Today’s guest is someone who’s not just challenging the norms of the accounting profession, she’s rewriting them. Courtney De Ronde is co-founder and CEO of Forge Financial and Management Consulting, where she leads a powerhouse team delivering virtual CFO, audit, and tax services to organizations that want to grow with intention, not chaos. She’s the creator of the Simple ScaleUp System, a strategic framework that’s helping business owners scale wisely by aligning finance, structure, and execution. She’s also a faculty member with Upstream Academy, where she’s helping to shape the next generation of accounting leaders. Courtney is proof that running a firm differently can actually mean running a firm better—let’s dive into how she’s helping others grow with clarity, energy, and purpose. Courtney, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thanks for having me, Randy. So glad to be with you.

Alright, so, Courtney, I don’t know, you and I first met four, five, I don’t even know how many years ago. We were on some webinar together with Jeremy Clopton, and I was just so impressed hearing the story that you had to tell there. Do you remember where it was and who it was? I don’t even remember.

I think you’re right. I’m sure it was probably a webinar with Upstream or some kind of an event with Upstream, where we got to meet several years ago. So, yeah, it’s been fun to hear your journey along the way, just the different ways that you’ve approached time and stress management and mental health, and I’m glad to be with you.

Well, thank you for that. It’s been fun. Your story, your journey, what you’ve done with your firm has been something that I’ve talked about quite a bit ever since we originally met because I am just so impressed anytime—but specifically you—anytime anybody tries to do things different, when someone realizes that we don’t have to continue doing things the same way we always did just because it’s been done that way. When somebody challenges the status quo, when somebody decides to try something different, to make things better for people in this profession, I just get so excited. So that’s why I’m going to go on a rant here for a minute, but anyone that’s listened to the show before, or seen me speak at conferences or online on other podcasts, your story often comes up because I’m just so impressed with what you’ve done with your organization. So this is a thrill for me today. This is like you are a superstar to me. I am in awe of this conversation today. So thanks again for being here.

Well, thank you. I’m glad to share what we’ve learned. Lots of lessons along the way, lots of good, but lots of learning, too. So, thank you.

Sure, and let’s start with this: I think what we’re going to do part of today, is we’re going to fact check me. We’re going to see if the story I’ve been telling has been accurate, because I want to hear it straight from you. We know bits and pieces and everything, but I talk about your journey into realizing you can be more efficient with your time, realizing that you can do things differently; try to get more work done in less time, be more efficient, more profitable, get more work out the door, and have a family life too. So let’s start at the beginning. Did it just all of a sudden hit you that, “Hey, I’m putting in too many hours, I gotta figure out how to do this?” What was the catalyst for “Hey, we need to change what was going on at the firm?”

Yeah, really what happened was in late 2018, early 2019, we had gotten really clear on our vision for the firm. I had just been elected the next managing partner, so I got to create this vision for who we wanted to become, and how we were going to get there. So I just had all this clarity about what we could do to make the firm a place I wanted to still work for a long time, a place that other people would want to work, and we started looking at what are some of the reasons that people leave our profession—our firm, specifically. A lot of it was around compression of work during busy season, long hours, feeling like you have to sacrifice your personal life for professional success. A lot of us had seen that with other partners in our firms. We retired some partners that we saw how that had impacted them personally after a really successful career. Once we got really clear on what we wanted to create and we started working towards it, things just really fell into place, and I found myself in this situation where my calendar was completely out of control. It looked like a game of Tetris. Anything could go anywhere. I had transitioned out of client service and into business development and firm leadership, and so I just had all these different things going on, but it was all working in terms of in terms of “we’re trying to do this, we’re trying to get here, we’ve got this project” and it was working, but it felt completely overwhelming. 

I was working every evening, I was working on the weekends, and even throughout each day, I was just exhausted. I started to feel like, well, if this is what success looks like, I don’t know if that’s what I want. You know, I say I value my family and my faith, and mostly if you look at my calendar, that doesn’t seem to have a space in there. And so thankfully, I heard this podcast episode by Michael Hyatt. He was promoting a book that he had just released called Free to Focus, and he was the first successful person I ever heard say, “You can win at work and succeed at life. You do not have to choose.” He calls it the double win. And it struck me—this whole book is about how to do that and about his experience. 

I had actually had a female partner in my firm several years prior when I was pregnant with my first child tell me that I was going to have to choose: I could either be a mom or I could have a successful career, but I was going to have to sacrifice something. And so here, several years later, to have somebody else say, “That’s not true,” completely shifted my paradigm. That’s where it started: to have someone say, “No, that’s not true, and here’s how you approach that differently.” That’s what started the journey. It was really just a personal journey for me to get my life under control and to feel like I could not be sacrificing any longer. Especially when what we were creating was something that I was really excited about and wanted to make happen, but not at the expense of everything else in my life. So that’s where it began. 

That’s where it began. That is so often where people get to that point and don’t take the step to change things. Well, “No, I mean, this is the way it’s been. This is what I’m doing. I’m making really good money. I am going to just have to power through this schedule I’ve got.” So I give you so much credit for saying yes, although it probably came to a head, but you said, yes, I need to make a change. So then, I mean, obviously you heard what Michael Hyatt said, you heard that you can have both, but then you had to do it, you had to start implementing it. How did that come about or look like or evolve over time?

Yes. A couple of real principles that I learned came from mindset shifts, like changing what you believe, that’s what’s going to change the way you behave. If you don’t believe it’s possible, you’re not going to do it. So that’s where it started, this kind of, “Oh, somebody can do this. What does that mean? What does that look like?” So there were a couple of key shifts. One was realizing I shouldn’t be trying to get everything done, I should be trying to get the right things done. I had this belief that someday I would catch up. Someday, when this person comes back from maternity leave, when we get that project, when we fill this open position, after this thing wraps up, you know, this perpetual idea that then it’ll slow down, then I’ll be caught up. I had that belief and I had to change it to say, “No, that’s not true. It will never happen. You will never be caught up. You have to stop trying to do that and start focusing on what are the right things to do. What is your role? What are your gifts and strengths? What is the unique contribution that you make? What are the priorities we’ve agreed on personally and professionally, and let some of this other stuff go. Get rid of it, delegate it to somebody else, find a way to automate it, but stop believing that there will be some magical day where it is all done.” So that was one of the big shifts. 

Another big shift in my thinking was—and this is tricky for an accountant who’s been tracking time to the tenth of an hour for at that point, almost two decades—the belief that more hours equal more productivity. That is not true. More productivity comes from managing your energy and your focus. And as soon as I understood that and learned how to apply it, that’s when I realized I can actually get more done in less time if I am focused and leverage my energy. It’s not just about managing time—not all hours of the day are created equally. Our energy flexes throughout the day. We can do things to replenish our energy. We do certain things that totally drain us, but when we try to manage time, we think of it as if it’s all equal. So that was a huge mindset shift for me. So those are the two kind of core beliefs that had to change. We can talk more, I’ll let you decide where you want to go next. But then there were certain things, once I understood and believed it, that I had to start doing differently as a result.

So far, I think I’m fact-checking okay. I think I’m okay on the story. The few things you said that I completely agree on, well, everything you say I completely agree on. But one of the things that I’ve been saying a lot lately, and honestly, I don’t know if I got this from you in the past or not, but I love that leaning into your passions, your skills, where your time is best suited, because I think we as a profession have a hard time with that. We want to control everything. I think that’s a personality of us in the accounting profession. “This is my client. I’ve got to do everything with them. I’ve got to be the one to answer. I’ve got to check my own email.” Whatever it is, it’s just, “I have to do, I have to do,” when in reality, a lot of those things you said, we can automate, delegate, or eliminate. Those things alone can make us a lot more efficient and probably keep us at a higher energy level because we’re doing the things we love. And so I think that’s great.

Yes. What you’re describing there within that framework you mentioned in my intro that I created, the Simple ScaleUp System, we call that “Human Intelligence.” It’s when you understand your gifts, your strengths, and your unique abilities and you leverage them, you’re more effective and fulfilled. We call it a turbocharger—it’s like this additional, optional add-on to a vehicle that will make the same vehicle, with the same fuel, produce even more output. You don’t have to have a turbocharger, but when you do, it just enhances what’s already there. It’s like finding $20 in your coat pocket. It was there, you just didn’t know it. That’s the next level I would say, Randy: managing your energy and your focus, stop trying to get everything done and do the right things, and then if you can even go a step further and understand the way you think, feel, and take action—the three different parts of your mind, we use your CliftonStrengths, your Enneagram, and your Colby—leverage that to decide what you do and how you do it. It’s exponentially more effective as well.

Yeah, we’ve used CliftonStrengths finders, and that was one of the most impactful things when we did this as a company group. We all got together and everybody found out what their one of the four… you know, whatever it is. The Doer—The Get Stuff Done—The Relationship Builders, The Influencers, and The Strategic Thinkers. I think I got that. But man, when you see that, what we did is we broke into four corners of the room. Each corner had the group you fell into. You were sitting in that corner and then talked amongst yourselves. The person running this said, “Okay, now look at the other groups.” It was common sense, but I looked around and I go, “Wow, this company goes nowhere if everybody’s sitting in this corner where I’m at right now. We run so much better when each group is able to concentrate on what their passions and skills are, this group gets to concentrate, that group, and that.” It’s like a goosebump moment for me when I think back to that, and over the years, I’ve started calling this, whether it makes sense or not, “living at the intersection of your passions and your skills.” That’s where I feel I live, and man, I don’t feel like I work. I feel energized all the time, so thank you for sharing that story. I appreciate that. 

So I know in the past when I’ve heard you talk, you’ve talked about this and the positive impact it’s had on you and what that created, but then you went a step further, and it was not just you starting to do this, you rolled it out to the team. How did that work and the impact of that?

Yes. As I mentioned, that podcast sparked this kind of thing for me personally. It was never a journey to change my firm or impact the profession or, you know, what eventually became a coaching program we have with small businesses and nonprofit leaders. It was a survival mechanism. But what happened was when I started implementing the practices of setting a daily Big Three—what are the most important things to do today—[and] a weekly Big Three—what’s most important this week, planning my week ahead, reflecting on the prior week, managing energy through rhythms and boundaries, all these different things. When I started to do them, my team noticed. I don’t think I was a flake before, but they noticed: “What are you doing? You’re showing up differently. You’re less frazzled. You’re dropping fewer balls. You’re spending more time doing fun things in the evenings and weekends.” And really one of the first decisions I made, one of the first boundaries I put in place was I’m no longer working nights and weekends. 

Nice.

So that was very evident to my team. That had been my default before, so what happened when I made that decision, is then, that thought would creep in during the day, something else comes up that I wasn’t planning on: “I guess I’ll just finish that tonight. Oh, wait, I don’t work nights anymore, so what am I going to do? I either need to get something else off my plate, renegotiate a commitment I already made, or find another way.” And every once in a while, I make an intentional exception to work a little later. That happens, but that’s not the default anymore. So that just naturally was apparent to my team, and they started asking, what are you doing? So I shared with them. We all got the book, started, there’s a planner, a physical planner that Michael Hyatt created called the Full Focus Planner that I’m now certified to teach and use within, our whole firm uses it, we use it within our coaching program. 

Anyway, we started rolling it out just within our executive team, and then within our leadership team, and then eventually to our whole team. Then I’d speak about it at a breakout session at a conference and that would lead to private trainings with other firms, it’s just gone on and on and on—that was never my intention. It was just so incredibly impactful for me and my team. It was about teaching them the mindset shifts that we already talked about, and then the behavioral shifts: planning what you’re going to do this quarter, this week, this day, and setting rhythms and boundaries in place to automate some of the things you want to get done in your life. Like if you have a time in the morning when you want to take a walk, for me, it’s take a walk, do devotions, drink my coffee, do my personal budgeting app—those things that sometimes we want to get done, but we can’t figure out how to fit them into our life? You put them together into these routines, you just stack these habits together and it changes your ability to get things done because it automates it. It’s those types of things: implementing these practices of essentially the full focus system first, and teaching our team to do it as well, and what we found was that eventually we could get more done in less time. 

But just like for me, that first boundary I set in place personally was I don’t work nights and weekends anymore, the first boundary we set in place at the firm level was we don’t work more than 50 hours a week during tax season. Then you’ve got to figure out what do we have to do, to manage our energy and our focus so we can still get all this stuff done. So that’s how it cascaded very organically because it made such an impact on my ability to show up, and get things done, and have a personal life as well.

Which is hugely important. Let’s talk about that 50-hour week for a second, because somebody might be thinking, okay, so what they did is they just put everything on extension and everything got done later. Were you getting more work out the door in this less time that you had, or how did that work?

Well, to tell you the whole story…

Yeah!

The first year we did it was 2020, and if it hadn’t been for COVID extending the due date, we would have been in big trouble. So we capped the hours, and people were really pretty good about capping the hours, stopping at 50. What we had was some people who weren’t as good at managing their energy and focus to get more done in the 50 hours they were working.  Coming out of that, towards the end of 2020, we had to think, “Okay, well, was that just something we tried and it didn’t work? Or are we going to double down and figure out what we need to do differently to make this happen?” And as an executive team and as a leadership team, we had all experienced it personally, that we could do this. And so we were like, we’re not giving up. We need to double down, and we’re going to do more training, we’re going to do more one-on-one coaching, we’re going to get more visibility on how people are doing—not so that we can penalize them if they go over 50 hours, but so we can coach them and guide them on how to change their beliefs and their habits so they don’t have to.

Because the thing about time is that we think by putting in more hours, we’re getting more done, and there’s tons of research that shows that’s not true. You actually go backwards in effectiveness, especially after 50, 55 hours—it kind of drops off like a cliff. So we think we’re getting more done, but we really aren’t. So why are we doing this at the expense of quality of service to our clients, our own personal lives and our families, our health? Why are we doing this if it’s not even effective? 

And so we really believed that, we did experience it ourselves. So we just put more effort into the training and the coaching. So 2021 was our second busy season doing this, and that’s when we saw the results. In that January through April timeframe, our team cut 2,500 total hours and we increased our billable hours by something like 1,300. So let me say that again: Total hours, down 2,500; billable up 1,300, when you compare the same group of people in the same timeframe. So we absolutely got more done in less time. We also decided some things weren’t the right things to do right now. We don’t need to do these things in this season, we don’t need to do them this way, we can automate some of these things, we eventually got to the point where that became so effective that using time as a measurement for anything became pretty irrelevant. But it was a journey, and for sure in 2020, we were grateful for the COVID extension.

Well, you just mentioned time. Let’s talk about that because you said billable hours, but I think at this point you are no longer tracking hours. How did that transition happen?

Right, yes. So we stopped tracking time on November 1st, 2022. That’s the date that Forge became a thing. We split off from a firm called TDT CPAs and Advisors—that’s the firm I started right out of college, built my career there, became the managing partner there, and eventually, we just had these two very different business models within the firm, and we had a unanimous decision to split. TDT remains a very successful tax firm, very rooted in Southeast Iowa, and the audit practice that I had built, and then the virtual CFO and controller practice that I had launched, they were serving clients virtually all over the country, just in a completely different model. So we split.

And we had in our three-year vision at that time, a vision around eliminating time entry, but it wasn’t in our one-year horizon, until we got the quote from the software company to stand up our time and billing system again as Forge, and I thought, you know what, never mind. We’re not doing that. The time is now. So we decided we’re just not going to buy a new time and billing system as Forge when we don’t want that long-term. We decided to split around the end of April of ’22, and it was effective November 1st. That was our time horizon to be prepared. But we’d been preparing for it for years because we had been pricing all of our work in advance in those two service areas for years and years. We knew what we were going to bill people, we knew the scope of things, we’d been value pricing. There’s a lot of things that had predicated that—it wasn’t like we just ripped off the Band-Aid and we’re like, well, let’s figure this out now. There were a lot of steps already in place. 

The more we had our team getting more done in less time because they could manage their focus and energy, the less effective a measure of value became using time, and the more things we could find to automate, same thing. If you do this and you keep billing based on WIP, your revenue could actually go down because there’s less going into the WIP, but they’re still getting the same things. That just didn’t make sense to me. So anyway, that’s what we did. We’ve been almost three years now, two and a half years with no timesheets.

I assume people are enjoying that internally?

Yes, actually, you know, it’s interesting. I thought I would get like, you know, they’d lift me up, you know, and cheer me on. There was some of that, like people were thrilled to not have the administrative burden of entering time and reviewing WIP and all of that. But one thing I hadn’t really expected is, there are a few people on our team who, based on kind of their personality and their wiring, really missed the metric: “How will you know how good I’m doing if you can’t see my hours or my utilization rate or my realization?” And so we had to help people understand the different metrics that we were focusing on, like revenue per client, profit per person—those types of things—net promoter score, client renewal rates, different measures of outcomes, not inputs. That was a shift. That was probably the only thing that surprised me about people’s reactions to it. There are all kinds of things we can talk about, too, of lessons learned, but we’re definitely not going back there for sure. That’s never been a thought that’s crossed our minds.

Yeah, that’s the mindset thing you said earlier. It’s just, hey, this is the mindset, this is what we know. We know hours. We know how I can show how valued I am by the hours and just getting people’s mindset to change. Yes, there are different metrics. There are different ways we can look at this. It’s just, change is scary to I think everybody, in reality, and so I can see a little bit of pushback on that, but it sounds like you’ve gotten past that, which is nice.

Yeah, and I will, just for context, too, for your listeners: TDT was about a 70-person firm. Forge, what we became when we split off those two departments, and then we added management consulting when we became Forge, 40 people. We’re not talking about a shift of hundreds of people within a few months, but a relatively small, nimble team requires a lot of leadership and change management to do anything. But just for a little context, that’s what we’re talking about there. I had talked to a couple of other firms who had done this before, what lessons they had learned. One firm, I think, had been timesheet-free for like a decade already when we did this. So there are people out there doing these kinds of things, but not a lot.

No, there isn’t. I actually talked to somebody recently who was a major partner of one of the top 10 firms. He said he was talking to somebody in the Big Four, and they said, “Hey, the first one of us four to figure out how to get rid of timesheets is the one that’s going to win.” I don’t know if you win in the profession, but that’s what they said. I think everybody’s looking at it, trying to figure it out. I think AI is going to impact that as well. My concern is, with what you did—I’m not concerned about what you did—but what you did, my concern is other people look at that and they’ll say, “Oh, well, we’re working less, so we can’t charge as much. We’re more efficient, so we have to pass that on to the client.” You’re delivering probably more value in that time, and that’s another mindset thing that we have to get past. Was that ever an issue that you had to deal with?

I would say not necessarily for us, because I’m a faculty member for Upstream and I also do speaking and coaching, you know, different people, that’s one of the frequently asked questions, like, what about that? How do you manage that? But I think that one of the things that we’ve really had to understand and work through is the mindset shift around inputs versus outcomes:tThat how long this takes us does not equate to the value that the client receives. And we had to stop thinking that way, which I get it. It’s hard when we’ve been doing that for hundreds of years as a profession. It’s a huge shift in thinking. One of the things we had to really learn to manage was scope and change orders, because although our engagement letters have always said, if something comes up out of scope, we’ll talk to you about it first before we move forward with the work, the reality was it was usually caught when somebody reviewed the WIP after the fact, and then we’d go and bill the client and kind of hope they didn’t get mad about it. So when you don’t have a timesheet, you don’t have a safety net to catch those extra hours on a timesheet when you’re reviewing WIP. So we really had to make sure our team understood that when we price things in advance, it’s for a set scope of work. If we do something beyond that scope, we have to do a change order to get paid for it. That was something that really had to be built into the process as well.

There are some other things I want to get to and we’re already at a half hour, which is fine. I’m going to keep going if you’ve got time?

Yes, absolutely, keep going.

But I want to cut to today because before we started recording, you told me what the hours were this past tax season. So let’s fast forward from 2022 when timesheets stopped to, how’d this last tax season go?

Yeah this last tax season, we finally got to the point where our tax team really didn’t go over 40 hours. Partners and all were able to keep within that boundary. Some of it is what you mentioned earlier, Randy, oh you just extended everything. Yeah. I mean, we do extend a lot of things.

Which I think is great.

Yeah! That’s part of the process: deciding what needs to be done when and what could be extended. But a lot of it comes down to managing energy and focus, which are daily choices that people have to make. So it takes time for people to change what they think, it takes time for them to change their behaviors and collectively as a team to build different paradigms and systems and processes to do that. But yeah, so five years after the initial 50-hour cap, the COVID year, we were able to get to 40. 

Nice. What you just said about extending, that’s something I’ve always been a proponent of forever because, you know, why do we try to get everything done in 75 days or whatever the timeframe is, when we have the rest of the year, and as advisors, and you’re advisors, you know the answers already on most of the stuff because you’re doing tax planning ahead of time. So why do we have this, you know, it’s not an artificial deadline, but a deadline that’s only set there because it’s set there. In reality, we don’t need to. So yeah, I love the fact that you stretch out the seasonality of the tax season as well.

Alright, so that’s that. I mean, there’s a lot in-between we could have talked about, but I do want to get to a few other things, because I’ve seen other things you’ve been doing. One of those things, and we mentioned this in the intro, is that you’ve pretty much taken this knowledge and what you’re doing, and you’ve started your own system now, the Simple ScaleUp System. Explain what that is and who you’re using it with.

The Simple ScaleUp System is a proprietary framework that I created—it’s essentially a business intelligence and leadership development system. So it’s a set of practices, principles, and tools—a body of content—that is really designed to help leaders of small businesses and nonprofit organizations, including CPA firms, we’ve got some clients that are also CPA firms, but to really help them be equipped to lead the bigger business that their vision entails. So you think about focusing on growing and what you need to do for growth initiatives, and marketing, and sales, and all of a sudden, when that works, you have a different business. When your business is larger, it gets more complex, you have more people, and that’s a whole different thing that requires different systems and structures to actually lead.

So there are really four main parts of a business that you need to focus on when you’re scaling to the next level or when you’re leading that business and you’ve already gotten to that size: It’s finance, leadership, productivity, and people. And essentially, this whole system and all the tools in it are just a reverse engineering of what we did to build our firm, to build the audit practice originally, to build the virtual CFO practice, to carve off and become Forge. These are the things that I learned along the way and how we did things. It was created when we launched Forge, that was part of our vision, to add management consulting. We were continuing the financial side of things with virtual CFO, controller, audit, and tax, but what those services do is give visibility on what’s happening in the organization—if we do our job right, we’re translating the story that the money tells about what’s happening in the organization. 

What I was finding was more and more clients were starting to ask, “So what do I do? How do I make decisions? If this is the problem that the money reveals, how do I solve it?” These were questions about capacity, leadership decisions, leveraging resources, managing people’s energy and focus, knowing their gifts and strengths. Instead of taking a bunch of one-off lunches and coffees and saying, “Well, I did this and I’ve done that, and here’s what I use for this,” I just set out to create a framework that we could use as the content basis for our management consulting practice. That’s what the Simple ScaleUp System is. And then, after we created it, we beta-tested delivering it through one-on-one executive coaching, private consulting with leadership teams, and a group workshop format. They all worked, because I needed to prove if these tools even worked if Courtney’s not the leader, ‘cause that’s the only proof I’ve got, that they worked for me. Thankfully, they did.

But it just so happened that the model of the group coaching program was the one we chose. That was the strategy. It really aligns with my passion and proficiency. I come from a family of teachers and preachers. I love being able to teach and lead a workshop. I love having people together in person, building community. So we turned our primary management consulting delivery method at this point into Scaling Leader, which is a group business coaching and leadership development program. I do a limited number of private coaching and private consulting engagements throughout the year, but most of the effort is going into that one-to-many business model of a group program.

Makes sense. And you did say there are some CPA firms that you’ve worked with on the system, right?

Yeah, and I’ve done private training with a lot of firms specifically around productivity and focus, you know, helping them achieve similar goals or visions to reduce the hours—they want guidance on how to do that. I am certified in the Full Focus Szystem, so I’m able to teach that. Then we also, within the Simple ScaleUp System, we’ve built some additional tools to help bolster that work. So we can pair those together. Then we have some firms in our Scaling Leader group coaching program as well.

Nice. Alright, so I honestly can never hear enough of the story that you share and the way you’ve done this with yourself and the firm and the hours that you’ve gotten down. Forty hours! I didn’t even know about the forty until you told me today, so that was amazing. That just puts a big smile on my face. Here’s my question to you: You’ve done all this. You’re helping others do this. You’ve obviously done it for yourself. You’ve gained more time personally . What are your outside of work passions? Now that you beat the system, you found out how to have a work-life balance that people don’t think we can do, what do you do with that time?

Well, I love to travel. My husband and I have always been road trippers. We’ve got three kids, and we’ve turned them into great little travelers. So that’s a huge passion of mine. I love to travel, road trip, take vacations. I also am a huge fan of clean stand-up comedy. Nate Bargatze is one of my favorites.

YES! Oh, he’s awesome. 

He is, and so I listen to his podcast every week. I’ve been to so many of his live shows.

Have you?

Yes. 

Oh, I’ve never done that.

Oh, you’ve got to go, Randy. You’ve got to go sometime. He’s actually working on a movie right now, so I’ve heard that he might not have a tour again for a few years. So you’ve got to get out there this year.

That’s right. He’s touring this year, I know. So I’ve been looking at all the dates. I think we’re just going to travel somewhere and go, because he’s at the United Center here in Chicago, and my wife’s like, “That’s so big. Can’t we see him somewhere else?” We have to do that. When you said that, you just lit me up. I really want to do that this year.

Yes, I hope you do. Very fun. Those are a couple of things that I love to do. Then I also just love that each morning I start the morning taking a walk around my neighborhood, listening to my devotions and my podcasts, drinking my coffee, and thinking. It’s just like a completely different way to start my day versus, you know, I used to sleep until the last possible minute and snooze the alarm and kind of come into my day already kind of frazzled. I remember my mom, she taught second grade for years and would always say, “I can’t wait until I retire so I can enjoy my coffee in the morning, just in my chair.” I thought, you know what? I don’t have to wait until I retire. That’s one of the things when we had a launch party for Forge back in 2022, that’s one of the things I told my team, my vision for this firm is that we can be successful personally and professionally, that we’re not waiting for retirement to do the things we want to do—that we have enough margin in our lives to do those things now. So that’s one of the things for me that’s just a simple, everyday thing that I get to do and enjoy.

 Yep, and again, that mindset: “I don’t have to wait.” We’re recording this about two weeks before our conference that’s coming up, and I’m writing a keynote right now—I’ve been doing this since January, so I’ve been working on it for a long time—but mindset is a big part of it, so I love the conversation about mindset.

Alright, so last thing then. If people want to hear more about what you’re doing, learn more about the Simple ScaleUp System, or just see what you’re doing, where’s a good place for them to look?

So for me, directly, I’m on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active. I usually post a video, so connect with Courtney De Ronde on LinkedIn. Then our website is ForgeAhead.com. You can find links to Scaling Leader, the Simple ScaleUp System, our events, and other things there at ForgeAhead.com, or I’d love to connect on LinkedIn.

Sounds great. Courtney, this has been years in the making. I’m glad we got it done today. I really appreciate you being on the show. It did not disappoint me in any manner at all. I love hearing your story, so thank you so much.

Well, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Always great to chat, Randy.