Today our guest is Mike Whitmire. Mike is co-founder and CEO of FloQast, and an author of a few books—at least two that I know of, but maybe more. And one of the most recent books is called Shift Happens, which will be, I like the name actually, Shift Happens, which we’ll be discussing today. Mike was actually a previous guest on The Unique CPA podcast as well—he was episode 124, titled Automation as a Way to Reduce Burnout, which is obviously an area I’m very passionate about. So it was a great discussion back then, I expect another great discussion today. Mike, welcome back to The Unique CPA.

Thanks for having me again, Randy, I appreciate it. 

Yeah, no problem. It’s fun to see when people are putting books out and what the topics are, and especially obviously when they’re part of the profession. So before we get deep into it, I mentioned you were on the podcast before and I mentioned FloQast. Why don’t you give us a quick update or reminder of what FloQast is and what you’re doing. 

Happy to, excited to do that. And also I’ll add, I’m an inactive CPA as well. So that’s the background. And if we want to, we can dig more into my saga with the California CPA society. Yeah, I am an inactive CPA, and so FloQast was really born out of a lot of my own frustrations. So we’re a Software as a Service company. We offer what we now call accounting transformation software, so in line with kind of what we talk about in Shift Happens, we really think there’s a lot of operational efficiency to be gained within accounting, and we think the controller is in a really good position to help drive a lot of that efficiency. And so our software and the book, I would say, are very interrelated. We feel strongly about the industry and where it’s going. 

So back to the origin of FloQast: My career started at Ernst & Young, I was there doing financial statement audits for about four years. Loved it, but also got burnout, and decided it was time for me to leave public audit and I went over to a pre-IPO company by the name of Cornerstone on Demand. And turns out I was going to work even more hours there than I worked in audit. So the quick trick on that one, they pulled on me, it was really funny—I was interviewing there—the last interview was with the HR guy and I’d already gotten the offer letter and everything, so I was sort of like, “Hey man, level with me, like, how many hours does accounting work? Just level with me.” And he goes, he goes, “Well, I leave at about 6, 6:30 every night. And when I leave their door’s closed. Like they’re good.” I go, “Oh, okay. 6 o’clock is like a dream. That would be unbelievable if I got to leave at 6 every day.”

And then it turns out what happens. I started on my first day and at 6:00pm, the door was on one of those automatic lock things. Yeah. And so the timer goes off at six, the door closes. They are still back there ordering dinner. Technically, he didn’t lie to me, but I certainly, I certainly felt misled in the moment. And yeah, I proceeded to spend the next year and a half—13 months later, we went public and I stepped into an insane situation and maybe at the time I didn’t realize how insane it was. That was the only experience I’d ever had, so it felt normal. Now that I’ve been doing this for a while, I realize it was totally insane.

So I got hired. CFO goes, “Yeah, we’re doing really well. We just raised venture. We’re going public in 18 months.” So I was like, okay, and I step into a team where there are five of us. None of us have experience taking company public. We are using QuickBooks to close the books. We’ve never gone through a financial statement audit before. And I am the second CPA to join the team over there, and I was just sort of like, “Wow, we have a lot of stuff to do.” So we then proceeded to implement NetSuite to help us scale and go public. We also had new revenue recognition guidance that came out at the time. So back then it was EITF 08-1 was the new one that came out then, which required us to restate three years of revenue recognition, and I was the lucky one who got that project to be taken on, and all of that was then occurring in the middle of our first audit, which went to, we just went straight to Big Four for that one. So we went from zero to a Big Four audit while changing ERPs, adopting new guidance in the highest risk account that we had, trying to draft an S-1, get ready to go public, think about Sarbanes Oxley compliance and hire on a team. It was absolutely crazy. 

It sounds like it!

So yeah, I worked a lot of hours doing that. The way I cope with it is I learned a whole lot in a shorter period of time because I was spending so many more hours in the office. But ultimately we had a great IPO. I was there for three years. We scaled from five people in accounting up to about 50 people. Went public, got Sarbanes Oxley compliant, international expansion, had more challenges to deal with, and did some M&A work as well, and got to pull all it in the fold. And then there was one day a cornerstone where we’re sitting around and I’m closing the books, I’m doing my job. And the CFO pops his head outta the office and he goes, “Hey Karen, when are the books going to be closed?” And Karen was our controller and she’s, she goes, “I don’t know.” So then we have to have a status update meeting and we’re all giving updates on it. And the very simple idea for FloQast was, why isn’t there a better way to track our close and our team members? And then this reconciliation process sucks. How can we automate this as much as possible? And that was it. 

And I was on the revenue accounting side was part of my job still, so I was in Salesforce all the time. And I really just thought, “Why isn’t there something like Salesforce for accounting departments?” I thought back to my time in audit and we had a really great engagement management software where you’re working through all your audit steps, you save your documentation, you have sign off, prepare, review, all that stuff. I’m like, “I wish we had that at my current job.” And I start looking around, I can’t find any software that does this. And I felt like I had learned a lot at Cornerstone about running software companies, building software companies and what it looked like, and had kind of reached a point in my career where I felt enough confidence to go off and do that. I’ve always been entrepreneurial and wanted to start my company one day, and so I was just like, “Wow, here’s the opportunity.”

It was a little scary starting a B2B company. The idea of convincing a business to use your software felt pretty daunting, which ultimately it was, but we made it happen. And so that was the jump off point for me, and that was the foundation of FloQast was helping manage your close, automating the tie out process, automating the reconciliation process, just helping optimize the close. That was all the way back—I’m like starting to feel old doing this stuff—that was all the way back in 2013 that I left my job. So 2015 was when we put out our first piece of software, very much around the management and organization of what we do. As the years have progressed, we’ve expanded out to go beyond the month end close process and really help with any of those workflows that exist within accounting. When we take a step back, what we realized was our clients were using FloQast for so much more than the month end. They had things like SEC reporting, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, payroll, operations, tax. There were all these workflows that started getting tracked inside of FloQast. And in speaking with our clients, the general feedback was, “Hey, I’m the controller. I’m responsible for a lot more than just the close, and I want everything tracked in one place. And you guys have the best checklist, best workflows, and so I want it all in there.” We thought, okay, that’s really interesting. But the problem was they were hacking the application to make that happen, and it killed me looking at some of the dashboard results because of how it was being used, it just like rendered some of our application worthless. 

And so we went back and we decided to rework some of those things and structure the application so we could support just any workflow that’s going on, give the controller total visibility into their accounting department. And that’s when we really started to think more about operational accounting and broadly speaking, like everything that falls under the responsibility of the controller. So we helped them do that. And then we really set our sights on how do we help automate more and more of the work and help alleviate a lot of the responsibility of the controller. So the next step was more automation solutions around reconciliations—the transaction matching process is a very time consuming process that feeds into reconciliations. So how do we automate that? 

And then the other thing we started to look at was what are some of the most commonly used workflows inside of FloQast that are not the close? And then is there an opportunity to go deeper with a product there? So a really good example of that is we, in talking to our clients, we realized the most commonly used non-closed workflow was around compliance, in particular, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and audit readiness. So sort of that whole part of the step. And since I was on both ends of the table for that one—I had been the auditor, I had been the accountant—I’m like, okay, this makes a lot of sense. And there’s this process that connects the two of them that’s very manual that I passionately hate, which is the PVC process. 

So auditors come out, it’s the prepared by client list, they give you a Excel workbook with, hey, give me these 500 pieces of documentation. All of a sudden, I’m digging through all my files, I’m trying to get it to them. And it really annoys me because it’s all related to close activity and it’s living with all that information. Oftentimes I would just think to myself like, go get it yourself, the auditor. Go get it yourself. You know where it is. But you can’t do that when it’s just a folder structure that you’re saving things in. So we decided to productize that, build a purpose built solution for compliance and for audits, and the value prop that we have there is, we have all the source documentation needed for the audit, we can link our compliance, completely eliminating the PBC process. And so it gets way better for both the auditors and the accountants. And that product’s been out for about 18 months at this point, fastest growing product we’ve ever had. It’s really landing with the market. It just makes all the sense in the world. And from a personal standpoint, getting rid of the PVC process just feels really good and helps everyone go home a little bit earlier and automate a dumb operational task that we have to do. So I will stop there. I ranted for quite a while. And yeah, I’ll stop there. 

And I told you it was okay. You can go as long as you want. So there you go. Well, no, but I do want to touch on a couple things and some of the things you said there made me think a different path than what we’re going to talk about—I want to get to the book and we’re going to do that in a minute here. And actually before I do that though, and I have a question I want to ask about the book, but just a few minutes, because this is such a key topic right now, just talking about the new products, innovation you’re doing and everything you’re doing to really, I love what it says on, just on your LinkedIn about you, which is, “I love building software that helps accountants go home early.”

Yep. 

And I think I understand where that came from, some personal history, but when you’re building the software now, obviously, and I’ve seen you talk about this, is AI is a big question everybody has, what we’re doing, how we’re doing, and I don’t want to go real deep into this or, or you can do whatever you want. But I want to get to the book. But how is AI now affecting what you’re doing with FloQast? 

Well, yeah, AI is newer than the book, so it might be a good topic right now.  We’ve spent a lot of time digging into AI and researching it and then thinking about how it applies to accounting. And I think there’s amazing potential behind it. One of my concerns around it is at the end of the day, everything still has to be audited. So how do we embrace AI but do it in a way where auditors can in fact audit the work at the end of the day? So if you listen to non-accountants, there’s this idea that, “Hey, I should just be able to throw all the GAAP rules into an LLM, train it, and accounting should be automated.” And it’s like, for me, I go, “That’s cute that you feel that way. However, it’s a little bit more complicated than that, and you sort of have to work in accounting to understand just the little nuances.” It’s all the, I call it death by a thousand paper cuts. It’s no one thing, they’re just all these annoyances you have to deal with. And so you need to be a little more thoughtful about how to apply AI to make that easier. And again, think about the auditability of it, the backend. Audit is already difficult enough and they’re already overworked. If we’re going to go to auditors and say, we now expect you to learn about large language models and how to audit them and how all the endpoints, it is just not going to work. So there needs to be a different approach to the whole thing. So our take is that we feel like we’re in a really good position to be able to embrace AI and work with it, because we’re at a point where we’ve built this whole platform that can handle end-to-end workflows and automate a lot of the work that’s going on out there. AI then gives us an amazing opportunity to go deeper with those automation capabilities and handle the uniqueness within each organization. And that to me is where the challenge is. 

We talk a lot about accounting, how it’s, call it 80% the same across all companies. You have fixed assets, you have prepaid, you, you have, you reconcile your bank account. There’s, there are a lot of commonalities, but the challenge lies in the 20% where it’s different by industry, but then even within each industry, every company is unique because they made different system decisions upfront. There’s slightly different ways they’ve negotiated this contract to do business over here. So it’s the devil’s in the details with that last 20%, and then really with the last 1% of the work to be automated. So we think AI gives us the potential to go the full 100% route, and really automate end-to-end workflows, and that’s where you start to move into the world of agents and having to build custom agents to take care of the different forms of work that occur. And our general belief is accountants are best suited to automate this work and take a look at their own workflows and figure out how they can apply technology to automate it, and then transition themselves from the person doing this mundane work to the person reviewing the work that’s being done by the agent, and then thinking more about efficiency.

But also honestly, there’s just a talent gap and it’s not going to get any better. Right. So part of me also says, if we can just automate this work so accountants can go home a little bit earlier, that would make me thrilled. There’s a concern that it’s going to automate jobs. I’m actually more concerned that burnout is going to continue and we’re going to lose accountants from the profession. To me, that’s a bigger risk than AI automating jobs. I think AI will significantly shift the role of the accountant, and our goal is to make it so accountants own that, and are the ones in a position of power to be able to do that work. Our general sentiment is we want to level up accountants and help them become more like software engineers with our solution to allow them to automate their own work and more so focus on business changes and how do we do things going forward.

Yep. Well, you just said a key word there, a shift, which ties us back then to the, the book, but the new book, Shift Happens, why don’t we do this, with Shift Happens, you give our listeners like a quick overview of what the core idea is behind this book. 

Well, the core idea is the evolving role of the controller, and as I reflect on what controllership looked like when I started working versus what it is today, it’s wildly different. I even remember the CFO role—when I started in audit. So now 2006 was my first year in the audit world. A lot of CFOs, it was just about getting the financial statements prepared and then handing them off to the rest of the executive team to kind of then make decisions and business decisions. And with that, the controller was very much siloed to just accounting guidance and booking journal entries and getting it done, and getting it accurate and getting through the audit. That was kind of the extent of the job from what I saw. 

As time progressed—and a good example is when I went to Cornerstone—I saw our CFO there be much more generally business-minded and take the financial statements and help be strategic with the rest of the company about it: “Hey, I’m looking at our deferred commission balance, comparing it to our revenue recognition, and I think we’re doing this with the commission plans and are we driving the right behavior?” And you just like get a little more strategic with the numbers and with that, what you give up as a CFO, because you can’t do it all, the type of work you start to give up is that operational work. That gets delegated down and pushed down on the controller. So all of a sudden the controller has a lot more responsibility around running the department, getting numbers out on time without the pressure of the CFO—that’s just now the expectation of the CFO. Like, hey, all these books should be closed fast, it should be done accurately. I should get my financial statements and I should get insight behind the financial statements so I can go have an intelligent conversation with the rest of the executives and with the board of directors as well.

So it’s really about how responsibility has been pushed down on different roles because of the role at the very top changing. And to me it’s also a really exciting change. It’s more interesting, albeit more work. However, we have automation and we have systems to hopefully take some of the more mundane work off of our plate and allow us to focus more on the operational type work. So then you get into defining what is operational—that to me is an interesting one. It’s like there are certain terms where I think a lot of people know what they mean, but they actually mean different things when they talk about operations. So when I talk about operations, I talk about, it starts with hiring great people, so like hiring is a really important part of this that is really not discussed with the role of controllership. And once you hire people, it’s about being as a controller, not just a great manager, but also being a great leader. Those are distinct skill sets and need to be developed differently, but that is now the expectation of a controller is to be that leader of the accounting department.

And then beyond that. You have to be very good at interpreting technical guidance, knowing how that should be applied to your specific company, and then digging a layer deeper, it’s how do we get this work done? And that to me is the heart of operations, is how do we do our work? And the idea with the controller, we should establish a way that we’re doing our work, but then we should forever be trying to make it more efficient and improve those operations over time. And that’s the shift that I’ve seen within the role of the controller is simply much higher expectations, and a lot of those expectations kind of fall under the definition of operations. But when you think about it, it’s hard, man. We’re asking controllers to be great at hiring people, retaining people, managing people, leading people. By the way, you gotta be a technical expert on guidance. And oh, by the way, you need to know how to run operations. And then you look at the bottom of the job description and it goes “plus ad hoc projects.” So you just have random stuff being thrown at you all the time. It’s a tough job, and I think we really need to appreciate how difficult it’s to be a controller. 

So as part of the book then too, because it sounds like controllers need different skill sets that they’ve had in the past, and is this partly educating on what these skill sets are or how you develop these skill sets or what this new role is? It’s all of the above, I assume, with the book, but yeah, go ahead. Expand on that. 

Well, step one of it is explaining the expectation and how that’s changed over time, because I don’t think every controller is aware of this yet—so if you haven’t seen it in practice and you’re going to interview for your next job, you don’t even know that you’re falling short in this interview process. So step one is like, “Hey, here’s the shift that’s happening, and if you’re not aware of it, here we go. Heads up. This is what’s happening.” And if you want to have a great career progress, get that promotion, get the raise, get the next job, if you want to be a chief accounting officer one day, these are the expectations of you. And so setting that tone is step one. Step two is then talking about how you do those different things and how you can focus on it to help elevate your career from there. 

Okay, so let’s, I mean, obviously things are happening, things are changing. The roles are changing, everything’s changing. One thing I like on this change, and I talk about this all the time in accounting, is going from that reporter to an impactor—making decisions that are going to affect the path that the company goes down, the growth, the profitability. But when you’re seeing these changes, from your standpoint, what do you see the future? What does the future look like for this controller? 

So the future, to me, it’s not about just doing the work, it’s about consistently improving how the work is done. I think that’s the way you really drive operational efficiency, and that can be challenging if you are an overworked controller—the idea of being able to carve out some time for forward-looking improvement is tough, but very necessary. And I think with how technology’s being built today, that can be done a little more incrementally over time. And that’s back to FloQast real quickly, just, that’s our approach with software is the way we build our software and the way we like it to be rolled out is we want to help transform an accounting department but not disrupt you within any given month. 

One of my lines, when I raise money with venture capitalists, I go, “A big focus of ours is transformation without disruption. And I know you venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, you love the word ‘disruption.’ Totally your thing, not the thing of accountants. We have to close the books every month. We have to get financial statements out. We’ve got to work with the SEC quarterly, like there are no negotiations around these deadlines. So disruption is not cool for accountants. Transformation is cool, but we need to think about it the right way and not disrupt any given accounting department.” So that to me is the way to really help achieve change is over time, incrementally not feel the pressure to do it all at once with some big piece of technology, but do it incrementally over time. So that’s how we think about it and that’s how we want to empower that future. 

And just on a personal note, it’s a lot more fun. To do work, work that is helping improve things rather than just getting through the month. And if you have that mindset, I think it’s really healthy and is how you help drive better operations. So the challenge with all of this going forward is going to be how do we commit time and hours to getting better because we’re already overworked. FloQast, we talk about this a lot, I think we beat the drum on it and there’s a lot of coverage around the talent shortage in accounting, and then how much worse it’s going to get. Over time, we’ve taken a look at this and we are at a point of accountants, the amount of talent available is shrinking year over year at this point. And I think we can all agree, we hope the economy continues to grow. There’s more GDP, I think we’d all agree, like increase in GDP is still a good thing. However, as GDP goes up, that means there’s more broadly a demand for accounting to be done out there, and we have fewer accountants to do it. So something’s gotta give because. There’s more business, there’s less accountants, but there’s more demand on those accountants and there’s fewer of the accounts available. So how do we plug the gap and make that happen? And obviously that’s where we think technology comes into play. And we want to focus on empowering controllers to do the work that’s expected of them going forward, which is to be thinking more operationally. 

Yeah I think that’s one way I, in my personal opinion, to get more people into accounting is to show that it’s not just sitting and putting numbers together that someone else is going to use. It’s, people want to have an impact. And if this controller role becomes this impactful role, I can see that being an impact. Same thing with just public accounting. Advisory instead of reporting is such a key thing. And if we can get more people excited about that change, not only the reality, ’cause the reality has to change, but the perception of what’s going on in accounting, and I think what you’re doing with a book like this is setting the stage for that. I think what others of us are trying to do in the profession is just show there’s another side to things. And so from that standpoint, getting the word out, getting the perception / reality message out there and show that it is changing the book’s, doing that, you’re doing that, how do you get that message out there? 

So getting the message out is the tough part. I think things like this, like this podcast, writing a book is important and then FloQast, we try to take a little bit of a outside the box perspective. We’ve produced a comedy series called PBC, sort of about the, some of the jokes within accounting and going back and trying to highlight what the job is actually like. Because if you ask a non accountant what accountants do, they’ll generally say you do taxes, or—this is an interesting one to me—they’ll say that you do financial planning. So my source for that is we send a guy down to Venice Beach and we had him do Man on the Street stuff and just walk up to people and be like, “What does an accountant do?”

Oh wow. 

And those were the two answers we got, was taxes and wealth management. We’re like, okay, that’s kind of interesting. That’s the other perspective. Nobody talked about closing the books, doing a reconciliation, issuing financial statements, talking to the SEC. None of that was brought up at all. There’s no understanding, and that’s kind of what we do and how we deliver business value. So getting the word out a little bit more about what the majority of accountants actually do on a daily basis, I thought was, would be interesting because yeah, if I thought people just prepared tax returns, I’m not a tax accountant, like, I don’t like that stuff—I agree, I agree. But this is more interesting to me.

And taking a step back just back to the talent shortage, there are three issues with it: We have people retiring, people just leaving the profession altogether, and then a lack of people majoring in it. I feel like what we can impact right now, and hopefully this shift that’s happening impacts this is retaining our existing accountants in the field. If you shine a little bit of light of this is what the future of the job is, this is more rewarding, you’re not just wailing away on spreadsheets all day. You get to think a little bit more about how you make the team better or the company better, the department better. That to me is just more energizing work, and I think hopefully we can at least stop the bleeding on the people leaving the profession as it exists today. And then addressing the getting more people into the profession is a whole other topic. And I do think there are a few things happening that are really helpful with that. Like have you seen the, you’ve seen some of the rulings around the 120 credit hours. That’s a fascinating hot topic. We got some LinkedIn content going on around that. 

I saw you had something out there that got a lot of comments on it with the 150 hour rule, so that was pretty cool. 

Yeah, it’s an interesting topic and I’m going to keep diving into it more ’cause I genuinely don’t see the merit of it. I mean, when I was majoring we were, it was 120 hours. I went to school in New York and New York had already adjusted to the 150 hour requirement, but I was moving back to California ’cause it’s way too cold in New York. So I moved back to California and we were still on the 120, but transitioning to 150. So what I did was I went to college, I graduated, I had 120 hours, and then I went to a local community college in California to get the rest of my 30 credits. And it’s not like I was getting materially better at accounting. Like, man, astronomy was super interesting. US History 201 was boring ’cause I’d already learned all that stuff. It was just, it was such nonsense to me. It was just literally about paying a community college, grinding my way through these classes, and then coming to learn that I don’t even need 150 to be a CPA. It’s like a type one and a type two. So I actually, funny enough, stopped at 147 credits, said I’m never going to need this type two CPA, I’m not going to be an audit partner or signing in tax returns. So I didn’t need it. So I actually stopped at 147 thinking if I somehow end up as an audit partner, I’ll get the, what’s the joke? Like underwater basket weaving? I’ll go take that one a little bit later. So I think 150 is a really interesting topic and my next post on it is going to be like, and I do mean this from a lens of genuine curiosity: What is the incremental accounting knowledge that you get from staying another year in school? 

Well, and I’m no expert on this, but what I’ve heard in the past is there’s really nothing. There’s no requirement. You don’t—the 150 is not, the universities didn’t buy in on the 150, so they don’t have 150 hour programs, and it was pretty much, you just get the hours. Now, I’ve tried to stay neutral on this, for the most part for myself, but I literally, I think probably the first time I’ll say this is yes, I think the 150 is an issue and it has been, and I didn’t have to have 150. I probably do because accounting was my third career, so I had to go back and get more hours. 

But yeah, I want to go back though ’cause what you were saying about retaining people and the important part of that. That’s something that I’m very passionate about too. And we just, I did a survey in fact. The idea came into my head about a year ago right now, and we put it out last year and we called it the Accountants Professional Satisfaction Survey. And we got a lot of responses—we got some really good data. What we’re doing is we’re releasing a kind of like a little workbook or writeup on it, and we’ve released a lot of data already, but this is going to be like the final version of it. And I do presentations for firms or associations on it now, where we’re talking about the findings we’ve got. There’s some very obvious, some not obvious areas that create dissatisfaction within the accounting profession. It hits certain levels of people in the profession different than others, and we got all this data on all these different levels, and so now if we can use that data to go make changes to those areas, I think that can be significant in getting people to stay. 

Same thing with what you’re doing now. Even with the book and just going out and talking about it. If we can identify changes that should happen and help facilitate those changes, I think we can at least start to make a little dent on that middle part of retaining people in the profession.

Yeah. What were some of the top findings? 

So there’s some really key things that I’ve always been passionate about, but, and I’m always passionate about mental health awareness, and that was one of the key things, when people felt that there was a good program in place to address burnout or overburdened with stress, the satisfaction levels went way up. But it wasn’t just having the resources, it was de-stigmatizing asking for help with the resources. Saying that I’m dealing with burnout and I need help with that. So they had to go together. There was things that again, I concentrate on the things that I’m always been passionate about as well, but getting to know the people you work with on a personal level created such higher satisfaction. It almost seems obvious, but I don’t think it’s as obvious as I think people often think people want to have a life at work and a life at home separate. But really people want those integrated. They want their passions to be known by other people. And if your passions are known, oh, I’m going on my rant now—if you know that someone is plays in a band, if somebody is a mountain biker, if you know thesethings about them, that actually affects how you work together too, on a positive aspect in my mind. So those were key. 

The funny thing is ours was not a huge negative impact when people were working on projects that they enjoyed. So allowing people to find their role within the business, not only right person, right seat, but right projects that they’re working on, right client base they’re working on, when they really enjoyed that, the hours didn’t make as big a deal, and the pay didn’t make as big a deal. As long as their pay was competitive, if these other things came into place, they were good. Hours, we could work 60 plus hours during tax season and people weren’t—which is probably nothing compared to Mike Whitmire past in the audit fields. 

Yeah. 

But you’re at 60 plus, it didn’t have a negative impact if you enjoyed the work. So there was key things and there’s 30, 40, 50 key things. Those are those, some of the ones I concentrate on when I’m out talking now. But yeah, the data will release. I’m really excited because it is more of a, here’s the data, but here’s things we can do to make changes, to help combat this. 

To have those relationships, it’s best to be in the office, hanging out with people. 

Yes.

And I had a really interesting interview with—do you know Simon Sinek? 

I do. 

Okay. So we paid him enough money to where he was the keynote speaker for one of our… 

What!?

Our user conferences. 

I want him!

Yeah, he’s awesome. And I got to interview him and my biggest takeaway from that is I was asking about work life balance and working from home and he goes, “I think a lot of people don’t process how important work is to them with, for their personal life.” And he went on this thing about how you take a step back broadly in society—broadly in society: We spend less time with our friends outside of work and we are not nearly as religious as we used to be. And I’m like, all right, where is this going? He goes, so, “There’s not as much of the, ‘I’m in the bowling league with my buddy and I see him every week,’ ‘I play softball,’ there’s just not as much of that as there used to be,” and people derived a lot of meaning from spending time with their friends and from going to church and having something higher than them to really feel, make them feel as though they’re, there’s more going on to life. And also to see their friends at church, like it’s a social gathering. You have your friends, you have your community, and you might as well understand that. 

Now if you are busy all the time, you don’t spend as much time with your friends and you don’t have an institution that you’re a part of, you actually turn to work subconsciously to provide all of those things. So it’s a subconscious turn to it, and that’s why all of a sudden, a lot of younger people, they care about what’s the political stance of a company on something? Because they’re missing that from the religious institution and expect it from their company. And then they also have a lot of their friendships and you see people meet their spouses at work all the time, it’s so common. That’s just it. It is what it is. However, many people have the mindset of that’s work, I don’t want to be there, if I can work from home that’s better, like as few hours as possible, blah, blah, blah, work is evil. But when you’re actually there with the team having comradery, that’s actually way better for your mental health than being at home by yourself all day just doing a reconciliation and not being able to spend time with people. 

So I thought that was a really interesting observation and after kind of walked through it that way, it’s like, man, that makes a lot of sense. 

Yep. So I agree, but I also, one of the key findings—I didn’t say this—is one of the highest satisfaction level creators for accountants was flexibility to work where they want, when they want. And so that freedom. Now that being said, it also was the relationship end of thing. And so how do you build the relationships in a remote environment? And so one of the key things that I’ve been starting to talk about a lot is what are the things you can do to make sure you have both? Give people flexibility, but also allow people to get to know each other. And there’s a lot of tricks we do as a company. We’re fully remote and we’re 75 people, not thousands, but 75. I would put our culture up against anybody’s culture, but we do get together twice a year—the entire company—in retreats and without that, it would be very hard to continue that growth.

Yeah. We’re close to 800 at this point. And we’re distributed, we have offices in L.A., New York, London, and Sydney. So there are people who go into those offices, but we’re also distributed and have people in other states and everything. So we get people together once a year is what we try to do. We have more regional, or we have like the team will get together separately, the RD will get together separately. 

We do that, yep. 

But what we found, there’s one group in particular, so we have a sales group. It’s the entry level sales role. It’s called the BDR. It’s a hard job. You’re calling, people are hanging up on you all day, it’s a really difficult job. The retention for people who go into the office is significantly higher than those who work from home. 

Okay. 

And a lot of them would say, I want the flexibility. I don’t want to have to go in the office. I want to be able to work from home. They’ll say that, ’cause I think they think that makes sense, but subconsciously it’s actually a lot more rewarding to be with people who you’re, you have comradery, you’re working with them. And that’s where I try to juxtapose the logical desire versus the subconscious need of a human. Not to get too philosophical here, but anyway—

We are way going down tangents! 

But no, Simon Sinek, it like really got me thinking about a lot of stuff. It was fascinating. 

Yeah, no, we have a conference we host every year, Bridging the Gap, and man, I’m like, how do I get Simon Sinek there because I cannot afford to pay what I think his fees are so—

Not cheap. He is a popular guy. 

Yeah. But I would love it. Our conference is kind of down the path of the themes he likes to talk about. So it’d be good. But one last thing then on that, and this is, I knew we would probably go different directions in the conversation today, we’re both passionate about this profession, which is cool, but, retention. You’ve said this, and that’s a key thing with me too, because again, we’re 75 people, 18 years in business. We’ve had nine people leave in that time, even being fully remote. 

Wow. That’s very impressive. 

Yeah. And it’s because the culture. And I actually have written a culture code that everybody knows, and that’s a living, breathing thing, if people want to suggest changes, they can, but it’s just kind of more of a here’s what really we it’s almost our promise to the people that work here, and I think that’s important. I don’t think a lot of people do that. But yeah, somehow we’re able to create a culture just on Teams calls, people get to talk about themselves at the end of a call and who they are and they can do a slideshow on themselves, and I learn all these cool things about people. Every time we have a new hire come on, I personally get on a one-on-one call with them to talk about anything but work. We’re not, I’m not even asking them what they role they came in as.

That’s awesome. 

Let’s, let’s just talk about Hey, what do you enjoy doing? They can tell me as little or as much as they want, I’ll be vulnerable. I’ll tell anything and that usually frees them up. But so little things like that, if we could do incremental things, I think it helps with the culture aspect of things. 

 

Yeah. And it sounds like you’re doing a good job of being very intentional about it also. 

Yes. That’s one of my key words. 

Yeah. It doesn’t happen organically.

Intentionality is one of my key leadership words I talk about all the time. Intentionality, vulnerability, empathy, and transparency. You can add more in there, but those are the four keys I think I talk about a lot, and so I agree with you. Alright, we completely changed directions from—not really.

It’s good with me, ‘cause I’m more here to have an interesting conversation than market a book, so I’m excited we went this way. 

Alright, well good. And man, we need to do this more often. I love talking with you. Let’s though, let’s just wrap up on the book because that was the key that got us into all these different tangents, which is awesome because it gets us thinking, gets us talking about the importance of, you know, the shifts that are happening in the profession in general. So let me give you an opportunity to just give a wrap up of the book or the discussions we had, basically from your mindset. Oh, and mindset, something you like talking about too. 

Yeah, definitely. I guess I’ll wrap with, there’s a lot of talk in the industry about accounting and being strategic. I think we’re a little more on point with it, talking more from the operational lens. I think accountants really are operational. There’s some strategy within there, but the future is going to be on the operational side. And to me it’s really exciting if you’re able to focus on how you get better every month, just incremental change. And these are the expectations of the profession going forward. 

So we like to highlight it, give some practical tips on how to make it happen and it’s more fun work. That’s what I think is really encouraging for the profession. Like you had brought up the working a lot of hours, and there’s some work that’s meaningful and some that isn’t, and employee satisfaction, it’s not necessarily the number of hours and I reflect on that, and to me, there’s work where you are doing it and you’re looking at the clock all day waiting to be done with the day. Then there’s work where you pick your head up and you’re like, “Oh crap, it’s already six o’clock.” And as I reflect on that, if it was boring, tedious, mundane, and just had to be done, that’s what I was looking at the clock, or if what I would do is in Excel, I would have a little percentage complete calculator for myself so I could like will myself to the end of this project, that’s how I trick myself to do that. 

But if I was working on something where it was like, “Hey Mike, we need you to help implement Sarbanes Oxley. Can you go figure that out?” I’m like, this is awesome. And that’s where I had a day where I pick my head up and it’s like, whoa, it’s already six o’clock. So it’s just the allowing and moving into this operational mindset allows us to do more of that, figuring out how to do something better work. And to me, that’s way more rewarding, and a day that ends at six will feel very different than a day that ends at six if you’re looking at Excel and doing the same back and forth stuff all day long. So I want to just end with saying this is a really exciting future for accounting, and despite the talent crunch issues, I’m confident that we’ll be able to automate a lot of the boring work with technology and allow accountants to level up and think more operationally and genuinely enjoy the hours they’re putting into work a lot more.

Well, I think that’s an awesome wrap up. But before we completely wrap up, two final questions. And I think I asked you this last time because I asked everybody on the show, but you know, when we’re, when you’re not figuring out how to get accountants to leave the office earlier, get home earlier, spend less time, automate and shift the profession, what do you do for fun? What are your outside of work passions? 

Okay: Family. I have a 7-year-old daughter. And I’m married and they love Disneyland, so I find myself at Disneyland a whole lot. So that’s—which I enjoy, I can only take so much, but I do, I enjoy going, seeing the my daughter get to ride a rollercoaster for the first time every time is a lot of fun. So, yes a lot of fun with my family. 

I do have a softball league with my buddies every weekend. So back to that one—I do get to do that, but then I realized I fill the accounting stereotype to a T and I realized that based on marketing: So I love baseball—accounting and finance companies market at baseball games—and I love golf, and they market with golfers, and so I just, I just like an accounting bro who loves golf and accounting and it is what it is. So those are the things I like. 

Nice. Nice. So you know who you are. 

And as a Dodger fan, I’m dealing with a whole lot of crap from all other baseball fans right now, but it’s the golden era of Dodger baseball and I’m very excited about it.

Oh yeah. No, for sure. Alright. And then last thing, if people want to find the book, find out more about FloQast, find, your LinkedIn posts you’re putting on there, what’s the best place for them to check out? 

Book’s on Amazon—reasonably priced. So feel free to go ahead and snag that one. You can learn more about FloQast on just FloQast.com. And if you haven’t been reading any of these things, we have a weird spelling to our name. It’s F-L-O-Q-A-S-T. The quick story there is the properly spelled domain was too expensive for us in the early days, so we switched the spelling of it, so that’s how we got to where we are today. And then if you want to, yeah, check out my LinkedIn content, you can just search my name on LinkedIn. Happy to connect. If accounting is in your title, I will accept your connection. If it’s not, I will not accept your connection. That’s my rule of thumb. So feel free to connect and we can get linked up and check out the LinkedIn content. 

Well, I thought we were already connected and I saw it today, we weren’t. So I just sent you a connection request, so hopefully I get through the gates here. 

Well, The Unique CPA will get accepted, yes. 

Alright. Well, Mike, thanks again. Great conversation. I really enjoyed it and good luck with everything. 

Thanks, Randy. I appreciate it.