{"id":115869,"date":"2023-08-27t01:02:42","date_gmt":"2023-08-27t05:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.g005e.com\/?p=115869"},"modified":"2024-08-27t17:01:25","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27t21:01:25","slug":"bill-penczak-stop-forcing-smart-people-to-do-stupid-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/08\/27\/bill-penczak-stop-forcing-smart-people-to-do-stupid-work\/","title":{"rendered":"bill penczak: stop forcing smart people to do stupid work"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong>challenge your people and keep the work interesting or risk losing them.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<div style=\"padding: 56.25% 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: center;\"><iframe style=\"position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;\" title=\"bill penczak: stop\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/856147438?h=2c3c34163b&amp;badge=0&amp;autopause=0&amp;player_id=0&amp;app_id=58479\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: center;\"><\/h6>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>subscribe to 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 podcasts anywhere:<\/strong> <span style=\"color: #0056a6;\"><a style=\"color: #0056a6;\" href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/apple-podcasts\">apple<\/a>,<\/span> <a href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/google-podcasts\">google<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/spotify\">spotify<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/iheart-podcasts\">iheart<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/deezer\">deezer,<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/amazon-podcasts\">amazon music and audible<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/playerfm-podcasts\">player fm<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/audacy\">audacy<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/gaana\">gaana (india)<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/cpa.click\/boomplay\">boomplay (africa)<\/a>.<\/h6>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podomatic.com\/embed\/html5\/episode\/10591154?style=normal&amp;width=&amp;height=208\" width=\"100%\" height=\"208\" frameborder=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>the disruptors<\/strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-96261 alignright\" src=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-disruptors-with-liz-farr-and-cpat-hdr-vf-2022-424x242.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"254\" height=\"145\" srcset=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-disruptors-with-liz-farr-and-cpat-hdr-vf-2022-424x242.png 424w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-disruptors-with-liz-farr-and-cpat-hdr-vf-2022-300x171.png 300w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-disruptors-with-liz-farr-and-cpat-hdr-vf-2022-600x343.png 600w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-disruptors-with-liz-farr-and-cpat-hdr-vf-2022-849x485.png 849w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-disruptors-with-liz-farr-and-cpat-hdr-vf-2022-768x439.png 768w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-disruptors-with-liz-farr-and-cpat-hdr-vf-2022-1536x877.png 1536w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-disruptors-with-liz-farr-and-cpat-hdr-vf-2022.png 1600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 254px) 100vw, 254px\" \/><br \/>\n<em>with liz farr<\/em><\/p>\n<p>too many accounting firms have \u201csmart people doing stupid work,\u201d according to bill penczak, a veteran sales and marketing professional. the founder and chief insights officer for mica ventures said to think about the effort it takes to get an accounting degree and get your cpa, and contrast that with the years of mindless work that many new hires are required to do, especially if they go into audit, he said. \u201cone of the reasons why there\u2019s such a talent shortage is because the market has figured this out,\u201d and no one wants to do that stupid work, penczak said.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>more <\/strong><strong>podcasts and videos:<\/strong> <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/08\/21\/sandra-wiley-staffing-problem-check-your-culture\/\">sandra wiley: staffing problem? check your culture<\/a> | <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/07\/27\/scott-scarano-first-grow-people-then-firm-growth-can-follow\/\">scott scarano: first, grow people. then firm growth can follow<\/a> | <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/07\/13\/jody-padar-build-a-practice-that-works-for-you-not-vice-versa\/\">jody padar: build a practice that works for you, not vice-versa<\/a> | <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/07\/07\/ira-rosenbloom-with-ma-nobody-wants-a-fixer-upper\/\">ira rosenbloom: with m&amp;a, nobody wants a fixer-upper<\/a> | <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/06\/19\/disruptors-peter-margaritis-the-power-skills-every-accountant-needs\/\">peter margaritis: the power skills every accountant needs<\/a> | <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/05\/31\/joe-montgomery-find-the-sweet-spot-of-the-right-clients-right-services-and-right-prices\/\">joe montgomery: find the sweet spot of the right clients, right services and right prices<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/05\/17\/marie-greene-with-staffing-lose-bad-apples-before-ruining-the-bunch\/\">marie green: your bad apples are ruining you<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/05\/01\/megan-genest-tarnow-hire-for-curiosity-rather-than-compliance\/\">megan genest tarnow: hire for curiosity rather than compliance<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/02\/18\/clayton-oates-one-way-to-keep-clients-for-life\/\">clayton oates: one way to keep clients for life<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2023\/02\/10\/randy-crabtree-follow-these-3-rules-to-keep-employees-happy\/\">randy crabtree: follow these three rules to keep employees happy<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/12\/12\/erik-solbakken-work-less-and-make-more\/\">erik solbakken: yes, you can work less and make more<\/a> | <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/12\/05\/future-firm-growth-requires-a-mindset-shift\/\">donny shimamoto: future firm growth requires a mindshift<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/11\/28\/jennifer-wilson-empower-young-workers-to-build-the-firm-everyone-loves\/\">jennifer wilson: empower young workers to build the firm everyone loves<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/11\/16\/mike-whitmire-re-think-your-hiring-and-training-practices\/\">mike whitmire: re-think your hiring and training practices<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/09\/21\/hector-garcia-how-niche-knowledge-drives-success\/\">hector garcia: success strategies of a quickbooks youtube superstar<\/a> | <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/04\/19\/disruptors-blake-oliver-liz-farr\/\">blake oliver: why tax work yearns to be free<\/a>|\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/04\/08\/watch-martin-bissett-urges-accountants-to-go-commercial\/\">private equity explodes in u.k.<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/04\/04\/stop-accepting-the-status-quo\/\">brannon poe: the status quo must go<\/a> \u00a0| <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/03\/28\/accounting-nerds-tap-into-your-secret-super-powers\/\">accounting nerds, unlock your super powers<\/a> \u00a0| <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/09\/02\/disruptor-jason-staats-shakes-up-the-status-quo\/\">disruptor: jason statts shakes up the status quo<\/a> | <a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/03\/09\/matt-wilkinson-think-small-to-think-big\/\">think small to think big with matt wilkinson<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/03\/06\/the-disruptors-corey-schmidt-on-re-inventing-your-firm\/\">when financial statements go extinct with corey schmidt<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/02\/14\/geraldine-carter-can-she-save-accountants-from-themselves\/\">can geraldine carter save accountants from themselves?<\/a> |\u00a0<a href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/2022\/01\/27\/disruptors-tyler-anderson\/\">re-inventing accounting with tyler anderson<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #c9990a;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cpatwpe.s3.amazonaws.com\/cpatrendlines\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/yellow_key_clip_art-e1375897299811-36p-hi-1-e1603911598474.jpg\" alt=\"goprocpa.com\" width=\"39\" height=\"16\" \/>\u00a0exclusively for pro members.\u00a0<a style=\"color: #c9990a;\" href=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-login.php?redirect_to=\/\/www.g005e.com\/2021\/02\/05\/22-predictions-for-2021\/\">log in here<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0<a class=\"external\" style=\"color: #c9990a;\" href=\"http:\/\/goprocpa.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">2022世界杯足球排名 today<\/a>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>besides making smart people do stupid work, penczak said many of the firms he works with are realizing that they need to do a better job with mentoring and career development, as well as simply having more conversations with their people.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>while the need for open conversations \u201cmay be out of the wheelhouse for a lot of the partners\u201d who are unaccustomed to \u201cletting their hair down,\u201d these kinds of relationships can directly drive retention. \u201cpeople don&#8217;t leave jobs for money necessarily. they leave it because of the relationship that they have with their boss,\u201d penczak explained.<\/p>\n<p>firm leaders also need to be willing to have deeper conversations with their clients, but, for many cpas, \u201cit&#8217;s not in their comfort zone to be able to ask questions if they don&#8217;t know the answer themselves.\u201d these questions are essential to understanding what your clients\u2019 needs are and how to serve them. understanding what those needs are can \u201csolve a number of different problems of client retention, client growth, challenging your people,\u201d penczak said. challenging your people and keeping the work interesting can help you retain those smart people.<\/p>\n<p>asking clients and prospective clients questions about their long-term plans for succession or exit can be enough of a differentiator that they will likely hire your firm. \u201cyou&#8217;ve got to get out of that pure compliance mindset and figure it out,\u201d he recommended.<\/p>\n<p>figuring it out means going into the \u201cwhy of the numbers and being able to explain that in a meaningful way with clients.\u201d penczak also believes that taking the embedded knowledge from working with many clients and turning it into a meaningful conversation with clients may be the most important skill for the future. \u201cwho else would \u2013 or could \u2013 a client turn to to get that broad view that cpa firms could be offering?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>8 more takeaways from bill penczak<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>money talks. average salaries for new accountants are too low and are causing a brain drain away from accounting and towards other professions that pay more. partner comp can be 10 times compensation for new hires, which may also be causing resentment, especially when staff members are working longer hours than the partners.<\/li>\n<li>the firms that can find ways to nurture our need for human interaction, and who are serious about growing and developing their people and communicating with their people are the ones that will continue to be attractive.<\/li>\n<li>many firms are actively culling their smaller clients. this creates an opportunity for someone else to pick up those small clients. with efficient processes, they can compensate for the low margins with volume.<\/li>\n<li>we can\u2019t deliver on the aspiration of having relationships with our clients when our book of business includes 600 clients.<\/li>\n<li>client attrition isn\u2019t always a bad thing. it can give firms incentives to invest in people or technology. adding new clients adds variety and interest to the work.<\/li>\n<li>to make changes stick, you need a specific plan with people responsible for it. otherwise, when busy season come, all those ideas go right out the door.<\/li>\n<li>consider hiring people with expertise in other areas to help run your firm, rather than funneling everything through the managing partner. the two most important people on the leadership team will be the experts in sales and marketing and in hr.<\/li>\n<li>stop treating employees like chattel or cattle. find out what their strengths are and create an environment where they can thrive with those strengths. embrace the incredible diversity of your team members.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<figure id=\"attachment_115876\" class=\"thumbnail wp-caption alignright\" style=\"width: 201px\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-115876 size-thumbnail\" src=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001-201x201.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"201\" height=\"201\" srcset=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001-201x201.jpg 201w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001-424x424.jpg 424w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001-300x300.jpg 300w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001-100x100.jpg 100w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001-24x24.jpg 24w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001-48x48.jpg 48w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001-96x96.jpg 96w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001-150x150.jpg 150w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/c4a-inspiration-operative-bill-penczak-001.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 201px) 100vw, 201px\" \/><figcaption class=\"caption wp-caption-text\">penczak<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><strong>about bill penczak<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">bill penczak is a 30-year operations and growth professional, including tours of duty at big 4 and regional cpa firms, and he served as coo for one firm. two of his cpa firm clients have been cited as the fastest-growing in the country.\u00a0 he is the author of the upcoming book &#8220;big fish, little pond,&#8221; about middle-market firm growth and profitability.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">penczak has spoken to cpa firms and associations in australia, brazil, spain, ireland and the us.\u00a0 he started his consulting firm, mica ventures, to help firms improve operations to result in both greater margin contribution and more sustainable working environments for cpa firm professionals. he is a proud eagle scout, the father of an eagle scout, and volunteers in his community on the olympic peninsula of washington state, including a gig as a radio host of a music program on the community radio station.\u00a0contact him at\u00a0<a href=\"mailto:bill@mica.ventures\">bill@mica.ventures<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>transcript<br \/>\n<\/strong><em>(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>00:03<br \/>\nwelcome to accounting disrupter conversations. i&#8217;m your host, liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. my guest today is bill penczak, founder and chief insights officer at mica ventures. so, let&#8217;s dive in because we have a lot to cover. accounting talent in the u.s. has been scarce for years. covid made it worse. what are some ideas you have on how to make things better?<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>00:51<br \/>\nsure. i&#8217;ve used this quote before, the problem, oftentimes is that many firms have smart people doing stupid work. and so what i mean by that is think about what it takes to go through college and earn your accounting degree, even more effort than it has is required to get your cpa. and you get these really, really talented, smart, young people. and they go through, let&#8217;s say, on the audit side, they go through years of mindless work, that is could be automated, could be offshore, it could be something else. and that&#8217;s one of the reasons why there&#8217;s such a talent shortage is because i think the market has figured that out. and i also think that that there&#8217;s a lot of different other options that young people have, that isn&#8217;t public accounting. and it&#8217;s kind of a shame. i think the other thing, too, that is the salaries that are paid for to newcomers into the industry, even though they&#8217;ve been rising, and even more firms are paying more as we saw with the inflation in 2022, it still is below, below average. so the average college student in 2022, earns about $55,000 a year in their first job. so what used to be, i think there&#8217;s always a perception in the industry that we paid really well. and that may have been the case years ago. but now the average is about $15,000 a year. and by comparison, if you look at kids that are getting out of college today, with an engineering degree, for example, it&#8217;s about $20,000 more per year, but $75,000 a year, we&#8217;re starting out. and not to mention, i think there&#8217;s also been a brain drain over the past decade or more of kids with the same sort of skill set that will go into finance instead of going into accounting. and, you know, they may have to work ungodly hours to if they go work for a private equity firm or whatever else. but the reward is a lot there. and, you know, i think money talks and i think that&#8217;s one of the things that that also is an encumbrance for the for the industry is that besides doing that, that tough, mindless when i call it mindless work, that salary levels are not where they should be. and then i think there&#8217;s also in this may be perception, and maybe it&#8217;s a reality about that the partners in firms are hoarding all of the profits. and i&#8217;ve seen i&#8217;ve seen a lot of different information from either associations or from the map survey or other other publications. and so the i&#8217;m not going to cite a number, because i&#8217;ve seen it all over the place. but the partner comp is a 10 times maybe the compensation for a person starting off. and i think there&#8217;s probably some resentment on the part of younger staff of why should i be busting my butt at 10 o&#8217;clock at night, you have cash reconciliation for a client, and the partner has already gone home or to one of their homes and their new lexus. and again, i&#8217;m overstating it a little bit, but i think there&#8217;s that there&#8217;s a perception or reality of that disparity. and then i also think that firms could do a better job of explaining or setting forth a path of what what your career path could be either in public accounting, or at the or even at the specific firm. and so, you know, the performance reviews that firms do are usually looking in the past or the past of what did you do, what could you do better, but, but creating a, a notion of what your career could be like at a firm and whether it&#8217;s moving up to the next level, or getting into a consulting role or doing something else besides that kind of cash reconciliation, nightmare that you have to go through would be would be a better way of getting people to understand that there is life beyond busy season. and i think you get so caught up and in working those awful hours that anything that comes up that you could do that&#8217;s different whether it&#8217;s a different firm or different career is going to sound appealing when you know, march or april rolls around. so so so it&#8217;s a combination, it says the pay pay levels, it&#8217;s the lack of technology and the type of work that that young people are forced to do. and then maybe that perception of fact that all of the disproportion amount of the of the money is that firms error and go to the partners and not to the rest of everybody else. i think that that those are, those are kind of fundamental issues that some firms are getting better at, and others not familiar with one firm that is going to do a program in 2023, where if there&#8217;s incremental profit, that is tied back to the activities of individuals, the individuals are going to benefit from that in a pretty significant way. so like at the staff level, that could be bonuses of you know, $10,000, at the extreme end of it, but it&#8217;s kind of a revenue share. so firm does well, in that individual is responsible for that in terms of what they do, or how they&#8217;re working, or how much their billable, they&#8217;re gonna have an upside to it. so i think that&#8217;s kind of an innovative way. and i think firms just have to think differently. and the challenge is the the most of the people running firms today, whatever system it was, in the past, it&#8217;s worked for them, they got to, they got the brass ring. and now they think they have to think a little bit differently. because, you know, there&#8217;s a different, there&#8217;s been a generational shift in the, in the marketplace, and the things that i as, as a person in my 60s, think about and the way that i grew up is gonna be different from somebody in their 50s, or their 40s, or definitely in their, in their 20s or 30s.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>06:45<br \/>\ni agree with you there, you know, i think you&#8217;re spot on with the money because there&#8217;s this perception that well, you know, the partner is taking home 300 400,000 a year, you know, but yet i&#8217;m busting my butt, and doing all the work, they&#8217;re taking all the glory. and i&#8217;m not earning even even a third of that. so why why should i do all the work and not not get the reward,<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>07:14<br \/>\neither the monetary reward or, or the the softer reward of doing a job well done, or seeing the future or, or having some sort of, you know, something to look forward to, rather than the next audit or the next tax return.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>07:31<br \/>\nall right. and you also mentioned having a career path, a clear career path within firms? is that something that some firms are beginning to do more?<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>07:47<br \/>\nyes. so it&#8217;s funny, this is recording this the first week of january. and so i&#8217;m finishing up the strategic planning sessions for a number of different firms. and probably two thirds of the firm&#8217;s that i&#8217;m working with right now have identified the need to do a better job of either mentoring, which is not the not that job skill, so much more of the softer skills and the career development that i was describing earlier. or even ramping up the conscious the conversations that they&#8217;re having with people that fernando review, and it&#8217;s not anything formal, but just like spending time with your people, and talking to them for god&#8217;s sakes. and so that&#8217;s pretty, that&#8217;s become predominant. and i think, you know, there&#8217;s always an ebb and flow. and, you know, the, the mantra for 22 and carrying into 23 has been all about the people. because, you know, as everybody knows, there&#8217;s not enough people to do the work that we&#8217;ve got right now that firms have right now. and, you know, the wisdom has now become, well, maybe we should talk to them and see what they really need. and it&#8217;s like, yeah, maybe a good, good thing to do. and so, and i don&#8217;t know if this is maybe gross and gross overstatement, but it&#8217;s like, it&#8217;s the whole left brain, right brain type of thought. and so a typical typical, quote, unquote, cpa, more left brained, and this these kind of softer conversations is more right brained, and it&#8217;s maybe out of the wheelhouse for a lot of the partners to have the kind of conversations and let their hair down. and, and, you know, open themselves up a little bit. so in order to get their, their people to do the same and have kind of a frank conversation. that&#8217;s not just, here&#8217;s what you need to do, here&#8217;s when you need to do it. and, by golly, get it done. i think that may be out of the the zone. so i think we need a kinder gentler way that we&#8217;re approaching people because it&#8217;s directly drives retention. and, you know, people people don&#8217;t leave jobs for money necessarily. they leave it because of the relationship that they have with their boss and then all of the data that i&#8217;ve ever read it indicates that so it&#8217;s more about the environment. and what what today is and what tomorrow could bring, versus what, what what ends up in their paycheck every two weeks. again, that&#8217;s a factor. and if i was, if i was in my early 20s, gonna make 10 grand more than i&#8217;m making it confirmed, that would certainly be interesting. but at the same time, there are other environmental things that firms can do to improve themselves and really stand out from from other firms.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>10:33<br \/>\ni agree with you there. and i&#8217;ve talked to a lot of people who really emphasize creating a good culture where you&#8217;re really appreciated, and where there&#8217;s just constant communication, at all levels. you&#8217;re not just in this little cubicle, cranking out to work. but there are people who, who really do take an interest in you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>11:01<br \/>\nand, you know, covid, has made that harder. because so many people are sick, a lot of people are still working at home. and, you know, maybe i&#8217;m old fashioned in this regard, but it does make a difference, being able to walk into the hall, walk down the hallway and bump into people and have a conversation. and like, oh, yeah, i forgot to tell you about this. and it just, it makes it less transactional. and i think what&#8217;s happened now in the past, almost three years now, is that a lot of work has become transactional, we want you to go do this, and you have to do it by here, and here&#8217;s what we&#8217;re gonna pay you for. and there&#8217;s like, there&#8217;s not a whole lot. and you know, all the all the virtual happy hours in the world are not going to really fix that. and because i think at the end our essence, humans are social creatures, even even shy accountants, and you need that need and deserve that kind of human interaction. so it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s interesting. so so i&#8217;m not sure if the industry has the capacity to do that. and, you know, if if the economy goes south in 2023, and there&#8217;s a whole lot of speculation about whether that actually will happen or not happen. and let&#8217;s say that, that the job market for public accounting leveled itself again, and there wasn&#8217;t such a demand for people, would we would we go back to the ways that we&#8217;ve always done it, and that&#8217;s probably the case, but there&#8217;s always always going to be some outliers, and some firms are going to be better at it, and about growing their people developing their people communicating with their people. and i think those are the ones that will be continuing to be attractive, regardless of what&#8217;s going on in the economy.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>12:40<br \/>\ni think you&#8217;re right, and i&#8217;m not sure that what the economy does, will really impact the the talent shortage too much. while back, i looked back in the archives of the journal of accountancy to see how far back i could find articles on the talent shortage. and i went all the way back to 1998, which is as far back as their archives went. and every couple of years, despite what was going on in the economy, there was an article about the war on talent. now, it&#8217;s hard to find people. so this is not something that i think a poor economy will ease in any way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>13:29<br \/>\nyeah, i think i think you&#8217;re right. and the other dynamic is in a macro sense, there are fewer student high school students going into college to study public accounting. and so so you&#8217;ve got that they&#8217;re going into engineering or, or finance or something else. and that trend is going to continue. so now what if we think it&#8217;s bad? now, let&#8217;s take a direct trajectory. and fast forward that for another site, another four year cycle of another set of kids go through college? what&#8217;s it going to look like that? you know, is technology going to save us? i don&#8217;t know is, is people gonna have to work more and do the same thing? let&#8217;s hope not.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>14:06<br \/>\nyeah. i don&#8217;t know what the future will hold. but i do you know that. i&#8217;ve been seeing the business model for accounting change a little bit. a couple couple of weeks ago, i saw ron baker talk about the subscription model. i&#8217;ve heard people talking about really different ways of running their firms. what are some of the things that you&#8217;re seeing<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>14:33<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s funny, you mentioned that said literally last thursday and friday, read time&#8217;s up the book that ron baker wrote about the subscription model. and so your question is very timely. so so i think i think two things are happening. there are younger partners coming into the forefront that may be more amenable to looking at different things done for ways of running the business, so, you know, you can unpack that a couple of different ways. so for for the typical middle market firm, typical typical middle market, like under, say $15 million or so the average i think, could be looking at the inside public accounting or the accounting today data, the average is about 15% of their revenue is coming from non compliance work. so not audit, not tax compliant, but consulting type work, advisory. and i think that&#8217;s one trend, because it also addresses what we were talking about earlier, it gives another career path for somebody that&#8217;s got some good skills. so whether it&#8217;s doing esg work, or doing forensic accounting, or running a client accounting services practice, or one of those other things that are not the typical kind of compliance work. so i think there&#8217;s more firms looking at those types of solutions. one, because it&#8217;s stickier with, with clients to be able to do that, you know, obviously, the challenge is that with some of those things, i just mentioned, it, especially on them on the pure consulting side, it&#8217;s less than new at work. so people are a little bit afraid of that. but but i think that the balance can can work out from from a revenue standpoint, i think things like value, pricing is another opportunity that that more firms are talking about, again, we&#8217;re kind of at maybe at an inflection point right now. so everything&#8217;s everything that was talked about before is, you know, maybe being acted upon a little bit differently than than in the past. so value billing and pricing, and you want to think about it that if you think about a firm that has a lot of 1040 work, or even a lot of 1065 return work. in essence, they&#8217;re there. they&#8217;re kind of doing value pricing already. now, what&#8217;s it going to cost for you to do my return? it&#8217;s going to cost $1,000. and, you know, i think it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s probably it&#8217;s very likely that firms with a big swath of 1040 work are marking up their time rather than working down their time, like they might do on the audit side. so that that that exists already. and we have to think about it a little bit differently. so i think those are a couple of things that are maybe coming out again, we&#8217;re at a point where i think more and more firms are thinking we got to do something different. another another example, that i&#8217;ve got a couple of clients right working on right now that they&#8217;re actually doing it, even though firms have been talking about this forever, is client calling. so again, the labor challenge of having enough people to do the work that you&#8217;ve got, is precipitating the need to say, should we really have this client? and it&#8217;s a matter of, you know, the relationship that they have? are the clients a pain in the neck? are they runeterra people? are they doing things on time? and and what&#8217;s our what&#8217;s our realization? are they paying on time and those kind of things. and for the first time in a long time, firms are actually pulling the list and going through and, you know, there&#8217;s still still firms that are reticent to do or partners that are reticent to do it. but i&#8217;ve seen that actually happen more than it ever has before. where in the past firms have played paid lip service to it this year, they&#8217;re, they&#8217;re doing it more out of necessity than they have in the past.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>18:27<br \/>\nyeah, i would agree with you about the need for client calling. there were plenty of really terrible clients that i worked with in public accounting. you know, fortunately, the really bad ones fired us eventually. they usually fired us for the wrong reason. but that was okay. or, you know, we didn&#8217;t really care. they were gone. and so, you know, if we could have called them earlier or better yet, not engage them. not, not let them come on board. that would have been the best? absolutely. yeah,<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>19:11<br \/>\ni think i had symptoms, i have these weird thoughts. and i&#8217;ll share one with you now that let&#8217;s put aside the for the clients that are terrible people and you don&#8217;t want to work with them just say that they&#8217;re too small. there&#8217;s probably a business opportunity for somebody some smart person smarter than me out there. who, who could pick up a lot of business from the clients or from the firms that are trying to call their clients. so have a different cost structure, have a more efficient way of doing the work both on the audit side on the tax side, and, you know, set up a referral network and be able to to take advantage of the fact that firms are trying to jettison some of their smaller clients. somebody&#8217;s probably going to do that. you know, there&#8217;ll be you&#8217;ll be interviewing somebody next year but somebody who thought about that and made a go of it on lower mark maybe lower margin work, but then ended up in volume.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>20:06<br \/>\nthere, there is that option. and that&#8217;s that&#8217;s an interesting idea. you know, in my experience, it wasn&#8217;t always the release small clients who were so awful, but there were some pretty sizable ones that were really challenging to work with. so, you know, i, but i do like that idea of establishing a different kind of business model with somebody who can just automate the heck out of it, and focus on making it super easy for the clients, you know, forget the relationship, just just crank the workout, just get in and out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>20:49<br \/>\nwell, and, you know, we know, i think you&#8217;ve got a question about this later on. but the relationship thing, i think, is, is an aspiration that the industry doesn&#8217;t always deliver on. and so, you know, i worked with a firm a couple of years ago, they had a pretty strong tax practice. and the average partner had about 600 clients, external clients, so, you know, decent books of business, you know, in some of them were corporate that they did the 1040 work, but a lot of them were 1040. i challenge anybody that to like, have a relationship with 600 different people. and so you&#8217;re, you&#8217;re, you&#8217;re just by nature going to default to something that&#8217;s transactional? and i don&#8217;t know it, i think it takes some effort to do that, to be able to have relationships and know enough about the business for to be able to give them advice and counsel the way that you should. it&#8217;s tough to do that. but with 600 clients, there&#8217;s no way that could ever happen.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>21:54<br \/>\nno, no, it&#8217;s it&#8217;s pretty tough to do that, you know, if you had 50 clients that you were intimately involved with, then it would be easy. or even, maybe 200, that you were maybe not quite so intimately involved with, but you met with regularly, that would be doable.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>22:17<br \/>\nyeah. but to do like, 201 a day, one a workday.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>22:22<br \/>\nthat is true, that is true. so you would have to plan things out pretty well.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>22:29<br \/>\nbut what it&#8217;s funny, because one of the things that ron baker wrote about in time&#8217;s up was, was was concierge medical services. i don&#8217;t know if he i don&#8217;t know if he talked about that in the presentation that you saw. but but doctors, some doctors have gone off and said, putting together a subscription model was going to be better than spending seven minutes on average with each patient and have been doing 40 patients a day. and, you know, the effort to make the math work, obviously, but the satisfaction levels. and even more importantly, the quality of care was better in the mind of both the physician and their and their patients under that kind of model than it was in versus the typical gp or specialist model where you get seven minutes and you&#8217;re done.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>23:20<br \/>\ni would agree with you there. and and i think that there are that ron baker&#8217;s book does have some really good ideas for how you can better align the incentives of the client, what the what the customer is, he calls them what they care about, and what we can do as a as a profession.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>23:48<br \/>\nwell, and he goes off, in a good way it goes off and goes into a lot of detail about a couple of examples of the value here, one of the premises is value, right? and the definition of value is what you pay for what you get. and so many times, firms, companies, retailers are always focused on what the what you pay part of it, and not what you get part of it. and so understanding what a customer needs or wants, and being able to deliver that using your unique skills is really what that&#8217;s all about. and so i mean, the other example i&#8217;ve always heard is not in public accounting, but it&#8217;s in, in cell phones. so the cost of goods of a an apple iphone is about the same as it is for a samsung. but there&#8217;s a premium, there&#8217;s an apple premium that gets that you pay, because there&#8217;s an apple, and you know, you can argue about the utility of it. i&#8217;ve got both so i can i can i can argue both of those. but but that&#8217;s that&#8217;s that&#8217;s the intangible that you get. and we forget about that. that that. i mean, i&#8217;ll give you a great example about it. knowing about clients so years ago, we instituted a client satisfaction program for one of my firm clients. and we did 51 on one interviews with with clients. and the hard the hardest part of this whole thing was like the logistics of setting up the meetings, but we did it over the course of the summer. and we would spend half the time talking about how did we do in asking specific questions. and at the end of that we would get a net promoter score, how likely would you be to recommend we aggregated all those 50 with the other ones that we did electronically and kinda number was actually pretty good. but then the second half of this meeting, and that meetings typically took place with a partner with me as an independent third party. and with the business owner, a lot of times there were smaller, smaller, closely held companies, as first half, we&#8217;re talking about how do we do on the accounting stuff, you know, a good conversation, but then i would ask them questions about their business and looking at growth or expansion or people issues that they&#8217;re having. and they&#8217;re the these, these business owners would sit on the edge of their seat, and they get up and they&#8217;d write on the whiteboard, and they get all excited about it, because it was like their baby. and it was remarkable to me, how many things that the firm lana learned in those courts of those conversations that we had no idea about, because we never asked it, but damn question like, oh, you&#8217;re gonna open up a new plant in this market? or wobbly? are you planning to sell in a couple of years or whatever? and because we didn&#8217;t have those conversations with him. and it was, it was just, it was remarkable. i mean, almost every time maybe 80% of the time, we found out something that we probably should have known ahead of time or known about already.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>26:47<br \/>\nyeah, i&#8217;ve talked to other people, notably l anderson, who works over in the audit side, about the importance of really asking clients what they care about, and about their business, because they they frequently are never asked to talk about their business. but if you can ask them, what are your struggles? what are your challenges? what are your triumphs? what is your goal? what is your succession plan? when are you are you planning to sell is that in five years, 10 years, never. any one of those questions could lead to just incredible insights, not only about the customer, but my client, but also other things that you could do for this client to help them get where they want to go.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>27:47<br \/>\nand even that the whole process of doing that is a great new business technique. where where, you know, the typical q&amp;a will be okay, can we see last year&#8217;s tax return and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is obviously what they&#8217;re paying you for. right? but but think about if you were affirm that ask those questions about what&#8217;s your what&#8217;s your succession plan? or what&#8217;s your exit plan? because there is a direct implication of that to your tax planning. that what a differentiator that would be and what a refreshing conversation that would be for that business owner, and they probably be hard for unless your fees were crazy. they&#8217;d probably be hard pressed not to hire you, if you can have that level of conversation, rather than just the compliance part of it. and i think the challenge is, is that because of the way that god created cpas there, they feel like they have to know all the answers, because they do know all the answers for the band in which there have their expertise, or most of them at least, and it&#8217;s not in their comfort zone to be able to ask questions if they don&#8217;t know the answer to themselves. and, and that&#8217;s never, not because i&#8217;m not a cpa. that&#8217;s never scared me. and in fact, it&#8217;s always it&#8217;s more for me personally, it&#8217;s more interesting like that i&#8217;m learning something new. and i&#8217;ll ask anything, you know, and that&#8217;s how i absorb knowledge over the course of my career. and it&#8217;s made, it&#8217;s been it&#8217;s made it interesting for me. and i personally like that, and i would invite anybody who wants to differentiate themselves as a as a cpa in today&#8217;s market, to maybe try to take that same kind of tact about hope answer open to ask open ended questions that you don&#8217;t know the answer to. and it&#8217;ll be remarkable about one how differentiated you are than most other people. and to the answer may surprise you and delight the person you&#8217;re asking.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>29:52<br \/>\nyeah, yeah. yeah, i&#8217;ve heard that from so many other people, you know, and learn to ask better questions. there is an art to it. and you need to it takes practice, but you can do it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>30:09<br \/>\nor even, even even even like some of the sales books that i&#8217;ve read over the years, it&#8217;s like, if you go into somebody&#8217;s office, you kind of do the scan and see what kind of things are, are displayed, or what kind of books they have on their shelves, or, or whatever, that when. years ago, when i had my first date with my wife, my now wife, i picked her up, and you know, she&#8217;s getting ready, and i&#8217;m in the living room. and i&#8217;m looking at under bookshelf, we had like three or four of the same books. that&#8217;s like, okay, that&#8217;s probably a good sign. and 27 years later, i think it all proved out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>30:47<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s, that&#8217;s a good idea. i&#8217;m not sure how you would apply that to your clients. but just asking them things about what they care about, can really open doors.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>31:02<br \/>\nyeah. or like, even with clients, like i&#8217;ve see, oh, you read, good degrade, or somebody has another book that have something else on their shelves, oh, i read that too, or, or like the ron baker thing, just now with you and me are that&#8217;s just like a kind of a bonding experience that we have that same, we&#8217;ve had that same exposure. and that gives us an opportunity to talk about something that we have in common.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>31:26<br \/>\nthis is true. this is true. so so listen up accountants, it&#8217;s easier than you think. now, what about growth? you know, there&#8217;s a lot of talk about growth. and and i just kind of wonder do firms even really need to grow?<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>31:45<br \/>\nso, yes, but you have to take that with a grain of salt, because i&#8217;m fundamentally a sales and marketing guy. but but here, here&#8217;s something to think about what we never think about, or firms rarely think about is, there&#8217;s always going to be attrition. so you&#8217;re going to lose clients because the company gets sold or the owner gets mad at you or whatever. and, you know, i&#8217;ve seen numbers like from 5% to 10%, we&#8217;re firms will, smart firms will bake that into their, into their, into their their modeling for the future year. the other thing is to and this this is a recent example, that happened about a year ago, we&#8217;re sitting in the partner meeting with a with a small, very successful firm. it&#8217;s primarily tax. and they said, okay, we had a great year and 21, we closed at 6% ahead of where we were in the year before. and i said, did you guys just give everyone a raise the beginning of this year? how much was that, on average? about 8%? that so your labor costs, which is about 40% of what your total cost is? went up? 8%. and your growth only went up? 6%? so you&#8217;re not as smart as you think you are? it&#8217;s like, oh, yeah, we didn&#8217;t do that. i thought about that. so i think it&#8217;s i think it&#8217;s always important. again, i&#8217;m kind of biased that way. but so when you&#8217;ve got attrition, and too, it does allow firms if they manage it right to make investments in people in technology in acquisitions, or whatever else that that they want or need to do. so. so. so the question is that i was gonna bring this up later, but i&#8217;ll do it now. is the are you familiar with the concept of a lifestyle firm? where, where people, the partners make good compensation, they don&#8217;t want to rock the boat. they worked hard during busy season, but the rest of the time maybe not want to do that. it&#8217;s all kind of it&#8217;s kind of working for them, right? they don&#8217;t want to they don&#8217;t want to rock the boat. and i think in those firms, growth is maybe a nice to have, but not mandatory. and again, i guess the reality of i don&#8217;t have enough people to do the work that i&#8217;ve got, i&#8217;ve got one client, where a couple of the partners are like, we don&#8217;t want to get any more business this year, because we have hard enough time doing the business what we got right now and i get that. i mean, i don&#8217;t have to live in the trenches, like like they do. but over time, that&#8217;s not a good strategy. i mean, every every firm, i think about this, i was getting ready for our conversation of the firms that i work with. this is not a weighted average, but it&#8217;s just an average, they grew by about 10% to 12% in 2021, ranging from about 30% to about 8% among just among the the spectrum of firms. in some of the ones that the bigger end of the spectrum we&#8217;re picking up larger clients they had a comparatively small base that they&#8217;re working from. but but all of them grew. so, so the challenge is now in 2023, how are we going to do the work that we&#8217;ve got already, but i think i think it&#8217;s important to do that. the other the other factor, i think, in terms of growth is not getting stuck. i mean, with whenever you pick up new clients, or new assignments, you learn something new, if you&#8217;re paying attention, and i think if you get in a rut of, of having the same thing year in and year out, the the drudgery factor, or the boredom factor is gonna set in for the partners, for the managers for the staff, and all the way down. so it&#8217;s like the same ol if you ate the same breakfast every day. and it wouldn&#8217;t be very interesting, i think. so so, so that that changed. and again, i&#8217;m more predisposed that way personally, but i think having something different is an opportunity to learn in every instance, from every client. and then if you&#8217;re good about it, you can apply that in other places. so i think that i think that and then also, this also ties back to the idea of opportunities for younger people. because if you are trying, if you&#8217;re more of a senior level partner, and you&#8217;re grooming somebody to come up in the ranks as either from a senior manager to a principal or principal to a partner, having the ability to have a book that you can hand off to people is is kind of how most firms do it. unless you&#8217;re growing, unless you&#8217;re growing, that the math doesn&#8217;t work as easily. and also, i think it and this is a little bit and it&#8217;s very intense, tangible. but the fact that, you know, most business still comes from referrals, it&#8217;s referrals from current clients, and referrals from people that you know, out in the marketplace. and that&#8217;s always going to be the case. i mean, i know, digital is certainly more important than it&#8217;s ever been before. and we can argue about a lot of the different marketing tactics, but at the end of the day, it&#8217;s always referrals. and the ability to be active and stay active is, is important. and i think when you&#8217;re out in the market and growing and viable, it&#8217;s it kind of plays on itself. i mean, i had a firm, when i first started working with them, they were about $30,000,000.03 years later, four years later, they were at $50 million, and got bought out by a big national firm. and we were able to create a buzz. and it wasn&#8217;t like we did a big splashy advertising campaign, it was we were consistently out in the marketplace, working with referral sources, being part of industry groups, and all those other other tactics that we did, and its effect upon itself. and it became fun, it became a little bit of competitive competition between the different industry groups, and all that. so i think that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s invigorating. and it gets you out of the drudgery of it. but having said all that stuff, we were talking about the bet the net promoter score earlier, is that one of the ways if if referral sources, including clients are important to growth, a lot of the ways that firms have have neglected to leverage leverage that is by not like we&#8217;re talking about a minute ago, not knowing a lot about their clients. not being that, that go to person go to person for the commercial clients, so forth. the most one of the most amazing statistics that i&#8217;ve seen is we were talking about net promoter score earlier. and for companies that are highly regarded in their industry, so i was going to use their the example of southwest airlines. but until last week, i literally had to rely on my notes here. but given the past week notwithstanding, or google or amazon or starbucks, all of those kinds of types of companies get net promoter scores and the seven low 70s, mid 70s really good. and the average that last day that i saw was from a couple of years ago, but the average for the cpa firm industry is 24. so like that&#8217;s that&#8217;s the that&#8217;s like in the territory that that cable companies get. so nobody likes cable companies. and that just indicates to me that firms are not being proactive firming up doing good job of communications firms are not learning about the client&#8217;s business in a way that can they can meaningfully add to it other than from the compliance stuff. so so that bar is in baker&#8217;s book that was that was kind of one of the premises to about value. what are you really doing? what do you stand for? so all these things are kind of interrelated. but it really does matter. really. does indicate to me is like, if if a firm can make a conscious effort to determine how they can serve their clients better, besides just filling out their return and having it done by april 15. and understanding what the needs are, that does have their clients it does service solve a number of different problems of client retention, claim growth, challenging your people, and all of that. so i think that&#8217;s another piece of it. you&#8217;ve got to get out of that pure compliance mindset and figure it out, as baker said, you know, what is the value that you&#8217;re really providing? and, you know, and i&#8217;ve had, i&#8217;ve had those conversations with some partners and some firms, and the answers that i&#8217;ve gotten so far are kind of lousy. they&#8217;re just not, not compelling. so i think, i think that&#8217;s an opportunity for firms do to differentiate themselves?<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>40:58<br \/>\nyeah. now, since you&#8217;re a sales and marketing guy, do you suggest different strategies for growth to add firms into big firms? i&#8217;m curious, or is it kind of the same,<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>41:12<br \/>\nit&#8217;s so it&#8217;s funny, i&#8217;ve worked with or worked for everything from one of the big four firms to a $3 million firm. so from a $20 billion to a three mil. and it&#8217;s all the same. i mean, the number of zeros on everything is different. but the but the approach is similar. so the people that excel in are good at what they do, and their clients value them have those characteristics of being technically competent, or knowing or having enough or little of an ego that they can bring in people that might know the answer, even if they don&#8217;t understand the client&#8217;s business, and to encourage and, and inspire their people that work with them to do the same. and to embrace that client relationship. i think, whether you&#8217;re doing the audit for, for a fortune 10, or whether you&#8217;re doing the audit for some little retail store, or it&#8217;s got a bank loan in your neighborhood.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>42:22<br \/>\nsounds like all these these, these strategies are just things that accounting firms should be doing. as it is.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>42:31<br \/>\nyeah. yeah. but it&#8217;s like, so again, we&#8217;re in the throes of finishing up a lot of planning sessions for 2023. and, and what i always say this at the beginning of the sessions of with firms, it&#8217;s like, what are you really committed to doing because everyone, we can write a great plan, everyone sing kumbaya at the end of it, and it&#8217;s all great. and then, in about a month from right now, everyone&#8217;s going to be in busy seats threatened getting into busy season, any notion of anything we talked about is out the door. and so. so i say, i tell you revise. and it&#8217;s like, if you&#8217;re really committed to this, then we got to have a more specific plan, and have people actually responsible for it, and actually talk about it even during business&#8217;s busy season, god forbid, and have specific tactics, timing, and kpis that you look at. it&#8217;s funny, because my observation has been that a lot of cpas are really good about a process of what they do, how they deliver the work for their clients, whether it&#8217;s an audit, or a tax return taxes, or even a consulting, engagement. and when it comes to running their firms, it&#8217;s like, yeah, maybe. what do you think? what do you think the revenue is going to be? oh, about what it was last year, and maybe 6%, it&#8217;s like, you know, hope is not a strategy. and, and, you know, having a vision and having the, the guts to execute on it, and the infrastructure to be able to execute on it, i think it&#8217;s super important. and, you know, as firms get bigger, and have a little bit more infrastructure, like, you know, in hr or in marketing, or finance, or it, those, if you have the right people on the bus, you know, to quote that old phrase in praise. those are the people that professionals that could actually help you do that and help you run the firm and not have the partners or just an energy partner be that funnel through which every decision has to be made. and, you know, yeah, it costs money to do that. but, but it&#8217;s also an opportunity cost. so if you&#8217;ve got a smart person that could run a firm can help run the firm. in their area of expertise and hr, let&#8217;s say, you know, use them, instead of having it be at administrative, i hate it hate it, when firms talk about the admin department, because that says automatically, it&#8217;s there just overhead. i had one firm i work for the ceo, new ceo came in and said, we&#8217;re not going to call them any of that anymore. we&#8217;re going to call them strategic services, because that&#8217;s what they&#8217;re offering. and i think i think there&#8217;s a, there&#8217;s a firm in, in arizona, where the growth person, the marketing person, became the managing partner. first, first of all, they made him a partner, then they made in the managing partner, it&#8217;s like, oh, my god, how mind blowing is that?<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>45:43<br \/>\nit&#8217;s pretty different. yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>45:47<br \/>\nand they&#8217;re doing and they&#8217;re doing things like value pricing, and they&#8217;re looking at succession, and they&#8217;re letting they&#8217;re having conversations with their clients. and so having having someone that has a different business sense, then then a cpa is, is, is unique. but i think but again, i think you as a firm gets bigger investing in those kind of people that can help you run the, if you&#8217;re a managing partner help you run the firm. and, and think about some of those things, because it&#8217;s all about growth, and it&#8217;s all about people. so the two, two most important folks on the team should be that chief revenue officer or marketing person, salesperson, whatever you want to call them, and your your hr person or whatever you want to call them. and if you don&#8217;t have that strong that all you got to do be doing is executing a bunch of tactics.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>46:43<br \/>\nright. yeah. and, and i was talking to my husband today about the, there are many firms who pay for expensive coaching and expensive mentoring, but much of their ideas, you know, it&#8217;s like a kumbaya moment. you know, they give lip service during the meeting, oh, yeah, that&#8217;s a great idea. and then they file that away, none of it really works into the culture. and that, you know, unless the culture is willing, most are willing to change their culture, nothing is going to change<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>47:22<br \/>\nwill or unless they have a process for executing things and making it really stick. i mean, what one of the things that i i do with my clients, and i do i get really entrenched with what they do, is, i&#8217;ve never, in ever since i started my firm, i&#8217;ve never had a client that that i just left and said, here&#8217;s the plan, go have a nice day. what forgot who it was some ceo of some big company, the urban legend was that he he left a copy of their business plan on an airplane, by accident. and he wasn&#8217;t worried about it. because he said, you know, it&#8217;s all about the execution, i could i could write anything i want to in the business plan. but unless you got the right people and process and coaching and all that kind of stuff to maybe be able to make it happen. it doesn&#8217;t matter. like, it doesn&#8217;t matter. so so i think that goes true for for planning and strategic planning as well. of having having somebody in charge of making sure that it&#8217;s all happening otherwise, again, you wake up at the end of the year, and it&#8217;s like, yeah, we&#8217;ve talked about doing that we never did.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>48:36<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s exactly right. you know, in you any kind of change management, you&#8217;ve got to have somebody who&#8217;s really pushing that change. and too often i i&#8217;ve had the experience that well, you know, we got this great training by xyz company. but beyond adding maybe a sheet to the performance review for this one year, we&#8217;re not going to change at all. so why? now,<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>49:12<br \/>\nlet me ask you a question. so do you think do you think it&#8217;d be easier? or would it be easier to to start a firm from scratch that had all of these grand notions that we&#8217;ve been talking about, versus changing affirm from the inside?<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>49:32<br \/>\ni think it depends on the individuals involved. now, if you come in if you have a pretty well established firm, where everybody is used to doing things the way that they&#8217;ve been doing them for a long time, it might be really hard to come in as the new sheriff in town and say, no, we&#8217;re gonna be doing things a different way from on, that might be really challenging. but if you have a firm of young people who are threatening to mutiny or leave for better pastures, then they may very well welcome a new way to do their jobs and to function within an organization. so i think it really depends on the firm and how invested everyone is in the status quo.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>50:38<br \/>\nso i think i think about i&#8217;ve got examples on both sides. so on the on the traditional firm side, i can think of firms like aprio in atlanta, or arm amino on the west coast, where there were both old line firms that had been around for a long time, i think, if i&#8217;m correct, or mamina was was like a family owned firm. and the second generation of our aminos took it over. and, you know, set the set the market on its a year in a good way, by investing in technology and people and processes, and building out their consulting practice and doing all that. i give them a lot of credit, because would have it easy just to kind of keep the status quo. and the same thing with aprio. i think richard koppelman is a great example of taking an old mind firm and renaming it rebranding it with that with a way different name that wasn&#8217;t wasn&#8217;t much old, dead white guys, like most farmers are. so i think those are examples, but they they, you know, had a lot of struggles, i&#8217;m sure along the way to be able to do that. on the other hand, you&#8217;ve got, you&#8217;ve got smaller kind of startup firms like dark horse cpas, that&#8217;s on the tax side, where we&#8217;re at chase is trying to do things in a very different way, or audit club, where chris man over is trying to try to do the same sort of thing on the audit side, and re rework the model. and i don&#8217;t know, which is easier, because i think there&#8217;s probably struggles with either model, but it just seems like if you could start from scratch, and hire the right people, and grow it, when we&#8217;ve got all this disruption in the market right now, now might actually be the right time to do that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>52:24<br \/>\ni think you could be right. the challenge might be that if you hire people who have been in public accounting for any time, they may be uncomfortable with the switch to a new kind of way of operating, and they may really push to go back to the status quo. yeah. so it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s difficult all around.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>52:54<br \/>\ni think the data that i saw recently was, the average, the average managing partner was, it was a little bit different for different sized firms. but i think the youngest average, depending on which tranche you&#8217;re looking at was like, 56 years old. and so and then for a certain for the, for the smaller firms, it was, like 62, or 63 years old. and, you know, they kind of change, it&#8217;s like, it&#8217;s working for them for me, they shouldn&#8217;t, because it&#8217;s been working for them. and if they can figure out how to get out of dodge, it&#8217;s like right off into the sunset and be fine without, without going through all that painful change. but the problem, probably the market is, is that if that&#8217;s the case, the i just wrote about this and cpa trend lines and wrote an article about succession planning, or succession in firms that in the next couple of years, the last baby boomer is going to reach retirement age. and so we&#8217;ve got the pig in the python going out. and so if a lot of these smaller firms are owned by individuals that are of that age, you&#8217;re gonna have a whole bunch of more of those firms come on the market at that same time. and, you know, that that multiple that firms have been getting in the past may not be the same case, because that whole supply and demand thing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>54:17<br \/>\nexactly right. and, you know, somebody new who&#8217;s you know, in their 30s or maybe 40s, looking to buy a firm might not be very interested in buying a legacy firm, if they see that everything will have to be changed from the ground up.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>54:38<br \/>\nand obviously, you&#8217;ve got that you got the the fact that you have clients makes things a little bit easier. so you&#8217;ve got to build that from scratch. but again, with with with the two molt, that&#8217;s happening in the market right now, like we were talking about earlier. more and more clients are looking for firms and if you could put together a different value the proposition that that again wouldn&#8217;t wouldn&#8217;t be hard to do or to execute on. i think a young a young person could do that. now, i think in the next five years could be the time to do that. that&#8217;s right.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>55:16<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s right. well, at any rate, accountants are gonna have to pick up some new skills, you know, it used to be that to be good in accounting, you have to be great with the 10 key. but, you know, young accountants these days, they don&#8217;t even know what a 10 key is. so what are what are the skills that accountants need to be successful today, and in the future,<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>55:43<br \/>\ni think it comes down to lynn thing, and it&#8217;s the why of numbers, not just the numbers, but the why of the numbers, because people have written about this and spoken about this in the past that accounting is of looking back, you&#8217;re looking back at last year&#8217;s revenue and doing your tax return, you&#8217;re looking back at last year&#8217;s revenue, and you&#8217;re doing your audit. and maybe with the exception of consulting, which tends to be a little bit more forward looking. that&#8217;s what we do for the most part. and we don&#8217;t get into the why this happened. and so you know, and the closest that i&#8217;ve seen come recently is, with client accounting services, where firms are realizing, you know, we&#8217;ve got all the information in real time for the client company, of what how the sausage is made, and where they make money, and all of that. and i think, delving into that and becoming the better expert about helping the clients running run their business, and why these are happening in its own client accounting services, where firms are saying, you know, we can do dashboarding, for that. i think the smart firms are trying to do that. but that so that&#8217;s one part is it&#8217;s not just the report of, hey, your margin, was this your cost of goods is that, but rather, so? so what the answer the question, so what? and what do you what do you do with that information. and again, if you&#8217;re doing it for enough different clients, especially if you&#8217;ve got an industry expertise, it becomes easier, because the patterns are going to be similar, you know, every company is going to be a little bit different. but it gets you have that, that embedded knowledge. and, you know, the ability to, to take that, that body of experience that you have with other clients and say, i don&#8217;t know if this will work with you. but here&#8217;s what i&#8217;ve seen before. and to be able to have a an informed conversation about that would be so powerful, because who else? i guess there are other people, but who else would would? or could a client turn to to be able to get that broad view that that that cpa firms could be offering? so the short answer is understanding the why of the numbers and being able to explain that in a meaningful way with clients.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>58:06<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s really, that is so important. and that&#8217;s not something that we get taught in cpa school. no. you know, there was like, one little chapter in one of my books that went into the ratios. and never again, you know, pull it up, and we never used it again. and, you know, it would have been so powerful if we could have just kept sort of a running dashboard, have our clients by industry have different ratios and different kpis. and use that in ways to give them advice on how to improve things or just benchmark them? you know, i mean, even your benchmarking isn&#8217;t that useful? because she&#8217;s looking at the past. but you know, at least that could have been something more than just, here&#8217;s your tax return, mr. client. yep. just<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>59:12<br \/>\nsomething in, in having the ability and the desire to have this kind of conversations. because of that, that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s what makes it interesting for your people. it makes you more of an expert for them and more invaluable to your client, and it gives a value that most other firms aren&#8217;t even doing. good.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>59:33<br \/>\nyeah. yeah. now, we&#8217;ve talked about things that accountants should do. what are some things that accountants should stop doing immediately<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>59:46<br \/>\ntreating their people like chattel or cattle depending on where i mean, again, we talked earlier about the about compensation, and that that model is broken. if and it&#8217;s only going to be more ugly in the next couple of years. and so it&#8217;s partially part of its compensation part of it is that that human factor of taking these smart people, finding out what their strengths strengths are, and being able to create an environment in which they can thrive with those strengths. and again, not everyone is created equally. but but spending the time with individuals to understand what what their potential is, and it sounds all airy fairy, but at the end of the day isn&#8217;t that one everyone wants, you know, they want some sort of satisfaction for what they do, we spend a lot of time at the office. and, you know, if there&#8217;s not some purpose to it, then why the hell bother.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr \u00a0<\/strong>1:00:48<br \/>\nwe need some, some feeling of connection to what we&#8217;re doing. and just treating people like individuals, instead of just means to get the work done, will help a lot.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:01:05<br \/>\ni have one client that is a very diverse firm. so they&#8217;re about 70%. diverse, and rather than white, and they use that as a selling point. because the notion is, you know, out of many ideas, comes comes good ideas. and so people have different viewpoints, because they grew up differently or didn&#8217;t grow up in the united states, or went to represent part of the country, whatever else. and rather than fighting that, and being being, you know, defensive about it, they&#8217;ve embraced it. and i think it does make for better people in a better environment, like at their at their thanksgiving dinner. everyone brings things from their native country, and i couldn&#8217;t even begin to describe some of the weird, weird, some of the very different things that do not appear on normal thanksgiving tables in most american households. but but, but that, but they embrace that, and that&#8217;s kind of the kind of their, their claim to fame where people can fit in, you know, so whether it&#8217;s first generation americans or first generation college graduates, or people who just learned english or whatever else, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s a really cool environment where people have come together, and they speak i think, my last count, there&#8217;s like, 19 different languages that people speak there. you know, that they had some client that had some document that came in, in the it&#8217;s like, anybody speak portuguese, or anybody speaks portuguese? it&#8217;s like, oh, yeah, she does.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:02:45<br \/>\nwow. yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:02:47<br \/>\nbut they&#8217;ve, they&#8217;ve embraced that, and they&#8217;ve made that part of the culture of the firm.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:02:55<br \/>\nyeah, well, you know, it&#8217;s, it comes down to culture, you know, we&#8217;ve got to adapt, and what&#8217;s a changing demographic here and in the us, and it&#8217;s not going to be old white guys running things forever.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:03:14<br \/>\nyou know, i&#8217;m sitting right here, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:03:15<br \/>\nyeah, i know. i know, you are. but you know, i know from from hearing you talk about diversity, that that&#8217;s something that you&#8217;re not frightened of.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:03:26<br \/>\nno, i&#8217;m not.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:03:29<br \/>\nso now, what are the things that keep accountants from changing? what are some?<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:03:36<br \/>\ni think it&#8217;s, it starts with the notion of the lifestyle firm. like, like, it&#8217;s working for me. i&#8217;m making good compensation. i&#8217;m a pillar of the community. i got a good parking spot. and, and that that is i&#8217;ve got the brass ring. and i think that&#8217;s like, why why upset the applecart and, and i get that, i mean, i&#8217;ve been a shareholder in two different organizations before and i get that, and i know, you know, conversations i&#8217;ve had with other people i work with, it&#8217;s like, well, one, they think that that&#8217;s never going to happen for them. because for whatever reason, and and two, it doesn&#8217;t, from a statistical standpoint, i forgot what the number is. but like the chances of somebody who comes into a cpa to a big four firm, as a as a staff, you know, how many out of 100 how many went up become a partner? i don&#8217;t know what the number is, but sure, it&#8217;s single digits than<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:04:36<br \/>\nless than one. yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:04:40<br \/>\nit&#8217;s probably it&#8217;s probably right. so so the fact that it&#8217;s worked for them personally and professionally, it&#8217;s like, why would i want to mess why would i want to go through you know, oh, my god, this whole value pricing idea what everything and i have to keep track of change orders and you go back to my client and ask him about this<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:05:06<br \/>\nor figure out a subscription model and what what is this subscription?<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:05:09<br \/>\nwhat&#8217;s, we&#8217;re not a magazine? we&#8217;re a cpa firm.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:05:14<br \/>\nwe&#8217;re not amazon. yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:05:17<br \/>\nbut it&#8217;s funny. i&#8217;m getting ready for a meeting next week, probably you mentioned amazon. and one of the opening conversations we&#8217;re going to have is, is up on the slide, i&#8217;ve got a picture of amazon logo, and the whole foods logo. and the lunch of the slide says, what would amazon do? so if amazon decided to get into the cpa firm business accounting for our business? what would they do?<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:05:45<br \/>\nlike they would buy one?<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:05:49<br \/>\nthen then what would they do to it? or with it,<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:05:53<br \/>\nthey would make it like a subscription, they would have memberships, they&#8217;d have tiers of service, they would make it easier to interact with,<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:06:04<br \/>\nthey do that they do balance billing, where they say, okay, we&#8217;re not gonna charge you $60,000 over the course of two months to do your audit, we&#8217;re going to break it out into $5,000 a month, they help you with your cash flow, or wherever else they&#8217;re gonna do. and, and yeah, and so, i always think that&#8217;s funny, because we, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;ll be interesting to see what happens next week, when you have that conversation with, like, once people get their heads around that, and they&#8217;re obviously they&#8217;re really smart people. but, but what ideas might come out of that, in that ron baker book, he talks about richard branson asking the question, you know, what are the 10 things that that your customers? are that that 10 people or 10? what are the 10 things that you should be asking your customers or something like that? that kind of opens up that that thought so, so. so that nicely packed your question, the notion of the lifestyle firm, combined with the demographics of a 55 year old guy now, and it&#8217;s worked for me, why would i want to change anything? and i&#8217;m in charge. i know everything. i know, i know better than anybody else. there&#8217;s some of that still some of that mentality, whether it&#8217;s overt or not. and that&#8217;s, i think that&#8217;s the that&#8217;s the biggest impediment. like, it&#8217;s always work this way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:07:30<br \/>\nyeah. yeah. why change?<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:07:32<br \/>\nwhy and why? and? i&#8217;m not sure. i guess the answer is why this is not sustainable. and then that partner, and i&#8217;ve literally had this conversation before with partners that are in their early 60s, it&#8217;s like, you know, i only got a couple more years left, i&#8217;m not gonna, i&#8217;m not gonna worry about it. it&#8217;s like, i get that, i get it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:07:56<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s, that&#8217;s okay. if if there are other partners who were younger, who are willing to push those changes through. but if this is a solo practice, then they may have a hard time finding a good buyer. and they may have a hard time finding a buyer who is going to treat their, their clients, just the way that they do things and their people, they may have a very hard time with that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:08:26<br \/>\ni mean, we had we had a firm of years ago, that we bought, so the mothership firm was about $40 million in the firm that we bought was probably three or four no, no, no, they&#8217;re probably $5 million or so all, they were all tax three partners. and they were like making really good money. and they had a good client base and blah, blah, blah. and i was talking to one of them after the deal was signed, i said, what would you have done? if it didn&#8217;t sell to this firm, but we probably would have shut it down. like we&#8217;ve we&#8217;ve made money over time, like, didn&#8217;t want to go through the whole process of turning, we didn&#8217;t have anybody to turn it over to really wanted to shut it down. like oh, okay, so instead, they sold it and made boodles of money. and one of the partners stayed on and made even more boodles of money. but, but i&#8217;m sure that thought goes through the minds of some of these small firms and think i&#8217;m just gonna shut it down. i&#8217;ve got enough in my retirement nest egg. i don&#8217;t have anybody to turn it over to this firms do do a lousy job of internal succession planning. and so i think i think that that&#8217;s back to our our idea. the idea of that small firm that takes takes the business from these other smaller other smaller firms. you know, there&#8217;s there is going to be a market for that where there&#8217;s no succession planning. there&#8217;s no no market for it really, that a big firm like a big four firms not kind of or big regional, is not going to buy a $2 billion firm in poughkeepsie, what&#8217;s gonna happen to them? what would what would amazon do?<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:10:10<br \/>\nthey they would probably try to find a buyer or cut their losses now. i mean, the other extreme is that if you don&#8217;t plan in you don&#8217;t want to don&#8217;t have a plan for selling, then what happens if you, you know, god forbid, drop dead of heart attack? yeah, yeah, you know, we i&#8217;ve seen that happen to a few solo firms in my area. and you know, what happens to the clients after that it, it&#8217;s terrible. they&#8217;re they&#8217;re kind of stuck.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:10:52<br \/>\nbut you know, there&#8217;s there is thinking about the small firms bdo in canada is got like 100 offices, wow. 100 offices. so and, you know, in canada, population, canada is 30 million, it&#8217;s like the size of texas. and i don&#8217;t know what percentage are in the big cities, but i&#8217;m sure that most of it, so they&#8217;re in, you know, white fish, or some of these little towns like, terrible yellow arrow or white fish or whatever. and, but they make a go of it in the smaller markets, because, you know, the, these, these small and medium sized businesses are kind of the backbone of the economy, whether it&#8217;s the canadian or the us economy, and if they can get, you know, high level attention and good service and from sophisticated people like they needed as well as somebody who was in vancouver. that&#8217;s very true.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:11:45<br \/>\nvery true. well, to tie up this conversation, i&#8217;m going to ask you to get out your crystal ball. okay, and, and predict what you think the next big thing in accounting will be.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:12:00<br \/>\nso i&#8217;ve got a broad answer for this. so you may want to pin me down a little bit more, i think the the, the idea of going more into more of the consulting business is going to be the difference. again, some of the themes that we&#8217;re talking about before it gives, it takes the people that you&#8217;ve got that have a specific skill set, whether it&#8217;s in audit, or tax, and being able to reapply it in a different more interesting way. it&#8217;s a way of creating greater value for companies, i think about, think about the typical firm in the typical medium size, small, medium sized business that they work with, it&#8217;s like they still have the same the small businesses have fewer internal resources to be able to figure this stuff out. because usually it&#8217;s a sole proprietor. and they need more help than a big company that can afford to hire consultants or people with experience or whatever else. so that middle market, which again, is sort of the backbone of the economy, needs adult supervision, i call adult supervision more than anybody else. and then adult supervision is more than just doing their returns tax returns or doing an audit if they need that. it&#8217;s like running their business. and, and there is no, as far as i know, i haven&#8217;t come across any type of company that that or firm that can offer that omnibus look at how to run your business better. you know, it&#8217;s like, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. so if i&#8217;m a, if i&#8217;m a manufacturing expert of improving what goes on the on the floor, that&#8217;s one thing, but i could be a human capital person and help on that. but there&#8217;s no one. so it sounds like a game of whack a mole. right. but but if you have, you had an organization that was specifically tailored to helping small and medium enterprises grow, i think, i think you&#8217;ve got as an industry, we have the doors open already, because we&#8217;ve got credibility and objectivity. but do we have the ability to actually add value kind of like what we&#8217;re talking about before? and i think that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s a big differentiator. and then i think there&#8217;s also some kind of bridge areas, whether it&#8217;s esg, which is, you know, still audit, in some regards, or some of the financial planning and wealth management where firms are getting into i mean, baby boomers are still retiring, and that whole transfer of wealth is gonna be the largest transfer of wealth in human history. and trying to figure all that stuff out is still an opportunity. so i&#8217;m seeing more firms getting into that. and it&#8217;s funny because they got into it years ago, and they got out of it, and it seems like they&#8217;re getting back into it again. so i think those are two but i think that consulting for middle market companies is the one thing and that&#8217;s that&#8217;s probably not at 2023 it&#8217;s a next five years thing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:15:03<br \/>\nyou know, well, there are firms that are doing like outsourced cfo work. so that&#8217;s kind of close to that it&#8217;s kind of close. it&#8217;s just it&#8217;s just the cfo that isn&#8217;t looking at the whole entirety that isn&#8217;t helping them with their, their marketing, it&#8217;s not helping them with their hr and their hiring and their compliance with all the labor laws. it&#8217;s not, it&#8217;s not everything.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:15:30<br \/>\nso maybe the better piece is, outsource, see, oh, because i mean, think about again, think about the average sme, and somebody who started a company had a good idea and they were good at something, making widgets or selling services or whatever it was. and, you know, as companies get bigger, it gets harder for them to spin all the plates at the same time. there&#8217;s a there&#8217;s a thing i remember from management school called the greiner curve, gr e i n, er, not to be confused with brittney griner. and it&#8217;s about the challenges that companies have as they grow. and it&#8217;s less less about the dollar volume and more about the number of employees. and then the crisis crises that occur and i&#8217;ll get it wrong. it&#8217;s like crisis communications, the collaboration and there&#8217;s like another see, and think about it like you&#8217;re the if you&#8217;re the owner of the company, you started the company, and you start hiring much more people. the organization is accustomed to going through you to get all the decisions made. and so if everyone&#8217;s coming to me as the owner, to get all the decisions made, it&#8217;s like you can&#8217;t just physically hit communicate with that many different people, your inbox gets backed up. and then as you get bigger, it&#8217;s a collaboration we&#8217;ve got, you tend to have silos where i got this person doing this, and this person doing this and this person doing this. and then there&#8217;s another see that happens. so i think i think having a chief operating officer service that could help that small business, avoid those those challenges on the grinder curve would be would be an interesting solution.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:17:19<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s, that&#8217;s a really interesting idea. and it just happens that i&#8217;m working with a tech firm, that create the bills, accounting technology for all kinds of companies. and one project i&#8217;m working with them on is trying to encourage controllers to step into more of an operational role, you know, not not the cost accounting kind of viewpoint. but operations, optimizing iterating, making things better, putting in processes figuring out where all the bottlenecks are, and fixing them. and so, controllers, and controllers are the logical choice, because they already touch just about every part of the business. so if we could bring back controllers from industry, and have them have their add their genius to public accounting firms, we could do, they could do something fantastic.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:18:35<br \/>\nwe need to talk offline; we&#8217;ve come up with two new business ideas here. we give it giving away to free to everyone who reads or subscribes to 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:18:47<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s right. but you know, lots of people will hear this, but not very many people will take us up on the offer.<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:18:57<br \/>\nit&#8217;s like leaving your business plan on the airplane. it doesn&#8217;t matter. it&#8217;s all about execution.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:19:0<br \/>\nthat&#8217;s exactly right. well, i think that that&#8217;s probably a good place to wrap things up. i want to thank you so much, bill, for taking the time to talk to me. now, if listeners want to connect with you, where&#8217;s the best way to find you?<\/p>\n<p><strong>bill penczak\u00a0 <\/strong>1:19:18<br \/>\nthey could go to 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, and just google bill penczak, and my contact information is there. i&#8217;m a regular contributor there. or you can go to my website, which is www.mica.ventures. so it&#8217;s no no.com, dot ventures. yes, that is a real url. and my contact information is there as well.<\/p>\n<p><strong>liz farr\u00a0 <\/strong>1:19:44<br \/>\nwell, thank you so much, and you have a great rest of your day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><strong>challenge your people and keep the work interesting or risk losing them.<\/strong><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-115884\" src=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/penczak-gif-424x239.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"141\" srcset=\"\/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/penczak-gif-424x239.gif 424w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/penczak-gif-300x169.gif 300w, \/\/www.g005e.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/penczak-gif-600x338.gif 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px\" \/><br \/>\n<em>the disruptors<br \/>\nwith liz farr<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4386,"featured_media":115884,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1362,2254,2327,2374,2734,3120,3002,2297,2301,1906,2246,3869,2764],"tags":[3958,2429,3962,3961,643,715,572,3959,38,272,226,1416],"class_list":["post-115869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-video","category-growth","category-innovation","category-pay-compensation","category-podcast","category-pro-member-exclusive","category-special","category-staffing","category-talent","category-tax-practice","category-busy-season","category-the-disruptors","category-video","tag-cpa-billing-rates","tag-earnings","tag-fte","tag-headcount","tag-hiring","tag-jobs","tag-pay","tag-salaries","tag-salary","tag-staff","tag-staffing","tag-wages"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- 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