Today our guest is Dave Hartley. Dave is a partner in charge of advisory at Anders CPAs and Advisors. Anders is a firm I’m very well acquainted with, been in their office quite a few times. They’re a top 75 firm out of the St. Louis—I was gonna say St. Louis area, but actually out of St. Louis, downtown St. Louis. And actually a great, I’m going on a side track already, but a great office with a nice tap, a few beers on tap in one of their rooms in the office.

We do have a bar in the office. That is correct.

Which is pretty cool. You know, besides what I mentioned there at the firm, Dave also hosts his own podcast, which is But Who’s Counting Podcast. He recently mentioned to me while we were talking, as I am, kind of a reluctant podcast host, was just kind of thrown into it, but I think enjoys it as much as I’ve enjoyed it. So Dave, I’ll stop rambling. Welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thanks, Randy. It’s great to be here. Yeah, I’ve got a point of view on some things, so excited to share it with you and your audience. It seems like every time I interact with you, we have a good time, so I think that’s probably going to be the case here.

Yeah, I expect to. It’s a lot of fun. And as I’m sure you can attest to, just being a podcast host, you learn so much. Every time I talk to somebody, I get so excited because I learn something new. And I assume that’s the same with you.

Absolutely. Yeah, we’re on season three, ati this year for But Who’s Counting, we’re focusing on innovation. That’s our theme for the year. So already we’re four episodes into the season and some of the things and the perspectives on innovation that we’ve gotten as part of that, it’s been mind-blowing.

That’s cool. That’s fun. So we can talk about anything. In fact, I gave you a little bio, but why don’t you give us a little more background before we jump into things?

Yeah, happy to. So. Dave Hartley, I lead the advisory practice at Anders, and most firms define advisory differently, so just so everybody knows, basically for us, that’s everything except audit and tax and internal administration. So for us, the biggest parts of our advisory practice, I think we’ve got 115 people in our advisory practice now. Of that, about half of that is our virtual CFO practice. Many of those folks are spread all around the country. So we’ve got team members in, I think, 26, 27 states. The other major chunk is our technology practice. So we outsource and co-source technology for small to mid-sized companies. And then we have other things, like we help with recruiting, forensics, valuation, litigation services, and we have a great healthcare niche, which is doing really well for us. So that’s a little bit about Anders. 

My background, I’ve actually been in the profession for over three decades now, which is crazy. I don’t feel that old. But I actually started Big Four, so I did a decade in Big Four, did audit for a while, transitioned over to consulting, then a couple of other hops. And then I actually left the CPA profession and I went to technology.

One of those, huh?

Yeah, I went to the technology side of the house. And then the obvious question that I’m sure your listeners are thinking, which I get all the time, which is, why did you come back? And so I did. I led technology for a public company for six years, and it was a great experience. And I think being on the other side of the desk has made me a much better advisor because I know how hard it is, because I’ve done it. And I’ve had the sleepless nights, I’ve had project implementations go wrong, I’ve had employee issues to deal with. So all of that I think is great. 

And then I joined Anders just over five years ago, and kind of came back to the CPA world. So for me, it’s a perfect blend of the technology aspect and how that’s changing the profession combined with, I was in audit back in the day, so I kind of understand different things about how things are done across the firm. So anyway, that’s about 60 seconds about me and Anders as well.

So you’re a success story then for the profession, left and came back. I kind of like that. So one other thing I took out of that, which, you know, I’ll have to apologize for, is it sounds like you work closely with Jody Grunden then. 

I do. I get to work with Jody on almost a daily basis. So we don’t agree on everything and I love him like a brother, but you know, me, Jody, Adam, you know, we’re all “best idea wins.” So we all put our stuff on the table and sometimes I win, sometimes I don’t. But yeah, it’s a lot of fun, and the virtual CFO practice has brought a lot to the firm and I think it’s going to be a big part of our future.

Yeah. And so I’m sure anybody that’s listening to the show, if you listen for a long time, Jody’s been a guest in the past and Jody ran a virtual CFO firm that merged in with Anders, what, like three years ago or is my timing off?

Just over two years ago.

Two years ago. Okay.

Actually, I think it would be interesting for your listeners, kind of the backstory behind that, that we actually had a really strong outsourced accounting practice already, and we refer to it as OAS (outsourced accounting services). And it was great, but as we stepped back and we go through a lot of strategic planning, strategic road mapping at Anders, and one of the things that we recognized is that business over time, the margins were going to be compressed, just because it was becoming more and more of a commodity. So we knew we needed to go out and find that differentiating factor, which for us was the virtual CFO part of it. 

And so we went out with the goal of finding the best virtual CFO firm in the country, we found Jody and Adam and the team at Summit CPA Group, and we were able to work out a deal where they joined us just about two years ago. And so for us as a firm, a major part of our advisory practice, and we think just the value that virtual CFO services and the general shift in advisory and in CPAs from being reactive to proactive, we think that all plays in perfectly with sort of where the profession is going.

Yeah, and I love that “reactive.” Wait, say it again. 

From reactive. I mean, when I think about…

Sorry, I was going to say it backwards. 

When I was in audit, that was one of the things that frustrated me, was that all I was doing was looking back. 

Right. 

And I think we’ve done that a lot. You prepare a tax return, you know, it’s basically here’s what happened, we’re going to account for it, we’re going to calculate tax on it. And I think the future of the profession is much more of that proactive lens. 

Oh yeah. For sure.

Making our clients’ businesses better. And so I think what we’re doing as part of our virtual CFO team and a lot of our practice areas, and including, we even do that as part of our audit and tax practices as well. But anyway, we think that’s, you know, very much where we’re headed in the future.

Yeah. Well, that brings me to probably the point that I wanted to bring up on this whole conversation is, I love one of the taglines that you have on your LinkedIn profile, which is, CPA innovator, podcast host, and the final thing, “building the future ready firm at Anders.” And I love that because that’s part of what you were just explaining. What is the future and how do we be future ready? So when you think future ready, when you think Anders, which is a top 75 firm, I’m guessing anything you talk about, even at a large firm like that, can equate to other firms. So what are the key things that you think firms need to be equipped with, to be future ready? 

Well, I think one of the underlying things is you’ve got to be ready to change. Your team, your leadership has to be open to actually assessing the landscape and being willing to make changes, which is not a strong suit of the CPA profession. So you’ve got a lot of firms that have been doing the same thing for a long time, and it’s even, I fully respect the team at Anders that had the vision: They basically in 2018 decided that they were going to get very serious about advisory services. So, and this predates me at the firm, but they said, we don’t have anybody internally with the time and or capacity to really lead this. So we need to go find somebody. 

So they came out, recruited me in. I looked at where Anders was in the great firm that it is, and I’d always admired it from afar. And so to have the opportunity to go there and be part of this, that to me is one of the great characteristics of a future ready firm, which is we’re looking at the landscape, we’re constantly assessing it, and then we’re going to make moves and adjustments. So right now we’re going through a fairly major project where we’re doing a strategic road mapping effort, where we’re actually looking at everything about the firm in terms of how we’re structured. Should we be organized the way that we are? You know, our compensation? How do we do that? Because generally in CPA firms, there’s sort of a, you’re a partner or you’re not, and if you’re not a partner, then you’re just working for the partners. So how do we change that mindset? How do we get our team members to really feel like they’re sharing in the success of the firm going forward? So I think that openness to change is super important. 

The second part of that, I think is. Okay, well, in order to do that, you’ve got to be seeking out and constantly learning. So, the leadership team, we all read a lot, but the other thing is that we go to conferences. We’re a member of LEA Global, so that’s our alliance that we’re a part of. We network with those firms, we learn from those firms, we go to conferences, like Randy, like yours. I was there last year and I learned a great deal there. And that’s part of how you learn those things and then you bring them back, and you start to think about how they could impact your organization. And I think that probably the third element of that is you’ve got to be serious about technology. You’ve got to recognize that technology is going to have a significant impact on the profession, and you’ve got to start dealing with that now. 

The challenge to all of that. Is that it’s a great time to be a CPA firm. There’s no burning platform. You know, firms are doing well, firms are growing, the market is demanding our services, we’re highly trusted. So there’s all those things. Everybody’s like, ah, we’ll ride this out for a while. But we are of the opinion that we’ve got to start proactively making those moves before somebody comes and forces us to.

Yeah, I agree with that completely because it is a great time to be a CPA. And I really want to stress the fact on this podcast often, that it is such a great profession and we need to attract more people into it. And so that’s something at some point I want to talk about, but I want to go through that list a little bit that you talked about. So compensation: There’s a couple things. You know, you hear this quite often, you know, so there are many people that go into the profession, they don’t really, you know, if this is the right way to say it, care to be a partner or not. That’s not the ultimate goal of a lot of people, probably less of a goal than it was in the past, unless I hear things wrong, but that’s what I’m hearing. But they still, you know, should be rewarded. So when you look at a comp structure, do you have a plan in place now that still needs to evolve that you think is starting to change the way comp is looked at?

Well, we do, and it’s good. But I think that’s the challenge. So when we look at it, what we’re hearing from our team members is, so we have a bonus structure where we do bonuses, and those are based on the contributions that people make to the firm. So we’ve got your base compensation, but then we try to recognize our high performers, and we try to really do that. So that’s good. What we’re hearing from our professionals though is, I want more control over that. In some ways, it’s kind of a “trust me” system that, and I sit on the staff comp committee, so I know the discussions that happen and how we try to do that. But more and more of our team members are saying, I want to know with certainty, kind of what that looks like. What are the things that I can do and how that can work? So we’re stepping back and reassessing and really rethinking everything about how we do compensation, and how we can make it more impactful for our team members, for their engagement and their motivation, and then also to make sure that they understand and feel confident in how they’re going to be compensated.

And when you talk about overall the firm in general, but that compensation is, I think, a big part of it, I think transparency is important and sometimes, you know, historically and even me personally, historically, I had a hard time, you know, sharing numbers of the firm and sharing comp numbers and all that. But I think, of course, people knew, not that the partnership model has to be the one that exists, but if people knew the potential earnings, especially when you get to the partner level, and I think it’s often been kept this secret, oh, you’re not going to tell people what partners are making. Do you guys have any type of policy around that transparency with these types of numbers?

Well, from our positions that we post, we’re required to disclose, you know, comp ranges and all that kind of stuff, but we don’t have a great way of being transparent about that, but we do have, like, you know, I have colleagues that will go on an amazing vacation and they’ll come back and they don’t want to talk about it because they fear that it’ll make people jealous. And I’m like, no, you need to talk about it because if we want people to be excited to be here and to be a partner, if they don’t see the lifestyle that we actually have, then they’re not going to know how great this is. 

But Randy, I did actually explore this topic because one of the, when we talk about the health of the profession, one of the issues is the pipeline, and one of the aspects of that issue is starting salaries. And that’s another thing that the profession’s not great at, because you look at, well, I could start at an accounting firm making 55, but if I went in analytics or supply chain, I’d come out at 70. So we’re losing a lot of great students that are choosing to go elsewhere. But the untold part of that, which a lot of this is, we need to get better at telling our story. The thing is though, you may start lower, but then when you look at the long-term earning potential by being a CPA, it’s tremendous. 

Yes.

And it accelerates at a much greater, and actually I did a presentation at Washington University here in St. Louis, and I was talking with the professors afterwards, and they’re like, yeah, we fight that battle every day. And so, they’ve actually produced some statistics and things, and some survey data to show that actually staying in the CPA profession long-term is an immensely rewarding career.

Yep. But I don’t think people coming in, and again, I’m old, so I don’t think like these people. I don’t know how they think. But what I hear is they don’t want to wait. They don’t want to have that, you know, payment 25 years down the road. They want it today. So how do you address that then?

And that’s exactly what we’re studying. We’re looking at that, and we’re spending a lot of time on this because, and you referred to this earlier, this is really important—this is kind of one of the core elements of how things work. And so if we screw this up, that’s going to be a problem. So we’re spending a lot of time on it, but that is an issue. Like, so I’m as an advisory leader, I’m going out and I’m trying to attract sort of non-CPAs to join the firm. And when they hear about the firm, they go, I described the retirement plan for them and all that kind of stuff. And they’re like, okay, so let me do the math on that. You’re saying I would get paid in 20 to 25 years, and when you look at sort of the reality of the business world today is when people are comparing offers, that is not very attractive, because the likelihood of somebody, picking something and saying, yep, I’m going to be here for 20 years in today’s environment is very low. 

So we’re looking at that and trying to figure out how we can set up a structure that fairly and equitably compensates people for their contributions while not having to, now we’ll have some vesting and, you know, those types of things, but in general, it’s not that you just have to cross your fingers and hope you’re going to stay here for your entire career.

Alright. And I think this kind of ties into that. And we didn’t talk about this ahead of time, but just structure of a firm. I mean, you hear this all the time now, is the partnership model dead? Does it need to evolve? Does it need to change? Do you have an opinion on that? 

I do. And that’s one of the issues that we’re looking at. Because historically, CPA firms have been consensus driven and especially at smaller firms, every partner is involved in every aspect of the business. And as firms grow, then it becomes more important to specialize. and now let’s say you’re a firm with a hundred partners—Anders right now has 40. But when you think about like making new partners in certain aspects of the Like there are people within our firm that do their thing really well, but they don’t know other parts of the firm. So therefore it’s becoming increasingly harder for that. But when you think about it, a lot of the partners grew up in smaller firms where you could do that. And so that’s a big change and an adjustment to say, Hey, being a partnership where we strive for consensus, that just doesn’t work anymore. One of the key differentiators of the future, which I firmly believe is the ability to rapidly make good decisions based on data. And I think that in a partnership model, that model really struggles with that. And so I think that’s one of the things that we’re looking at as well, is trying to figure out for the, you know, the future ready firm, what does that look like? It may or may not be a partnership, but those are the difficult questions and the issues that we’re wrestling with. So no conclusions yet, but I think firms need to be willing, at least to step back and say, does this still work anymore? 

Yeah. And I think that is much, just as important as anything else. Cause if you don’t, we, and you mentioned it earlier, we are a very consistent profession. You know, consistency is a key thing we need to kind of, you know, especially when we’re looking at tax, we have to be consistent with what we’re doing. And I think we get so ingrained with that, that we build it into every part of the practice without even knowing it, you know, same as last year. Let’s just keep going. Same as last year. And the fact that we’re doing so well as a profession, you know, financially and that, why change? Well, ’cause if we don’t change, we’re going to have a big surprise coming down. So, the fact that Anders is proactively, as you said, when we’re talking to you about our clients, you know, being proactive rather than reactive, proactively looking at that, I think is awesome. 

Alright, so, I mean, we mentioned a little bit on the future of the profession and attracting people and getting them excited about it and all this and, I honestly, and anybody that listens to the podcast probably is tired of me talking about this, but I think it’s a huge issue and I think we need to do something about it. I just feel the billable hour is just so bad for everybody involved. This is my personal opinion, but for employees, you know, for clients, for mental health, for burnout, all this stuff. And so, I assume you guys track hours or bill by the hour on some projects. So what’s your opinion or do you think there’s something we need to change there?

So, Randy, I agree with you that I think it’s a fundamental issue in the profe ssion that we have to grapple with. Because the problem with the billable hour is it focuses on effort, not outcomes. And we have to shift the mindset to where we’re more focused on outcomes and not necessarily the effort that went into it. Now, let’s talk about that, because we’ve been, you know, a lot of people in the profession have been talking about that for a long time, and it’s like, hey, the chargeable hour still works. So, I think one of the things that’s going to be interesting, I think AI is the thing that finally kills the chargeable hour, and let me tell you why.

So when I think about up to this point, that basically, hours worked has been a reasonable approximation of value. So I can look at a work product and I can say that probably took 10 hours. That probably took 20 hours. And regardless of what firm you go to, that’s probably the same reasonable number, cause we all go through similar steps to produce the outcome. Now, what do we do when somebody figures out there’s a new tool out there, then instead of that taking 10 hours, we can now get that same outcome in four hours. Do you charge less? Well, if you’re stuck with we’re just gonna do chargeable hours, billable hours, then basically then are you gonna charge less? Or how are you gonna adjust to that going forward? So I think it causes this disruption. 

And then do we punish people? If somebody’s smart enough, if one of our team members is smart enough to figure out how to get the work done at 40% of what everybody else takes to get it done, do we punish that person because their chargeable hours are low? It’s like, it’s going to cause all this disruption that up to this point, we’ve been able to kind of get by, and now I think it’s going to raise a bunch of questions that people are really going to have to scratch their head out, which I think then when you think about value building and those types of things, I think is going to be critical going forward.

That being said, I’m still an advocate of tracking hours, because when you think about our business is—I know, we can argue about this—but, I believe that it’s important to know where your effort is going. And so I think that’s important to really understand your inventory, how your time’s being utilized and how we can make it better, because without that data, I can’t figure out where I should be applying some of these technologies. 

Won’t AI somehow help us do that without tracking in an hour? I don’t know. I don’t understand. 

So when you think about some of these practice management systems and where people are, shouldn’t it be able to take that out, look at your prior periods, figure out where that goes, and then basically, instead of it taking you an hour to do that, maybe it takes you 10 minutes a week to record your time. I do think we’ll get better at that and the systems will get better, but I think that underlying principle has value. 

So let me ask you this then, how much time does the firm spend tracking time? 

Too much, too much for sure. and so will we look for ways to minimize that and to bring that down? Absolutely. A hundred percent. And obviously there’s the, you’re calling the question of, It takes people a lot of time, couldn’t they be doing more valuable things with that time? 

Or have more free time. 

Or yeah, have more free time, which is another great thing about AI, which is I think instead of working a 45 hour week, now you can probably get it done in 35. What are you going to do with that extra time? I think that’s another great question to go through. But I think the value, you gotta do that, you know, it takes this amount of time, are we creating more value from that by those people investing that time? And that’s a fair argument, one hundred percent.

Okay. And so you see the problem, you see a solution coming, AI is somehow going to help us at least eliminate the, you know, selling our hours and more integrate selling the outcome of what we’ve just delivered to our clients. And I may be going on a tangent here, what’s going to happen though, because you’re always going to have the firm that is going to now drop the price because they’re able to do it faster, and they’re still going to have the mindset of the time. And now I spend less time, I got this done. And is there going to be this battle between, you know, firms on how that works? 

I think that is a great question. And I’m going to be fascinated to watch that over the next three, five, seven years. Because I think that is going to play out in the market, and I think we do have, what will the masses do? When you look at all of these firms, will they say, you know, “Man, it only took four hours, I’m only going to charge four hours for it,” and bring it down all the way, or will they say, “I’m investing in technology, so I need to charge a little bit more,” and they’ll discount it a little bit, or will they say, “No! We created the same value that we were creating before. Therefore, we need to shift to value billing and we need to charge X amount.” That to me is kind of one of the massive questions of the profession over the next few years to see what actually happens and how firms resolve that issue. 

Yeah, because what’ll happen is you’re just going to have it. And you talked at the beginning about, you know, a service line becoming commoditized, and seeing that the value wasn’t going to be there, from your standpoint, the billing value, I’m afraid that this could very well happen with this, and then people are just going to work more and more again, just to continue to get up to that same revenue that they were doing before. And that’s the backwards way to do it in my mind. 

And that comes into a play then too, so I’m going to pivot. And I go on these rants sometimes, but I’m going to pivot here. 

I’ll go with you. 

Alright, thank you. Because we talked offline, and I think this is important to this whole discussion we’re having now, we talked offline of the emphasis that Anders is putting work-life balance and mental health and burnout and avoiding these issues. So, do you want to explain a little bit what Anders is doing to educate and avoid people dealing with burnout? 

Yeah, I think we’re, you know, just as a profession, we have an image issue. And when you ask people in high school, in college, they’re going to tell you, I don’t want to do that because you just do the same thing over and over again, and you’ve got to work a boatload of hours, and I want to have better work-life balance. That’s kind of the coming in position for that. We as a profession have to combat that, and we have to change that image, and I think we’ve got to be much more visible about. A lot of different things, but that’s probably a whole other episode. 

No, for sure. 

So at Anders, we have our people team that is actively working on this issue. So we have employee resource groups that’s basically, different communities within the firm to provide support to them. I’m not sure if it was April or May, but basically mental health awareness. 

May. 

May is. So we’re doing a lot of programs as it relates to that. So we’re going to see that coming up. And just in general as a firm, the leadership team takes this seriously, and we recognize that we’ve got to figure out a better way. The unfortunate reality is that for our audit practices and our tax practices, we have this massive compression issue. So it would certainly help if we got some relief on the compression issue. But regardless, we have to figure out ways to get around that. And so I think, you know, and it’s a super high priority for the firm because we recognize our employee engagement, our reputation, you know, can we retain the amazing team members that we have today? We want to be able to do that. But then also the next generation of CPAs, how do we make them look at different firms and point to Anders and say, that’s the one I want to be a part of? 

Which actually, Randy, a little bit of a tangent, one of the interesting things is, actually, so my daughter did an internship at the firm, an audit internship at the firm in the spring, and so it was interesting for me because when she accepted, which, by the way, I introduced her to the recruiter, but I didn’t know, like, they were having discussions, she just told me one day, which I thought was fantastic. But then I really, that caused me to step back, and I’ve always thought about the future of the firm, but that really made me say, what’s the decisions that we’re gonna make today that my daughter, when we’re having dinner in 20 years, she’s going to say, “Dad, back in 2024, when you made the decision to… that changed everything.”

And so I think a lot about what is that decision? And when I think about these mental health, when I think about how many tax returns does somebody need to do? You know, what’s the number? And then beyond that, is it just because we need them to do the work and they’re no longer developing as a professional? How do we deal with that issue? But it made a lot of these big picture issues very relevant and real to me, when my daughter joined and now, actually, it appears she enjoyed her internship. It went well. They made her a full time offer in the audit practice. So she’s going to be starting next fall, which I’m super excited about as a parent. 

So that I think is just, those are the types of things that we’re thinking about as it relates to work-life balance, mental health, mental wellness, and we’re trying to do things about it. But I think that’s the, you know, that would be one of my calls to action, which is if your firm’s good at this, you need to be great. And you’ve got to figure out those other things. You’ve got to get better in this area. This has to be a point of emphasis. 

Yep, nope, that’s it, we can do a whole separate podcast just on, on that and attracting and retaining the next generation, which your daughter now is, helping with that next generation, so that’s awesome. And just as a side note, May is Stroke Awareness Month and Mental Health Awareness Month, and those are two passionate topics for me, so that’s why I knew those were in May. And as you know, our conference, Bridging the Gap, mental health awareness is a big topic that we discuss at that conference and avoiding burnout and all those kinds, just work-life balance in general, so.

Alright, well, I’m going to start wrapping up and I honestly would love to do this again because there’s so many other topics that you and I are both passionate about that we could go deeper into, but before I ask you a couple of final questions, any wrap-up you want to do on the discussion? 

I think just in general, I think firms, you know, hopefully if they’re listening to this podcast, these are the progressive firm leaders that are thinking about change, but I think there’s a whole lot of people who aren’t listening to this podcast and who aren’t thinking about change, and we’ve got to figure out a way to get these topics in front of people. So I applaud—I don’t know, you’re 150 plus in episodes, so you’re doing a great job getting the word out. There needs to be forums where we can share these ideas and push the profession forward. So I’m glad to be a part of this one and then trying to do my part to help make this a better thing for this current generation, but also the next generation.

That’s awesome. Alright. Well, before we wrap up. Well, you have listened to a few episodes, so you may know this already, but I’m going to ask you, you know, hey, we just talked about the profession and all that, but that’s not who you are. Who you are is your outside of work passions. So when you’re not working and helping Anders and helping the profession, what do you enjoy doing?

So I actually just went through this with John Garrett. And I was a guest on What’s Your “And?”, which should be coming out this summer. But mine is, I’m a huge music fan. And, so you can actually see I’ve got a signed record by Joe Walsh behind me. So that’s been a big part of my life, my family, and by the way, as I’ve grown older and I’ve started to go to concerts with my kids, And watch them sort of develop their love of music. And it may be different music that I’m into, which is totally fine. But seeing them come into that and being part of that and actually going back in the day, that’s how I got good at business development, because I realized that, you know, when you’re in Big Four, you become a senior manager and they’re like, go sell. And I’m like, I have no idea how to sell. But then I started really, how do I relate to my clients? I’m just going to ask them what music they’re into.

And then I find out that the controller of one of my clients is a huge Earth, Wind and Fire fan, and so the next time Earth, Wind and Fire comes to St. Louis, I reach out to the controller and say, hey, you want to go to the show together? The controller’s like, yeah, that’d be great, and so as a result of that, I figured out a way to personalize and use my love of music to actually benefit my career. And that’s what I talk about with John Garrett, his discussion. But for me, that’s my thing, family and music of all sorts, especially concerts.

Yeah. And anybody that’s listened to this show knows that I’m a big fan of John Garrett. Although I was always asking this question before I knew that there was actually a name for it, What’s Your “And?”, and I was fortunate enough to be on John’s podcast about four years ago, and yeah, he is just so awesome. He spoke at our conference last year. 

That’s the first time I heard John was at your conference, and then I got the book, I read the book, and I said, this is a great concept. I think this has legs and when you hear it, it makes so much sense in the world. He gives this great example. If you’re in a hotel and you walk by a ballroom and you see that there’s a bunch of CPAs in there, what’s the normal person going to do? They’re going to say, “I don’t want to have anything to do with that room.” But then you think about there’s all these skills and very cool things, but we hide them so well, which, going back to my days in Ernst & Young, we definitely hid them well. Now, you know, we’re trying to create environments where we can bring that out. So I really think John’s on to something with that. If you haven’t read the Watch Your Hand book, I would recommend it. Check out his podcast, because one of them will be me at some point in the coming months. 

Yeah. Another friend of mine was on there, Stephen Vono, and he talked about his 3,000 vinyl albums, and talked about, very similar to what you did, he realized that he can make connections talking about music with people. And that’s so easy when you just be authentic, and be yourself, and just get to know people, and really appreciate them, and that’s how you make connections, so I think that’s awesome. Alright, well we’re not going to do a whole episode of What’s Your “And?” here, which, honestly, I’m going to have to go bug John, I want to get back on the podcast, so.

It was a fun conversation, and actually John started his career in this same building. 

Oh, I didn’t know that. 

Yeah, so he started with Price Waterhouse back in the day, which was in this same building that I’m in today, so we discovered that when we were talking. 

Oh, that’s pretty  cool. Alright, now I have to reach out to him. But alright, so in addition to that, if people want to find out more about you, other than your love of music, you know, if they’re intrigued by what we discussed, where would they find more information out about what you and what you’re doing? 

Yeah, so the number one thing is connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s where I share a lot of my thoughts and different things that I find that are valuable. I’m following a ton of people on LinkedIn that are really creating value. So I share that as well as my own thoughts and pieces of that. Two would be subscribe to the But Who’s Counting? Podcast, which I’m a co-host of. We’re in season three now. So that’s available on all the podcast platforms. And then also follow Anders. And so Anders, we publish a ton of thought leadership, and we very freely share our insights and our thinking—some people would say too much—but we put that out there. and so if you follow us, you’ll learn a few things along the way and hopefully provide us some feedback. But Randy, yeah, I’d love to connect with any of your listeners. Those would be the best ways to get in touch with me. 

Yeah, that’s awesome, and I’ve always had a motto, share your knowledge, so I don’t think you can put out too much information. I think if you share your knowledge, people are going to realize that you know what you’re talking about, and they’re going to come to you for whatever needs they have. Alright, well, Dave, I appreciate you being on, I really enjoyed the conversation, and I look forward to next time we connect. 

Yeah, thanks Randy, and sorry I can’t be at your conference this summer, so, I, will make it, hopefully I won’t have a conflict again and I can be there the next year. 

Well, that’s the plan and you and I need to talk about a topic that you could present at the conference the following year then as well.

Sounds good.