your clients may need a great deal of empathy and not just tactical advice. plus 13 key takeaways.
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the disruptors
with liz farr
terrell turner started his “journey of doing things differently” on april 1, 2020, during the pandemic. while “2020 was the reset button for everyone,” that reset offered turner a tremendous opportunity to create a new kind of firm. “we don’t have any history in doing this,” turner recalls thinking. “so how would we do this in this new environment that we’re in?”
more disruptors | more 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 podcasts and videos: 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 |
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his path to founding a firm was unusual – from public accounting to industry and back to public accounting. he credits his time in industry with providing a “really solid foundation” in connecting processes with the impact on the financial statements. “i think being able to connect those dots is something i would have never been able to do had i not worked in industry for some time,” turner says.
because he started his firm during the pandemic, there was no option for live networking events or conferences to find new clients, “so we really leaned heavy into social media,” turner explained. the expansive reach of social media allowed his team to talk to “people that we probably would have never met because most of the people we ended up interacting with just didn’t live in north carolina.”
turner says that on social media, with a bit of effort, “you can find your audience online, and you can speak directly to your audience.” you don’t have to be doing a commercial trying to sell your audience something every time, but “you could just show up and continue to be helpful.” combining humor with business lessons – as turner does with his ‘meme video’ series – helped him realize “i can build a solid business by finding people who i can actually be myself with.”
like many new firms, turner started out working with anyone willing to pay them but soon realized that bouncing from industry to industry was “a great way to exhaust yourself and burn yourself out.” turner and his team landed on law firms because “we can solve their problems, and they really appreciate what we do.”
turner’s helpful attitude toward law firms led him to join the american bar association, where he chairs the law firm finance committee. in that role, he has created training materials to train law firm leaders on the basics of the accounting and finance side of running a law firm.
turner’s firm also does things differently with performance reviews. instead of the typical annual performance reviews, each employee performs a monthly self-review on three clear metrics that relate their work to the overall goals of the firm. each metric has ranges for average, good, and excellent, and the results provide opportunities for personalized coaching. if someone is below average, he steps in as a coach: “how do we come up with a plan to help you go from average to good,” while also considering what may be happening in that person’s life.
13 more takeaways
- spending time in audit and in industry helps you understand how a transaction or a process will impact the financials. it helps you connect the dots in ways most accountants cannot.
- you will learn from everyone. you can learn what to do, and you can learn what not to do.
- embracing the lessons from the past allows you to move forward faster.
- questions to consider when deciding on a specialty:
- what types of businesses would we like to work with?
- what are the average price points for different types of clients?
- which clients have the types of problems we can help with?
- how much do those clients value the solution we provide?
- reach out to your specialty industry with offers to help them understand the accounting and finance side of running their businesses, and you will be rewarded.
- the older generation of accountants had to focus heavily on compliance to restore trust in the markets that had been damaged from accounting scandals. they had to be the financial adults in the room. thanks to the secure foundation those accountants created, we now have the opportunity to be more experimental and entrepreneurial.
- many accountants underestimate how costly it is to provide advisory. not only does advisory take time, which is in short supply for most accountants, but it can also be emotionally difficult. your clients may need a great deal of empathy and not just tactical advice.
- a key to implementing technology is to start by mapping out the goal you want to achieve. look for places in that process where technology can help you.
- using more technology frees up teams to do more mentally taxing work, but the extra effort can be exhausting. we may need to adjust the goals and objectives we set for our teams.
- instead of setting weekly hourly goals for your team, start from the ultimate goal to be accomplished for a client and work backwards to determine what needs to be done to achieve that goal. set incremental milestones for the smaller tasks. people appreciate having freedom and flexibility to work within those guardrails.
- define metrics for individual team performance according to what they can do to keep clients happy. clients want their reporting, they want it on time, and they want the accountants to point out issues or opportunities. this allows team members to control their performance.
- implement the right technology and processes so you can give more control to your team yet still have checkpoints in place that give you both feedback. help your team develop judgment so you have confidence that they will make the right decisions.
- encourage your team to be proactive in their communication with you so you don’t feel the need to micromanage.
more about terrell turner
terrell a. turner, cpa, is a 3x 40 under 40 cpa, 2x global finance influencer, and founder of a ny times featured cpa firm. in 2020, he founded the tlturner group, a premium accounting firm that provides bookkeeping and cfo services to law firms. turner oversees the marketing, sales, and staff development functions in leading the firm. he has created several professional development resources available to other accounting firms and professionals, including the golden a.g.e. performance development process, accounting career transition training, and train your offshore staff training program. terrell believes that accounting is a life-changing profession that should not be as complicated as it is, so he is on a mission to make it better and less complicated.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr
terrell, can you tell listeners a little bit about your business? you know, where you’re located, what you do, how long you’ve been in in business, stuff like that?
terrell turner
yeah. so i’m located in just outside of charlotte, north carolina. so in the southeast of the us and my firm, the tl turner group, we started the firm back in 2020 after working for in the corporate world of just working with public accounting to, you know, fortune, 500 corporations and startups, i decided to branch out and start my own firm. and so the timing aligned for me to start april 1 of 2020 and it really led to a, i think, just the start of a journey of us, you know, doing things very different. because i think every it was almost like 2020, was the reset button for everyone. and so we just came in and said, all right, you know, we don’t have any history in doing this. so how would we do this in this new environment that we’re in? and we began building the business, and eventually we identified that our focus area would be providing bookkeeping and cfo services for law firms. and so we are deeply entrenched in working with law firms. and outside of that, i do a lot of speaking at different conferences and trainings and workshops as well.
liz farr
fantastic. now, now i did a little bit of stalking of your your background and and so i know that you started at ey, and then you were in industry for almost a decade, and then you jumped into starting your own firm, and that’s, that’s a path that almost no cpas take, you know, from public to industry to back to public again now. now, how does that impact the way that you operate your firm?
terrell turner
yeah, i think it’s really helped me understand, you know, how different aspects of business work. because when i was in public accounting, like, you’re very insulated from the real hardcore business decisions that have to be made. and i think when you’re in public accounting, especially as an auditor, like you’re not really thinking about the economics of the work you do. you’re not thinking about really, you’re not thinking about the economics of the client that you’re you’re looking at. you are just purely there to check the boxes on compliance, provide feedback, but you didn’t really have to deal with the emotions that come with making business decisions. and so moving into corporate and working in industry and private sector for, you know, so many years, it really gave me the experience of having to wrestle with the emotions, the ups, the downs, all of the different factors that go into making a decision. so now, stepping back into public accounting, it’s as i’m working with clients, and even as i’m training my staff like we don’t just focus on well, we’re going to check the box on the things we need to do is we go into it understanding that everything we do is playing a role and having some impact on the actual decisions that our business partners and the business owners and the business leaders, the things that they have to actually execute our work empowers that and so we can really work as a better partner for all of our clients because of that experience
liz farr
that’s that’s something that i think a lot of cpas and accountants really would benefit from, you know, the revolving door. i’ve talked to a bunch of auditors who said that when they come back to do audit after a stunt in in industry. they’re much better as auditors, because, as they say, they know where all the skeletons are buried.
terrell turner
so and i think, to that point, like, you know, i, at the time, i did not enjoy my time in audit, and it was after spending some time, you know, in the industry of working for companies, that i really started to develop a deeper appreciation for my time and audit and because one of the things that i spent a lot of time on was, like, internal controls, narratives and processes, and to be honest with you, that really solid foundation, and being able to look at a process to understand what was going on, and to be able to see how that impacts the financial statements, that has probably been one of the most valuable lessons for me throughout every aspect of my career, even till now, to where i can have a conversation with a business owner or a business leader or someone at any business and based on the conversation, i can take what they’re telling me or what they’re explaining to me, understand the process, and then i can tell them how it’s going to impact their financial statements. and i think being able to connect those dots is something i would have never been able to do had i not worked in industry for some time.
liz farr
that’s exactly right, you know. and when i moved, when i was in public accounting, you know, i never really did too much of the bookkeeping, but when i had the chance to, and i could really dig into a client’s quickbooks file and just kind of follow how the transactions came in and how it worked. you know, especially with law firms, who are, they have kind of a different transaction flow that really helped me understand how the business is operated at a much deeper level. it really gave me a lot more sympathy for them.
terrell turner
absolutely, yeah.
liz farr
now, now something else that really sets you apart from a lot of other public accounting firm owners, it is that you have a real entrepreneurial bent, and that’s something i see in a lot of the younger generation of accountants, but not so much in in the older ones, you know, the ones who are, you know, about ready to retire, about now. so, so can you talk about that a little bit? yeah, you know,
terrell turner
i think it is. it’s a some aspect of necessity, and i think also some aspect of, i would say, a lot of gratitude that needs to be paid to the older accountants. and the reason why i say that is because, you know, the older accountants and i spent a lot of time, even talking to some older accountants and how the industry used to work, and how the industry used to operate is, you know, we had the legacy in the past of, you know, compliance was really kind of a top down driven kind of thing, where there were some really big scandals that came out. so accounting and compliance, like the industry, and not even necessarily like the tops of accounting firms, but the tops of regulate regulators and regulatory bodies were really pushing for compliance. so during that time, a lot of the older accountants, they really had to be good at compliance, and they really didn’t have to figure out, you know, the entrepreneurial side, because the business was being pushed to them. the gap that they had to learn was we got to really wrap our minds around the compliance and the technical side. and i think older account is really delved into that now, now that we’ve gotten to a point where people, you know, we haven’t had as many major scandals, or we have a lot better transparency now, now, i think that pendulum in the industry has swung a bit more back to all right now we got to get back to running a business, and i think that we have the luxury, and this is a part that, i think, is where the gratitude comes in, is that we have the luxury of being able to experiment with different things. because i think the older generation of accountants did such a good job of establishing a, you know, a safe place in compliance, to where we know the rules that we can play within. now, i think we have a little bit more flexibility to say, okay, all right. how can we get more creative in by the way we run the business, but still keeping you know the standards and the structures and. we’ve created technology that can do some of the compliance work, which has freed us up to be a lot more entrepreneurial. and so for for me, i look at it as all the work that the older generation of accountants did set us up to put us in a place to where now we can really experiment and really try to be more entrepreneurial. and also, i think the industry is demanding it now, because in some respects, some aspects of accounting have become a little bit of a commodity. so now we really have to stand out in the minds of our potential clients, and that requires us to be entrepreneurial, to to think about, what problem are we solving? how do we come up with a profitable and cost effective or cost appropriate solution that we can offer to solve that problem, and then how do we continue to deliver that service so we can keep a healthy firm going and growing, and i think that now is just the necessity to be more entrepreneurial is higher now because of the older generation of accountants, they did such a good job of establishing the compliance. now we can get back to running a business.
liz farr
i love the way that you, you frame that as as gratitude for the older generation. because i think that so much, so much of the time we’re, you know, we curse the older generation and we blame them for creating this toxic work culture and the long hours and all of that. you know, we blame them for that, but we forget the foundation that they created for us. so i love that.
terrell turner
yeah, absolutely. i mean, because i always try to take a step back and really put myself in the shoes of someone in history, because i think it’s very easy today to look back and to just curse what someone else did before you. but i think when you put yourself in the shoes, because i think back to, you know, in the, you know, late 90s, where you had the, you know, the internet bubble that burst. and then you also have things like enron, when you have, when you think about just the gravity of that, like the 1000s and millions of people whose financial lives were absolutely upended by these, you know, horrific things like what happened with the scandal with enron, it’s like so many lives were financially and emotionally torn apart, and at that time, you know, the world was looking for who is going to help us pull these pieces back together? and you know, i’m grateful that accountants stepped up and said, hey, we will help bring the confidence back to the market. and you had things like sarbanes oxley, where they stepped in and they really went hardcore in compliance, and the accountants of the older generation, they were doing the best they could to work through the chaos that was handed to them and and so i don’t think that there is room to just continue bashing the older generation, i’m like, they did the best they could with the situation that they dealt with. now it’s up to us to appreciate what we can and then also adjusting and make some adjustments and tweaks where we need to to continue adding on top of, you know, the foundation that was set for us, because if you spend all your time just bashing what other people did before you, you’re not going to make much progress moving forward,
liz farr
absolutely, you know, and and in my own experience, i was fortunate to work in a firm where the founder was still taking an active role. he had started the firm back in the 60s, and he really was an entrepreneurs entrepreneur, because besides running a cpa firm, he always had other stuff going on on the side. so he had, he had an apartment building, he had an indoor shooting range, you know, he also helped his sister with a restaurant, you know, he did all kinds of stuff, and he really was kind of a good example for what a firm leader should do, because by the time i came into the firm, he really wasn’t doing much of the day to day work. he would kind of come in every now and then for a super high level review of something. but. but he wasn’t really doing any of the work, and instead, he spent his days on the phone, talking to clients and meeting with them, and going out to, you know, the board meetings for all the nonprofits he was on. so, you know, he really was an example that i think many firm owners today could emulate,
terrell turner
and i think that there’s always so much value that we can learn from those who came before us, and it’s something that i learned probably when i was maybe about 17 or 18 to where a mentor of mine at the time, my mentor was what 61 when i was 18. and one of the things that he had told me was he said, you know you’re gonna you can learn from everybody. you can learn what to do. you can learn what not to do. and i really took that to heart and said, all right, i’m going to embrace what i can and the lessons that i can. i think there’s so many things that the older generation of accountants that they did out of necessity for where the situation was when they were developing systems and processes and approaches, and then also recognizing, okay, all right, where has the environment, where has the circumstance changed? where do we need to make adjustments and tweaks but still keep the underlying fundamental value that they were trying to create? but how do we maybe change the delivery of it. and i think when you really do embrace the lessons from the past, it allows you to move forward in a much faster way.
liz farr
absolutely, you know, we it’s all too easy to forget the things that that our forebears did and the lessons that we can learn from them. it’s just way too easy. now, terrell, as you mentioned, you work a lot with lawyers and law firms. now, how did that come to be?
terrell turner
so probably, like most accounting firms when i started, you know, especially in 2020 in early 2020, it’s whoever would pay us. we’ll work with them. and i realized that’s not the best way to build a growing business. i mean, it’s a great way to exhaust yourself and burn yourself out, and it’s a great way to have high turnover in your firm, because your staff just mentally bouncing back and forth from industry to industry and from like systems and tech stacks to tech stack. it’s like it just became very exhausting. and so we took a step back and said, okay, we need some consistency for the team, because the team need because they couldn’t really get into a good rhythm. and so i had looked at, what are the types of businesses that we work with, and i looked at it from a, who do we like to work with? and then i also looked at it from a, okay, what is the average price points of the different types of clients? we also looked at, okay, all right, you know, who had, what are the types of problems that we are solving for, the different types of companies that we’re working for, and then, how much do those clients value the solution we’re providing? and when we started looking at it from that standpoint, we realized that, you know, we could develop a system around, you know, working with law firms, plus law firms were the loudest and the most grateful for the work we were doing, and they were paying the highest price. and so when you look at all of those things, you’re like, okay, it’s very clear, like, this is where we need to focus. like they we can solve their problems, and they really appreciate what we do. they we have the highest profit margins on this sector of clients and and then i think also from the marketing standpoint, is the market of law firms that are available for us to work with. the market is huge to where we were, like, you know what? all of it’s like, all the stars align to where, like, this is the industry we should work with. and also think, from a personality standpoint, a lot of people do, um, tend to get a little nervous about working with lawyers. of you know, are they going to be very aggressive or argumentative and and maybe this is just a personal thing for me, being the youngest of four boys is i’m used to having to clarify and defend my point. and so i’ve had a couple conversations with some lawyers where they challenge some things. and i, you know, i was clear about what my perspective. my recommendation was. and i think once you can put together a good foundation or good argument for why you are recommending what you’re recommending, what i notice is a lot of lawyers would say, you know what you sound like. you know what you’re doing, we’re gonna go and then also, whenever i made a mistake, i would come back to them and say, hey, you know what? i made a mistake on this, and here’s why i made the mistake, and here’s what we’re gonna do to make sure we don’t make it again. when you come back with that kind of humility and clarity, the lawyers were just like, okay, yeah, i even though you made a mistake, the fact that you actually thought through it and you have a plan to avoid it, like, yeah, i trust you, yeah. and so we’ve never really had an issue with working with law firms. it’s it’s been huge upside for us.
liz farr
yeah, that, that makes perfect sense. and you know, thinking about all the the law firms that i worked with. you know, i was in one of those firms where, yeah, i bounced from plumber to hvac to construction to restaurant to lawyer all over the place. and yeah, you know, the the attorneys were always the friendliest and the most gracious, and they were also just so dang busy and so focused on their own work that they really just didn’t have the time to try and play around with their books. so they were always grateful to have somebody who could come in and keep those iolta accounts reconciled and keep all of that lined up the way that it needed to be. so, yeah, i that’s a great choice, good reasons,
terrell turner
and it’s been a fun journey, because i think the the need has is bigger than i imagine, and also the i’ll see the legal community. it reminds me a lot of the accounting community, where the accounting community has, you know, a few years ago, really embraced, i felt like embraced me and my firm with open arms of really, you know, being able to develop some solid relationships. and i feel like a similar thing happened within the legal industry where, you know, i was creating content on social media, and the upcoming chair of the law practice division of the american bar association that reached out to me asked me to be a guest on her podcast. i came on her podcast. at the time, i had no idea about the american bar association, because i’m not a lawyer, i’m an accountant, and so we talked about it. she was like, oh, you should, you know, join because we need some help creating finance content. and i was like, okay, i’m, i’m glad to help wherever i can. so, like, within 15 minutes, i went on, i registered, i paid my fees to become a member, and i emailed her and said, hey, just let me know when the next meeting or when i can help. and she was like, oh, we’re having a meeting. and i think it was, yeah, we’re having a meeting in san francisco. i’m like, okay, i’ll be there. and so i went to the meeting. i sat in a couple sessions, and was like, hey, wherever i can help, i’m willing to help. and within, i would say, probably less than a year, they said, hey, you. you put out really good content, and you seem to show up and offer help in wherever you can. what do you think about being the chair of the law firm finance committee. and i was like, um, okay, if i can help. and so being able to get elevated and welcome into the legal community to where now, as the chair of the law firm finance committee, you know my my role is to help create finance related content, whether that’s articles, or whether that’s webinars or presentations and different resources to really help other law firms as well as you know, helping create a training program of teaching law firm leadership the basics of the accounting and finance side of running a law firm. it’s just being able to do that at a national level all because, like, hey, we just pursued the opportunity to help where we could. and so i would say the legal community has been very gracious in accepting me in and allowing me to bring my skill to the areas where they needed it.
liz farr
well, you just demonstrated that it’s it’s hugely useful to just raise your hand and say, hey, i’m willing to help, because you never know when that’s going to pay off. and in my experience. eventually it always does. so congratulations to you. i think that’s great. yeah. now, now, something we’ve kind of alluded to is the role of technology and how technology has enabled accountants today to really automate a lot of the compliance pieces of what we do. and so you know, how can you talk a little bit about how using technology really helps you lean more into an advisory role and to help your clients at a higher level? because, because i know you do that too.
terrell turner
when it comes to advisory, the biggest challenge that a lot of accountants and a lot of firms face is just time and availability. because if you’re very steep into doing the tactical things behind the scenes, you don’t have as much time to do advisory. and also, i think for a lot of accountants, they tend to underestimate how costly it is to do advisory, and not necessarily from a monetary standpoint, but from an emotional standpoint. because when you are really doing true advisory, i mean, you have to understand, where is the person that i am speaking to? where are they emotionally and then, how do i take the advice or the recommendations i’m giving? how do i give it to them in a way that is actually going to help them, which means sometimes i gotta exercise a lot more empathy than i expected. like, when you get on a call with someone and they’re just like, they don’t know what they’re going to do next, like, payroll is coming up soon, and they’re trying to figure out whether or not they need to go take out a line of credit. and if you’re just looking at the numbers, you’re just like, okay, yeah, you just take out the line of credit, but not realizing they grew up in an environment where debt was seen as bad, so now you have to help them emotionally work through that, to where i was like, there’s no way you can really deliver advisory services as well if you’re just still stuck into all the tactical things, and so that’s where technology really played a role for ourselves. how do we start to use technology to move faster on the compliance things? or, how do we use technology to get access to information faster? and how do we use the technology to create the types of reports that will make the problems more clear to us, so we know where to spend our time. and so for us, we’ve really looked at taking approach and said, all right, here’s how we’re going to start. we are going to map out what is the goal that we’re trying to achieve. what are all the processes and the factors that are involved to get us to that goal? and then we start saying, okay, all right, is there anywhere in this process that technology can help us move faster? and so for us, some of that has been, you know, finding a good reporting tool like i would say, all of our clients are in quickbooks online. so we found a tool that allows us to pull the data from quickbooks into spreadsheets so we can do our analysis faster. because we said, hey, we need to automate that and liveflow. was a great tool for us to be able to do that. and then we looked at some things around all right, now we’re trying to manage this growing firm, and we got staff and we got clients. we have staff that’s, you know, spread around the world. we have clients that are spread throughout the us, and we are like, how do we keep up with this? so then we look at a practice management software that could help keep us organized. because if we didn’t have the practice management software, what ends up happening is now a physical person has to be the person who becomes the air traffic controller for everything, which is a chaotic job.
liz farr
yeah? absolutely, absolutely. yeah, you know, and, and something you mentioned about the emotional aspect, you know, what i’ve been thinking a lot about lately when i’ve heard about, you know, people who didn’t reach their hourly billable goals in some firm, and then got dinged for bonuses, or, you know, promotions for that. you know, what i think about is, is that, you know, before we had all this technology, we had a certain amount of time where we were doing the. quote, tedious, boring stuff, and that that took time, but it was also not very mentally taxing. so you know, you could go, oh, god, i am. i’m just beat okay, but it’s only four o’clock. i’ve got to stay until five. here’s a trial balance. i can key in for this other project, and that doesn’t take much bandwidth, that doesn’t take much brain power, but i can get that done. but now you know, when we’ve got these tools that do all that for us, then we really need the emotional and the mental bandwidth to work with our clients at a higher level, because we just can’t, you know, we don’t have that kind of reprieve that we used to have when it was all manual. so, so what do you think about that? am i? am i on to something there?
terrell turner
i think you are definitely on to something because, and i even think that there is a lot to what you were saying, because i agree before, when we were doing a lot of stuff manually, then we could just say, all right, i’m just gonna stretch out the time, because i need to key all these things in, and we’re going one by one. now it wasn’t the most value add for the client, but it still needed to be done, and there was no other way to do it. but now with technology, it’s a lot of that stuff we used to be able to do on autopilot. now we have to spend our time doing things that require more mental intense. i guess you say that are more mentally intense to where you have to be more engaged. and i think the other side of that as a firm we have to think about is, well, if i’m asking my team to do work that is more mentally intense, then do i need to adjust what the billable hour targets are? do i need to build in more downtime? because one of the things that i know is on like i have, i try to set it aside like tuesdays and thursdays to really go deeper on marketing and, you know, creating content. and some of those days, like, i don’t do as much like work, or, let’s say, accounting work on those days, but those days i am just exhausted. and part of it is because all of it is trying to really flex the my creative muscles, and it is a mental drain to really be deep in that. and i think that firms do have to look at that and say, hey, it’s great to implement the technology, but when we start asking our teams to do things that are more mentally taxing, then we probably need to relook at the goals and the objectives that we set for them. and then also, i think, you know, really helping the team achieve or reach the right level of productivity and efficiency. one of the things that we do in our firm is, i’ll meet with the bookkeepers or the senior accountants or the accounting manager, and we’ll just kind of talk through, like, we’ll pick one of their clients, and we’ll literally walk through, like, the the phases of things that they’re working on, and i want to get their opinion about how long they think it should take, and then we can kind of talk through it to where it gives them kind of a benchmark to really gage, so they’re not trying to run towards what they believe is an unrealistic target. is because if i walk through the process with them and i show them that, hey, the target i’m giving you is realistic, but you’re going to have to leverage technology this way. you’re going to have to make some adjustments this way. and as we talk through that and come to an agreement now, when i hold them accountable to the target that i’ve given them, they can actually hit it, and they don’t feel like i’m just beating them up. it’s just like, no, we’ve already walked through this. and you and i both agreed this is doable. it’s just, hey, you might have to make some adjustments. and i think, as a, you know, from a leadership perspective with accounting firms, as more technology gets introduced, we do have to go back and revisit the process and really ask ourselves, okay, if technology is now doing these things, what am i going to ask my team to do? and how confident are they that they can do these new, mentally taxing things? do i need to, you know, spend a little bit more time with them, helping them develop their confidence to do these things. or do i just. is tell them, hey, you still need to hit the same targets you had last year, although technology is stepping in to do a lot of the menial work that you used to do. and i’m like, we do have to change the way we approach, you know, how we’re leading and working with our team as we implement more technology?
liz farr
yeah, and i think that that’s something that that gets overlooked a lot in the discussions about how we keep our our people accountable and motivated. you know, i do a lot of work with al anderson, who works with auditors, and he suggests that, instead of looking at hourly, billable hour targets, you look at deliverables so you know. you tell some staff auditor, okay, your deliverables this week are going to be to get cash done, to get ar done, or you know, or whatever you know, whatever is reasonable to get done this week. and so you just do that. so if they can get that done in three days, perfect. let them take some time off. spend time with their kids, if it takes them four days, five days, okay, you know, it’s still the same. you know, it’s less important how many hours they took, and more important that they got the work done and that it was as accurate as possible. that’s more important.
terrell turner
yeah, i definitely agree with that, that approach, because, i mean, it is the way we tend to approach. it is that way because a lot of our work we do is flat fee. i would say maybe 15% of the work we do is hourly. most of it, you know, is all flat fee. and so we do work from that perspective of, hey, here’s what we need to accomplish. and what we usually do is we say, okay, here’s the ultimate goal we need to accomplish for this client. and here now let’s work backwards to say, okay, what needs to be accomplished for us to achieve the overall goal. and then we can set incremental milestones for the smaller task. and so the team knows like, hey, here are the incremental milestones that you need to work towards. and hey, as long as you get it done within this window, we can still stay on track for the overall, you know, goal that we’re trying to hit. now, if anybody misses a incremental milestone, it may have to adjust things. so i’m like, yes, here’s your individual window. but also keep in mind, we may have to make some adjustments along the way. and i think a lot of people like the flexibility of being able to say, hey, i know what my deadlines are, and you give me the freedom to work within these parameters. a lot of people really enjoy that freedom and flexibility within the guardrails, and i think it also allows us to better plan and to better project where we need to be. now, i will say on the leadership side, it requires us to actually look at what’s the overall goal, and then to kind of walk that backwards to okay, what are the end, what are the incremental milestones necessary? and we have to do that for every client, whereas before was just, hey, here’s how many hours you need to hit. go hit your hours. and it’s like, as leaders, we have to become way more thoughtful than we probably were in the past,
liz farr
absolutely, i think you’re absolutely right now, now something you know, if you follow terrell, then you will find out that he is all over social media, and he is a master in marketing, and this is something that a lot of other accountants really struggle with. now, can you talk about a little bit about all the different things you do? i think it’s just astounding.
terrell turner
so i started, you know, my firm really trying to get the word out about what we were doing by leveraging social media, because it was back in 2020 when a lot of the states and cities were shutting down and in response to covid, and we were trying to figure out, like, what is going on in april of 2020, so, you know, getting online was the only way for me to get the word out, because i couldn’t go to any networking events. there were no conferences. no one was meeting in person. so we really leaned heavy into social media. and when we did that, it gave us the chance to really have an expansive brand and to really start talking to people that we probably would have never met, because most of the people we ended up interacting with just didn’t live in north carolina. and as we started doing that, we realized like there is a lot of opportunity here to be able to get a message out. because i think if it was, it’s probably like how the television was when the television first came out, to where people used to listen to radio only or read newspaper, but when television came out, it’s just like there was so much attention there. and so i realized that, hey, getting online, like there’s so much attention there to where you can find your audience with some skill and effort and research, you can find your audience online, and you can speak directly to your audience. and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a every time you get up there, you’re doing a commercial trying to sell them something. you could just show up and continue to be helpful to your audience. and you could also test different messages to figure out what works what doesn’t work. and so for us, that’s what we really looked at social media as, as as the opportunity to find and connect with our audience, and to test different messages, to figure out what actually resonates with our audiences. and so in doing that, it led to us, you know, doing webinars with different companies and different content creators. right now we’re doing one series that a lot of people love is we call them a meme videos, where we’ll find something funny that’s happened in a meme video, we’ll play the video for like, maybe five seconds, and then i will give a business lesson related to what you just saw. and so i think, like today was one where it’s how one bad decision can lead to a number of other horrible, catastrophic decisions. and the first video is a guy has, i guess there’s a fire pit in his backyard, and he decides to pour gasoline on the fire, and then the gasoline can catches on fire, so he throws it and he throws it into his bushes, and then his bushes catch on fire, and a lot of people saw it, and they’re like, wow, that is hilarious, but, but i think it’s very similar to, like, there are many times where our gut reaction to a problem has caused even more problems in our own business. and so i think there’s a lot of business lessons we can find and and i think it’s always helpful to be able to bring in comedy, to give people a good laugh with a good business lesson. and then we also do things like writing articles. we’re also, you know, hosting podcasts ourselves and joining different podcasts, and then that’s also led to opportunities where we’re doing speaking engagements, or we’re partnering with software companies to do sponsor branded ads and different things like that. and so i think the potential of what we could use, you know, online for is tremendous. and, you know, who knows, as as life begins to progress, and let’s say we get to a phase where people are all in a virtual reality world, we’ll figure out how to show up there too,
liz farr
yeah. and, you know, and something that i really love about all the video you do is that it you show up as yourself, so it gets people to see you as you are. you know you’re not pretending to be somebody that you’re not. you know you you get to be your own genuine self and and i think, you know, back in in my early days of public accounting, that was really hard to do, to be all of myself, you know. and so i think that that helps you connect with your prospects and your market at a very deep level, because it’s not just this random name that you see here and there, but it’s this actual guy who makes you laugh about somebody throwing a flaming gas can into their bushes.
terrell turner
you know, and i think that that is, again, it takes me back to the gratitude that i owe to all of the accountants who came and the generations before us. because, i mean, if you go back to the examples we were talking about earlier, i mean, in the late 90s and early two. 1000s, where you have, you know, stock market bubbles, you have massive frauds that are happening at that point. what the market was demanding is we need the adults to come back into the room and add more confidence back into our global markets. and i think that accountants of prior generations did that. and you know, for them to be the financial adults in the room, it’s like there was a certain image that they had to portray, to show and bring people back to a level where they could trust the markets again. and i think that as the prior generation of accountants established that a lot of times, i do think, because that was the role that the accounting industry played, a lot of people were not afforded the opportunity to show up as themself, because it’s like, hey, we got to step in and play the role of the of the profession that brings confidence back to accounting and finance, but i think now that they did that job, we now have the luxury of now we can show up and bring our own personalities back into it, because i don’t have to fit a certain mode anymore. and there’s comfort, you know, with the internet and different resources to where it’s okay for me to find the audience that wants to work with the real version of me. and that’s another thing that i like about the content, is, at the end of the day, if someone does business with us, they’re eventually going to find out who we really are. so i’m just like, well, let’s show them up front, and so we only attract the people who actually connect with who we really are. and i think that’s why it is so important of leveraging, you know, social media, just leveraging different online outlets, and even leveraging conferences to show up as yourself, because what you’re really trying to do is find your audience. and i think in the process of finding your audience, it will be so liberating, because you can always get to be yourself, because that’s who you are attracting anyway. and when those people show up and you realize, i can build a solid business by finding people who i can actually be myself with. and i think that has just been a amazing journey for us in the content, and why we continue to just, hey, how can we be more authentic in the content that we’re sharing, what we’re putting out, even, i think about a maybe six months ago, we started doing this series called insider tips, where we really started taking some of the things we were doing internally in our business, and how do we start becoming even more transparent about those things? like there were areas where i realized my leadership was actually hurting the team, and so i just had to be honest about i was honest about that in a post, and i was talking about the areas where we were making changes, because i recognize my leadership was great to get us where we had reached in the past, but it wasn’t sufficient enough to lead us to where we needed to go next, and i was just open about where i needed to make some changes and adjustments. and it resonated with a lot of people, and we realized that, hey, in being ourselves, we can also be, you know, transparent and vulnerable. and it actually attracted more potential clients that like what we were doing, because they saw that era like, hey, he’s going through some of the same development that i’m trying to navigate in my own business. he probably understands what we’re going through and can be a good accounting firm partner for our organization. so i think that you know, the social media, the content, has just been a great way to really bridge those connections in a way that i never imagined was possible.
liz farr
and i think it’s just, it’s opened up such an amazing world. i mean, you know myself, i’ve met so many people online that i would never have met had i stayed in one of those little glass cubicles as a tax manager, you know, whatever it was they wanted to call me, you know. and and it also it just opens up the world to a much broader spectrum of who we can be, and and allows our clients to be more themselves.
terrell turner
i absolutely believe. it, and i think that that is something that that allows people to really find more value in the profession that they’re pursuing, and especially when it comes down to accounting, because as people realize that you could really, you know, bring your, you know, bring, bring your personality more to the work that you’re doing, and that part that actually becomes an asset in the field of accounting, the more i think we open up to embrace that, the more we will increase people wanting to come into the profession. and i think that, you know, a lot of people do talk about how, just how bad the old guard and accounting is and and i think it’s just we’re in that transition period to where it’s like the older generation and accounting like they are the way they are because they had to be, and if given the chance. and many times i always like, you know, going out to dinner with some of the, what people would call the older generation of accountants, and when you go out to dinner with them, you find out, like, wow, they’re just like us. and it’s just that professionally, because of the role they had to play in the industry, they had to show up a certain way. but i think that now that we’re in that transition period of just showing it, hey, we can bring a little more personality and still do a great job. i think as we’re kind of transitioning through that phase, i think you’ll start to see more people come into the profession, and more people see value in being part of the profession. but i do think we have to get through this transition, or this change of the guard type of process,
liz farr
i think you’re right, you know, and and one of the things that that i always resented about being in public accounting was the annual kind of check the box activity of the performance review, which i thought was a complete waste of time. i mean, the last one i did, i think i pulled out last year’s answers from the partner reviewing me, and i just copied them down for mine, and he kind of noticed that, and i just said, well, i can’t figure out any better way to answer them. so here you go. but you know, when i was at engage recently, you mentioned that you do these monthly performance reviews, and i’m really curious about that. how does that work?
terrell turner
so this is one of my entrepreneurial i call on my crazy business ideas when i propose this thought, because right now, my wife serves as as a part time finance director in the business, and so i’m bouncing the idea of her, it’s like, i want to do monthly performance reviews, and it’s like, you initially get this look like, i don’t know how that’s going to be possible. like, where are you going to find the time to do this? how is that going to work? and because we grew up in a from a corporate culture, of you do annual performance reviews, but one of the things the experiences that i had was i did a review with my staff about two years ago, and get to the end of the year, and we let them rate themselves first, and then i tell them what my rating was, and everybody was exceeding expectations. and i was like, oh, i don’t see it the same way. and i said, okay, all right, something got lost in translation, because, as you said, we were just going through the motions of it. and i’m like, this should not be, you know, this shouldn’t be this way. and plus, whatever feedback i had to give them, had i given it to them earlier in the year, they probably could have fixed it and actually exceeded my expectations. and so we sat down and said, all right, how do we really start to make this a lot clearer to people? and so we sat down and and this is kind of how we came up with this process we call the golden age of really helping people go from average to good to excellent. and we started off from just really laying out what is the overall company goal, and then we went through every role, every position within the company, and said, okay, all right, what do they need to do to support these overall goals? and how do we set measurable goals for everyone? so we have measurable goals for the finance director, for the accounting manager, for all the senior accountants, for all the bookkeepers, and we laid it out, and there are three metrics we identified for every role. and then the metrics are different depending on what your role is in the company, because it directly correlates to what your response. abilities are. and so now what we did is we were able to paint a picture for them and said, hey, this is what average looks like. this is what good looks like. this is what excellence looks like. and so every month, they can now actually evaluate their own performance on their three metrics to say, am i average? good? am i performing average? am i performing good, or am i performing excellent? and wherever they are on that scale, they can actually rate themselves. and then we have a performance review on that to say, okay, all right, where were you this month on this metric? where were you this month on this metric? and if they’re below average, then the goal is, how do we come up with a plan to get you to average? if they’re already at average, it’s okay. how do we come up with a plan to help you go from average to good and then, and also, when we take into account like, what’s going on in their personal life, because we had a staff member that was going out on medical leave, and she’s usually excellent in the things that she’s doing. and one of the things that you know, we were able with this clarity and the goals, i could tell her, hey, i only need you to be average during this time of your medical leave. i don’t need you putting in the extra effort, because i need you to focus on healing and being with your family. so can you dial it back down to just average for the next two months, and then after you finish healing, you can go back to being excellent. but i think being able to give people that flexibility and developing that golden age process is was a huge game changer for us to be able to say now we do the performance reviews on a monthly basis,
liz farr
that that’s really cool, and it’s really helpful for the person. so, so what? what’s an example of, you know, like, pick a role, and what are the metrics that you use, and how do you do average? good and excellent.
terrell turner
so i’ll say for my accounting manager, one of the metrics is the time to onboard a new client. so when we have a new client, one of the things we look at is say, okay, all right, for average is it’s going to take you three weeks to fully onboard them. good is going to take, you know, two weeks. excellent, it’s going to take one week. so as we’re onboarding new clients, they are we’ve already mapped out what the onboarding process is. some of it is directly in the accounting manager’s control. other parts of it is they need to work with the bookkeepers and the accounting managers to get all the accounting caught up, and so now they have a vested interest in helping the bookkeepers and the accountants go through the onboarding process faster, because we’re holding the accounting manager accountable to say, hey, the better we are at onboarding these clients, the happier our clients will be. and so their metric is, how long does it take us to onboard a new client? and then also some of the one of the other metrics for the accounting manager is the days to close. it’s what percentage of our clients are we closing the books on time. and so the accounting manager is responsible for managing the closing calendar and holding people accountable to hitting their incremental deadlines. and so when we look at all of our clients and we say, hey, you know, 90% of our clients were closed on time, then we’re like, okay, all right, you’re performing at a good level. and if you get more than 90% that is excellent, because we do know that things come up here and there and stuff like that, but those are just two metrics we you know, we measure the accounting manager on is, how long does it take to onboard a new client, and then how long does it take to actually close the books for each client? and as we measure them on that, they know these are the metrics that i’m being measured against, so they know what they need to focus on, and they can use their judgment on where to drive performance so that the company is moving in the right direction.
liz farr
i love that because it’s concrete, it’s definable and it’s achievable. it’s not some just kind of vague providing superior client support, you know, you know, i remember looking at these forms and going, what the heck does any of this mean? you know? and this was even a performance review that had been kind of it had been. modeled in the journal of accountancy is a really good model. and i’m like, what the heck? i don’t understand. i can’t quantify this. so i love it that that it’s achievable and it is definable.
terrell turner
it’s a and it took us some time to really figure it out. and i think that that’s a leadership thing of, really, you know, because we could have taken the, you know, the the generic approach of, are you meeting expectations? are you, you know, keeping the client happy? and it’s just like, well, what does that mean? and what we realized when we really dug into it, and i asked myself, what makes the client happy is that they’re getting their reporting and they’re getting it on time, and also that we’re pointing out, calling things to their attention. and so we said, okay, all right, if those are three things that make the client happy, how do we turn those three things into a definable metric for the team? because the team knows, if they are making progress on those definable metrics, then it’s going to lead to happiness for the client. and so we had to really take the time and say, okay, all right, how are we going to take these abstract, you know, goals, or these abstract objectives, and turn them into definable metrics that can really help give the team more clarity, and i think the team feels more at peace because they know what they’re going to be graded on, and so it’s no longer this surprise pop quiz at the end of the year. it is a very clear objective that they can actually control what their performance is. and it also makes it a lot easier when i’m talking to a staff member, and let’s say if they’re underperforming, there is no guesswork in it. it’s very clear. here’s what your objective is. now let’s talk about why you weren’t able to meet the objective. is it because we don’t have the right technology in place to support you? is it because you didn’t get the right level of guidance, or is it there are some questions that you need help answering, and so we can also use the performance process as a way to do monthly coaching on our staff’s performance, and then we can make it clear to them is, hey, if you’re a bookkeeper, if you want to get promoted to a senior accountant, you got to be performing between good and excellent, somewhere in that range. if you want to get promoted and your your performance has to be there consistently, because if you can consistently perform at that area, you’re showing the signs that you’re ready to move to the next level. and i think for people, it allows them to actually have a lot more clarity. and for some people that say, you know what, i don’t think i’m ready to, you know, to take on a promotion. i just got married, and i really like the role that i’m in. okay, good. if you’re performing somewhere between average and good, guess what, you’re going to be just fine, and you’re still going to add value to the team. and so i think it’s just being able to provide definitive clarity for the team, and it really helps us in our planning as we look at planning out capacity, and it helps us as we’re forecasting where our growth can go as a firm.
liz farr
you know, all of this makes so much sense, and and i, and i seriously hope that some of the listeners reach out to you to really dig into this, because i think that this could really help a lot of firm owners grapple with capacity and coaching their clients and their team and getting everybody in sync, i really think so, and i will applaud you for figuring that out. so absolutely, kudos to you.
terrell turner
i will say i am traveling, speaking a lot at different conferences about this topic. and one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve created some, like, sample kind of scorecards of how we evaluate the bookkeeper and how we evaluate, you know, use it in our marketing, because you can use it in different departments of your business. this model we created, and so we have a free one. and i mean, if it’s okay with you, i can definitely share a link in like, the comments of the podcast, where people can click on it and they can download a copy of how that scorecard looks so they can, you know, try to start working it into their firms.
liz farr
cool. we will. we will endeavor to make that happen. yeah. fantastic now. now we’re kind of at a transition point between the old top down style of leadership, which you know we know about, and this new, more collaborative and more humane version. now, what advice do you have for leaders who want to become better leaders themselves.
terrell turner
yeah, the first thing i would say is, you know, respect the way leadership was approached in the past. i think that the way you know, because of the conditions of the market, the environment you know, for whatever reason, those that came before us determined that that was the best way to address the concerns of the market, and i would say, respect that, but also understanding that now we’re in a different place, plus we also have the luxury of technology that we can leverage, because one of the things that we couldn’t do as well in the past is decentralize, kind of our the objectives to everyone in the organization, as well as we can do now, for example, like when it comes down to practice management software, i can set up processes and have the system automatically communicate to the team to give them kind of guidance along the way as they’re doing their job, to where they don’t have to have as many frequent meetings with me, which means i can empower them to have more ownership of their part of the process, a lot more and so i would tell leaders is respect what came before, but also recognize that there is a change, and then also embrace technology. because in areas where i see a lot of leaders still trying to use the top down only perspective, when you really dig into it and you ask yourself, okay, why are you taking that approach in this area? a lot of times it’s either their fear that something is going to go wrong or that’s the best way that they feel comfortable about where things are going. and sometimes it’s like, well, you need to implement the right technology and processes so that you can give more control to your team, but you also have the built in checkpoints where you’re getting the necessary feedback without having to be so controlling. and so i think that there’s a lot of room for organizations to really empower their staff and then also just build in those regular checkpoints. one very specific example is we try to empower our bookkeepers and our senior accountants to have more, you know, more, i guess, a freedom around making judgment calls. and in order to do that. what we said is, like we need to as leaders, we need to get comfortable about their their judgment. and so what we did is we implemented, you know, monthly financial review calls to where i’ll have hop on a call with a bookkeeper, and i will act like the client, and their job is to walk me through the financials, so then i can actually get a view on how they’re making judgment calls, and i can coach them a little bit, and as they get better at it, then i’m like, all right, i can give you more freedom to make more judgment calls, because i know how you think about this area. and so i think leaders have to really start thinking about that is like, how do i prepare my people to take more ownership of things? because as a leader, you need to go do other things. i mean, right now, i spend a lot of time on sales and marketing. i can’t be in the details the way i used to. so i spent about eight months really working with the team, helping them develop their judgment and their expertise so that i could afford to step out and still have confidence that they are doing things well, and at the same time, we still do have like templates and analysis that i can quickly look at the check high level things to spot where there might be a problem. so we still have checks in our system to where i can step in and look at something and observe. and if i look at the checks in the system, and the checks all look fine. or, as we would say in accounting, if the controls are in place, then i’m fine that the system is still operating. i don’t have to do the top down control as much.
liz farr
that’s that’s really excellent advice, and you know it, what really ultimately drove me out of public accounting was just kind of the micromanage. okay, and, and i gotta say, you know, it’s like what you said. that was the best way that they knew how to do stuff, because and to monitor that i was making progress on some of these big projects i have. so, you know, i can’t fault them for doing it the only way they could, but it was still really annoying to me.
terrell turner
and i agree, because i mean living through that myself, i mean that was an annoying part of of the job. and when i worked in public accounting, and one of the things that i recognized was all right, what are some checkpoints that we could put in place in the process that could give them the comfort, like at time, like my supervisors, my managers, how could i be a little bit more proactive to give them the comfort so they didn’t have to keep checking on all these details. now, occasionally you need a no matter what you give some people, they’re still gonna micromanage. and i realized that, all right, how do i how do i do the best that i could to give them the heads up so they didn’t feel like they needed to micromanage? and that’s something that i’ve been honest with my team members about of like, hey, i don’t know when you’re in over your head, so i am going to step in and check on things. but the more proactive you are about communicating these types of things to me, the more freedom i’ll give you. and when i tell my staff that, and they know that, hey, i’m not being micromanaging because i don’t trust you. it’s just i’m not getting the right type of feedback to tell me that i can go do something else. and when i started kind of explaining it that way, the team really started saying, okay, all right, here are the things that i need to proactively communicate. some of them, they would just start creating loom videos and say, hey, terrell, here are the four things that you need to know. and then i can watch their loom video, and then i can go do whatever else i wanted to do, because it gave me the assurance that, okay, this is being covered, this is being reviewed, or if i knew that i had to hop on a call with a client, they would do a very quick write up. hey terrell, when you meet with a client, here are the three things you need to bring up with them. and i’m like, great. i don’t have to go back into the details anymore. but it took some time, and for us, it took about eight months of really hardcore training to really get them to shift to that mindset
liz farr
that’s that’s excellent, you know, excellent advice for becoming a great leader is to really elevate your team to have the expectation that they can do that. so i think that’s super now. now i want you to kind of put on your crystal ball and and, you know, get your get your crystal ball out, put your hands on it, and try to imagine. what do you think the accounting industry is going to be like in 10 years,
terrell turner
10 years from now. so 10 years from now, i believe that the accounting industry is going to be a lot less of the technical accounting that happens in the background, because i think software is advancing, and our clarity around the systems and the processes to reach a clear objective are becoming more defined, which means we can program technology as we develop our understanding, but i think is going to free up our time to actually start becoming more active in the business decision making process to where i believe that accountants in which i may be biased, but i believe accountants are some of the best position professionals to make business decisions because they understand the practical side of it, and they understand how it translates to the finances and very few professions or professionals understand both and accountants do. so, i think accountants will move more into what we call advisory roles, where we’re actually on the front end of a decision being made, to where we’re being able to tell people, well, if we do it that way, here’s the potential financial implications of doing that, and then we can actually play that role of helping the decision get made. and then when the decision gets made, we kind of already knew what was going to happen, so the accounting on the back half becomes. a lot easier and a lot more predictable.
liz farr
i like that answer, you know, and i think that that that’s probably where we’re going to be, that it’s going to be a whole lot less about the debits and the credits and more about supporting the clients and helping them to achieve their business and their personal and all their financial goals. i think that you’re right there
terrell turner
now where i do think will be interesting is, as technology does, that one of the things that we’ll have to figure out in the accounting industry is we’re still going to have to teach the newer accountants the fundamentals. although they may not have to do the fundamentals, they do need to understand it, because we’re going to need to be able to understand when is the technology giving us a wrong answer. and i think if we don’t have a solid grounding in the fundamentals, we won’t be able to do that role effectively, so we’re going to have to be creative about although we have the technology to do some of the debits and the credits and but we’re still going to have to understand it and and that’s something like even in our firm that we’ve been working through of just creating training programs around helping people understand some of the fundamentals, like the debits, the credits, like when a problem comes up, can you go back to basic t accounting and map out to figure out where is the problem and how do we need to fix the system? because i think the systems will need to be tweaked. and in order for us to know how to tweak and adjust the systems properly, we still have to have the foundation and fundamentals in a very, very good way.
liz farr
i think you’re absolutely right, and i think that that’s probably the best place to end our conversation for today.