Today on The Unique CPA, we’re diving into one of the biggest challenges facing accounting firm owners—and you may have heard me say this before—but it’s burnout. Our guest, Ashley Carroll, isn’t just talking about it, she’s fixing it. She’s a former accountant turned COO. Ashley founded Operations House to help firm owners break free from the burnout cycle by rethinking their business structures. She’s proven that profitability and psychological safety can go hand in hand, and that a firm can be both scalable and sustainable without sacrificing well-being. 

There’s another reason we’re talking too, which I’m probably going to get into first, but I actually met Ashley, I think six days ago now, so we went from not knowing each other six days ago to recording, and one, it’s because of the passion I see she has for burnout in the profession, but really, we met because of this really cool thing she’s doing right now, her firm: it’s the “professional pep talk.” We’ll get deeper into that. So enough of me talking. Ashley, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah. And so before we even talk about burnout, which is a huge passionate topic of mine, and this probably relates, let’s talk about that professional pep talk. Because when I saw this on social media, what you were doing, I was just intrigued, I was like, “This is amazing, why didn’t I think of this?” All this kind of stuff. So why don’t you give us a little background on what this is that you’re doing right now?

Sure, thank you. Well, that is mostly the feedback that we’ve gotten, and we’re so thrilled. This came about because I have honestly been having a hard time—I’m in the second year of growing Operations House, and what we do is very unique. We have a very unique approach to helping accounting firms grow. And we are planting our message deeply, and that takes time, and we know that. So my parents, very lovingly, have been sending me text messages once a morning, just little things. I think they go on Google and grab them. You know, it’s just, “You’ve got this,” “Toughness is greatness.” And it just, as much as I couldn’t believe it, those little messages, after a few weeks, were really meaning a lot to me, that if my dad didn’t send one, I was like, “I don’t feel right. I don’t feel jazzed up.” 

I was sitting with my team on Thursday, the day before we met, and I said, “Guys, you know, this thing has been happening. My dad’s been doing this for me.” We have something called Tea Time Thursdays, where we just get together at the end of a Thursday and we spill the tea on the week. We just say everything that we’re thinking. It starts with a feelings wheel, and we just pick our emotions, and we go from there. I was telling my team about this, and I said, “You know, wouldn’t it be so cool if we could just send these pep talks to people just when they need them?” And my chief of staff, Fanni, who, when I’ve got an idea and it’s meant to go, she’s not going to let it go, said, “Post it tonight.”

Oh, wow.

I said, “Okay, let me think about it!” I got it all together that night, I posted it Friday morning, and we’re about 25 pep talks in now.

Wow.

Yeah.

That’s awesome. I requested one of them for a group of, I think, six people. So I thank you for doing that. The response was immediate. As soon as you sent that out, I got, this is a group of seven of us that are in a text chat, all accountants, and they immediately responded with a thank you, and “Where’d you get this? This idea is amazing,” that kind of information. So yes, it’s making a difference, and I appreciate the fact that you did that.

Absolutely. I think one of the things that is leading into burnout—and for me as an accountant—it’s quite a thankless job. We can be seen as the end of the totem pole, the red-headed stepchild, you know, we’re not as cool as marketing. We’re the necessary evil of a startup culture and expenses and providers. Sometimes I just really wanted someone to be like, “You’re making a difference. You’re doing a good job. You’re making an impact.” And I think on the form, we just have five different options about, you know, “Keep going,” or “You’re making a difference,” “Something is going to change,” but mostly people wanted to just hear that it was going to be okay. The most chosen option was that: “Keep going, the one step at a time” option. I think that is just so important to acknowledge that people are missing that kind of positive feedback and positive affirmation in this industry.

Yeah. Well, that’s great. That kind of segues into Operations House. But before we get there, let’s talk about your journey, you know, from accountant to COO to Operations House. That journey really led you in the long run of focusing on burnout and fixing the problem within accounting firms and other places. So why don’t you give us that background?

Sure. So I never wanted to be an accountant per se—I was guided into becoming an accountant by someone who said, “Get a degree in something you don’t want to have to pay someone for once you run your own business.” You know, I thought, “Okay, let me try out accounting.” It was just very black and white. It clicked, you know, I’d been good at math, kind of similar to your experience, where you just found it and switched to it, and you went from there; it fit. It was a good fit. But when I was about to graduate, I kind of had a crisis and went to my marketing professor actually and said, “I don’t think I want to be an accountant. I don’t see how going to the Big Four, I don’t think I’m going to survive.” And he said, “Well, what do you want to do?” I said, “I want to help people. My whole dream was to start a nonprofit.” He said, “Helping people and being an accountant is not mutually exclusive.” And that sentence has been ingrained in my mind. Thank you, Professor. Because that opened up a world for me and he told me to go get a job as a staff accountant at a nonprofit.

Really? Alright, nice.

Yeah. So I started my journey there as a staff accountant. I was reporting to the board. One day the board asked me, “What is this line item?” When I unpacked it all, the line item was 86% late fees on our loans that we are giving out to constituents. We were a CDFI giving out loans to low-income constituents for payday loans, getting them out of predatory loans, daycare, some things that you couldn’t get through traditional lending. And 86% of the lending money that we had out was late, and that was going on their credit reports. This was a bigger impact than this one question in the general ledger was actually uncovering and telling the story of, and that was not going to settle right with me. I knew I was just a staff accountant, but I did not care about grant money. Without a lot of encouragement, I said, “We’ve got to figure out what the problem is.” After talking with the bank tellers at the CDFI, it was just that we didn’t have an online payment processor. It was crazy to me that it was 2017 and we didn’t have a payment processor. I have plenty of ways to make my bills pay online, you know? So I spent a year working with the Federal Reserve Bank and the CDFI to build an ACH payment processing system.

Wow.

That was my introduction segue into operations. As soon as that went live, we turned it onto the website. A month later we were down to 9% late. 

Amazing!

Seventy-nine percent of people just wanted to pay their bill. We were living in rural South Carolina with no bus system, people just had no way of getting there. That really showed me that technology for good, that’s possible, we can do this. So I pivoted, I tapped my potential there of making change and I decided, “Okay, I’m going to take this accounting skillset to a remote firm who really enjoys technology and try to play my hand there.” So I went to work with Brandon Hall for a while—fantastic leader. He gave me the opportunity to help grow his accounting service line in the early stages. From there, I went to work for Nicole McKenzie at Momentum Accounting. She was looking for a staff accountant. I replied to the job description and said, “I would love to do anything but accounting work.” I think that got her attention enough to be like,”’Okay, what do you want to do?” and I said, “I want to take care of your team and your clients. I want to show you that it will make you a ton of money.” 

Because I had been sitting there in that role, we had a salesperson who wasn’t really an accountant, who was giving me my work and had my role, but I didn’t have all the authority. I was still lower in the ranks; this was just my second job, so I was really shooting my shot here. She allowed me in, and from there I grew to COO. 40% profit margins at the end of four years, 0% turnover with the team, 9.7 NPS score. Just a happy team, successful business. Nicole explained to me that she had everything that she dreamed of, that satisfied me, and I was like, “I’m going to go get everything I’m dreaming about too.”

Mmm hmm, and that’s where Operations House came in?

That’s where Operations House comes in.

Alright. Before I ask the next question: Man, I’m surprised we didn’t cross paths yet. Brandon Hall’s a friend of mine. Nicole McKenzie’s a friend of mine. In fact, Nicole and I were in a rap video together.

Oh, that was you? That’s so funny! Yeah, her and Scott? I’m always in the shadows, just in the background. That’s the best part about being the COO. That kind of really fits me. But yeah, being out front now, it’s really fun to be able for everyone to kind of put a face to a lot of the things that they’ve known about.

That video was actually, that song was called “CPA Now,” which was The Unique CPA theme for our conference the first year, a couple of years ago.

Yeah!

That was fun. Alright, so now, obviously, you helped Nicole, you helped Brandon, you got them to their firms, to places that obviously Nicole is very happy, has everything that she ever dreamed of having. Then you went on to Operations House, and really, I think, a major focus, I mean, you can, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, is fixing the burnout problem in accounting firms. How did that become an emphasis of what you wanted to do with your consulting work with firms?

Yeah. I recognized how lucky I was to be in the position that I was in. A lot of why I wanted to go into nonprofit work was originally to give women who did not have maybe a traditional path, like my own mom, who was a single mom who did not have a college education. She worked her way up from an admin assistant at a procurement agency up to a doctor of procurement now. I still believe that path is possible with the right encouragement, connections, training, and teaching. I wanted to build a nonprofit that basically trained women on those entry-level skills. So that had always kind of been in the back of my mind: How do I start to share my journey and the way that I grew through the levels of accounting from staff accountant to senior associate to manager to operations, you know, if that’s somewhere you want to go, onboarding specialist, some of these other roles that accountants would like to be in that are not necessarily a direct path that they are given at the Big Four, and just start to educate people out there about what the different options are. 

So it came from wanting to share with people that there were better options out there. I have my own journey with mental health that I’m pretty public about, and to see other people in the accounting industry, especially in the Big Four, and what they’re struggling and dealing with, and having had a taste of that in my own way, you know, I think there’s a lot of the same—it’s an industry problem, I would say. Burnout is not a personal problem; this is an industry problem. I saw that, and I knew that if I can make a difference at this one firm, I can make a difference at all the firms—I truly believe that. So my mission is to create a change in the accounting world, not just to stop at one firm, or the one firm that I’m working at. That’s not my mission, but I’ve proven it. We’re going to go out there and pressure—kindly, lovingly—the other firms into treating their teams better by building firms that already do it and taking their talent.

Nice. That’s why you and I connected so quickly, because we have the same passions and ideals. You just said that your mission—I actually have had to look it up here because I’m still messing it up when I say it—“My personal mission is to have a positive impact on people in the accounting profession by inspiring change.” And I think we align in that, even if we say it a little bit differently. But anytime I talk to anybody that has that mindset, I’m so impressed. So let’s talk about that a little bit further then: Obviously, you showed that you didn’t have to deal with burnout and you help people avoid that. Why do you think firms struggle with burnout? Before I even ask that, because you have a term or you have something you say out there, that you talk about burnout as a business model flaw. What do you mean by that?

This is a structural, organizational flaw. We don’t have to have processes in place, hours in place that lead to burnout within our team. It is possible to provide great accounting services, whether it be tax or advisory, without burning out our team. Just because things have been done in the way that they have been, where it’s required 80-hour work weeks during tax season and “ that’s just busy season, just push through it,” no one else should have to pay their dues just because there are still people who have had that experience today. So let’s build our models to not include workflows that would naturally lead to burnout, like overworking on hours, unclear roles, unclear responsibilities, unclear context, client relationships that they don’t have any say in, and things of all that nature that really come down to impacting their overall well-being and how they show up to the job.

So it’s kind of like just structural or rules-based issues that we feel that we have to have in place when in reality, we don’t. I have another saying, sorry I keep quoting myself right now. When I talk about culture, and I know that people is an important thing you like to talk about too, and I’m talking about people-first cultures, I have a saying that I, again, I’m pretty sure I put this together, unless I don’t remember stealing it from somewhere else, but “poor cultures rely on rules while strong cultures”—no. It’s “weak cultures rely on rules, while strong cultures rely on relationships.” I think we avoid the relationship part too much because there are rules in place, and it’s so easy for us as accountants to follow rules because they’re everywhere in the profession. But then we start following them when we’re running our business rather than looking to the people we work with and making sure that they have what they need. That they are—as you say, the psychological safety aspects of things are there. In fact, why don’t we go to that? Because I guess I can picture it, but I’ve never had somebody define it for me or how you define it. When you talk about that psychological safety in a firm, what does that mean? And then, the lack of that obviously is an issue that causes burnout, I assume.

Sure. So more than just showing up, how does that person feel when they show up? People talk about the Sunday scaries. What is that about? Because I’ve cried in my car before going to work. That’s not healthy. That should not be acceptable. Your boss should not make you afraid. You should not constantly feel like if you make a mistake, your job is on the line. A team member came to me with a really bad habit of asking if she was on the chopping block. I’m like, “Someone has said that to you?” “Multiple times.” That is the psychological safety that I’m talking about—that there is a level of perfection that is expected from our clients, that we need to create space for within our firms: a learning culture, safety to make mistakes and grow, and break these rules that we have been taught by these bigger structures that aren’t serving us, like we need to be available 24/7. We need to answer emails within an hour. Everything is an emergency. These things keep us psychologically on edge and emotionally, energetically drained all the time. That is not how we want to operate. So it’s not just about building workflows that are efficient and profitable. We’ll do that. But it’s going to be, not at the sake of your team or your mental health.

So talk about that then, your team or your mental health as well: When you’re going in as Operations House and you’re working with somebody, obviously part of it’s probably, “Hey, here’s best practices for processes, and here’s how we workflows, and here’s how we can not have the rule of 80 hours a week.” I’m guessing there’s as much of helping with those processes in place as there is of just changing mindsets as well. Is mindset a big part of it?

It’s a huge part of it, and a lot of it is self-confidence. It’s less about thinking “this is possible.” Accountants are very dollars and cents and I can easily prove the ROI on this. So that’s a quick roadblock I can get right over. But then it comes down to, “I’m not used to having conversations about feelings with my team. I don’t know if I want to do that. I don’t know what that’s going to open up.” There’s all this, “What’s on the other side of that door here?” What I want to share with people is that all the greatness in the world is on the other side of that door. All the potential of your team is on the other side of that door. All your free time is on the other side of that door. It’s challenging. It’s difficult. You’ll have to learn how to hold space. You’ll have to learn how to care about your team members as humans. It will be harder to fire them, right? You will fall in love with them—as you should, in my opinion. If you take on the responsibility of hiring someone, knowing what that means in American culture, because your healthcare and all these things are tied to your employment, if you choose to bring on a W-2 employee—even a contractor, don’t get me started on that—you have a responsibility to them.

The people that I see, you know, I see owners lean so far into the servant leadership role that we have to have a kind of reality check of like, you’re not a servant though, and there are roles and dynamics here that have to happen for things to be successful, right? There has to be accountability and structure. But a lot of the times I just want to tip the door into what if everyone just showed up as a human with the base mindset that they’re here to do a really good job, and they want to do a good job, and if they’re not for some reason, let’s assume that it’s a process issue first before we assume it’s a them issue. That’s all. That’s the mindset change.

I love that. I love that. And I love the whole thing of—I’m putting words in your mouth, but—looking at a person as a person, not a job title, and starting to love the people you work with, which is something I talk about too. And how important, going back to those relationships, if you build relationships with the people you work with, sure, the accountability is still going to be there, but you’re not going to have to do a lot of that because when people feel valued—and they feel valued when you get to know them on a personal level—the accountability is not even really an issue because they know, “Hey, I’m enjoying this. I like what I’m doing. I’m not being micromanaged. I know what I need to do and I’m getting it done.” So I think we need a lot more of that. And that’ll actually change—there’s both a perception and reality issue in accounting—and both, the reality is changing, I think, maybe not fast enough in my mind, but perception’s lagging a little bit. So if we can highlight those types of things, both will change.

Absolutely. I think it was a recent Andrew Huberman episode that highlighted what actually makes employees happy, people happy, is—I don’t remember exactly what the first thing is, but the second thing was autonomy. Right? Just having the freedom to do what you do well, and that touches on your micromanagement. You won’t have to do that when you’ve built that trust within your team and they know that you care about them, so they want to do a good job for you. It’s built-in.

We just did a survey last year, it’s the Accountants’ Professional Satisfaction Survey. We’ve been leaking data out here and there, but we got the whole report coming out. Actually, it’ll be out before we release this episode. But some of the things you just said are in there with the way people work with autonomy is great in getting things done. You know, I’ve told this story on the podcast before plenty of times. We’ve been in business 18 years. We have 75 people now, and over that time, we’ve had nine people leave. And it’s because we do those things that you’re suggesting should be done. At least that’s the way I look at it. 

So the proof’s in the pudding!

At least I can prove it out with what we have.

Add another one to our list, then. We are always making a list of great places to work like yours that do things the way that we do them to say, you know, this is the Operations House way. Even if they didn’t come up through Operations House, if you’re an accountant or CPA looking for a good place to work, you know, that’s also what we’re trying to build, those connections.

And giving back, and goodwill, even if it’s not something that’s directly bringing in business for you, goodwill will always do that.

Absolutely. Starting with a pep talk.

And that was great goodwill! And that’s probably a good spot to start to segue out. But before I do that—I’ll ask you two final questions not related to our conversation—is there anything you want to say that I didn’t touch on or that you want to highlight before we start to close out here?

No, this was a ton of fun. I appreciate the great questions.

Alright. Well, it was a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to have a further conversation and hopefully see you out in the real world someday before long. But so the two final questions, and it really goes into the things that you are passionate about already, is, when you’re not out helping firms and helping people, making them more operationally, psychologically safe, and more profitable, what are your outside-of-work passions? What do you like doing?

Wow. So when I answer these questions, I feel like I answer them with work responses. I’ve listened to other podcast episodes—I’m going to answer with my outside-of-work passions—which is Chef’s Tables are number one for me and my husband. We both grew up kind of poor, and so we didn’t get to experience a lot of different foods. So our favorite thing is to go to a chef’s table where they give you a preset menu and wine pairings. They teach you where the food comes from and why it tastes good together. That’s my number one thing. I’d say hanging out with my husband and going to chef’s tables, and Go Birds, anything Phillies, Eagles related, we will go to sports games. Yes, we won the Super Bowl just weeks ago. So yes, you did. I have the energy to fight anybody on this one.

Alright. Well, you just said Chef’s Table. My wife and I—today as we’re recording, I shouldn’t even date this—but February 19th. So this is Thursday. Monday night, we went out to a restaurant in Healdsburg, California, called Little Saint, which is a completely vegan restaurant. I’m not vegan, but this is—their food is amazing. I think they’re listed as one of the top restaurants in the country or something. I don’t even know the statistics. But they had that night: It was the Chef’s Table. You don’t even have to worry about it. They’re just bringing the menu to you and there was a wine pairing, so exactly what you said, and the nine pairings were amazing. It was actually, I think, one of our favorite nights out dining in a long time. It was a great time.

It’s their art, you know? And you let them do their thing and you just sit back and get inspired and taste delicious food. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Do it wherever you go whenever you travel, that’s how we try the food.

Nice. I’m going to have to start looking for more of those too. Last question: People want to hear more about Operations House and what you’re doing—where would they look? Where would they reach out? What’s the best place to find out what’s happening?

Yeah, the best place to see what I’m all about is on LinkedIn. That’s where I post all my content and thoughts. It’s basically just a live diary. If you want to get some of your processes looked at and talk about your accounting operations at your firm, you can look at Operations.House.

Alright, nice. My wife’s been trying to sneak around the back here while we’ve been talking.

I see her! She’s hustling! 

She’s getting ready for wine tasting because that’s next when we’re down here.

Enjoy!

Yep! Well, Ashley, thank you so much for being on the show. I am so fortunate that our paths crossed in the last week, and I can’t wait to spend more time finding out what’s going on with you. So thank you.

Thank you so much for the opportunity. It’s good to see you.