Today, our guest is Chris Williams. Chris is CEO of System Six, not Six Sigma, as I said before we started recording today. 

Not the first one to do that, and that’s okay. 

Alright. Well, System Six is a cloud-based finance and accounting firm. I’ll let Chris probably give us more information on that, but before that, Chris, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Randy, it’s been awesome getting to know you the last couple of years, and thanks a lot for having me. I’m super excited to be here. And as I said earlier, I’m glad you’re not in freezing cold Chicago. Kudos go out to—we have some teammates there. I hope everybody’s staying warm. It’s pretty cold right now.

Yep. Unfortunately, by the time we release this, it won’t be cold anymore. 

Alright, we’ll probably cut that part out. 

No, we’re fine. We’re recording in January right now. I’m in Arizona, getting out of the cold weather in Chicago. It’s my MO, not sticking around for cold anymore. I’m getting too old for that. And so, what you just said is great, getting to know each other over the last two years. I actually think it’s been less than a year, hasn’t it? 

Quite possibly, yeah. Time flies.

Yeah, I know. When did we meet originally? Well, I don’t even remember the first place because I ran into you so many places since, but which conference was that?

I mean, I feel like we talked a bunch at Gusto Next here in my backyard in San Francisco. Probably something before that. I usually make the rounds with the Cloud Mafia, as I like to say, so…

Yeah. Could it have been QuickBooks Connect last year? 

Yeah. 2022. 

I think maybe that’s what it was. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. Same thing back at you. It has been great getting to know you, and the reason that I asked you to be on the show is because you’re doing some really interesting things, but you personally also have a very interesting background. So why don’t you give us a background on you, and then we’ll get into the origins of System Six.

Yeah, absolutely. So personal background, I was born and raised in Washington, DC. Fun fact, actually in DC, most people from the DC area live around—I didn’t grow up in the White House. My parents aren’t actually in politics, ironically, but grew up in DC. Loved DC, moved to California where I now live in 2015. And I spent my career before System Six in traditional sort of investment banking and finance. So I worked at a bank for a couple of years out of college, and then I spent three years at a private equity firm in an investing seat where we did, we were actually in real estate, and we did a lot of acquisitions. Built an acquisitions background there. 

Kind of picked my head up and said, “Hey, I’m not sure this is what I want to do forever. I want to go explore other career opportunities, then maybe go back, maybe not.” The best way for me to do that was business school. So I was fortunate to be able to get my MBA, had two great years in business school, and that’s where I discovered the path that ultimately took me to System Six, which is becoming a more and more popular path nowadays in and outside business schools, which is, there’s a ton of great businesses, millions of them owned across the United States and a bunch of different industries that have, call it 10, 20, 30 employees, $5, $10, $15 million of revenue. They don’t have a succession plan in place. There’s not a son or daughter who’s going to take that business over. And so there’s a lot of people out there, searchers in the accounting space. 

I’m sure many of your audience gets emails from these people, maybe myself a couple of years ago. The basic idea is like, “Hey, I’d love to buy your business, take over, take care of your business, take care of your customers, and then obviously try to grow it.” That’s the path I went on out of business school, was going to find an awesome small business to buy, to grow, because I wanted to bet on myself. I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I love working with a smaller team now, really feeling a part of the result. That’s becoming a more and more popular path. Ultimately, I got excited about acquiring accounting, and that’s how we’re here today.

Yep. And so a couple of things. One, you’re being humble there because you didn’t tell us where you went to school. Brown undergrad and Stanford for grad. That’s a pretty big deal.

Lucky to go to some great places, learned a ton, especially at Stanford, it exposes you to crazy levels of success that put pressure on you, but also, I think, are very eye-opening. For me, that’s where I got the confidence to go do this. There are tons of people in the last couple of decades before me who have bought $5, $10, $15 million revenue businesses. Then over a decade turned it into a $100 million dollar revenue business. Cool experiences, and yeah, the network and the people I got exposed to, I feel very fortunate to have been able to go to those places.

So let’s talk about System Six. You’re not an accounting background. You’re not a CPA. You’re not—

I can’t do any of the work. Yeah, I’m kind of useless actually.

So what attracted you to this profession then?

Yeah, and I think this is something I try to reinforce when I’m at conferences, is like, look, I know accounting can be a drag, especially this time of year dealing with clients. But this is a great industry, and as an outside investor looking to acquire a business in a great industry, I just want to make sure people hear that. So there are a couple of things. First of all, we serve a massive market, so System Six serves small business owners, generally doing at least a million in revenue. There are millions of those in the United States. So large market. We provide a mission-critical service. We don’t provide taxes—that’s even more critical. But everybody needs bookkeeping, payroll processing, bill pay, invoicing. More and more of that is getting outsourced. So you’re serving a big market, you’re doing a service that everyone needs. It’s mission-critical, it’s consistent recurring revenue, especially as more people have moved to the cloud and gone to the MRR billing environment. It’s a decent margin business. There’s no CapEx, like heavy construction equipment you need to go buy. Those are all finance terms, and the reality is those are a lot of the reasons I was attracted to the ecosystem from a place to own and grow a business, it’s a great place to be for those reasons. 

And the last one that I think I’ve really come to appreciate more just since being in the seat is, hey, we’re helping small business owners grow their businesses, and I get to be in a sales seat, talk to small business owners. That’s fun. We run payroll for like 1,200 employees, and that’s a stat we get super proud of. Serving Fortune 500 clients is really good in other ways, too, because those are great clients to serve. I think I get some joy out of the people that we’re ultimately serving, at least on the client side.

So then how did System Six start? Did it start with an acquisition, or how would you build?

Yeah, so System Six, all credit to Jeremy Allen, who started the business in 2008. He started System Six Bookkeeping back then. He grew the business from 2008, 2009 to 2021 from nothing to about 20 people, $2 million and change in revenue, he had some great people on the way, some that are still here. Kelly was his first hire, now our head of HR which is a super important role for us. So yeah, he built the business, Joe Carufe who is now at Karbon played a big role in that as well. And then I sent him an email in October, 2020, you know, hey, I like what I see about your business, I’m interested in your space, here’s why, I’d love to have a conversation. And nine months later, I was lucky enough to get to acquire the business from him. He still has a small financial interest in the business, but he took his retirement real quick. I think that was actually good to have a quick separation of church and state.

Yeah, I think you’re probably right. I’ve seen it both ways, but it’s often, let’s just cut the ties and show that the new people are here now. So, 20 employees when you took over? And over time now, where are you at?

So we’re at 38—we just hired somebody this week, fully remote, 20-plus states in the US, which creates some compliance headaches from time to time. But yeah, been really fortunate to be able to grow the business. It’s all US right now, 38 people. We’ve grown client size. We had about three, four, five clients a month. We’ve increased the size of clients that we’re serving a lot, and the depth of our engagement over the last couple of years. But generally speaking, it’s been a story of just continued growth and improvement, no drastic changes. That’s a testament to the business that was here when I was able to step into it.

That’s nice. It was in good shape when you took it over, which is nice. The growth over that time, has that all been organic, or have there been acquisitions?

Yeah, we’ve looked. The answer is, it’s all been organic to date. We were about two and a half million in revenue when I bought it. We’re about $4.2 or so from last calendar year. That’s all organic. A lot of it’s been through my network of people who are acquiring businesses. Now they need outsourced accounting finance services. We’ve looked at M&A over the last couple of years. Got pretty close on a couple, nothing hit, and we were also smaller. I was in the business more where it would have been harder for us to absorb something. This year and going forward, it’s going to become a bigger part of our story just now that I’ve got more capacity, we’ve got more maturity as a business to absorb something. But to date, it’s all been organic. And that’s another thing, back to the earlier conversation, this industry is also growing. We’re not in an industry that is going downhill. So for everybody in the ecosystem, there’s opportunity to grow organically. And that’s a great thing. So another reason it’s a great industry to be in.

From the standpoint of that growth, or even when you took it over, I’m a big fan of “nitch” although I know some people say “neesh,” I don’t know if you’re “nitch” or “neesh.”

I don’t know the answer either.

Alright. That’s an argument that always comes up on the show. Was it a niche practice already, or have you, as you’ve grown, identified a certain client that you’d like to help?

When I bought the business, no. Size-wise, when I bought the business, our minimum monthly was plus or minus $600, so we weren’t doing a lot of the really local small businesses. Most clients were $500,000 in revenue and above. But other than that, generally a Pacific Northwest, Seattle area client base, that’s where Jeremy spent most of his time, that’s where his network was. Since then, yes, a lot of our growth, if you look at our whole book of business, I wouldn’t say it’s niched because of the size, but the vast majority of our growth is coming from business owners who just bought a business in the last usually six months, and they now need to upgrade their accounting services, either because the owner or the owner’s spouse was doing it before and is now gone, or they have a bank loan, and they now need to be in GAAP or modified GAAP because they’re going to go through an audit. 

So it’s not one industry, that’s across a variety of industries. It’s like a niche of a theme, which is someone who just bought a business and now needs to upgrade. That’s just primarily because it’s my network. And this year we’re starting to do Google ads and digital advertising and marketing to try and build some niches outside of that, because I don’t want it to all just be my network because that’s not sustainable forever. Hopefully next year I’ll have more answers of more industry niches that we’re in.

We’ll do this again next year then. Your network’s pretty broad. Like we talked at the beginning, you’ve been out at conferences quite a bit. Being that you are right now, at least, strictly payroll, bookkeeping, what are the services you’re offering?

We say it’s day-to-day finance operations and controllership. That just means controllership and below. For us, a core, average client engagement is bookkeeping, payroll, bill pay, and usually some invoicing support. We’re in the books on a weekly basis, and that’s usually plus or minus $1,500 to $2,000 on a monthly basis. That’s usually a $3, $4, $5, $6, $7 million client. There’s going to be some modified accrual work in there, but we range up to $10-$15 million revenue businesses that are going to be audited, so we’re maintaining all the schedules that are going to be a part of that for readiness throughout the year. A formal preliminary close on the 8th with a meeting, a final close every month, a much more professional finance operation for that business that has higher expectations. But we do stop at controllership. We’re not doing go-forward forecasting, CFO work. We’re not doing tax work. Hoping to get into both of those lines of business. For now it’s all the day-to-day finance operations type stuff.

I was going to ask you about advisory type stuff or the tax stuff, but let’s skip that for a second, because I want to come back to that, because it sounds like that is a potential future plan. The question I wanted to ask on the services you are offering, because you said you get new clients through your connections and all that. Is part of that, or have you thought about or looked at full service tax and accounting firms that need to outsource this part to somebody else? Have you collaborated with other firms on things like that?

Yeah, so we have gotten a good amount of leads through a couple of transaction advisory firms that get hired for the QOE, the tax diligence, they’re doing the opening balance sheet after a business is purchased, and they’re hoping to have that client long-term for the tax and the audit work. So they’re sending us in to do the outsourced day-to-day accounting, the CAS work, so to speak. Right now we’re working on the referrals, day-to-day, but working on formalizing the partnership so that when we get the client from a sales perspective, our salesperson can say, “Hey, we need to include in the proposal these exact type of readiness things that we know this tax firm is going to want come audit time.” So including upstairs entity management, like we’re going to do bookkeeping for the holding entities that sit upstairs on these operating companies. It’s been referrals to date, but we’re trying to get a little bit more structured in that so that we can deliver books that work better for the auditors, the way they like to see stuff.

Alright, and did I just hear you say salespeople?

Salesperson, Tim.

Tim, okay. So besides your network, you do have somebody out generating business. How’s that? This is new, I assume?

Yeah. Tim joined us in April. So I would say, and he has done a fantastic job and spends most of his time executing on sales that are coming in. I’m no longer—leads still come to me through my network, but I immediately say, “Hey, great to meet you. Congratulations on what you’re working on. We’d love for you to have a conversation with Tim.” So he has been closing all the deals since he joined us in April. Candidly, he’s spending a ton of his time trying to drive business. He’s building relationships with our CPA partners, some people in his local network, but primarily, most of our leads are still coming through our presence in the acquisition ecosystem. But that’s also partially because he’s only been with us for nine months, and I’m starting to bring him to conferences and stuff. I was lucky to be able to hire him from another cloud accounting business. Came to us with industry experience, which was great because he was just able to hit the ground running.

Yeah, I like that a lot because even larger CPA firms do business development at the partner level rather than have a business development team. We have a business development team and I think that’s so important for the business.

That really comes from like, hey, I’m not an accountant, so I think about this as a business. And every business has a sales org. It’s not sales that runs through the managers of service delivery. I think it’s super healthy for the durability of the business, not just for sales but also on retention, because then clients feel a little bit less attached to the service delivery people because they don’t think about them as the person who also sold them that business. And so God forbid we lose someone on our team, they leave or whatever, hopefully there’s less churn risk because they’re not as attached to the partner, so to speak.

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess I didn’t think about it that way in the past. I don’t think about anything. I just go out and talk.

That’s not true. You’ve built a pretty impressive business, Randy. Give yourself some credit.

I’m just along for the ride. But what you had mentioned before, I make a lot of contacts, I meet a lot of people, but I don’t sell anything. I don’t close anything. That’s why we have a business development team because like you just said, I hand it off to them and then they’re the point of contact. Like today, I had a webinar before this with a bunch of new people I didn’t know. I knew some of the people at the firm, but I brought in one of our business development people because I basically told them, “This is your point of contact. If you have anything that you need us to answer for you or help you with, this is who you will reach out to.” And it’s not the project manager, even, it was a business development person. And they’ll get both as well.

For me, when I first started doing that, it felt icky. I felt like I was just throwing off this lead to somebody else, but I kind of just forced myself to do it. Then I realized it’s part of how the business needs to operate because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to do the next thing. 

So you’re out, you’re the figurehead, you’re the face, you’re the one that people know. For me, I am nervous that I’m going to get an email and I’m not going to see it, and then we’re not going to follow up. If the emails go to somebody else, or I have an assistant now that’ll forward the email to somebody else, it’s just, I don’t have the time or the passion to be the one to finish off the deal.

The next question that candidly, we haven’t figured out, at least in this vertical, the acquisition vertical is, how do I not be the face forever either? I’m not closing the deals anymore, but also at some point, you don’t want the leads to associate just with the person because then if I’m not around in 10 years or whatever, how does the business still sustain it? But I don’t have an answer for that.

For us, it was, I was managing partner and gave that role up, so I don’t have to worry about any of the operations ends of the thing, and so I can be out there and be the face of the operations. But for you, I’m guessing that you are still in the operations. Just as you continue to grow, this is my—now I’m giving advice here that you don’t care about anyways—but as you continue to grow, then that decision will be made. Where are you best suited for this business in its continued growth, or is there an exit at some point for you as well?

Do you feel like, are you training somebody underneath you to take over as the face one day or not yet?

I have people in mind. I have people that go out and do webinars when I can’t do them. I have a couple of people that I have on the podcast occasionally with me. So yes, that is for me a concern, like okay, who is going to take over this role? But I don’t think it’s going to be one person, it’ll be multiple people.

You probably don’t have to have it answered today because you’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

Well, who knows? I enjoy what I do quite a bit. But I’m not getting any younger.

Nobody is. Sorry, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot there.

No, I don’t mind.  I had actually somebody reach out to me that, and we didn’t do it yet, but he said, hey Randy, is it okay if I’m on the podcast, but I want to interview you on the podcast. 

Ooh, I like that. I like that. 

And I told him yes, but we, I have, I should reach out to him and we should do that. Although I get, I’m interviewed on every single podcast out there, it feels like. So I enjoy that side of things actually. So let’s get back to System Six. 

There you go, I said to you earlier, it happens a lot. A lot of people say Six Sigma. And I joke like, hey, it’s not the worst thing in the world if Six Sigma is like, I don’t know that much about it, but it’s like a lean manufacturing…hey, if people think about us as highly organized manufacturing, I’ll take that.

Yeah no, that’s good. Well, there are a couple of key things that we need to still learn about what you’re doing and what the plans are. You alluded to one a little bit before, but future, what’s the future you see? And we’ll get into acquisitions because I think that’s part of the potential future. But before that, you mentioned taxes going forward, projections potentially. So do you have plans for those things?

Yeah, I mean, the first thing is I got into this business two and a half years ago with the intention to build for a long time. I’m pretty early in my career and feel like we’re in a very good industry that’s not going anywhere. It’s going to change a lot with AI, but our businesses aren’t going to disappear. So, I think about decades hopefully of the journey ahead for me and System Six. 

But yeah, the immediate two-year goal is we want to be providing the one-stop shop of core finance services that a small business might use third parties for. So we’re doing all the day-to-day work. The obvious ones are tax services for our S Corps, we don’t want to get into probably the more complicated tax stuff for some of our investor-owned clients, where there are audits as well. Then, CFO go-forward, financial advisory, we have a handful of clients that are hiring fractional CFOs, these days a couple of thousand dollars a month. We’d love to be a part of that. I think CFO, I’m less clear if that’s…we are 100 percent going to build and own a CFO practice or if we might just form nice referral agreements with CFO businesses or even individual fractional CFOs. 

I think for sure, we want to be able to offer tax services. I know for some people, that’s crazy because it’s getting harder and harder to offer those services. But we just get asked a lot by our existing client base. It would make our job easier on the accounting side if we had more of a direct line to the tax team. So both of those lines of service, we want to have more formally over the next two years. It’ll start with tax most likely. CFO will probably just be friendly arrangements out of the gate, and then maybe that evolves. Definitely, the goal is to get into tax this year, actually.

In ‘24?

Yeah, in ‘24, in some form or fashion.

Okay, so let’s talk about how that’s going to happen. Is acquisition the goal for that, or organic on tax?

I think the primary goal, candidly, is probably through acquisition just because it’ll move the needle faster. We did run a posting for a head of tax position a couple of weeks ago. 

I saw that. 

It’s not the best time to be hiring. 

No.

I really did that just to get a better read on what types of candidates are out there. The goal is to be able to offer tax to a variety of our clients, and if we can do it through an acquisition, that just comes with more scale, ultimately that moves our bottom line more, which means we have more money to go reinvest in other stuff in the business, but I definitely don’t think it would be an acquisition of an old-school tax practice that we then have to modernize and get to the cloud. It’s the needle in the haystack of a modern, cloud-based organization that’s looking to have some sort of transaction. That’s why we’re also looking at hiring for that type of role post-April, because it’s hard to find those. It’s a harder place to deliver those services, it’s getting more complicated, harder to retain. We just get asked by our clients, we want to continue growing, it seems like a no-brainer given where we want to be five years from now. If we’re going to be triple the size in five years, we should have tax.

Is that the goal, to triple?

That was kind of a picked-out number. We’d like to get in the next couple of years to $10 (million) of revenue. That’s double and change, and then keep going from there. I don’t set very specific goals beyond a couple of years. Certainly, if we’re four now, at some point we’d like to be $15 (million) and keep going from there.

Well, you’ve been on pace. Let’s talk a little more about acquisitions then. Acquisitions, again in tax, but just in general, this is…you’re at the moment in time where acquisitions are something you’re looking at, correct?

Yeah, some of it’s reacting to the reality that there’s a lot more conversation. There’s private equity coming in spades—we’ve talked to some of those people. Because we’ve grown, I now have more time and capacity to look at acquisitions, and I think it’s a great way for us to get into different lines of service, tax being one of them, or get into a different niche with someone that’s got expertise in a brand, in a vertical that we don’t have a presence in. It’s also my background, so I want to make sure to leverage that, as it’s a helpful way for me to add value to the company. 

The last thing is, I do just think, especially as more stuff is changing in the industry, we need to be investing. We’re not going to go build AI ourselves, but if we’re a bigger business with more EBITDA, I can reinvest into hiring a head of technology. That type of stuff is easier to do if we’re double the size in terms of net income and EBITDA, and acquisitions is a way to move the needle there. So it’s getting into different lines of service. It’s part of a moment in our ecosystem, it’s my experience. And I also think it’s good for the business to be bigger so that we can actually invest in more places, hiring, etc.

I agree. Here’s a, to me, an obvious question, and I know this is a passion of yours, but culture is extremely important to you and building, in fact, on your website, it says you’re “focused on building and maintaining a fantastic culture characterized by joy, collaboration, and flexibility.” Internally, how do you do this? But then if you’re looking at acquisitions, how do you make sure that fits culture-wise?

One, I think to your second question, that’s a big part of the reason we haven’t done one yet, and we’re going to be very focused if and when we do that, on making sure there’s a cultural fit. Internally, the most important thing we can do is be a great place to work. That has to, and does, come above client service because ultimately, we can have tech and we can have Karbon, and Zapier, and the right products, but ultimately our people are the product. Our clients interact with two or three people at System Six. If those people aren’t happy, if they’re not enjoying their job, they’re not going to deliver as quality service, and then the clients are going to leave, the people are going to leave, and then you’ve got a death spiral. 

So ultimately, I feel pretty strongly about it. The north star is we want to be the best place to work in cloud accounting. When we have to make a tough decision, we’re going to decide for the team first, fire the client. It doesn’t mean that the client’s sometimes not right and our team makes mistakes, but it’s super important. Some of the stuff we do internally: we’ve got flexible work schedules, we’ve got a 24-hour response policy, which we let extend further some with clients. We’re fully remote, we don’t set people’s hours. When we’re interviewing, we ask, “What hours do you want to work?” and that can change. We do a lot of fun things throughout the year. We get together at least once a year as a group. That’s like, we don’t talk any work that week, that weekend. It’s just like, go have fun together. 

All of our team leads, so we’re pod structured, they have a budget every quarter for just little gifts and things. I’ve been really surprised the small stuff makes a difference. We give every employee and every employee’s spouse a birthday present. We’re quick to send flowers and stuff when someone’s sick or their kid is sick. We’ve got profit share that we think goes a long way to help people feel part of the organization and have good compensation. We want our people to be paid in the top end, top range of the ecosystem. 

It’s all the little things, like surveys once a month on employee experience. Kelly, our head of people, meets with everybody once a month, just like, “Hey, how are you doing? How’s your manager?” It’s all that type of stuff just to make sure we have a pulse on people and that they enjoy their work. I don’t think it’s culture as this whole thing of, “Oh, I can just go talk about it and we’re going to maintain a good culture.” It’s just like, know what’s going on with your people, ask them a lot, take care of them, send them gifts, make them feel loved, don’t just say it. That’s through adding up a bunch of small actions. I don’t think it’s one massive thing.

I completely agree with you. This is my, you know, I think many people know, my passions have been mental health in the profession, but my passion is still that. But the more I look at mental health, it can be helped by creating a great corporate culture. That’s, for me, starting to look at that as the base for everything. And that’s exactly what you said. So, thanks for agreeing with me!

Yeah. You’ve got to enjoy your work. And some of that’s systems and processes, some of it’s just being nice to your team.

Have you as an organization, have you thought about or looked at EOS?

Yeah, funny you should say that. It was somewhat implemented back in the day, and we still have vestiges of it around. That’s one of our goals for the year, we’re going to re-implement EOS this year. Probably in the late spring. We’re doing it at the management level and then starting the longer journey of pushing it down through the org. We’ve been talking about it for a year and I’ve probably kicked the can too much, but it’s time to just rip the band-aid because—do we absolutely need it right this moment? No. But next year, two years from now, absolutely. So I’m excited about it.

We have implemented it and we have, we probably…and I was not involved in that at all. I stay in my lane. I was not involved in that. But it was kind of the same, hey, looking at kicking around, trying to do a few things. Then, this last year got serious and hired an integrator to come on board. Everybody’s setting their rocks or whatever.

How has it gone so far? I mean, I guess you aren’t maybe as directly in it, but what’s your take so far?

Yeah, so my biggest concern with doing it—and this was a year ago May, when we really kicked it off—my biggest concern was the effects on culture. Technically I’m not, I don’t get involved with the leadership group or anything anymore. I honestly just go out and be the face of the company. But I was talking to them, I said, I’ll support this if you can guarantee me it’s not going to have a negative effect on our corporate culture. So they went into all that and explained it to me and how it’s going to do it. 

I see some bumps, I think, with culture myself, which concerns me, but overall, as it gets implemented, I think culture’s going to be good, but I think we need to have…personally, I think we just need to make sure that culture is being addressed while, not after EOS is all implemented, but making sure it’s completely part of it as we’re going forward.

Any advice for me on that? Is it just because the meetings become so rigid that people forget to stop just checking in?

That’s a little bit of my concern. Again, I don’t even get involved in the meetings. I get involved in a few meetings, our business development meeting and some marketing meetings, but other meetings, I don’t even do that. Believe me, I’m very spoiled.

You’re like, hey, I just, you know, get to do these. I get to do podcasts. Yeah, you got a good seat.

Yeah. But that is my concern is that we get concentrating so much on having these…I don’t even know what they’re called, L10 meetings or something like that, and forget about the whole big part of our meetings in the past. Again, I might be completely wrong, but a big part of our meetings in the past was just about the personal connections as well as everything else. We would just share, you know, most people know I’m a big fan of John Garrett and What’s Your “And?” People just get to share who they are outside of work on their calls and that kind of stuff. I just want to make sure we don’t lose that. I don’t think EOS gets rid of that, I just get concerned that during implementation, we forget about it.

I totally know what you’re saying there. We kind of have some, like I said, some parts of semi-EOS stuff. One thing is like, you start your meeting with personal best and business best. I got stricter about that over the last nine months and I got feedback from one of our team members who said, “Hey, that feels very structured. Can we just talk about our weekend for a couple of minutes and share what’s going on in our life without having to be just one personal and one business best?” And so to your point, and it’s supposed to be 60 seconds each or whatever, it’s like, hey, if we want to talk for five minutes about something that happened in my hometown over the weekend, make sure there’s still space for that.

Yeah. So John Garrett, a good friend of mine, I’m very fortunate to get to know him real well. This isn’t his research but things he found out during doing research on other people’s statistics, all it takes is 40 seconds of true personal interaction with somebody a day for them to feel valued. So that minute of asking about their weekend and how it was, and how was the play they went to, and how was their kid’s concert or game and all that, that, I don’t want to ever lose that personal interaction.

Ask the follow-up question and then remember next week. “Oh, you told me you were doing this thing, how did it go?” I don’t do a good enough job of that. 

But I think that’s important. You have that as a background, that culture is important. We kind of went on a tangent here, but I know we’re both passionate about culture.

No, it’s good. It matters so much, I just feel like you hear more legacy organizations in our industry complaining about employee churn over the last couple of years and quiet quitting, and they make it sound as if it’s the employees’ problem, there’s something wrong with this generation or whatever. It’s like, no, people are doing that because it’s not an enjoyable workplace. Thankfully with COVID now, post that, there’s more access to jobs because more companies are remote. I hope that the bigger organizations in the industry, my wife’s a CPA, not active anymore but started at Big Four and did two years, that was it for her. I hope they wake up to, if it’s a better workplace, those people will stick around more.

Yep. I agree completely. I think we have a great culture, and if you want to look at some proof of that, we typically don’t lose anybody. For the longest time, I said in the last seven years, we had one person leave on their own accord. Somebody just this week decided to move on, so that’s two now.

We’re not at that number and I’d love to be there, so that’s a good goal.

Yep. And that’s why I think culture is so important. If you want to quantify it, we don’t have to pay to retrain the new person, which is 50 to 200 percent of their salary to hire the new person, it’s crazy.

Plus knock-on effects of that. And so like, you’re asking the original, how do you think about culture through acquisition? Candidly, that’s scary. I can look at client churn, I can look at revenue and margin metrics and get a big understanding of these businesses. But what are the people like? Some of that I think shows up in employee retention in these businesses that we look at, but also, a lot of it’s got to come with trust and faith in the owner and getting to know that person really well, ultimately, in a smaller firm, the culture usually reflects that person. I also think the way we think about acquisitions is not necessarily like jamming things together day one. We may acquire a tax practice, and they stay, their brand exists, we’re not putting the teams together out of the gate, so there’s not a shock to both systems immediately and then do it more slowly over time.

Yeah, that would be interesting to see how it goes, but I like that idea for sure. Alright Chris, this was awesome. I really enjoyed you coming on. Every time we have a conversation, I completely enjoy it. Thanks for doing that. 

Likewise.

Before we wrap up, two final questions that everybody gets. One, I kind of alluded to or mentioned it, but I asked this question before I met John Garrett, but I would always ask everybody, and I still do. What are your outside-of-work passions? What do you enjoy doing when you’re not building this organization? What do you love out there?

Right now, I’m recently married, and we’re going to try and start a family pretty quickly. We’ve been together, Blair and I, for seven years, so I’m looking forward to building a family and being able to pour into that outside passion. We’re not there yet, but hopefully, that’s coming. 

Outside of that, it’s just spending time hanging out with Blair. We both love our fitness, so we try to get a workout in one way or another every day. I have a deep passion for golf—I love to play it, I’m involved in an organization here in San Francisco that is a nonprofit in the golf ecosystem. My hobby, on Saturday, I’m going to play golf. I’m really excited about five hours doing that with some buddies. So I’d say It’s fitness and golf. 

We love our cat Ruby that we got nine months ago. She’s been a great addition. We’ll get a dog one day as well. I grew up with cats and dogs, but that’s where I spend most of my time outside of work these days.

Yeah, if I move my camera, I think my dog is sitting on the couch here in this Airbnb right now.

Our cat thinks she’s a dog. It includes sleeping in the bed with us and everything. It’ll be a tough adjustment for her one day.

Yeah, I bet. Final question, if anybody wants to learn more about what you’re doing with the organization or in general, you or the organization, where would they get a hold of you or see what’s going on?

Drop me a line. Chris Williams is not the easiest name to Google, for better or worse. Email me at Chris@SystemSix.com. I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter, @CTW_SMB. Reach out to me whatever your preferred method of communication is. Always happy to chat to people in the ecosystem. And I just have to say, the ecosystem has been super welcoming to me. I’m able to meet you, go to these conferences, spend time with people who’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have because people like welcome new entrants in and I really appreciate that.

Well, we’ll put some links in the show notes as well, so if people want to get all of you or see what’s going on with System Six, I said it correct. 

There we go. Now, at the end. 

Alright, Chris, again, thank you for being part of the show today. 

Cool. Thanks, Randy.