of half marathons, and the family all love going to disney. in 2020, mike completed the disney dopey challenge – 5k thursday, 10k friday, half marathon saturday, and marathon sunday.

transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)

liz: yes. now, mike, can you give listeners a brief overview of your career in accounting? because you’ve had a very interesting path, and i think that’ll give listeners a little bit of context as to where you’re coming from.

mike: sure. some of them probably studied some things that happened in my career, which ends up being intriguing. my dad was a solo practitioner for 40-some odd years. he worked out of the house. i got to see accountants do accounting stuff. he was heavily tax-oriented with what he was doing. i went into accounting, and wanted to cut my own teeth. i ended up getting a job offer from arthur andersen.

however, it was during the same year that worldcom and enron happened. it was rescinded, and i graduated without a job. ended up at a local accounting firm, as opposed to one of the big five. at a local firm, when you’re a staff accountant, you do everything. i made copies. i was the computer person. i organized files in the file room. i brought a laptop out into the field, instead of using green bar paper.

if anybody doesn’t know green bar paper, go google it. it’s like columnar, and you have to write stuff down, and add it up. yes, i did audits, did taxes, individuals, worked in business valuations. i did a whole lot of things at the local firms, being early in my career, and i just wanted to learn as much as i could.

moved around to three different local firms that were all 10 to 14 people big, two, three partners. then, i landed at one that was about 35 people and 5 partners, filameno in west hartford. i spent seven years there. worked my way up to partner at that point, and then our firm merged into a national firm. i spent three years there, during which we had a major tax law change, so it was great having a national tax office.

then, we had the cares act happened, and i ended up being one of our cares act leaders on the ppp and erc stuff. as time-consuming as it was to learn everything from scratch, the thing that helped me really keep going every day was, if i had a half-hour phone call scheduled with you, i was like, “this is 50 jobs. you have half an hour for 50 jobs,” and it would help me get pumped up before each next call, so i could bring my best self to that person, because it was the one interaction i would have with them.

it didn’t matter how exhausted and tired i was from either staying up late learning about the latest change, or i was on hour 10 of the same half-hour call. for this person, it was the first call of the day, they wanted to feel comforted, and it was 50 jobs. after three years of that, i had all these ideas of parlaying that leadership experience into the second half of my career.

i brought all these ideas to my leadership team, and they told me that i didn’t hit my charge-hour goal, even though i beat my revenue target, and i realized that our value alignment was inconsistent. i also knew that with national firms, they’re going to be successful by their metrics. i would go be successful by mine. we just wouldn’t go do it together. i ended up quitting, went to hawaii for two weeks, stopped at the engage conference on the way home, and then started looking for a job when i got back home.

one of my friends connected me with aprio, which at the time, i did not know aprio existed. he was like, “hey, i found your next job for you. they’re looking for you, you’re looking for them, you just haven’t met yet. it’s perfect for you.” he was right. i’ve got the best job, doing exactly what i should be doing, exactly where i should be doing it.

liz: exactly. now, what exactly is it that you do at aprio? i’ve talked to you a little bit about that, but what is it?

mike: an alliance is a group of accounting firms that all pay in a membership fee to be part of a group of peers, and our peer group is designed for local accounting firms, purposely in that million to $10 million range is where our bell curve sits. we have some that are a little bit larger, which is fine, and we have some that have a super disruptive mindset like we have, and they wanted to get in early.

we actually developed a special program that’s much lower cost, where they could get in early, because we see that being on a rocket ship, and we believe if our alliance firms are successful, then the alliance and aprio itself is successful. some of the differences are that aprio is an accounting firm, and these are also accounting firms. we have a backbone and a consistency with a business practice.

it’s more than just some of the peer-to-peer alliance groups that are out there. i grew up with these firms. i tell the partners, i said, “look, i’ve had every single job at your firm. we could start on the same page all the time, whether i’m talking to a staff accountant, whether we’re talking to the operations leader, or we’re talking like executive leadership team meetings. i’ve had your job, i’ve had your resource constraints, i’ve had your concerns. didn’t always get them right, but that’s cool because you could learn from my mistakes, and you could start on step two or three.”

liz: that sounds great. something like that would have been incredibly useful to the leadership of the firms that i worked at. however, i think most of them had just a little bit too much ego to ask for help.

mike: i can see that being a thing in the profession. the benefit that our members enjoy is that, people show up vulnerably. when we come to a peer group meeting, someone will say, “i have a problem. i’ve tried to solve it this way. it’s not working. have you had the problem? do you have a solution that works?” we talk. people will share, “well, i also feel this way. i was successful part of the way by doing this.”

it’s great to just sit back, and listen to how the conversation flows. someone will say, “okay, so this worked in oklahoma. i get that you’re in new york city, and that might not fly there, but what she said out there in san francisco, if we married those two, have you tried that idea?” we’re like, “oh, this is like gold.” we get this third idea that we never would have thought of on our own, but because we had the conversation, someone pieced it together.

liz: that’s just amazing. everybody helping each other to create the best firm that they can. that’s terrific. you and i have talked before about some of the changes that we both see that need to be made in accounting. can you explain what you think are some of the changes? i agree with you on all of them.

mike: [chuckles] yes. my current soapbox that i want to stand on and shout out from, is that charge hours is a capacity metric, and that’s it. it is not a way to evaluate your employees, and it is not a way to evaluate the value that your clients receive. 90% of our work is recurring. our clients have already told us what they value at, probably 10% more than what they paid us last year.

if you don’t have a certain number of clients calling you up, and saying your fees are too high, your fees aren’t high enough. you don’t want to make your clients mad, but if nobody’s complaining about your fee, you’re too low. if you’re in one of those compliance areas, just go look at the big box store, and see what they’re charging. you have licensed credentialed professionals performing work, not somebody reading prompts off a screen, or one of the other boxed softwares just said that partnership tax returns cost $17.95, and the decimal point’s after the five.

that tells me that’s the floor of what partnerships could cost, because that’s just an automated software thing. the value of the client has nothing to do with charge hours. i get that it did. i talked about green bar earlier. nobody can write on green bar any faster than anybody else. maybe you can do a 10 key really, really fast, but the differential rate for the people that know how to use a 10 key, wasn’t anything to write home about where it mattered.

we can be so efficient with technology and process now, that how we do the work, does not equate to the value of the work. if we do something for a client, and it’s part of an overall package, and they pay us $4,000 a year for the ability to have us as their accountant, and as part of that, get their compliance done, it’s worth $4,000. now it’s our job to see how fast we can get it done right.

we can use more of our time to have conversations with them about, “here’s what we did. we noticed a couple of things. what else is on your list? let’s have a conversation.” go get your next really cool project out of that conversation, instead of trying to figure out how much more you could charge per hour on the compliance stuff. please don’t evaluate employees based on charge hours, because all you do is incent mediocrity.

you’re asking superstars to regress down to a mean that is below what they’re capable of, and you’re incenting them to. there’s no incentive to being a superstar when charge hours are your primary metric, because your punishment is more work– i’m sorry, your reward is more work, although i’m pretty sure i said it right the first time.

liz: i agree with you. i remember there were times when it was a friday afternoon, and i needed to get another three hours more billable time, and well, gee, i have this trial balance that i could key in, and that would about fill up that three hours, or i could import it, and that would take about 10 minutes. i think i’m going to take the slow route, and key it in, because that’s going to take me at least three hours to do, because that’s a long trial balance. that’s not really adding any value to the client, nor is it giving me any opportunity to learn anything new.

mike: right, what were you incented to do there? if instead of saying, “you need three more charge hours this week,” if i said, “liz, this is a review. we charge $9,000 for it. it should take you 50 hours.” 50 hours is your time budget. i want to check in with you every 12 hours to make sure that you’re about a quarter of the way through, so that if you’re off, we have time to redirect.

i don’t think you’re going to be off. i just want to let you know i’m not going to drop a pile of stuff on your desk and disappear, and check in with you in a week. here’s the other thing. this is the only thing i need you to do this week. to be honest, i know it really should take you until monday to finish. let’s say, it’s monday morning when i’m dropping it off.

when you’re done working on this, you don’t have to do anything else till tuesday. if you’re done on thursday, you’re done. go have a four-day weekend. if i teams message you because i have some questions, you got to respond. you could respond from wherever you are, cool?

liz: cool.

mike: you’re making plans to go to the beach, because your phone works there, and you could respond to a teams message, because you’ll link it up to your watch just to make sure that, if you’re milling around, if that’s the only thing you have to do, and assuming that you did your work right, i don’t have to contact you at all. well, i’ll just say, “just check your email on monday morning, and make sure that, if i have some questions, you can answer them. take friday, saturday, sunday, go nuts.” i’m still billing the client nine grand.

liz: yes, and it wouldn’t matter if i were in the office or not. it wouldn’t matter if i were dressed up in a suit, or working in my home office in shorts and a t-shirt.

mike: agreed. i still think ties are one of the dumbest pieces of clothing ever invented, but that’s a different story for a different time.

liz: [chuckles] oh, no, don’t tell my husband. he was a school teacher for many years, taught special ed math, and he wore a tie to work every day, because that was sort of a way to give those kids something to aspire to.

mike: it has its place, and that’s a wonderful story to prove that it has its place. i think that if i’m sitting in a cubicle, working for 40 hours a week, and never looking at a client, i don’t need to wear a tie.

liz: no.

mike: it doesn’t [crosstalk] make me any smarter.

liz: no. now, you’ve had experience with both big firms and small firms. are there any differences between them in terms of the changes that they need to make?

mike: the number of minds you have to convince to actually make the change, is probably the biggest one. the ideas aren’t different, but when i have to convince the partner i report to, who has to convince the office managing partner, who has to convince the regional managing partner, who then has to go to the board of directors to see if it’s something that we should do, that’s a two-year process. by the time we get there, we need a different change.

liz: exactly.

mike: you realize that, you’re like, “well, i’m just not going to tell you that we should change anything,” and most people just give up. now, me, there’s a better way, and asking for permission will take too long. i’ll just ask for forgiveness, and do it anyway. i ran a number of, what i called, experiments that i figured would work. i did because i would continuously beat my charge hour– not my charge hour, continuously beat my revenue target, and i’d consistently be under my charge hour goal.

i’d get phone calls every month, “hey, you missed your charge hours.” “yes, that’s great. how’s my revenue?” “revenue is great.” “super. same conversation next month?” they’re like, “are you ever going to work more?” i was like, “no, i’m beating my revenue target, why would i work more?” they’re like, “i don’t get you, man.” i was like, “hey, i don’t get you either. it’s okay.”

liz: i really don’t understand that mentality, because what really mattered was the dollars that you brought into the firm, not the hours that you had your butt in the seat.

mike: right, and that’s a really important thing for anybody who’s listening, is to understand is that, my primary metric that i was being measured on was the revenue that i drove into the company. that was my job as a partner. the rest was how. if i was missing my revenue targets, everything that they were saying to me would have been 100% accurate. i do need to work more. i do need to build more. i’m missing my primary target, but i wasn’t.

i was blowing it away by 30%, 40%, 50% a year. the main thing i was supposed to do, i was doing well. it was– they would disagree with the how. if i wasn’t meeting my primary metric, we should be looking at the how. i don’t want people to think, there’s no place for any of these metrics. it’s– we need to put them in the right order that makes sense for running a business.

liz: exactly. you hit on something important there, running a business, because a lot of accounting firm owners and partners forget, or probably never really realized that they are small business owners, as well as just being accountants.

mike: yes. it’s one of the things that i knew, but i get to see in a lot more depth and detail, talking with the alliance firms. there’s a really beautiful reason why accountants are terrible business people. they care too much about their clients, to the detriment of running their own business. they’re so good at client service, that they ignore their own needs.

they’re so much into serving others, that they don’t realize the punishment they’re inflicting on themselves. which is, it’s a fantastic service, servitude model and mindset. it’s just, we tend to take it a little bit too far. then, until it’s too late, we’re like, “oh, no, now i have too much to do, and not enough people to do it. what do i do?” that’s when we’re in freak out mode right now. that’s where the profession’s at. it’s because we’re too good at client service. we’re too focused on it. yes. which is a great reason, right? it’s a nice thing to fix.

liz: yes.

mike: it’s not like, “oh, we’re terrible people, and we have to become nicer.” no, we’re too nice. we have to prioritize ourselves, put our own masks on before we help others on the airplane.

liz: exactly. something that we forget is that, we can provide much better service when we ourselves are rested, and when we have the bandwidth, the mental bandwidth to think at a deeper level.

mike: oh, yes. the way someone should take breaks during a day, or exercise, or yoga, or meditate every morning, or here’s the thing some partners don’t tell you, they take 45-minute power naps in the afternoon. no one sees them, but they don’t tell anybody they’re doing it. that’s how they can recharge themselves, so they can be totally on at that evening event they have to go to tonight.

it’s because they took a nap from 2:15 to three o’clock. now, maybe they weren’t like snoring, sleeping on the couch in their office, but they weren’t working, their mind was resting. they were preparing for what was coming later on. we need to normalize the fact that we can’t run at full speed for 12 straight hours for 52 straight weeks. our body ebbs and flows, and it’s all right to listen to it. if you’re hitting a lull in the middle of the afternoon each day, go take a walk for 15 minutes outside, get some fresh air. you’ll come back recharged, and the work that would have taken you four hours, you’ll finish in two and a half. point is, the work got done.

liz: yes. that really is the point that we forget about. now, you’ve been in accounting for close to 20 years, over 20 years, if i have my history timeline correct. you’ve been through a lot of changes, from the end of paper and pencil, to technology doing everything. that’s just the technology. what are some of the changes that you’re seeing now that are really good?

mike: technology changes now that are really good?

liz: or other changes in accounting?

mike: on the technology side, i think, it’s taking the most redundant, rote, worst parts about the job, and taking those away from us, which is great. i never liked auditing, because i couldn’t stand ticking and flicking four inches of checklists, before i could actually start doing work. it just, it didn’t make sense to me. it’s like, “why am i doing this? it’s the same thing over and over and over again.”

it had to be that way, because technology hadn’t yet caught up, and now it’s here. now, i can tick and flick four checklists for four of the audits that i do, and automate the other 12, so that i do get practice doing some, so that next year, i can review the ones that my staff are going to do for me. we can progress through faster, and as long as we’re taking 15% to 25% of the work that could be automated, and using it as a training ground, and then evaluating the performance on all of that, at a broader spectrum.

not, “oh, we’re losing money on this client.” “well, that’s the one that mike trained on.” “that’s not fair to say. you know all these other clients that we improved 9% on? some of that is getting reinvested in the training time on this client that you now think is a bad one.” we train on this client every year because their books are so good and neat. it’s a great one for our team to train on. we’re okay with it. this client’s metrics not being any good. that’s a really good change.

i love that the people that are hanging out their own shingles are treating the entire profession with a sense of humanity. themselves, their clients, and their team members. they approach them like they’re humans, and they realize that they don’t need everybody to work with them, or to gel with them, and that they’ll find the right group of humans to work with, and work for.

that’s a really good change of more people doing it, because it can give those other newer entrants in the profession, if they’re poking around linkedin, following the right people that, “hey, maybe their only experience is with public company auditing, and they’ve been doing the same audit for six months.” they’re like, “this isn’t really what i want to do.”

now, with so much information available, they could look and say, “oh, look what this firm is doing in missouri. that’s really cool.” it doesn’t matter that this person’s sitting in south carolina either, right? it’s, “mm, someone on my network is connected to that firm in missouri, which is how it popped up on my line.” “mike, tell me about liz’s firm out there in missouri. what do you know about it? any way that you could connect me?”

because everybody needs people right now. nobody’s going to turn away good talent.

liz: right.

mike: it’s way easier to find work than people. of course, you’re taking a phone call for someone that’s talented that’s reaching out to you.

liz: yes. i like that, and i wish that i’d stayed in public accounting just a little longer. at that time, i didn’t really see anything beyond the little bubble of firms in new mexico. i didn’t really see that there was anything different from what i was already experiencing.

mike: yes, the reach of a linkedin, or any of the other social media channels, it can really broaden how quickly you can see the profession. it used to be, you had to wait 20 or 25 years to be really involved with state society. maybe you got involved with aicpa, so you could actually meet the humans that were doing some things different.

even that is happenstance, luck on who you’re going to talk to. now, it’s all there. if you want to go figure out who to follow, just pick a chase birky or someone, and just see who follows him, and who he comments on, and then go follow those people. it’s like four hours’ worth of work to go find 50 disruptors in the profession. now, that’s going to go flood your timeline with even more people.

now, you’re going to be like, “oh, so my little corner of new mexico isn’t the end all be all of what accounting is. there’s people all over the country doing things really weird, and interesting. i’m going to give this a little bit more of a shot, instead of just two years and i’m out.”

liz: exactly. for me, really, the eye-opening experience was going to my first quickbooks connect. that was the first accounting conference i went to. i was transitioning out of public accounting, and into writing. i paid for it on my own dime. i went there with the idea that everybody there was a potential writing client for me. when i came back, i was so energized, and so full of enthusiasm for the profession.

i told the managing partner that next year he needed to send everybody in the firm to quickbooks connect. he just looked at me, and i could see the calculator wheel spinning in his head. i just said, “yes, you’re not going to do it. never mind. okay. you’re not going to make that investment. that’s okay.”

mike: yes, i remember the first time i paid for a conference on my own too. i asked the firm if i could go. they’re like, “you just got that training last year.” i said, “it’s leadership training. it’s not like s-corp basis, and i now know how to do it. this is lifelong people change. i’m constantly going to be learning this thing.”

of course, it was on a friday. i was really upset about it. i go home, i’m talking to my wife, and called my dad too. we had two really little kids too, so every dollar mattered. my wife goes, “just stop complaining and go.” i was like, “well, i can’t go.” she was, “yes, you can. they just won’t pay for it. you pay for it.” she goes, “you know a lot of people in the profession, just call them, see if you could like bunk up in someone’s room, or do something. go invest in your career. you’ve never steered us wrong. if you think it’s a good idea, go.”

i went back into work on monday. i was like, “i’m going to the conference. i just want to know, is it pto time i have to take, or can i take it as cpe time?” they were like, “wait, what?” i was like, “do i have to take pto to go to this conference? can i at least put it on my timesheet as ‘education time’?” i was like, “i’m going.” they’re like, “we’re not paying for it.” it was like, “i didn’t ask you to pay for it. how do i put the time on my timesheet? i want to know, am i burning a week’s worth of vacation on top of spending my own money?”

of course, they immediately called a partner meeting, because apparently, nobody has ever done that before at the firm. they’re like, “we’ll pay for it, but we’ll take it out of your bonus. at least, you’re paying for it with like pre-tax money.” [chuckles] i was like, “okay”. apparently they were mad, i didn’t say, “thank you.” i was like, “what do i have to thank you for?”

i went to the conference, and that’s where i met jason blumer. he was like, “you need to leave that firm, and start your own firm right now.” i was like, “dude, i’m 27 years old. i have two kids under four, hanging out of my shingles, not in the cards right now.”

liz: yes, well, getting advice like that from jason blumer is always a good thing to follow.

mike: yes, what i really heard him say was, “keep thinking. don’t just take everything someone has told you at face value, and it’s okay to question the historical norms.” you go to so many conferences, and there’s certain things to remember. i remember that session where jason blumer and jody padar co-presented, and still been following the two of them today on how much they’re disrupting the profession, and challenging the norms, and really making us think about, “is this the best way we could do it?”

liz: yes. you touched on changes. now, what are some of the mindset shifts that we need to make, in order to create firms that are both more humane and more client-centric, and more future ready?

mike: if we understand that we inherited the firm and the profession that we’re running, someone else told us what they did, and it’s probably because somebody else told them what they did. if we recognize that we inherited it, we can then say, “okay, but is this the best way?” if we take this other concept that i learned from sarah elliott, which is the dimension of possible, every construct within humanity that’s not an immutable force like gravity, we created.

we created counting, and time, and the 40-hour work week, and pacioli invented double entry accounting. why can’t we invent something else? what if we took a step back and said, “if i was starting an accounting, a way to provide accounting services to clients now, how would i do it?” then, you get some naysayers that’ll throw things in there like, “yes, but what about the sec, and gaap, and the irs?”

it’s like, “yes, okay, everything has rules.” i mean, architects have rules, lawyers have rules, but how would you run it? if you unscrew that canister of worms, and then you see what can explode out of it, it’s– all right, so can i create the firm where if we only worked, we’ll call it a normal amount, i don’t mean accounting normal, i mean, regular human normal, like 32 to 40 hours a week, could we provide the service to clients, where they would pay us enough money, that we would all make enough money to go live out the rest of the hours that we have every week?

we get 168 hours every week. we spend 50 of them working, and commuting, or lunching, or whatnot. we’ve still got 110 left. we’re sleeping for some of those. we want time to go enjoy our money that we’re making for providing these services. can we do that? if your first answer is, “no”, you’re not thinking, because there’s a “how”. how could we go create that kind of firm? how could we go create that kind of service to clients?

what are the right clients? what are the things i’m good at? you start lining up these different variables. you might come up with, “hey, if i write eight articles a week, i can make enough money, pay all my bills, and be completely content.” i know that every article takes me roughly three hours to write, and an hour to edit. i’m making all this up. i have no idea.

that’s 32 hours a week. if i want to take an extra nice vacation, i could go work a couple extra hours, so i could go spend three weeks in italy instead of two. all right, i can write a couple more articles. you’re totally in control of everything that you want to do.

liz: yes. you should be as an accounting firm leader, but we’re just so tied to, “well, i can only bill the clients so much for this work,” or, “i am used to providing this range of services. how can we break free of those barriers?”

mike: i think that you asked the brand new people that you hired what their 20 years on the planet has been like. not about accounting, like their 20 years on the planet. they’ve had phones in their hands their entire lives, and access to the entire world’s information with a google search. we learned the dewey decimal system.

we hoped our library had the book. we bought the encyclopedia britannica’s, and had them on our shelves, so we could do research projects. it’s totally different. the pace of change is obnoxiously different. i was talking with someone about why the younger generation doesn’t have a career mindset. i said, “because nothing in that world has been the same for any 5-year stretch, never mind 40.”

things that happen today, didn’t exist when they were– their brains were coherent at like seven and eight years old. why are they going to look and say, “i’m going to do something for 40 years?” seven jobs they’re going to have, don’t even exist right now. they’re not career oriented just because you are. they’re not career oriented, because it makes sense not to be.

given the amount of time they’ll work, which will probably be 50 years, and not 40 for a number of other reasons. they want to go spend time now with friends and doing things. they’re okay if that means they have to work between 70 and 80, because they’re not going to be as mobile, or their health might be a little bit deteriorated. now, they can go kayaking down the colorado river, and they won’t be able to do that.

they’re okay with a longer timeframe. they don’t know what it’s going to be. all they know is, it’s going to be constantly changing. they’re ready to adapt instead of invest in something that’s static, which is the opposite of their entire life. if you want to figure out how it has the mindset shift, just continuously sit down with the new people that you hired, and say, “could you tell me what it’s like having no clue what’s going to happen tomorrow, every single day?” because i grew up knowing exactly what i wanted to do. i’ve been here for 30 years.

liz: exactly. my dad had the same job at los alamos national labs for some 40 years. he worked there. his father before him had the same job he had for 40 years. that’s not the future that our kids are going to be growing up in, and our grandkids. what do you think is holding accountants back from making these changes that we need to make, what do you think is the mindset shift?

mike: i think that they’re very comfortable making the amount of money they’re currently making, and they don’t want to put any of that at risk.

liz: bingo.

mike: now, what those people fail to realize, is that doing nothing is a choice, and all of your choices have consequences. you might be making enough money, but you might be eradicating the value of what you built, because if i look like your future partner, and your exit strategy, and you’re building the type of firm where the partner at the top makes plenty, but when you go to say, “hey, mike, do you want to buy it?” “absolutely not.”

“why?” “because you’re 67 years old, and you can’t keep doing the work. you need to retire. i don’t have to buy it. i can just wait for you to retire, and then go start mgm cpa across the street, and just take all the clients and people, and pay nothing for it. he did a terrible job trying to build something of any value. plus, the client base is terrible. you charge less than the big box store for tax returns. no, i don’t want that business.”

then, they get all ruffled. they’re like, “well, i had to buy in.” it’s like, “well, yes, 30 years ago, that was the only way to do tax returns. it made sense. doesn’t now. you didn’t keep up.” the value of a cab medallion in new york city significantly decreased as soon as uber showed up.

liz: yes, the cloud made the barrier to entry so low that, instead of needing to invest in a server, and a couple of computers, and thousands and thousands for desktop software and practice management software, all you need now is a laptop and an internet connection, and you can start a firm. that’s it.

mike: you can. i’d recommend having more than one monitor, but.

liz: yes, well, you can start that way, and get your first client, get the first bill, and, “oh, now i can buy another monitor, okay?” do another tax return, bill them for that. “oh, i can get a third monitor.” then, “oh, now i can get a little better desktop computer, so that i don’t have to rely on just my laptop.” you can bootstrap your way up.

mike: for sure.

liz: now, you’ve talked–

mike: a way that i think of what someone did, who was willing to take some risk with the money, the payout isn’t necessarily that they’re going to make a lot more by taking the risk, which i think is part of the problem is, you will make more money as a firm, but you will then need to go reinvest it, because these things that are changing, are constantly changing, and they’re changing so fast.

the firm will be doing better financially, be showing better profits, but the after-tax money that you have available, isn’t going to be significantly more. i think a lot of the owners look at that as a risk of, “i need to make all these changes, but i’m not going to make enough to satisfy my risk tolerance.” i do believe that the risk of doing nothing is greater than the risk of trying to invest in these changes, especially with your team. while you might not make significantly more, year over year, you will probably be creating something that does have value that one of your employees might want, or might make you look like a great acquisition target. or might make you look like a great home for somebody that’s not doing those things when you could go be the acquirer.

you could be the firm that survives out of your peers in your community to keep serving the people and businesses in your community. there’s nothing that says it. it’s just work until you’re 65, sell, and then go retire. what if foreign companies, cpas, continue to exist in new mexico, and another group of people are running it because you invested in them and created something of value that then they wanted to pay you for, so they weren’t starting from scratch?

liz: exactly.

mike: i’d love to sit on a rocking chair one day talking about that. it’s like, yes, there’s nine other people on the planet that could say my last name.

liz: that’s right. now, you make it sound so easy that all you have to do is just stop doing what you’re doing and be bold enough to make the investments and the changes. we both have worked with people who were really fearful of making those changes. you mentioned something about the risks of not changing.

mike: i like to ask those people, “if power went out in your house in the middle of the night, could you navigate to the kitchen?” you’re also probably scared of the dark. courage isn’t the absence of fear. it’s going forward even though you’re afraid because you can logically think, at least in this thing, it’s not talking about bears in the woods or anything i’m in this profession. i know my environment. while it might seem scary because it’s dark, i know my way around it.

i might stub my toe. i might stumble a little bit. i might whack my shoulder on the doorframe because i misjudged where it was. i can get where i’m going. it’s not without incident, but you’ll get there. now, imagine if you’re with one of your spouse or one of your kids who’s been in the same house as long as you have, and you can both hold each other’s hands and go through and navigate the same thing. if i whack my toe on something, odds are the person whose hand i’m holding behind me isn’t going to whack their toe, right?

liz: right.

mike: maybe i’m taller and they’re shorter, and i’m in the back this time, and nothing hits them in the forehead, but it does on me. i was like, “oh, that’s a different obstacle that we met.” you’re still going to run into stuff, but you’re doing it together, and you support each other. it’s really, really important to have friends in the profession that you can lean on and be vulnerable with. share successes and share failures and realize that there’s no such thing as secret sauce in running an accounting firm because it’s not secret. the sauce is treat your people really, really well.

it’s that simple. they’ll take care of the clients. they’ll take care of each other. they’ll tell their friends. people will want to work there. it will be the reason why you make the business decisions. they will believe you when you make decisions that are in the best interest of the company. those handful of times where you have to approach them and be like, “liz, i’m really sorry, but next week we need all hands on deck for this big project. we’re all going to work more than 40 this week, not going to make you cancel any of your personal plans, but we need everybody’s best effort.”

i’m guessing it’s going to be more than 40. if we can get it done faster, that’s fantastic. we’re going to be done. the reason why is it’s going to be really lucrative to the firm. remember how we were talking like pie-in-the-sky stuff that we could do at our last internal retreat? we had this idea of renting out a beach house in newport, rhode island, and staying there for a three-day weekend and doing a whole bunch of team-building activities. we’re going to be able to do that. “okay, i’m in.”

if you explain it to them that way, now it’s not about the amount of work they have, the amount of hours they have to put in, the effort, and the short-term pain. we talked about something we wanted to do as a firm, and it was, what if we had no resource constraints? we know we have them, but what if we didn’t? well, now we have an opportunity to eliminate one of those constraints, the money because we have this wicked cool project. it’s just a really short turnaround, which means we price it accordingly and we can go do something really great for the firm with that money.

not, i need you to work late so i make more and i can go put gas in my yacht this weekend. “sorry, i’m sick. i can’t.” no. “hey, team, go pick one of those things on the board that’s in that under $25,000 range that we want to go do. you pick. don’t care which one. you’re the ones putting in a whole bunch of the effort. you guys decide. if you tie, i’m going to pick.” we’re not arguing over this. we’re doing something awesome because that’s the only thing on this list that are awesome things.

liz: it’s such a different way to operate and to lead than i experienced, and i’m betting than the way that you experienced too.

mike: yes. not from everybody, but from enough that when i finally ran into someone while i was on my leadership journey and it’s like, “what do you do if your boss isn’t this kind of thinker?” you go, “well, you work with a whole bunch of other people at the company. be the leader you wish you had because then you’ll be that leader to everybody else that’s looking up to you.” “oh, so it doesn’t matter if my boss doesn’t think like i do.” you’re like, “no, because leader isn’t a title. you can’t call yourself a leader.”

that’s not a thing. someone else has to call you a leader because they follow you and they choose to. “oh, all right. i can model my behavior after what i wish somebody did for me, and then i should be good.” that really helped unlock my ability to challenge the norms and be like, “no, that doesn’t make any sense. i’m not going to do that.” they’re like, “well, i told you to.” i was like, “okay, what are the consequences of me not doing it?” “i didn’t think of any yet.” “okay, so none.” “okay, still not doing it. see you guys later.”

the consequences usually ended up being a parade of partners coming into my office asking me how i could possibly make that decision and me telling them the same thing over and over and over again. i was like, “all right.” i’ve learned that the punishment is like three hours of telling the same story over and over again, which isn’t really a punishment because then they’ve all heard it directly from me too. that could have positive impact over time. i’m not working any longer that week because they paraded through my office for three hours. that’s going on my time sheet.

liz: now, when you did things like that, weren’t you afraid that they might retaliate or do something against you?

mike: let’s play that one out. what’s the retaliation? up to and including termination. there’s another name on my paycheck next week because i’m relatively employable because i’m really good at my job.

liz: that’s very true.

mike: most people who can think enough to be that bold and have those kinds of ideas to be able to execute them, they’re also really good at their job. it’s like, “is there really a consequence there?” because i just think that we’re finding out that we don’t work well together faster. that’s okay. you could be successful without me being there.

i could be successful without your name on my paycheck. the two aren’t intertwined forever. what could you do to me? because if you make my life at work terrible, i’ll just quit. again, i could go find a job relatively easily, and so can most people who do a little bit of networking, who pay attention a little bit in the profession.

liz: this is very, very true. i wish that i’d had a career counselor like you, mike, back when i was in public accounting.

mike: i guess the really tough part is, let’s be honest about what accountants are. they’re super type a overachievers who want their gold stars all the time. we don’t mind a little bit of pain because we’re willing to go through the busy seasons, regardless of when they are, whether tax audit, ebp, government. they all have. we know it when we go in because no one keeps it a secret. we’re okay with a little bit of pain. we’ve also been conditioned of what the word failure is.

we have learned that quitting a job or getting fired from a job is a failure. it’s not always a failure. sometimes it’s just a misalignment of where you belong and what they’re looking for. i want to find that out as fast as possible, especially if i’m in a sea of 1,000 people and 1,000 jobs. there’s too much work and not enough people. almost anybody is employable. if you’re good or really good, you’re super employable. it’s not a failure if you start out at a firm and then you figure out that you don’t work well together. that’s okay. that’s trial and error. that’s how we learn.

liz: exactly.

mike: that’s what i put in my bio, i quit my job. i want people to know that it’s okay that if you’re in an area and it’s not where you belong, it’s okay to get out. if [unintelligible 00:50:16] fired me first, that’d be the first line, was fired, because definitions of what success is, we’re different.

liz: it’s very true. now, one of the cool things i know about you is that you are an alumnus of the aicpa leadership academy. throughout the years, i’ve met a bunch of other people who were also at the leadership academy. now, can you talk about how that impacted your career?

mike: totally changed the entire trajectory of it. i went from sitting in a corner cube, cranking out hundreds of tax returns a year, to thinking about leadership and management, and that the entire profession is really about dealing with people, which i wish i knew when i was 18. i went into accounting because numbers make sense and people don’t. then i spent the rest of my career dealing with people. i’m really thankful for all those like psychology and sociology courses my college made us take.

i was in the second class and i’ve been an active alumnus, and i’ve met people from all the other classes. they’re some of the most brilliant and inspiring people that i’ve met in the entire profession. they’re just as humble and vulnerable and giving as they are brilliant. when i was figuring out what to do next, they were a great sounding board. they offered fantastic advice. they listened. they were encouraging.

it’s everything that you’d want out of an alumni network when you can go out there yourself and be vulnerable and say, “i have no idea what i’m doing. can you tell me what you think of this?” they did. one of the alumni introduced me to aprio for this job. a direct link from the leadership academy. i was like, wow, that’s awesome. a direct link from the leadership academy to this current role.

liz: bravo. i think that when the leadership academy was just getting started, i was too old to do that. i didn’t start in accounting until i was about 40. i think the cutoff was 35. already too old.

mike: yes, i think that’s about right. for a number of years, after i got in, i was convinced that i got in because i applied in the second year and nobody had heard of it yet. because what people were doing that were coming out of there the years after me were so ridiculously cool. 30-year-olds who had been chairs of the state society, people that had transitioned from being a public-facing accountant to total business development within their firm.

hanging out their own shingles while they’re in their 20s. just awe-inspiring things. i’m a proud alumnus for just being able to be in the same group as all those people that are doing so many cool things. there were like eight of them on the forbes 200 list that just came out.

liz: wow. the lesson here is if you are young and ambitious, apply to the leadership academy because it will change your life.

mike: for sure. start out before then and join your state society, get involved. i’m the past chair of the connecticut society and i know that we have a number of community groups like tax and audit and state and local tax and all those. the people in every one of those groups said, you don’t have to be an expert to join. we’ll teach you this stuff. we just want you excited to be there. if you’ve always wanted to learn about state and local tax, you don’t have to know a lick about it.

just go join the state society group about it. apply for their advisory councils, apply for their state’s leadership academy. start building out your network as early as you can, and then you get to trade stories with those people. you get to hear what it’s like to transition from big four to the internal audit team to the client that you used to be auditing. a midsize firm to being the controller of a big manufacturing company.

going from a small firm to a big firm or big to small. who are the people that made changes? who went into technology directly after like three years in the field? we’re going to have a truckload of different jobs within this profession during the 40 or 50 years we’re working in it. go build a network. one, they’ll help you find the jobs. two, they’ll tell you what it’s like when you change.

liz: the change is always the tricky part. i applaud you for all the changes that you’ve made. now, a lot of the time when we go through our careers, we make mistakes as we go along. sometimes those mistakes are really useful in learning. what is one of the most valuable mistakes that you’ve made in terms of the lessons you learned?

mike: growing up to work the way i thought people wanted me to and expected me to instead of as my authentic self. i learned that people are very good at seeing through the masks we put up very quickly. it’s just like this feeling of something’s off and they know you’re being inauthentic and it doesn’t build trust. it doesn’t necessarily erode trust, but it doesn’t build any. you just end up in this neutral place, which isn’t great if you’re trying to lead things and trying to do things differently.

people are always like, “what’s he really after? because i don’t know. there’s always this mask up.” i was fortunate at filomeno, i had a great management group and we had some really good people consultants, they sat me down and they’re like, “you got to stop faking it because you’re good enough just as you are. because when we’ve seen that person come out, it’s great. you’re the only one who doesn’t think so. our big change we want out of you is just be yourself.”

i was like, “but that’s really hard.” they said, “oh, we know. because you spent 30 years building up this giant brick wall and you got to go take it apart piece by piece. that’s what we’re here to help you with. because once you start tearing it down, it’ll come down faster and faster as you remove more and more of the bricks, like dominoes fall. first few will fall and then they’ll go.” since i started just believing in myself and showing up as my authentic self and doing that part, my career is like skyrocket.

the relationships have gotten deeper. they’re broader, they’re with more people, different areas of the country, different phases of their life. it’s a people business. as much as i got into accounting because numbers make sense, people don’t, it turns out that the people make all the difference. if you can show up as yourself, other people realize that just as quickly as they can see the masks you put up.

liz: that is really good advice. i can see that you really are your own authentic self these days. you have an air of confidence about you. that is something that i think some of the leaders i worked with were lacking. they had to stuff themselves into this little box of what they thought an accounting firm leader should be like. that trickled down that aura of, “well, this is what it means to be an accountant.” we were never really able to break free of that persona of what the 60s-style public accountant was supposed to be like.

mike: we did a leadership academy 2.0 at engage a couple of years ago. we did a like a brené brown dare to lead like full day session, which is normally like a two-and-a-half-day session, but it was [unintelligible 00:59:13] did the facilitation of it. one of the best things i learned out of there was kick the should out of it. mostly because it sounds like a really fun phrase, but we can actually say this one on air. if you take what i should be and what i’m supposed to do, and you remove those from your equation, and you just looked at it fresh, what could it look like?

what could a leader of an accounting firm look like if it didn’t have to look like the 60s version of an accounting leader? what if we could run a firm that cared about the people that are inside at a human level and realize they have personal lives and they have aging parents, they have their own kids or they have pets. any of those things that are happening in their lives and that work as a way that they can go be be fulfilled in those areas that’s okay. that’s humanity.

liz: that’s life, that’s how life should be.

mike: we’re fortunate enough that in our profession we can have quite a comfortable, financially secure life without working 100 hours a week. not every profession or job gets to say that. we can work a normal amount and have enough financial freedom to go solve many of those things that are in our lives or enjoy them. solving and enjoying is going to ebb and flow throughout your life too. sometimes you have problems to solve. i have two tuition checks to go write this fall for my daughters going to college. it’s a good problem to have.

liz: it is, that is. now, first of all, that you have a daughter who’s going to college, and that you have the means to write those checks so that she can fulfill her dreams. she can get off to the best start that she possibly can.

mike: that’s fun, but they’re going to be about 3,200 miles apart. one will be in northern massachusetts and one will be in southern california.

liz: well, it’ll be different, that’s for sure. now, mike, i want you to get out your crystal ball and try to think about what accounting is going to be like in 10 years. i’ve been asking people this a lot, and i don’t think that many people are thinking quite big enough. i want to challenge you to think as big as you can. what will we be doing in 10 years?

mike: i think the nuts and the bolts of the accounting can pretty much get automated by then, which means our job’s going to be telling our business owners what it means. we’re going to have a lot of cfo-type jobs that the accounting firms will be doing. i think that the firms will be doing them because we’re still going to have more work to do and not enough people. the firm will be able to have people at different levels for when the company needs those different levels.

we’ll basically be an outsourced finance department, i think, for a lot of the mid-market-type companies that are in our communities. we’re going to be helping those companies purposely be successful. we’re not going to be delivering the compiled financial statement and saying, good luck. we’re going to be looking at near real-time data with these companies as they’re making big decisions about not only this week, but next month, the next six months, and the next year in their industry.

i think the firms will be doing that from a very niched place where if you and i are in business together, liz, we’re only doing construction companies based out of southwestern new mexico. it’s all we do. if you do anything else, we don’t do it. we have an army of friends in accounting that we can tap into that do all the other stuff. we could do all the accounting for this. “all right, well, i need an audit for bonding purposes. great. that’s my other friend, liz, who’s just up in phoenix.

not that far away, but she absolutely dominates this area. you want her signature on your audit report, your bonding agent will be thrilled to have her firm do it. that’s going to get you the money that you need to go bid on this big project that we were just talking about.” cool, who’s doing my tax return? that’s my buddy, chad. he’s out in southern california.” oh, am i going to pay california rates?” don’t think of it that way.

chad knows all about construction tax work. it’s all he does. he knows exactly what to be doing. he’s got the whole southwest, all the state tax incentives that are available, the knowledge that he has, and the amount that he can help you with your tax planning, well worth southern california fee for you.” that’s how things are going to get done in the profession.

liz: i think you’re probably right, and you’re probably one of the few people who has made the leap to the people part of the work. that it’s going to be more helping leaders and helping business owners do something more with their businesses to fulfill their dreams.

mike: in our case, i’m almost playing general contractor with this client. i have my specific niche that he needs, so i can bring that to the table. i think a lot of gcs can do that if we’re looking at that as another model. i’m just doing the accounting part, which precludes me from partying for one, and two. i just don’t want to do taxes because i can do enough with just– if i part of new mexico, doing all the accounting work for these people, and i’m constantly talking to the different construction leaders.

helping them with what they’re doing, and they’re at different size, they’re doing at different size projects too. they’re not really competing against each other either, every now and again, because it’ll happen. it’s what do you want with your construction company? what do you want with your manufacturing company? do you want to expand it at 10 new jobs? how do we find the revenue so you can have 10 more miles to feed at your company? that’d be fantastic, 10 more households that you’re guaranteed to have lights and food on all the time.

let’s go do that. when you need something else, i can play quarterback and go find the people that you need. if i don’t know, i’m going to go talk to one of the three or four other firms that’s servicing you, saying, chad, liz, who do you know that can do this thing because i haven’t run into it before. the client’s worked with you the last two years, so they also trust your opinion. what do you think? let’s put the client in the center of the wheel and start spoking everything else out.

liz: i love that image of the client as the hub and the service providers as the spokes for the wheel that helps them move towards their goal. i love that image.

mike: we’ll see, maybe it’ll be partially right, maybe it’ll be totally wrong. it’s the fun part about guessing. no harm in guessing.

liz: no, there is not. there is not. i think that image of the client as the center of the wheel is the perfect place to end our conversation. i want to thank you so much, mike, for sharing all of your wealth of wisdom with us. now, if listeners want to get ahold of you, where’s the best place to find you?

mike: if you can find me on linkedin, that’s probably the best place. might not be that easy, because you have to string together all the contents of my last name. the second easiest way is going to be mike.max@aprio.com. i got an email address to make it easier. if my zoom name is showing up on the screen where people are reading and watching this, that’s it, mike.max right there. then at aprio, you can read it right there. perfect.

liz: well, i want to thank you so much and hope you have a wonderful rest of your day there. thanks so much.

mike: thanks, liz, appreciate it. great talk with you, as always.

posted on october 29, 2024