blake oliver: why tax work yearns to be free

disruptors: the business model isn’t broken yet, but the pyramid scheme is crumbling.

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with liz farr for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间

the accounting firm is a pyramid scheme destined for collapse, according to podcaster and enfant terrible blake oliver in this exclusive interview with liz farr for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间.

more disruptors: private equity explodes in u.k. | brannon poe: the status quo must go  |  accounting nerds, unlock your super powers  | private equity vs. the cpa firm partnership the fintech flood: accounting will never be the same  |  think small to think big with matt wilkinson | your sales tax headaches are only just beginning | when financial statements go extinct with corey schmidt  |  can geraldine carter save accountants from themselves? |  re-inventing accounting with tyler anderson |  turning client service into new revenue

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in this exclusive interview with liz farr for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, oliver says the system is simple and simply devious: bring in staff, work them a ton of hours, and the profits flow to the top, blake says.

but today, the model is being challenged by venture capital-backed tech startups delivering automated tax prep and bookkeeping and accounting services, by cpa firms following the lead of eisner amper into non-cpa businesses, and by the booming growth of non-cpa startups like acuity.

more take-aways from blake oliver:

• restrictive work policies are driving the great resignation. accountants want to work the hours that are necessary to get their work done and to do it from anywhere. the firms that are growing are offering flexibility. now that they’ve experienced working at home and flexibility, many people are not going back to a traditional work environment.
• growing by acquisition is the usual way many firms grow, but that can be harder than growing organically via marketing and sales because you have to teach the acquired firm members new processes and technology. however, few firms do any focused marketing. with a dedicated salesperson and online advertising, it’s almost too easy to find new clients.

• financial planning and analysis (fp&a) is the most critical skill set for cas services. combining fp&a with tax planning and succession planning can save clients millions when the deal to sell their firm is structured correctly.

• if firms were a little less greedy and were willing to make less money, they could have a much better work-life balance during busy season. how is it possible that some firms have figured out how to run tax season without mandatory saturdays and for other firms, it’s almost sacrilegious to suggest not coming in on saturdays?
• making it hard to become a cpa to keep the supply of cpas small won’t increase the value of the cpa license. it’s more likely to decrease the value of the cpa when there aren’t enough cpas and people need to go outside of licensed cpas to find the talent they need.
• cas will be a big opportunity for firms that wrap it into all their services for a long time. firms should consider providing bookkeeping and tax returns for free for clients who subscribe to their advisory services which include fp&a and cfo services.

transcript:

liz: all right. well, we’ve got lots to get through. let’s get started. now, accounting talent, as you know and i know, has been scarce for a long time and covid made that worse. now, do you have any ideas on how to make things better, and what have you seen firms do successfully?

blake: there’s a lot of places we could go with that, liz. i think the place to start that is the most relevant given everything that’s been going on recently is work flexibility. allowing staff to choose when they work, where they work, what hours they work, do they work from home? do they work from your office? based on my conversations with accountants and firm owners, that is what is really driving a lot of this great resignation. it’s that you have staff that have gotten a taste of what it’s like to be able to work from home because of the pandemic and they don’t want to go back to the office, and they don’t want to sit in that chair for 12 hours during busy seasons. they want to work the hours that are necessary to get their work done and to do it from anywhere.

i think this has been made it even more poignant by the recent letters that intuit has been sending out to accountants. i don’t know if you’ve seen these, liz, but intuit is hiring for turbotax live, for quickbooks live. they sent letters out to accountants who are working in firms, offering them flexible work arrangements, and didn’t mention the salaries or anything, which are probably not competitive. still, i think they have an advantage in that regard because they’re offering people flexibility and the firms they’re growing, they’re really attracting staff, are offering people flexibility. i think that’s what we have to be looking at as firm owners, as managers.

liz: i agree. i think that flexibility is going to be a big key to the future. i certainly didn’t have much options for that when i was in public accounting and that was part of what chased me away from public accounting was the long hours and no flexibility. i could flex my hours. i would come in at 8:30 instead of 8:00 and that meant that my commute was half an hour instead of 45 minutes. that was about the limit of the flexibility that i had.

blake: for me, it’s hard to imagine ever going back to work in any traditional office job now that i can work from home which i’ve been doing for a few years now. i have the ability to pick up my son from school at 3:00 pm. i clock out at three o’clock and i’ll do a couple of hours of work after he’s asleep at night. most firms wouldn’t be able to handle that. it allows me to be present as a father in a way that my dad, who worked at a corporate job, never was. he was always gone. he’d get home often after we were asleep. it totally changed my relationship with my family and for the better.

i think it’s hard, i think, for folks who haven’t ever had that flexibility and have had those traditional roles in a family to imagine it, to even think that it’s appealing, but it is.

i could never go back. i think there’s a lot of people like me who would never go back to a traditional work schedule.

liz: oh, i totally agree. another change that we’ve been seeing is the business model for accounting firms. until recently, accounting firms really followed the same business model that they had for decades, billing by the hour and this rigid hierarchy. you and i both know firm owners who were doing things quite differently. can you talk a little bit about what you’ve seen firm owners doing?

blake: what is the traditional model? it’s basically a pyramid scheme. it’s bring in staff, work them really, really hard, in public accounting anyway, so that you’re billing out lots of hours, time-based. it’s important to make them sweat. then the profits flow to the top, to the partners, and that has worked for years and years and years. not that long actually, like less than 100 years that’s been in place but it’s been very effective. it’s starting to fail because we don’t have enough talent anymore. we’ve got a talent shortage. this whole pyramid scheme, this triangle-shaped firm, just doesn’t work. especially when you’ve got technology coming in with these startups that are offering accounting and bookkeeping services that are under a corporate model, that’s challenging this traditional partnership model.

i think we’re going to see a lot of accounting firms that are just no longer going to be accounting firms. you’ve got eisneramper deciding not to be an accounting firm anymore. they took on private equity. they split off the audit practice into a separate entity. they’re really focused on growing consulting and tax under the non-accounting firm, the non-cpa firm. you’ve got firms like acuity. they just hit $10 million in revenue over 100 employees and they’re growing really fast in atlanta. they’re not a cpa firm. you’ve got the vc back startups like pilot and bench providing accounting services. you’ve got turbotax live basically turning into a full-service tax firm in many ways.

quickbooks live, intuit, is offering bookkeeping. that’s a threat.

i think that the whole business model has to be looked at again and i think we’ll see a lot of firms switch to probably a corporate structure. to me, that means giving staff ownership so that it’s no longer this two-tier system where you’ve just got partners with equity and you’ve got staff who work. i think we’re going to see more managers and even staff with equity.

liz: i think that that’ll be an interesting trend. i’ve seen a few top 200 firms that are overlaying the ceo, cfo, coo structure on top of partners. i do hear you that people will really want equity if they’re going to be sacrificing that much of their lives. that’s something that we can learn from the startup world is the desire for equity having some skin in the game.

blake: that was basically the choice that i was given when i lived in la, i was a manager at a top 25 firm and i was recruited by a startup in the accounting space.

the startup was offering me stock options and the potential payout could be millions of dollars for a few years of work. the accounting firm offered me a path to a partnership that was incredibly opaque.

i had no idea when it would happen or what the results would be. hold those two things side by side and decide which one is a better bet and for me, it was the stock options. we got to do a better job at making the rewards of becoming partners clearer to people. i know that even when you become a partner, often, you don’t really see the benefit for a long time.

liz: you maybe get a bigger paycheck, but you also tend to work an awful lot of hours.

blake: yes. you can’t cash out your equity easily. no.

liz: no, no. i’ve seen firm owners that were trapped because they really did want to get out but there was nobody who was willing to buy them out. i talked to somebody at digital cpa who told me that he was miserable and wanted to get out but here he had this business that was supporting about 25 people, and he couldn’t just shut the door and walk away. he had to provide for them somehow and he didn’t know how to do that.

blake: that’s where something like, i don’t know how this would actually work in practice, but an employee stock ownership plan could work. get the employees to buy the firm eventually. you really got to start that 10 years ago, not now. that’s the thing.

liz: now, what about growing? how do firms grow? we hear a lot about scaling and growing. are there different strategies for solo firms or multi-partner firms? what do you think?

blake: well, there’s so many ways you could grow. i think it’s funny actually when i talk to firms that are growing. a lot of them have been going down this acquisition path. that’s the traditional way that you grow as a firm is once you reach a certain size, reach a few dozen employees, you say, “okay, i’ll just roll in other firms.” they’re actually finding that it’s harder in some ways to acquire a firm than it is just acquire the business organically.

i think the reason is that most accounting firms don’t do any organic sales and marketing. by that, i mean advertising online, having dedicated salespeople who don’t provide accounting services, that just sell the services you have, like having a real sales department. if you do that, it’s really easy actually to acquire clients from what i’m hearing and in my experience too. i had a professional sales guy in my firm and it was easy pickings. we’d just go find the clients or they’d find us that weren’t happy with their current provider. again, most firms aren’t doing a very good job with retaining clients either, and they’ve got too much work anyway. that’s the thing, it’s almost too easy.

liz: the firms that i was at certainly didn’t have anybody doing sales or really any coherent marketing strategy look at their websites. i was starting out as a writer when i was still in public accounting, so i offered to redo the websites and redo blog posts and send out a newsletter. almost no one took me up on that because i don’t know whether it was lack of imagination or because the person who is already doing the marketing didn’t want to share that with anybody else.

blake: it might just be that most firms aren’t used to seeing results from that effort, and as a marketer, somebody’s gone into marketing, i can tell you, you’ll do a lot of stuff that doesn’t get a result or it’s hard to trace it, and so that’s tough. it’s tough for a partner to say, “i’m going to invest x dollars and then not be able to tie it to a result.” that’s just the way marketing can be. i also know that there’s stats, actually, a stat from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, that i saw recently that said that…

…100% of firms rely on referrals from existing clients to get new ones.

referrals, classic traditional.

only 58% get clients from their website, only 58%. that’s not that much really.

everybody should be getting clients from their website and then only 24% get them from social media and 8% from other internet channels. it’s just not common. cpa firms haven’t been doing that much in terms of marketing, except for the bigger ones. even the bigger ones, it’s more like the marketing is done at the individual partner level, marketing that person, not as much marketing the firm as the solution for your business that can do all this other stuff. then that’s where the startups are doing a really good job. go look at the accounting from startups that have popped up like pilot, see what marketing they’re doing. they know what they’re doing. they have to acquire lots of clients really, really fast in order to meet their goals. it’s worth a look, it can be a really good inspiration.

liz: yes. even though a lot of firms have relied on referrals for decades as reliable source of new business, not all referrals are created equal. i know that i worked with an awful lot of terrible clients who were referred to us by a great client, but we kept them on basically because we didn’t want to annoy our great client, was the one who sent them to us, and so we were stuck with these really awful, crazy people. that wasn’t any fun.

blake: yes. that’s the, we take our cameras, kind of problem as well where most firms don’t really specialize, and so that creates a challenge too. if you specialize then it’s a lot easier to distinguish yourself from the crowd and attract the right clients. that’s what i see other firms doing as well too, is really going in the specialty route.

liz: yes. i talked to a few people at digital cpa who were heavily specialized and there were some very narrow specialties that i hadn’t even really thought of as possible avenues for getting a lot of clients, but they were doing very well with very specialized niches. now, what skills do accountants need to be successful today and in the future? it used to be, you had to be really good with the 10 key and you had to carry the irs code in your head. what do people need today?

blake: well, i think being really good at google helps with anything these days. i joke that most of my success can be attributed to– the small success i’ve had it can be attributed to being able to look things up on the internet. yes, you don’t need to memorize the tax code anymore. you just need to understand it broadly. that’s where the cpa exam has trouble with. right now it’s– a lot of it was memorization of rules and regulations, but we all have all this at the tip of our fingers now. do we really need to do that anymore? it’s more about critical thinking, it’s more about problem-solving, and accounting programs just have a tough time teaching that. i’m glad that i was a liberal arts major because i studied music, i studied literature, i studied history.

that for me was how i got to be a broad-minded individual, and that has helped me a lot in my career. i think a lot of the– well, if we’re going to talk about specific stuff in accounting, technical stuff, i think finance, fp&a is where the action’s at. the way this ties into accounting is imagine if instead of just presenting clients with a 12 months of actuals financial report, if you could present to them six months of what happened, and then six months of what’s going to happen, and be able to forecast for them reliably in a systematic way. i think that is where the value is at when it comes to a lot of the basic accounting services that we’re providing now to clients. specifically when it comes to client accounting services which is where i come from.

when i’m talking to people who are doing bookkeeping, outsourced accounting, that’s what i say, i say…

“learn how to do fp&a, learn how to do financial planning and analysis, and be able to forecast and budget for your clients in a systematic way.”

there is a method and it’s not just guesswork. i suppose maybe you could say the same thing for tax. the best people in tax have always been doing planning, which is all about forecasting, what’s going to happen. if you don’t have a reliable forecast, how can you plan? that all ties together.

liz: right. now, and unfortunately, most people equate tax planning with just the cashflow planning to make your tax payments.

blake: yes. that’s like the basic level, right?

liz: yes. just telling you, “well, in april you’re going to have to write a check for this much, do you have the cashflow to do that?” just giving you heads up that you’re going to have to do that, but that’s not really much help. that’s not really helping them to see what they can do in their business that will move the levers one way or another.

blake: yes. that’s where combining forecasting with the tax planning can be helpful because you need to understand the business owner’s goals. if their goal is to sell their business in 5 or 10 years, and you build that into your forecast and you are planning for that, you can probably structure the deal that they do end up doing in a way that saves them a lot of money. that’s where you can create a tremendous amount of value. you could save somebody millions of dollars potentially. you do that one time and then you can go tell people that you did this and do that for others. the value of that, it’s hard to calculate.

liz: giving me some ideas of a sideline i could do, blake, because in a past life i even had a cva for a while, so i did do some business valuations, so we did do that.

blake: what i like about this, we’re just thinking about this off the top of our heads. what i like about this idea is that it brings together groups that may not talk to each other much in a firm. that’s another problem, which is that you have these siloed groups providing services under in a firm, and that’s, it needs to be more cohesive so that everybody’s on the same page and it’s not just, “oh, this group here provides historical bookkeeping, this group here provides tax. they don’t talk really.”

liz: yes. i was in two firms that had opposite philosophies. there was one firm where i did interact an awful lot with the a&a team, partly because they pulled me into audits all the time. also because they really relied on the tax people for their tax provisions. they ran that bias and we shared a lot of the same work papers, we shared clients, we really worked together. the same thing with our client accounting services people, they would really help us to get the adjustments into our client’s books and to help me get information out of the books, they were really very valuable in that way.

then at another firm, all these areas were just isolated from each other. they didn’t talk to each other. they didn’t even know each other really. one firm, i was there for about four months and i really didn’t even meet all the people in the a&a department.

blake: it’s interesting, the culture can be very different from one firm to another.

liz: very, very different. the a&a side had really good retention of team members, but over in tax, it was about 100% turnover about every 18 months.

blake: that’s tough.

liz: yes. that was pretty harsh. we’ve been talking about what accountants should start doing, but what should accountants stop doing immediately?

blake: [laughs] that’s a good question. well, i think, i don’t know, we’re coming up on busy season. it’s december as we record this, january, february, march are coming and i don’t really understand the whole feast and famine culture of most firms where you just wreck yourself during busy season. i almost feel like, maybe this is crazy to say, but if we were just less greedy, then we wouldn’t have to work so hard in tax season.

if we just accepted we’re going to make a little less money as a firm, but we’re not going to kill ourselves, we’ll just take on fewer clients during busy season, we could have a nice lifestyle.

maybe that’s not every firm, but i know there’s plenty of firms where the partners are making half a million dollars or more. how much money do you need? will it ever make you happy?

i almost take a step back and say like, “what does this money mean to me if i’m losing my life for it?” i definitely feel that way. i moved from los angeles to the phoenix area, so i don’t have to work so hard anymore to make a good quality of life. i would always look at every job i take now from that perspective. how much of my life is this going to cost me?

liz: that’s a really good perspective because so often, as accountants, we’re just trained to accept this status quo of this is how it is. i’ve heard that same sentiment from other people i’ve talked to in the series that accountants are just so used to the way it has been that making any change is really difficult because they don’t have the imagination to see what else could be there.

blake: yes. i see debates on twitter sometimes about mandatory saturdays during tax season and there’s firms that have dropped them completely, there’s firm that it’s almost sacrilegious to suggest that you wouldn’t come into the office on a saturday. i think to myself, “how is this possible? how can you have some firms that have figured out how to do it without the saturdays and you have all these firms that can’t figure out how to do it without the saturdays.”

to me, it means it’s not necessary. there’s ways to get around it. like you said, there’s a lot of assumptions that we have in this profession that are being challenged and it all comes back to this great resignation thing which is the pandemic has disrupted a lot of things and it has disrupted how we think about work and how we think out our careers.

i don’t have any desire to follow a traditional career path at this point in my life.

i’m 38, no way. i would never go back. a lot of people i think go that way too. if you really want to see the youth of accounting in their thoughts, go to reddit. check out the reddit threads on accounting and you’ll see people are actually calculating it. they’ll say, “this is accounting. i love this.”

you have accountants actually calculating what it would cost if they had to go back to the office and they couldn’t work remote given the amount of time they spent commuting and all this stuff. a lot of them are saying like, “it’s at least 10,000, $20,000 of my life right there.” they’re not even calculating all these other benefits into that. they’re not going to go. they’ll take a lower pay cut.

i saw a survey that somebody did on reddit asking how much of a salary cut would you be willing to take to reduce your hours proportionately and a bunch of people said, “i would take 30% less pay for 30% fewer hours.” if you’re a firm, you could potentially take advantage of that by offering below-market salaries, but offer people 70% of the work, let them have their work-life balance. if they can go move somewhere more affordable and enjoy life, i think there’s plenty people who might take you up on that.

liz: yes. i talked to a couple of people at digital cpa who said the same thing that if you offer flexibility, then maybe you don’t have to offer the highest pay.

blake: yes. you don’t get into this bidding more than we’re having right now, offer talent.

liz: there are so many other intangibles. we keep coming back to the status quo and how accountants really need to change this, but what is it that keeps accountants from changing? what are the blocks that keep accounting firms from changing?

blake: i think it’s partner model doesn’t like change, it’s resistant to change. there’s this attitude that i suffered so you have to suffer too. you see that. people will straight up say it. there are cpas who think that keeping it difficult to get the cpa from a red-tape standpoint, like 150-hour requirement standpoint, is good because it limits the supply of cpas and so it increases their value. that’s false.

it actually is going to decrease our value because…

…if there aren’t enough cpas, people will go outside our license to find the talent they need.

it’s a lot of just– changes come really quickly and when change comes quickly to a profession and disrupts it, it’s sometimes very difficult, i think, to convince people to change especially when it’s working, like it’s not working particularly well.

it works. firms grow, traditional firms grow. they don’t grow very fast, but they can grow. they struggle. they make do, it’s not fun, but they get by. the problem is that the model isn’t actually broken, but you have this new model that’s popped up that is on the verge of disrupting it to the point where the old model does break.

it’s just going to get worse and worse and worse until you have a traditional firmware. i was on a webinar and somebody chatted in saying that he’s a manager and that this year in the last month, every single one of their staff and seniors has quit.

liz: wow.

blake: there’s nobody but managers, directors, partners left. think about that going into busy season. that’s a firm where it’s breaking

liz: that’s not breaking, that’s broken.

blake: it’s broken. we’ll see if that firm is around. that’s why it’s so easy now as a startup offering flexible work arrangements to these staff, you get them on your team and then you go out and you pick off the clients from that firm that can’t service them properly anymore. that’s probably what’s going to happen, those staff are going to find jobs somewhere. they’ll find them at firms offering flexibility.

liz: the ones that i really feel sorry for are the partners who are close to retirement who have made it this far with this model and now just need to get out, but now they’re left holding something that isn’t very valuable anymore. what are they going to do?

blake: yes. i feel strongly for them too, that sucks. it’s like you played the game by the rules and now the rules have changed and it’s not going to deliver you the payout that you were promised. i don’t know, is there a solution? if you don’t change something, then you’re going to end up selling your firm for a fraction of what it should be worth, but traditional firm valuations are dropping.

well, the valuations for modern firms are increasing so i don’t see that changing. i don’t know, maybe the best thing to do would be convince one of these staff who are going to leave to stay and fix the firm and you’re going to have to bite the bullet and just give them a piece of it. giving up a piece of it to your current employees, letting them buy into the firm so that you can fix it is probably going to be a better bet than just letting it fade away.

that’s my feeling, but i guess it’ll depend on a case-by-case basis what’s possible. i guess this is why a lot of folks close to retirement are merging in to larger firms. there’s this race where the small under 10 person firms are just looking for all the opportunity they can to merge in to a bigger firm. that’s the other option.

liz: yes. i’ve seen a lot of that in new mexico with single partner firms merging into bigger firms. i suppose that’s a way to manage for a while, but i’m not sure that that will completely solve all the problems.

blake: yes. those firms may eventually get full, not be able to take on any more small firms for a while. it’s a race to see who can do that first. some of those owners have expressed to me, in some ways it’s easier for them just to go out and get the clients organically rather than to bring your staff in and have to train people who don’t know any of these processes. think about it this way.

i can take my pick of your staff who are willing to learn and just take those people who come to me. i can recruit them rather than taking on all of your staff who some of those people might be resistant to change. you got to move now. the longer you wait, the worse it’s going to get.

although, maybe we could get some of this vc money. people have talked about this, get a bunch of this venture capital money and go get a bag of money and just go and start buying up small firms at a discount, but then everyone talks about that, but the actual work to create the bigger firm is enormous and make it all work together is…

liz: one of the firms that i was at for about a year and a half was a single-owner firm, and that guy did everything on paper. this was just 2015, this was 2016 when i started there, so he was still doing everything with paper in 2015.

blake: that is amazing. that is hard to believe, but i believe it.

liz: i came in and developed the paperless workflow that they used for a while and then i left and i don’t know what they did.

blake: see, what they should have done is incentivize you to stay. they should have said, “this is brilliant. liz, will you stay and we will give you ownership and fix the rest of it.” they obviously didn’t have that vison.

liz: no, they didn’t have that vision and at the time i was on my way out of public accounting anyway, so it wouldn’t have mattered that much. well, cas has been big for a while. what do you think is the next big thing?

blake: the metaverse.

liz: possibly.

blake: no, i think that’s a long way off. i just think it’s so funny that everybody’s up in this metaverse idea when–

[laughter].

blake: anyway, what is the next big thing? honestly, the profession moves so glacially that i think cas is going to be a big opportunity for a long time. what it is, is the big frontier is not seeing cas as its own thing, it’s seeing cas as integrated into everything else the firm does. the firms that are doing the best are the ones where they offer tax and advisory work as the main drivers of value in the firm. i guess what i’m saying is advisory is the future, but not advisory as you’ve been sold it. it’s advisory as, “we’ll do your bookkeeping for free.

we want to charge you for bookkeeping. oh, by the way, i’ll also do your tax returns for free only though if you subscribe to our advisory services.” that’s the future i think because there’s very little in bookkeeping and tax, so why not give it away as a part of your advisory offering? that’s why i’m telling bookkeeping shops cas practices, you need to do forecasting because then you can do advisory around cfo type forecasting and budgeting, and you can give away the bookkeeping because that’s just a component of it.

that just is what helps you get to the forecast in the budget, it’s the same thing with tax.

offer tax planning, do the tax return for free.

now you can still offer the tax prep as a lower-tier option where people just pay for the tax return, but it’s very compelling if you offer people two choices, you say, “look, i’ll just prepare your taxes for x dollars or i’ll prepare your taxes for free and you subscribe to my tax planning advisory service that maybe it includes retirement planning and investment advice and all that stuff.” you can do that, there’s ways to do that through the right entities. offer that to people, they’ll sign up. i think that’s the future. it’s not actually creating anything new in terms of service, it’s just selling them differently, bundling them differently.

liz: i think you’re onto something there because for a long time we’ve been trained as cpas that what we sell is our time, and our time is used to prepare this meaningless piece of paper that has numbers and boxes. whether it be a tax return or financials, what clients really want to need, even if they don’t really know that they want to need that is what can i do to make my business better? we’ve been–

blake: help getting to their goals.

liz: how many firms do you know of who actually take the time to ask their new clients, what are your goals? what’s your five-year plan? what’s your 10-year plan?

blake: they don’t, and it’s a catch 22 because they have too many clients right now to spend any time with their clients, so it’s really hard to start that kind of practice when you’ve got, i don’t know, 1,200 tax returns that you do personally, which is a lot, and so you’ve got to cut down on the clients if you want to offer that kind of service, but that’s great because then you’ll have more time for fewer clients. it’s tough to do because you have to basically give up revenue while you do that.

you’re building up a new practice while you’re shedding the old one, and it’s hard to do that without a drop, so most people just aren’t willing to do it. they’re stuck on the treadmill, i think that’s the dream. well, here’s an example of that’s just going to make it real for people in terms of value. i hired an attorney to help me with my trademark application for my new business, earmark cpe, which you mentioned. she offered me a fixed fee to do this rather than an hourly rate, which i jumped at.

i love fixed fees and the fixed fee included preparing the application, submitting the application, and then any correspondence with the trademark office necessary to get it done. i’m not going to guarantee that i’m going to get the trademark, but it includes everything from start to end. there’s some out-of-scope stuff too, but generally. that was great because i bet she spent maybe a few hours on this thing and her hourly rate was probably way higher than if she just charged me as an hourly attorney.

to me, i still got the value because we probably had like a 15-minute conversation at one point during this process where her expertise, because she specialized in trademark applications, made me avoid a huge mistake that would’ve cost me a area of the trademark that i really needed.

what she was selling me was her expertise. i’ve done hundreds of trademark applications, so it doesn’t matter how much time she spent. that’s how we should be thinking as accountants.

it’s our knowledge that matters, our years of expertise that matters, not how many hours we spend on something.

posted on april 19, 2022