Celebrating International Podcast Day

Today, we’re doing something a little bit different. In celebration of International Podcast Day, we’re featuring six clips from six of the all time top rated episodes of The Unique CPA. So let’s jump right in, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Episode 3: Josh Lance

In the history of The Unique CPA Podcast, there’s been two individuals that probably have had more impact on me, than anybody else. And the first one’s Josh Lance. Josh was originally on Episode 3, where we talked about the innovative way that he built his firm, Lance CPA. Unfortunately, Josh passed away last year, but Josh’s memory will stick with me because I think in general, the topics that I talk about on this podcast ever since meeting Josh, all revolve around the conversation on Episode 3. You’ll hear some of this trailblazing work that he did, the way he was innovative in the profession in this clip. Enjoy.

When I started the practice, you know, back in public accounting, I traveled a ton. I was on the road all the time and I did not want to do that again. And so as I thought about how I would service our clients and what ways I go about doing it. I’m just looking at the technology available and look at some of the more really kind of progressive firms out there and what they were doing. I saw the kind of idea of doing this in a virtual mindset. So, you know, all of our team is remote. They’re all spread across the country. Same thing with our clients. So we have clients here in the greater Chicago area, but we have a lot of clients that are across the country too. And so, being able to kind of leverage technology to serve our clients, you know, wherever they’re at, using kind of cloud based tools to be more real time with them versus, you know, looking backwards, constantly, has allowed us to really kind of build a firm that kind of serves the right type of clients and have the right type of people on board.

You know, we still kind of maintain ties to Chicago so that, you know, the, while a virtual firm, you know, really doesn’t have a location, you know, I’m based in Chicago and so, you know, we kind of maintain ties to that location and, serving clients, you know, there, but also across the country. We have clients globally too, which is kind of fun and it’s exciting to, you know, interact with some of those clients. You know, we have some clients in Australia and so, you know, we’ll do calls with them and it’s five o’clock our time and it’s the morning the next day for them. And, we’re still gonna work and interact and get things done, so, it’s kind of exciting to be able to work with people globally and interact with them in that way. 

It’s been pretty, I wouldn’t say easy to get people on board, but it’s, you know, being virtual and having a remote team has definitely allowed us to kind of expand the type of people we try to hire and get the, really the right people we want on board. People can kind of work when they want to work. We basically kind of establish, you know, deadlines of when things need to be done and when things need to get out to clients. But people can work, you know, whatever works best for them. So we have a lot of people who have, you know, kids in school and so they’ll work during, while their kids are in school and maybe work some at night or on the weekends or whatever kind of fits best in their calendar. But it’s really allowed us to really attract really good people as a result of that. Because we’re offering something that most accounting firms don’t offer, or don’t offer well. 

You know, my old, when I was in public accounting, my firm I was at, they started like kind of a flux time work arrangement type deal, but when it actually kind of played out in practice, those employees are kind of treated as second class citizens, and you know, the kind of bounds or boundaries there always got broken, and so. it didn’t work well. So having, you know, being this kind of virtual model allows us to really have, you know, kind of a good parameters that having remote work, work really well, and like I said, it gets us really good talents.

Episode 54: Allan Koltin

So, this next clip will be Allan Koltin and myself speaking back in November of ’21. Allan really needs no introduction. I’m sure everybody listening to this podcast has heard who Allan is in the past, but Allan and I were talking about private equity. This was after one of the very first large private equity deals happened in the profession back in, in late ’21. So Allan and I went over that, got his take on what’s happened in the profession, his predictions, which will be really interesting to hear the predictions he made and what’s happened because he told us that it was going to be a lot of private equity transactions happening. And I think his predictions were probably right on, but we will learn that together shortly. He also talked about the importance of bots. We really weren’t using the word AI yet, but, it’s pretty interesting to see what Allan was predicting will happen in the profession.

As you know, Randy, most accounting firms today will tell you getting business is not a problem. I think now how to get the work done is darn near impossible. So you have the perfect storm. You have firms in need of capital, you have a generation of baby boomers, as you know, this decade, more are going to retire than the last three decades combined. You have a major transformation of the platform of public accounting, you know, just called simply compliance to consulting, and in that compliance, not only is, they’re going to be evaporation of compliance due to the bots, machine learnings and blockchain and all those things, the marketplace is saying, I’m only going to pay so much for compliance work, but I will pay a lot of money for value added type services. 

So, private equity, the one thing I think they learned is we’re not going to buy your whole business. A, we can’t, because as an alternative practice structure, non CPAs can’t own an audit firm. So, similar to what H & R Block did with RSM, similar to what American Express did with some of the firms they acquired, similar to what CBiz did, you know, CBiz to me, of those three public companies was the lone survivor. It’s 25 years later, if you’ve looked at their stock price recently, and you bought CBiz stock five years ago at six, I think it closed yesterday at 36. I mean, they have figured out how to have outside ownership within an accounting firm. 

Now, all that said, what private equity is looking to do is they break the companies apart, audit, you know, we’ll call it in the case of, Eisner Amper, Eisner Amper LLP, and then tax and consulting is, you know, Eisner Amper Advisory or something like that.

Everyone in the organization has business cards and is a part of the tax and consulting, unless you’re just strictly audit, then you’re going to be on the other side of the house. Candidly, it’s what gives the comfort to the regulators, just because of impairment of independence. You know, truth be known, many of the people that are going to do the work on the audits are leased from the advisory practice over to the audit practice.

That’s what I thought.

There’s a management fee then that goes from the audit practice back to the tax and consulting business. 

Episode 144: Tim Petrey

In this next clip, you hear a conversation between Tim Petrey and myself. Tim was actually the managing partner, or is managing partner of a firm that went down the PE path—a little bit smaller firm than what Allan and I were talking about in the last clip, but what Allan had alluded to would be happening in the profession. Tim explained how this whole private equity transaction worked, and why it was beneficial to him and everybody that works at his firm, HD Davis. And in this clip from about seven months ago, he extols the benefits he’s seen from this partnership.

We made huge investments into technology, into our workflows and automations and our billing systems and all these other things. And we knew that the investments were just going to need to continue to increase in order for us to truly capture the opportunity that was in front of us. So, our next step was evaluating a merge up and trying to find a like minded, larger firm that we could merge with but still have a voice, and still have autonomy and still have the ability to control our own destiny, because we’re young. And if you don’t have great people and if you’re not providing a great level of attention to those people, they’re not going to provide a great service. And if you’re not providing a great service, you’re not going to be profitable. If you’re not profitable, it’s not a good investment. Right? So that’s been our thesis from day one, to find a partner like that, at that level. That truly we connected with is that being the first priority for us, we knew that this was an exciting potential marriage at that point. 

You consider the alternative of the two choices here, the devil, you know, versus the devil you don’t—our industry has become remarkably difficult to operate in. So I see this as, we’re going to get healthy, we’re going to get stronger, we’re going to get better as a result of this partnership, no matter what. As opposed to five to seven years on my own, I’m going to survive, right? And we’ll probably get stronger and better along the way, but not the same level of stronger and better that I could get with that kind of capital behind me, not the same kind of stronger and better that we could get with that kind of people resource behind me.

Episode 62: John Garrett

As I mentioned before the Josh Lance clip, there’s been two individuals that have probably had a bigger impact on me than any others. And the second is John Garrett. As I hope you all know, John wrote a book called What’s Your “And?”  It is something that I live, you know, treating individuals as people, not as their job title. John’s been on the show twice, and in this clip from his second appearance, he hits on how deeply important it is to actually humanize the people in our profession and value them as individuals. 

And about, I don’t know, six or seven years ago, kind of married those two together—the Corporate John and the Comedian John—so that’s where a lot of the speaking at conferences started. But then I had a guy remember me at one of the conferences. He told the meeting professional, I know John Garrett. That’s the guy who did comedy at night. And I had never heard this guy’s name in my life. And it’s because he was in the tax department in my first PwC office, and I’m one of the cool accountants that doesn’t know how taxes work. So I never met this guy, I never went to that floor, I never worked with him, I don’t even know what he looks like, and yet 12 years later, he was like, I know John Garrett. And then he remembers me for all these other things, you know, this hobby outside of work.

And so that’s how What’s Your “And?” started is you’re an accountant and something else: a beer connoisseur, a world traveler, a volunteer at the dog shelter, a ballroom dancer, a runner, a golfer, you know, whatever it is that lights you up. And that’s so much more fascinating and rich, and, you know, there’s so many cool people that are doing neat things around us that we don’t take time to find out.

And it’s the greatest asset you have. It’s the biggest impact on your firm is your people. The number one factor in the success of your firm is your people. It’s not your software. It’s not, you know, how cool your office is. It’s not, is there a parking garage in the building? No. It’s your people. And so, you know, you need to invest in that and care about that. And I think, you know, one of the silver linings of the pandemic, I think, is now people are starting to realize like, oh, wow, I need to care, you know, about the whole person.

Episode 128: Eric Green

This was a really fun episode with Eric that we did earlier this year, where he shared a couple of IRS horror stories, as the title of the episode referred to, and we will take a listen to one which was actually a near miss for one of his clients. They just barely came to Eric in time to avoid a half million dollar mistake.

So all the people that were kind of cruising along, taking their government money, not filing, not paying, that has all now come to an end. They’ve already come flooding in. I got referred clients who were non filers. They’d had like horrific things happen to them in the last, you know, six, seven years. So first of all, for the IRS, you only have to file the last six years to be in compliance. It’s in the Internal Revenue Manual. Most states have voluntary disclosure programs. The IRS has a voluntary disclosure program, it’s really for criminal. It’s not for civil. So simply, if someone came to you and said, you know, I haven’t filed since 2000. You don’t need to do 21 or 22 years of tax returns—the last six, 17 through 22, they’re good. They’re in compliance. Most states vary, you know, but you know, anywhere from three to seven years in most States. 

Before you just kneejerk file joint, this couple gets referred to me and thankfully we had draft returns. The CPA said, all right, Eric, we’re going to file these, but they want to talk to you first. They’re going to owe $650,000 and about $150,000 to the state. And I said, okay, so let’s look at collection. She inherited their home in lower Fairfield County, small home, but still $1.2 million, no mortgage. And she had been a corporate executive in New York, had rolled over her 401k to an IRA, about $500,000. He has a pickup truck and a small IRA. That’s it. So I said, I think you should do married filing separate. She is a stay at home mom. They have a special needs child. You know, he’s a self employed salesman. 

Call the CPA, and I said, look, run these married filing separate, and let me see what the numbers are. So he called back and he said, now we’re up closer to $800,000, so we’re gonna do joint. And I said, no, we’re gonna do separate. And he said, why would you do that? You’re gonna cost them $150,000. I said, no, I’m gonna save her $650,000. She can pay. She’s got a house worth $1.2 (million), and cashing in the self-directed IRA, she can come up with $350,000 just like that, so they’re gonna end up full paying this. 

If we do married filing separate—now, I’m in Connecticut. If you’re in a community property state, it gets a little more complicated. But in one of the 41 separate property states, let’s do marriage filing separate. She owes nothing. Her assets are off the table. He owes, but so what? I ended up doing an offer in a compromise for him for $8,500.

Oh wow.

And made $800,000 go away.

Episode 147: Al-Nesha Jones

Al-Nesha is one of my favorite people in the world. She has a really interesting story about becoming an accidental firm owner. I share her story all the time when I’m out speaking at conferences. In this episode, she tells her story of how she came to realize that a typical accounting path through Big Four was not going to be the way for her. And when she realized that and decided to create her own firm, even if it was accidentally, she decided she wanted to create a firm on her terms, and a firm that would support work-life balance, for not only her employees, and her clients, but also a firm that would support the community. I know you’ll enjoy listening to Al-Nesha Jones.

I remember they recorded this like day in the life of Al-Nesha video, because I was on a partner track. I really did think I was going to stick around to partner. And then I realized: The partner is here with us too. This is not going to get better. Like, this will be my life. It’s not like I’ll get to some level and now I’ll get this flexibility and this freedom. I’m always going to work like this. And that’s when I knew it wasn’t going to be long term for me. And I ended up leaving when I—I’ll never forget. I asked the partner for, to leave early on a Sunday. Can I just leave a few hours early on a Sunday? I wanted to go to an open house. I was in the process of buying my first home. And he told me that I needed to think about my priorities. 

Wow. 

And that’s when I knew I was done. Life is just so short and so unpredictable. And this is probably somebody’s dream, but this is really not mine. But that’s when I figured out I did not hate accounting. I hated the way I was working, right? I hated that I felt like I was helping these big companies, but what I did really didn’t make an impact. I did not like that I was being told the way to do it when I knew there were better ways. And that’s how I found myself into entrepreneurship, but it was not like a lifelong dream. I wish I had that fairy tale, but that’s not even my story.

So you’re almost an accidental accounting firm owner.

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. It was the one thing I said I wasn’t doing and I did it anyway. It literally evolved over time. I am running a firm that first solved my own problems and then became what are the customer issues and that’s probably backwards. I’ve never written a business plan or anything like that. I literally said, I need to do something to earn income, it has to be flexible, because I have three children. My youngest was two months old, still nursing, still with me every day. And I made a lot of mistakes. I charged too little, so I did get myself into a position where I worked way too much. I created a job for myself, not realizing that at some point I’ll need to hire people and I’ll need processes in place. 

So I’ve definitely made mistakes along the way, but I knew what I wanted it to look like. I knew that I wanted it to be something that, I could still take my kids to the park just because it was sunny outside at 3:30 and it wasn’t going to be a problem for anyone. I knew I needed to be able to work from home or from the library or from an office. I always knew I was going to run a firm that operated in that manner.

Thanks for joining me on this look back at six of the top rated episodes in The Unique CPA’s history. I really enjoyed it. I hope you did too. Don’t forget. Subscribe to The Unique CPA on your favorite app and follow us on social media for the latest episodes. Happy International Podcast Day, everyone.