prove the naysayers wrong.
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the disruptors
with liz farr
in 2013, jody grunden’s firm, summit virtual cfo, became one of the first financial firms in the world to go fully remote. at the same time, they narrowed their focus to creative agencies. those two changes, combined with a weekly subscription pricing model they’ve been using since 2007, resulted in a “hockey slope type ramp up.”
jody grunden, part 2 of 2: see part 1, june 20 – jody grunden: subscription pricing is a game changer
more podcasts and videos: dawn brolin says grow your firm by shrinking it | jason blumer & julie shipp: move leaders out of client service | james graham: drop the billable hour and you’ll bill more | karen reyburn: fix your marketing and fix your business | giles pearson: fix the staffing crisis by swapping experience for education | jina etienne: practice fearless inclusion | bill penczak: stop forcing smart people to do stupid work | sandra wiley: staffing problem? check your culture | scott scarano: first, grow people. then firm growth can follow |
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since then, they’ve been doubling in size every three years, reaching $10 million in revenue by 2022 while maintaining a profit margin of 10-25%. they also ditched the suits and ties back in 2004 and “decided to go against the norm…it really changed the way that people thought about accounting,” grunden says. he is the author of the best-selling building the virtual cfo firm in the cloud.
weekly ach drafts from client bank accounts are administratively efficient as well. by eliminating invoicing, summit’s administrator can handle a $10 million firm on her own.
in 2022, summit merged with a brick-and-mortar firm out of st. louis, anders cpa, with the goal of hitting $50 million in revenue over five years. leadership at anders recognized that what summit was doing with remote work and virtual cfo services would be the future of accounting, and they wanted to join with a firm that could lead in those areas. leadership at summit recognized that anders could provide services that they were currently outsourcing. jody sees this merger as a way to “make everything better for everyone,” so that their clients “benefit significantly from this and our employees benefit equally as well.”
since 2005, they have also taken a slightly different approach to marketing. instead of pushing information out to prospects via email and ads, they use content marketing and thought leadership to pull prospects to them.
the goal is not to sell cfo services with any particular content but to educate business leaders. that generosity pays off later when one of those businesses loses its cfo, and summit is the first call they make. because they’ve been doing content marketing for so long, “it’s like a flywheel, it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the more content you have out there, the more people will see it, the more opportunities that you’re going to get the close,” grunden says.
a portion of their thought leadership content has been aimed at other accountants, including a book grunden wrote for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, to demonstrate that their approach actually works.
while summit’s services are not cheap – their average fee is around $85,000 per year – they are selective in the clients they take on, closing only about 40% of their prospects. clients are not bound by contracts – it’s strictly a week-to-week agreement. but clients see the value: summit’s relationship with clients is more like a member of the leadership team, not a vendor constantly trying to sell something else. the value for summit clients isn’t what they save on a tax return or the profit their business makes but is comparable to hiring an internal cfo at a much lower cost.
11 more takeaways
- expect to spend 7-10% of your annual revenue on marketing to be an effective thought leader. this includes hiring contractors to do the writing and the costs to prepare materials for speaking engagements and putting on seminars.
- if you believe that you can’t make summit’s approach of summit work, you can’t.
- growing your bottom line makes your firm more valuable when you’re ready to sell. selling for a multiple of revenue only works if your net profit is 25-30%, but won’t if your bottom line is less.
- moving to a weekly subscription base eliminates wip and a/r. your firm is no longer the bank.
- getting subscription pricing right is a trial and error process. the price needs to be sufficient to cover the firm’s costs while also enabling the firm to provide clients value for what they are paying.
- develop tiers of services, with a top tier that’s an all-encompassing, netflix-type arrangement where clients can get everything your firm offers. lower tiers have scope limitations, but also offer additional services on an a la carte basis.
- aim for an average 75% contribution margin on all clients. some will be 50%, some will be 90%. bring up the lower margin clients through efficiencies or reevaluate pricing.
- give your people the option of staying where they are instead of promoting them beyond where they do best. you need people who are eager to move up as well as people content to stay where they are.
- consider paying your people based on performance. summit pays team members base pay based on the national average plus variable compensation based on the book of business they manage. this also gives team members autonomy and control over their earnings and workload.
- people in remote firms need regular in-person retreats to strengthen connections. two retreats every year help to keep summit’s churn rate close to 10-12%. this can cost $3000-$4000 per person, but without facility costs, this is affordable.
- be willing to take risks and be willing to fail sometimes. you’ll learn from every failure. look for ways to be creative and to change things for the better. success comes from perseverance.
more about jody grunden
jody grunden, cpa, is an accounting visionary with over 20 years of experience. he has helped pioneer innovative changes within the industry, including introducing the first subscription-based billing method employed by an accounting firm. he is the author of two books, digital dollars and cents and building the virtual cfo firm in the cloud. jody and his partner adam hale co-founded summit cpa group (summit) in 2002, which merged with anders cpas + advisors (anders) in 2022. summit, now summit virtual cfo by anders, was the first fully distributed firm and the leading provider of virtual cfo services in north america. with this merger, summit brings to anders many benefits that will help continue his vision of changing the way people think about accounting, including strengthening the now “hybrid” work environment, building out the advisory side of anders with a virtual cfo service model, and implementing weekly subscription billing rather than hourly billing. his specialties include virtual cfo services, creative agencies, and remote team management.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr 00:03
welcome to accounting disruptor conversations. i’m your host, liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. and here we’re talking to owners of firms who are doing things a little bit differently from our fathers or grandfathers firms. and with me today we’ve got a returning guest. this is really going to be part two of a two part podcast, because he has so much to share. my guest today is jody grunden. cip, co founder and ceo of summit virtual by anders, how are you today, jody?
jody grunden 00:44
oh, doing well. thanks for having me on again.
liz farr 00:47
oh, great. well, in case people didn’t hear the first part of this podcast series, could you do just you know, a short version about your firm what services you offer? and where you’re located that kind of stuff?
jody grunden 01:05
yeah, for sure. so first started back in 2002. traditional brick and mortar bootstrapped completely. and then within two years, we changed the focus from traditional accounting write up and tax and audit type stuff to what we call at that point, virtual cfo services. and so it was one of those things we wanted to do a little bit more for clients and just simply provide them historical outlooks, we want to look forward. and what we what we mean by virtual cfo is really kind of being, say, alongside the owner, helping them forecast helping them make decisions, helping them model different scenarios, losing a big client and all that kind of stuff. so it really kind of see where they how that impacts cash going forward. and so it’s a very strategic position that we just fell in love with and love the idea and love the concept. as we grew, we later added on what they call cas 1.0 stuff, which would be the accounting the, you know, the paying bills, invoicing, payable. so about a third of our clients, we offer that service to 90% of our clients that come to us, they’re coming to us for that, that virtual cfo side primarily, it wasn’t until probably 2000, i’d say 10 years ago, 2013 ish, somewhere in that ballpark, we decided to do a couple things, we went and narrowed our our fixed and just picking up any client or marketing any client, really focusing on the creative agency niche, and really marketing towards creative agencies, attending conferences, doing speaking engagements, writing articles, books, etc, to really become that thought leader in the creative agency space. and from there, we definitely saw a huge hockey slope type ramp up and our new clients coming on for that, that level service because we had the knowledge of that industry. same time, we decided to go fully remote, one of the first if not the first financial firm in the world to go fully remote. and so at that time, we had 18 folks on the team. and because of that, we just allowed us to grow exponentially. and from probably 2010 to 2022. somewhere in that ballpark, we doubled our size every three years. and so is it a continuous growth, doubling your size, but the same point, we maintain a profit margin of about 10 to 25%, you know, from year over year, which was, which is what we really want to focus on a lot of firms out there are growing heavily, but the profit margins are super low. and we want to do both grow with a high margins that was a big focus throughout, it propelled us to about $10 million in revenue in 2022. and at that time, i know we’re going to talk about this in more detail. but a firm out of st. louis anders cpa advisors approached us to potentially merge with them. and we did so six months after that. and so we’re within about a year and a half of our of the merger right now, with the with the goal of going from $10 million in revenue and to generating going to the $50 million in revenue mark over a five year period. and so that’s what our new goal is or new exciting, you know, goal or rock or whatever you call it to achieve and so we’re we’re on that path and so so now now that now the firm is you know, really we’re the marketing arm are actually the v cfo arm of anders providing services, you know, to all the basically the virtual cfo clients. and with that we’re, you know, it just basically allows us to really take that next step on on growth level. and so that’s kind of where we’re at today. so i was kind of the short and skinny of everything, i probably left a ton of things out. one thing i forgot to mention is we’ve been 100% subscription based billing since 2007. so we don’t invoice clients at all we to zap their account, not once a month, but every week, which is kind of nice. and so we’ve been doing that for a long time. and so we sold well the nice things about it, we had no way are actually negative ar cuz we build on the monday before we actually do the work for that week. and so pretty exciting, a lot of different changes a lot of different things we do differently. we don’t bill by the hour, we track hours for, for costing and that sort of thing. but we don’t bill by the hour. and so again, we dress to the client, for the most part, we don’t, we have more suits and ties since we started back in 2004, which was a completely a bad thing to do at that time, you know, everybody wore suits and ties and suspenders and all that kind of stuff. and we decided to go against the norm and, you know, wore jeans and, you know, and other stuff. and really, it really kind of just changed the way that people thought about accounting in general.
liz farr 05:43
well, i, i gotta admire the way that you have operated your firm and the leadership you have, it’s very, it’s a very different flavor of accounting. and i mean, it’s the kind of firm that i kind of wish i would have found way back when i was in public accounting, so oh, well. now, now, in your last segment, you mentioned that you have a unique approach to marketing. and could you explain what that is?
jody grunden 06:19
i sure can. so we we tried every type of marketing you can think of from day one, we were not afraid to do it. we did. we had cold callers, we had people setting appointments for us, we had all these, you know, tons of mailers, and you name it, we sent postcards, we tried everything. and we found that it worked a little bit, but didn’t work a lot wasn’t something that we could really scale. and so we had to figure out a way that we can work it to actually attract folks to come to us. and so that’s where we really call it, it’s basically a pull marketing approach. so we’re pulling people to us, versus pushing information out to them and blasting tons of emails and that sort of thing. and with that, the biggest thing was is content marketing. and so we’ve been content marketing, since probably 2005, or six, something like that, where we’ve sent something out every single day, five days a week, to, to the internet, you know, get to talking a little bit about us as thought leaders. and you know, with that, it’s really great gained a lot of attraction intention so that if you were to actually google, virtual cfo services anywhere in the united states, we’re going to pop up on that first page, because we’ve got so much articles out there, so much content out there, that google looks at us as being that thought leadership and keeps us way up in that, that area. and so, we’ve been doing this for a very long time, to the point where writing books, you know, thought leadership is the really the key there just becoming that thought leader. and when i say thought leader, what i mean by that is when we go to conferences and speak, we don’t go there to sell cfo services, although that’s kind of the end goal, right. but our goal is to educate the person that we’re speaking with. so what if that’s in the industry, it’s we’re teaching them how to be profitable the kpis, they need to look at, you know, what’s going on in the industry itself, to bring that knowledge to them, so they can make informed decisions. and, and guess what, you know, you know, when they lose their cfo, three or four years down the road, where the first thing they think of when they do it, if they need that personnel were the first person they think of there. so the that thought leadership is an evergreen type of a solution that we’ve been doing for a long time. and, and as we open up different verticals, now that we’re, you know, we’re approaching some different verticals, whether it’s cannabis and trucking, and legal, you know, we want to do the same things, we have thought leaders that are doing the exact same thing, trying to replicate it by writing books by you know, reaching out to the community, finding out where the different areas are, and really kind of focusing on different ways to get their name out there, where so they can be the first thing that’s thought about when you think of virtual cfo services, or when you think of finance, where you think of the number one firm in that area. and so thought leadership has been a big thing for us from really the very beginning. and because of that, you know, it’s allowed us to really pick up and be very selective on who we bring on as clients, you know, we close about 40% of the clients that reach out to us and so you got to keep in mind thinking about that. so 100% of clients know about us, our website actually has our pricing on it has everything about us, you can actually find all that information out there. so they’ve got it, they’re kind of qualifying themselves that thought leadership and with that, when they call us it’s just a matter of can you afford us are we at the right fit? and so you know, you know, with that, you know, we won’t pick up clients that are under a million dollars in revenue, you know, we used to a long time ago, but we’ve narrowed that down because we just had too many opportunities that hey, here’s what we’re going to pick up it’s got to be a million dollars. it’s got to be a high growth company $5 million, or average client, you know, 100 million dollars is gonna probably not fit our mold. you know, we’ll look at you but you know, more than likely not a good fit, you know, 50 million not a good fit probably my it’d be who knows, but you know, all those different layers, we have a general idea of what’s going to qualify us for a client, you know, service based technology, first companies, all that. and so with that in mind, because about 40% of our clients, and because of that, because of the thought leadership, they’ll pay more for the thought leadership. and that’s why our average, our average, basically fee for services is around 85 $85,000 a year, paid out again, on a weekly basis, don’t forget. so that’s kind of the kind of the nice thing about that to the point that the thought leadership approach is, you know, hey, if we don’t do what we say, we’re going to do, you’re not bound by a contract, or it’s just simply a week to week agreement. and what that means is we fixed the fee for the year, and anytime during that year, if they decide they want to quit, or whatever, that’s fine, we’ll just transition to somebody else. again, that’s the thought leadership. so that’s the, that’s the power of actually having the ability to let the client know that, you know, hey, you’re important, you know, here’s why we we can help you out. if we can’t help you out, like we tell you, then no harm no foul, just look for somebody different.
liz farr 11:04
that’s it’s so refreshing to hear that because so many accountants are just afraid of marketing. and it was probably just two weeks ago that i was talking to somebody on a linkedin live about content marketing. and you just validated everything i said that this can portray you, as the expert that people want to work with, you know, the purpose of content marketing is really just to get people comfortable enough to do business with you. so you just validated exactly what i’ve been trying to tell accountants to do for years.
jody grunden 11:45
yeah, it’s not cheap to… i mean, you’re gonna spend seven to 10% of your annual is revenue in that marketing engine with the marketing personnel, you’re going to bring the contractors to help you do the writing, everything that’s involved in that, that the seminars, the everything, it costs a lot of money. so there’s a lot, there’s a lot of expenses there. but the nice thing about that it’s like a flywheel, it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the more content you have out there, the more people will see it, the more opportunities that you’re going to get the close and just continues to ramp up, the more content, you can get out to the to the folks out there that have eager eyes to look at it.
liz farr 12:20
that’s exactly right. and, and that’s something that a lot of accountants are kind of afraid to do, because of the time commitment. but really invest a little bit of time and doing that, and some resources in doing that. and the payoff can be potentially huge.
jody grunden 12:43
100% agree. yeah, i wouldn’t do it any other way. i mean, yeah, there’s two ways the market for an accounting firm, you can be the accounting firm that’s partner driven, where the partners are out there at country clubs, trying to mix and mingle with people and bring in clients that way, and usually that partners client, or you can do it the way we’ve done it and, and market the company itself and pull people to the company to where when they come to us, they don’t anticipate me doing their stuff, or my business partner doing their stuff, or anybody else outside of a cfo within that organization. so it’s against a different strategy completely. again, there’s a cost to it. but you know, with that, i think the reward is tenfold what you’d have in a traditional accounting firm approach.
liz farr 13:23
absolutely. now, we you mentioned in your intro, that back in 2021, or so you started the process of merging with a brick and mortar st. louis based and or cpa. and that was kind of an unlikely union. you know, it looked like it can yeah.
jody grunden 13:49
yeah, it’s kind of funny, because i really thought anything at that point was unlikely union, you know, as we are entrepreneurs are really unemployable. and, and with that, i’m probably, i’m equal to that. and so i never really had the idea that i was gonna ever gonna merge with somebody, or i never had the idea that i was going to sell and stay on, you know, i always had the long term idea that eventually it’s gonna be bigger than that. and i’m just either going to be on the board of directors of this great giant firm that i created, and, you know, receive a stipend for that, or i was going to completely sell it, and then just move on to the next thing. and, you know, and at the same time, i’m 54 years old. so it was one of those things, at some point, i’m going to retire and it’s probably over the next 10 years, you know, what do i what do i do and how do i do it? and so when, you know, just speaking at different engagements, and actually had written some articles for you all that it you know, our name got out there, like, you know, just like i said, as a thought leader in the industry, because we not only did it not only did the focus in the creative agency industry, but we also did it in the accounting industry, which i thought was more important because it really kind of gave direction to all those folks out there that are running firms and trying to figure out how to do this, and then do it well, because think back, you know, 10 years ago, when we started doing this, everybody thought we were kinda like just an anomaly, you know, an accounting firm that doesn’t have an office that won’t survive, or an accounting firm that their partner doesn’t bill a lot of hours. but what is that all about? how is that possible or accounting firm that you know, isn’t billing by the hour period, you know, clients are never going to go for that, you know, all these different kinds of comments, negative comments came out, and it’s like, well, you know, everyone here, we actually did it. and here’s how we, here’s how we do it. and i completely remember going to different cpe events and the accounting in the future, and we hop in it and think, yeah, eventually people are going to do this this lesson. it’s like, oh, shoot, we’re already doing all that. and so i thought, well, why don’t we tell everybody how we’re doing it, so becomes more common, you know, so that people don’t go through the same issues that we had, because you made tons of mistakes along the way, tons. and with that, learn from every one of them, and i would never do it over again, you know, obviously, love, they got through a lot quicker than than what we did in order to, you know, hit the end goal there. but, you know, that was part of that part of the journey there. and so we thought, you know, hey, how can we do this. and so we started speaking at different events. and with with those events, you know, we got more people listening, and i was like, it was great, because we would go to these events. and, man, we’d have 50 6070 people at our booth, room for 225 people in the room, there crowded standing outside listening to what we’re doing. and it was great, we thought, well, a lot of attention, people are really going to start making changes. and then afterwards, one by one, they come out and talk to us and say you’re doing a great job, i love it. but we could never do that it would never work for our industry had never worked for in new york city or never worked in san francisco, or it never worked because we’re this or that. and it was like, like, they gave me all these reasons why it wouldn’t work. they love what we’re doing. but you could never do that. and i was like, wow, that’s kind of different. and and they’re right, you know, if you believe you can’t do it, you can’t do it. i mean, there’s no, no doubt about that. and so, you know, with that, it was just one of those things, we continued to really develop that thought leadership in the accounting industry to kind of pave the way and show people, hey, here’s how you do it. here’s how you do it, here’s how you do it successfully, here’s how you do it. and here’s how to be profitable doing it. you know, because again, a lot of firms have that issue where their their profit margins aren’t where they needed to be. and, and we needed to get that up, because it’s not sustainable. if you’re not, you know, before people used to buy by firms based on multiple revenue, and now they’re getting smarter, these firms are getting smarter, because you could do the multiple revenue if you had a 25 to 30%. bottom line. but you know, what these, a lot of these firms are coming through with high revenue, high growth, but low bottom line, and then it’s like, well, those firms aren’t going for the multiples or revenue that they were in. so we had to kind of educate people, you know, hey, you know, do it this way, you know, generate them both at the same time, because you’re gonna get the best bang for your buck, if in doing it that way. and, you know, just continued out there for the last, i guess, five to 10 years, just promoting and trying to teach people how to do it, and in providing all kinds of webinars, and i wrote a book on how to do it, and you guys had published and it was like, all these different things that we we think that you know, it’s just the obvious stuff, too. it’s not like it’s rocket science stuff. it’s just real. have you read it? it’s like, oh, yeah, i guess like, that makes sense. you know, that makes sense. and it because it’s all common sense stuff. and, you know, with the idea that, you know, hey, as a, as a, as an organization, we wouldn’t need to have all these cpa firms, you know, build their value to a point where they do get a big return on when they decide to exit, which kind of fast forward to your question about the unlikely review. unlike union there, because i didn’t think there was any firm out there that was willing to take that next step, i really didn’t, you know, a lot of firms approached us, we got offers and opportunities from, from number five in the us to probably all the way to the top, you know, top 500, i would say at least, you know, a dozen different opportunities that we were looked at, and they wanted to swallow us up and be that same model, you know, hey, you can become a partner. and with that, we’ll pay you out at the end or, you know, hey, we’re going to, we’re going to give you this, but then we’re going to dissemble your team, and we’re going to merge you into it. and, and with that we just weren’t interested. and we were more interestingly, maybe a pe firm that was willing to do something than an accounting firm. and then it wasn’t it was one of the talks at the aicpa that we were engaged that we actually were speaking at, we speak at a lot of the engaged stuff, and we were there speaking and a firm out of st. louis, that i’d never heard of before be honest with you going into it, because i didn’t pay attention to any of the top 100 accounting firms it why would we, we live in a different bubble all by ourselves. and, and they approached us and they’re, you know, they’re like, they had a lot of interest to it. and of course, we listened to everybody you know, and not a big deal. we can listen, because who knows that one opportunity might come about oral just prep us for when we do decide to sell when we hit that $20 million. mark is what work what our focus was, and we were right at 10. and, you know, we hit it off right off the bat, you know, it’s like, well, the personalities are really great. you know, it’s like well this is this is not the traditional firm that i’m used to. they didn’t come in suits and ties, you know, like a lot of the other ones did. they, they basically had the progressive attitude, you know, hey, we’re a progressive firm, that’s why we’re looking at somebody like yourself, you know, we know that the remote thing is going to be the thing of the future, you know, our team is, is kind of moving to that, or, you know, kind of a hybrid type of environment. and we want to learn from you on that. and, you know, they talked about the cfo side, how we know that that’s going to be the way the future completely versus the tax and audit and we want some, somebody that’s actually doing it, doing it well, and doing it profitably to, to lead that and the all the different things that they said, were, you know, like, wow, this sounds like this could be a good a good marriage, you know, for us, and, and, but i was always looking for the no, i was like, that’s how i was, anytime in sales, you always look to get to know, as quick as quick as possible. that way, you’re not not married to something that you’re not really interested in. so, you know, i threw out some points and said, you know, what, you know, hey, our team gets compensated differently, are you okay with that, and, and, you know, that would have to continue on with the new thing. you know, we we market nationally, we don’t market st. louis, or we don’t market to missouri, we don’t market to indiana. and that’s where we’re founded we market nationally. as a matter of fact, we only have a handful clients in indiana. that’s where we actually started something. so the national thing was there, we needed a seat at the table, meaning that we needed to be a partner in the firm, we didn’t want to get into get involved into the firm, and then, you know, two years down the road, because we’re managers, whatever that, you know, we’re no longer in that at that seat at the table making the decision. so that was a real important thing. and then we had to have an incentive plan there that was greater than if we would have stuck it out for the next three years and doubled it and sold it, you know, in three years, because that’s the trajectory we’re going. and but at the same point, it had to be an incentive plan enough that it was a two way incentive plan, it couldn’t just be lopsided to us. it had to be laps, it had to be so that the firm really benefits if we hit our numbers as well. and so, you know, so we worked on that. and then i basically gave director team, you know, which consists of five or seven individuals at the time, veto power, you know, hey, i introduced it to him three months into the recording arrangement. so, you know, hey, here, we’re thinking about this, you have veto power, you know, let let us know, it’s got to be, but rationalize through and that sort of thing. and, and they all came back and said, well, that sounds like a great for, i think it’s a great opportunity. and something that we should definitely look at and investigate further. and it wasn’t until about three months after that, we inked the deal. you know, it just was one of those things that went pretty quickly. and, and, you know, i really haven’t looked back since then, you know, it’s been a great, great opportunity, and our growth has continued on, you know, right now, we’re, we’re gonna push almost $14 million in revenue from the 10 million we started a year and a half ago. and so we’re definitely on track to hitting the 45 to $50 million goal that, that we’ve got set out there. and the way you look at it, you know, that’s a pretty, you know, pretty steep goal, right? $50 million. but if we come in at 40, or 35, i’m cool with that, too. and so, you know, it’s just a great, great opportunity, it gives our team a lot, a lot more opportunity in regard that now they’ve got other folks that they you know, in high tech strategies that we had to outsource out or look out, we can we can bring it in house or valuations or investment advisory services, all these different things that we at one point had to kind of push out to somebody else we can now advise or bring in house was, it’s been a great, a great journey so far.
liz farr 23:45
yeah, and you know, and what really strikes me as what made it a great merger was that anders was looking to learn from you not take over a smaller firm and meld it into their culture, but they were actually looking to learn from somebody who moved into the future. i think that’s really the key.
jody grunden 24:14
oh, that was by far the key. and that was kind of the underlying tone for the very beginning. because the the one thing i didn’t mention is we kept our unit together, meaning that was a requirement. you know, our marketing team had to stay together or finance or we had to operate as a continuous unit, because what i didn’t want to do is i didn’t want it to disperse and go away, because at that point, the chances of us continuing the growth that we’ve created would be next to zero. i mean, and i didn’t want that to happen. and so i knew that was a crucial part of it. and, you know, with the vendors, you know, the partners, especially the managing partner and the advisory partner, they both are like, you know, hey, we really want to learn from you. there are some things that we do really well that you guys can learn from and there’s some things that you you do really well that we can learn from. and that ying ying yang was the was the important factor, you know, because going into it, you know, we always think that we’re running the best ship or the worst ship one of the two. and, you know, with that we thought were the best ship. but you know, there’s ideas that anders brought think, oh, that’s pretty cool. and we incorporate that into the model. and again, vice versa. and so it’s kind of a learn from each other type of thing, which, really, none of the other firms, you know, had that vibe to it, when we were interviewing it for it was more like, hey, here’s what you saw. great we are, you’re gonna want to come and join our team, because we’re that great. and it was like, well, this was the first firm that said, you know, hey, we really liked what you’re doing, you know, can you incorporate help us corporate some of that into what we’re doing? and it was like, yeah, we can definitely do that. and so, you know, they’ve held true to or to me, they’ve, you know, they held true to their word, and so they just accidentally turned my phone off and hit the 911. so i might be getting a call here. oh, yeah. i’ve never done that. and i was like, trying to turn it off, because it’s ringing. but anyways, the it was just marriage, you know, that worked out really well. and, like i said, we’re in our second year for, and i’m not gonna say it’s perfect by any means, because it never, never has, there’s never a marriage out there, that’s going to be perfect. but the idea is that, hey, we’re here for the long run. we’re here for the long, we’re gonna work on making make everything better for everyone. and we want our clients that really benefit significantly from this and our employees to benefit benefit equally as well. and i think that’s, that’s on its way to happening.
liz farr 26:32
wow, that’s great. yeah. and you touched on a bunch of things that you do differently, that you wish other firms would do. could you just talk about couple of these things? like the subscription piece? i know, we talked about that last time for sure. but it’s different enough that repeating it is not bad? yeah,
jody grunden 27:02
no, no worries, yeah, subscription base, there’s a lot of things that we do differently that i’d love for a lot of firms to do. and kind of leading in the subscription base is just simply getting rid of this hourly bill on tax returns and write up work and all that kind of stuff and, and go to towards more of a flat fee type model, in which they can, you know, where you can build value into it. but at the same point, in order to in doing so, you can create a subscription based model, which is what we had to come up with, because we had to figure out, we didn’t want to be the bank, because i couldn’t afford to bootstrap the company from the very beginning. you know, as i’m one of those things, i just couldn’t afford to have this big ar out there. and, and it just wasn’t it wasn’t working out. and so i had to figure out a way that, hey, how can we actually do this to prevent that, and the best way to doing it was, is to have a have the same dollar amount, every single month that a client could pay to justify the services we provided, we thought, hey, let’s try it, you know, we had nothing that no no harm, no foul. and so we we did, and we almost went out of business was like it was equity. it was like, what got the wrong value, amount, dollar amount. and so we so we had to kind of keep adjusting, because we always thought that we could do it quicker, faster than what we actually could do it. because when everything is said and done, you know, time is what, you know, based on the product, you’re giving a client to a point, the idea there is hey, how can we give that to a point to cover our costs, but give them a charge and the value that they’re actually getting from that engagement in our value wasn’t what they’re making, or what they’re saving on tax return or anything like that our value was, hey, instead of hiring somebody internally, here’s what we can provide you the same level of service if not better, for a much lower lower cost. and that was the value prop that we were giving a client. and so you know, with that we created that repeatable process, you know, something would be pre every single month, something that the client saw value in something that we can then instead of invoicing a client just simply as app their bank account every single month. and we did that month after month after month. and then at that point, i was like, well, clients were like, hey, we’d love to meet with you even more frequently, would you be interested in meet with us weekly? we were like, well, yeah, of course we could. and then we had to come up with the processes. and what we were going to talk about weekly, you know, we had a financial status meeting of forecasting the pipeline meeting for those service based companies kind of an ad hoc meeting to, you know, for the other meeting, but we always are part of their leadership team meeting. and so we’re always adding to that versus just being our meeting all by ourselves. and i think that was really key to the process, because we became part of their team versus a vendor that’s out here trying to, you know, sell them something, or, or help them out. and so that was a big key there. and so with that, we thought, you know, hey, we’re meeting with clients weekly. now, why don’t we just build weekly, kind of like what a regular employee would be built in. but this is great. and so we thought, you know, again, let’s start doing it. and clients loved it. and i was like, well, this is great. we’re just snapping their account. every single week we had the same dollar amount every single deal zapping it until they had a scope change in which we could then make a change order during that week and then be effective for the next week. or if they quit, we just stopped service that week, we don’t think do some preparation thing for the month and then argue about it, you know, that type of thing. so it’s really a simple easy way of doing it, though oh, i can’t believe that. this is just so simple and clients just loved it. they they love coming to the meetings and have to worry about hate i pay your invoice or not showing up at a meeting because they didn’t pay the invoice or, you know that that became a non factor thing. and especially as we’re helping clients, baby and some of them, they’re in a podcast situation, we’re helping them through that, without the guilt behind us, they you know, don’t worry about paying our invoices like well, no, we have to be paid to, in order to get you out of this this mess and so that it just eliminated those issues completely. and so subscription base has been really a godsend for us and and that’s what the billing process, but with our highest level of service kind of talking about the the ron baker approach there, our highest level services pretty all encompassing, you know, outside of the accounting side, we’ll do everything from big, you know, from helping out with bake relationships, the profit sharing plans, helping on phantom stock, getting them set up for different stuff, all these different things that it’s there’s no add ons, or no additional fee for it’s all part of the service, kind of like the netflix type of thing. whereas our smaller engagements are more of a flat fee fixed engagement approach. some people like one versus the other. most clients, i’d say 5050, like the the cfo, unlimited type thing, versus the, you know, the basically the the scope, scope engagement. but in addition to the actual level services, we provide the accounting service packages, in addition, any of those, so those could be like the ala carte services, where we could provide the highest level service, but and then do their payroll if they wanted to, or do their payables or whatever, the lowest level service, we could do the same thing. so we added that to it, then we also added tax to it as well, where they could add any of those services on top of that cfo level or control level service that we provided. so it was kind of a nice, nice approach. and it just kind of grew with it, to where initially for the for the clients that we currently had. we i’d say probably a third of them moved over right away. so not a big deal. two thirds one want to do it the old way, we continue to do it the whole way. until eventually we didn’t do it the old way. i mean, it was just one of those things that just morphed over time. but all new clients, we brought on here’s how we do it, and nobody pushed back, it was like, there was no push back at all from the very same from the beginning sales call. they love it. because again, there were no surprises. and that’s the one thing clients just hate is getting that bill opening the mail, like, okay, what’s it going to be this time? and they’re opening up all are here like, oh, no, it’s that much. and so that does happen. and as a matter of fact, like i said, we don’t even invoice clients. so we took the the administration part of the billing process completely out and just set up automatic ach, where for minister can handle a $10 million for mobile yourself. wow.
liz farr 32:47
that’s, that’s really impressive. because i remember how much bureaucracy there was in invoicing and tracking time and all that other nonsense. but just giving your clients the flexibility to be able to ask for these elite high level services, without having to worry oh, my god is my fee can skyrocket because can i afford this? but that’s, that’s just uh, that’s really great. yeah,
jody grunden 33:27
it’s kind of funny, because the client, you know, loves that. but then the converse side the accounts like, well, i’d lose so much money, do it this way, you know what, i spend so much time or whatever? it’s like, not really, because the idea is that you want to you want to maintain these for us, we want to maintain a 75% contribution margin on every single client. now, what that means is that that’s our average. that’s not every single client. so you know, there are certain clients that are 50%, there are certain heights that 90% we’re okay with that, in most accounts are not okay with that. and so with that, they’re like, well, i need to bring that 50 up. yeah, you do need to bring the 50 yeah, but you don’t do it just by increasing the price. you do it by figuring out how can we bring it up with efficiencies? what technology? are we not using this preventing this client from being at that dollar amount? are we pricing things properly for clients that are providing this level of service to? if not, we need to adjust it going forward and figure out how can we maybe push some things back to the client and bring some or bring some things forward. and so there’s a lot of a lot of basically ways that we looked at to improve the whole process or improve the way you’re providing the service or improving the engagement itself, by looking at those different things to bring that 50% or up to the 75% not just simply increasing the price like majority of accounting firms would do the same point. we don’t go to the 90 percenters and say oh, yeah, hey, bring it back down. no, those that’s the benefit of the subscription base. that’s the benefit of the flat fee or the value based bills that you’re going to make money on some folks and you’re not going to make as much on other but the average is what you have to look at. and then average for us is a 75% margin.
liz farr 35:06
and i would imagine for some clients, the level of service, they demand kind of fluctuates, you know, sometimes they don’t need much, but sometimes they need a whole lot.
jody grunden 35:19
yeah, it definitely fluctuates from time to time, there’ll be some times where people will touch the client only during the meetings, and maybe a forecasting meeting or whatever, we’ve got the set meetings where they’ve got to touch them a certain amount of time. but for that, that might be the minimum that that that client needs all year long. and then the very next year, they’re in crisis mode, you’re spending a little bit more time with them. and that’s cool, because, you know, that’s just how it all works out, you know, you you want that overall engagement to be profitable at that margin, you know, and with that, the other thing is that, you know, with with time itself, you know, you’ve got it, the cpa is getting just kind of forget about time and more focused on hey, margins, and they got to figure out how can we provide the service to this client, us make good margin on it, but the client feel that they’re getting a good deal for it. and that’s the really the key between any kind of sales arrangement, it’s really no different with with an accounting firm, we just got to get rid of thinking that you got to bill by the hour all the time, because that’s definitely not the case. in when, when you start when you’re when you’re, when you’re putting money time aside, for people, it’s the same way. it’s not like, hey, i’ve got you get 10 hours working on this client then work on another client’s like, no, you may work on that client for a day, or maybe a day, eight hours on that one. and that’s it, or you may work on it for 16, because they’ve got more things to do. you just got to be able to manage your time better. and and i talked about, and i probably talked about in the last one about parkinson’s law, about you know, when when folks look, you know, what that means is that you work the time that you’ve got available, basically. and so if i’ve got one client, which corporal does you work 40 hours at your job? and that’s it? well, we all know, there’s a lot of inefficiencies there. if i gave you two clients, as a cpa, you’re like, oh, i’m busting my butt, i still work in pretty good. but i got the two clients i’m working really tough on yet. we had four clients like, okay, i’m still working 40 hours and working for clients. and they keep keeps going on and on and on until you get to the point where it’s that stress level. they’re just like, wonder how can i work these eight clients or 10 clients in that 40 hour week? well, then you start looking for ways to to be efficient, right? it forces you to, hey, i need to my spreadsheets better be home and like crazy. if not, i need to find this new tool out here. and that’s going to really help me get to that next that next level. or maybe i need to download some of my offload some of my stuff to a different person, whether it’s somebody on the team, or maybe it’s a nearshore offshore individual, or, you know, what, what can ai or automation take over that as currently there. so you’re looking for, you’re forced to look for those things. and then, and you think there’s no way that i can do 20 clients, i’m busting my butt, i’d work 80 hours a week if i was doing it, but then you find a way to do it. and you know, we’ve got our, our cfos, they work about 18 to 20 clients on average, and they’re working maybe 40 to 45 hours. but i will tell you, when they start, you know, they’re to the point of they’re going on five clients, and they get no, there’s no way. there’s absolutely no way that i can do that. i’m killing myself right now. and then they look at tom or kristen or somebody on the team is like, how do you do 18 clients, and it’s like, well, because you force yourself to figure ways out, and unless you just don’t have that awareness, and you work in 80 hours a week, but most people aren’t going to do that. they’re going to figure out ways to narrow down so times get times i think i could talk about forever, but and i agree with ron, that you shouldn’t measure yourself on time, you just really need to measure yourself on the output and kind of figure out hey, what is the what is the bottom line, you’re gonna you’re gonna pay because you are paying these people. so what’s the bottom line that you can afford per client per engagement per task, and so forth, and work work that way?
liz farr 39:00
it’s really good. and i like how you manage how you require your people to kind of self manage their capacity by encouraging them to be more efficient, and to use all the automations that they have. you know, how do your new people learn how to do that? is it just why by copying what the others are doing?
jody grunden 39:31
yeah, a lot of it is a lot of folks coming in, whether they’re at the lowest level or at the highest level, they’re bringing in their own ideas, thoughts, and, and, you know, processes and so forth. so it’d become our team, you got to really be technology. first, you’ve got to be somebody that’s willing to embrace technology. also, someone’s willing to embrace change, because we’re changing all the time. you know, the thing that we think is the best thing since sliced bread tomorrow may be you know, something different. and so we’ve got to be we’ve got to be able to adapt that quickly. and not all folks can do that. so you’ve got to be had to have the right people in place for that. and then also, you’ve got to have the right people in the positions. what i mean by that is not all, not all great accountants are gonna be great advisors. and not all great advisors are gonna be great accountants. so you’ve got to understand that going into it, if you’re looking for the right person that had that right fit in that right position there, because what you don’t want to do, and we’re all guilty of it is promoting your best person up, and then having them leave because they at that top wasn’t what they thought it was going to be like. and so we always give our people the opportunity to say, hey, i’m done being promoted, you know, i met that senior advisor level, i don’t want any further, i don’t want to be a cfo, that’s not no interest to me at all, i don’t want to be that person that that last, you know, where the buck stops for that high level of responsibility, i want to be the person to prepare preparing that person, and that’s fine, you got to have those people you got 50% of your team has to be that, that personality. the other parts, you know, are the people that are moving up and want to advance and you’ve got to have those people too. so you gotta have the right people in place. and i think that’s really important. and once you do have the right people in place, the eagerness for them, the curiosity for them to learn is there. and so, you know, when we bring on our team, they go through an extensive training period, obviously, we can always do better. but we’ve got different video trainings that they actually actually go to, and they actually listen and learn how we do all the processes, and they’re seeing everything. so it’s a very consistent training layout. and you know what, once they’ve gone through that, and they’re there, they’re listening to other cfos. it depends on what the role they’re looking at. if they’re lucky in accounting, then traditional accounting will push them in with another accountant working on different stuff, whether it’s bank recs, accountant, journal entries, whatever that is that they’ll learn, like the normal accounting firm would pretty much teach that folk and but with the ones that are in the consulting side, they’re typically starting out underneath when the cfo is kind of doing the job of an advisory account in which they’re preparing the forecasting, utilizing the tools that we currently have. and, you know, we teach them on those tools through that training process. and then the cfo is kind of overshadowing them, and then eventually, they’ll move on with their own clients, or if it’s a cfp, or if it’s, you know, one of the advisors, you know, again, it’s baby, they’re piggybacking off of another person. and we’ve got a team and actually trains those folks to learn how to use the different software’s that we that we utilize. so it’s kind of a combination of having the right person, and then really having a dedicated time to train. keep in mind, we’re fully virtual. and so that’s the other wrinkle, right? because we don’t have a brick, we can’t like hang out at someone’s desk. so we’ve got to be very deliberate on how we do everything. and it’s just really a key of setting up continuous processes, and then sticking with them.
liz farr 42:43
yeah, and i really like what i’m hearing about helping people find their own career path within the company. because it’s not just okay, you come in as staff, and then you’ll be senior. and you know, after a couple more iterations, while maybe there’ll be a senior manager. and not everybody wants those kinds of careers. yeah,
jody grunden 43:12
it’s kind of nice. you mentioned that because we not only do that, where they can create a cross, you know, like, we’ve got a senior accountant right now in the accounting department, that he’s like, you know, hey, i’d love to try out the senior advisor role. you know, that sounds pretty exciting to me. and so it’s like, okay, great, we’ll give you a client in the senior advisor ci handle, you can continue to your accounting duties, you might love it, if you do, then we’ll transition to give you that path and transition to that role. and we’ve had the opposite effect to where it’s like, man, this forecasting stuff, and that’s, i just, it’s too intense for me, can i do accounting, and some folks have gone the other way, too. so it’s kind of they go both ways with it, which is perfectly great, because it gives them that opportunity. but the other thing is, is that we we pay our pace, our pay structure is really different. and so for a lot of the producers producing facing roles, we have a pay structure with a with a basically a base comp, a base pay and variable comp, the base pay is the national average that we usually use, like robert half or one of those organizations and find out hey, what’s the average person making at this compensation level across the nation, because keep in mind, we have people from east coast to west coast. and in the end, we pick the average. so unfortunately, we don’t get a lot of new york city or los angeles, folks, because they were they’re way above the average. and we just can’t meet that, that standard unless they look at the overall compensation package. because you know how the different organizations have the high and the low? well, we created it so that if you are at capacity, what we feel is that capacity for an individual, then you’ll make that high level so you’ll make the base pay and then your variable comp will be that difference between the base and that height, that high level, whatever, whatever is posted there. and at that point that’s making that firm a lot of money but it’s awesome. compensate that individual for the efforts they’re putting forth. the nice thing about that is that we don’t care how long how many years of experience you have, or whatever, if you’re, if you are at the same level and hit managing that same book of business, you’re gonna pay the identical and the only difference is your base pays might vary a little bit, but your variable comp is going to compensate you for that. and that barrel counts paid out monthly. so it’s, it’s an instant gratification for the folks all the way through. and the nice thing about it is they lose a client variable count goes down the game client, the variable comp goes up. and so what it did solve for us is that equality amongst anybody, you know, it doesn’t make any difference, what, you know, you know, anything, you know, any kind of diversity issue is completely out the door, because we pay our team the exact same amount, based on the book that they’re managing, which is great. but it also gave them the opportunity, the flexibility that you know, what, if i wanted to spend more time in, you know, different organizations within the firm, you know, and i didn’t want to, i don’t want to really spend my ton of my time on the clients, i want to kind of mix it up a little bit. so that, you know, there’s more of a social aspect of the firm, if i’m okay, with not making the top line, and i’m okay with making somewhere in the middle, cool, not a big deal. so they can manage their input, or they’re in but then they also impact their salary. another nice feature is we have a few individuals that have gone on maternity leave. and the nice thing about as before materially of their addition, clients off their verbal comps going down, as an addition, clients off, they may be a period of time, you know, after they get back, they’re like, hey, i don’t need a ton of clients, let’s put it here. so their, their compensations reflected accordingly, then immediately, like, okay, i’m ready and boom, they’re back up there without going through all this hr issues and trying to pay raises that just simply give me more clients and boom, i’m making more money. and so it was, it was really nice that it gave that impact, and gave that that basically autonomy and control to the to the team members. now there was a certain dollar amount that we came up with the hey, here’s the minimum that you have to have, in order to keep that base pay, which we’ve got to come up with anything over that, you can say no, i don’t want this additional client or give me two more, because i’m ready to make some money or ready to earn, you know, you know, whatever that that might be. and it’s been a great experience for the team. so they can kind of control the outlook, and they want whether they want, again, you know, a highly driven, successful, dollar driven, you know, outcome or if they want a highly successful, non drip, non dollar driven outcome, they can, they can kind of create their own path there. so, not only within the levels and different areas within the company, but also with the compensation that they’re receiving.
liz farr 47:41
i like that, because in that that really puts the power in the staff person’s control, they can decide how much they’re going to work, how hard they’re going to work. and their compensation will directly reflect that. yep, exactly.
jody grunden 48:00
it didn’t know there’s a minimum here, they’ve got to work at least a minimum to cover their base pay. but yeah, after that 100% it gives them the power to say no, which not many organizations give them their team members that.
liz farr 48:10
that’s right. now, a lot of non traditional firms make mistakes as they try out new things. now, you already mentioned one of the mistakes you made, which was in pricing and how you eventually landed on the correct pricing. what are what are some other mistakes you made that you learned a lot from? yeah,
jody grunden 48:38
i would say one that we made mistakes would be the i don’t it wasn’t really an intentional mistake. but when we’re when you’re remote, you can isolate it after a while. and so remote work without the physical touch and being around people isn’t for everyone. and so in order to make it for everyone, we have team retreats. so we’ve got team retreats, you know, twice a year, in which we bring the entire team together. and you know, we’re going through, you know, workshopping and soft skills and the biggest thing is just so that you have an opportunity to hang out with each other, grab a beer or coffee, whatever that might be. but kind of make it very intentional form and the nice thing about retreats is not like a company or typical company or tree where people go there just to clock in clock out and can’t wait to leave our team retreats people look forward to them so they they look forward to going to these retreats, they’re hanging out with everyone and they don’t want to go to sleep you know, it seems like they’re out till one o’clock. so we we typically start the retreats on purpose at 11 o’clock breakfasts at 1011 o’clock go to five and then kind of rinse and repeat for a three day three day retreat and and which is great. what we did find out and by the way that’s kept our retention rate really high you know, where we are churn rate for employees is under 15% and close closer to 10 to 12%. typically, and you know, with that we thought this is rate, it’s working out well, and then the pandemic hit. and we didn’t lose any people right away. but once once things started going towards the ending of that first year, we saw people start moving jobs. and that’s because it was kind of funny, it wasn’t funny. but the people that are moving the jobs are the people that we hire during the pandemic, as well as those that we hired right before. and the common link that we found is that they didn’t have their treats, you know, that there was that time to really bond with them, because they say, the number one reason people stay at work is because they have a friend, they weren’t able to build build that friendship. and so soon as we went back through treats you we saw the retention rate go you know, started going up, churn rate going down there, which was, was really important. so their treats are a big thing that we we really kind of focused on and have we used that one once a year. now we’ve got you know, once every six months, and you know, folks just love love tending them, they they love going to, and we get it probably 95% attendance rate to their treats, it’s usually somewhere fun, where you go to st. louis, once, once, once once a year, because it’s our home office there, and then we try to do somewhere else like las vegas or somewhere that it’s economical 14 to go to that they can get that bonding experience that they wouldn’t, that they would normally have, in a water cooler talk in a firm type of thing. so i’d say that’s probably one of the biggest ones, we learned that it wasn’t a mistake, because we were doing it beforehand. but we weren’t 100% sure, if it was money, well were spent because they’re, they’re pretty expensive. you’re looking three to $4,000, a person for those treats. and i did say that three or $4,000 versus our team is like 80 people. and so you kind of do the math, they’re not cheap by any means. but you’re we don’t have the 4% of revenue that usually spend towards facility costs either. so it’s kind of the trade off there is the key there. and so, you know, we were definitely justifying it, because of the fact that hey, we did it beforehand. and now we there was a timeframe where we didn’t have it, we saw the reduction, we saw the morale go down. and then you know, from that afterwards, he saw it pick back up. and so i would say that was kind of an accidental justification is something we are currently doing, we weren’t sure could have made a big mistake on purpose and didn’t make it. so that was that was definitely a big one.
liz farr 52:15
that is a big mistake. yeah, and i think back to the company retreats that i experienced in public accounting, and it was usually some kind of hokey activity that somebody from hr decided would be a fun team bonding experience. and it was usually kind of this cringe worthy thing that a few people enjoy it. but a lot of us are just like, oh god do i have to go. but it’s great to hear that. there are firms out there that can do this. and that have formed such a cohesive culture that people really look forward to being together.
jody grunden 53:08
100% agree.
liz farr 53:09
yeah. now you’ve already you know, this whole podcast, this whole episode has been full of ideas and advice for firm owners. do you have any final advice for firm owners on what they can do to create better firms?
jody grunden 53:28
i think just be willing to take take that risk, you know, be willing to fail. that’s, that’s the, that’s the biggest thing, you know, trying things doesn’t hurt, you know, yeah, you’ll fail every once in a while you fail probably majority of the time you’ll learn from it. but i think that’s the biggest thing is that a lot of accountants, we just hate hate change. and with that change comes money. and so we hate spending money, we hate change, you know, kind of combination of both, and you kind of kind of as an entrepreneur, and especially one a firm of the future, you’ve got to be able to look for ways to be creative, the ways that you can make change, make it better, you know, look for ways, you know, listen to what your team is wanting and say, hey, let’s try this. worst thing you can do is fail. i’m cool with that. we failed a lot. and so, you know, in order to fail, you know that success comes around afterwards, if you continue on and persevere with it. so i’d say just simply taking that risk to make change.
liz farr 54:24
well, risk taking is not something that a lot of accountants are comfortable with. but i am gratified that the younger generation of accountants coming in are a lot more entrepreneurial and a lot less risk averse than maybe you and i were when we began our careers. so i think that’s a good thing. now, i want to thank you so much, jody, for talking to me. this has been just great. now if listeners want to connect with you, where is the best place to find jim,
jody grunden 55:05
you can always check out the website if you just want to get a general idea a little bit about the services that we offer. so you kind of see how we provide how we offer those services to our clients at summit cpa.net. again, this.net so.com because they didn’t want to spend the extra money, or the.com. so summit cpa.net or feel free to just reach out and drop me an email. it’s my my email is jodi at summit, cpa dotnet. and i’d be happy to follow up with the svod y hat summit cpu that no.
liz farr 55:34
all right, well, thank you so much, jody.