The Ideal Practice Model

Today, our guest is Joe Woodard. Joe’s a veteran of the show, actually—second time on. I’ll give you a little info on Joe: Most of you probably know who he is and heard him speak before, but Joe’s an author, a consultant, a coach, a speaker. He is the founder of Woodard Events, which is a training and resource organization for the accounting profession, or accounting professionals. As part of his conglomerate of organizations, he has Scaling New Heights, which is a really cool conference. It’s one of the largest conferences out there for the accounting profession. I’m very honored to be speaking at his event for the second straight the year this year. A couple other things about Joe—I think this is his 10th consecutive year being listed as an Accounting Today, 100 Most Influential People in Accounting. So congratulations on that. And Joe, welcome back to The Unique CPA podcast.

It’s always great to be here, Randy. Thanks for having me.

Oh, no problem. It’s always a fun conversation. Either listening to you present, or having that conversation, I enjoy both ends of it. So a couple things—we’ve talked in the past, and we’ve talked about all kinds of things, you know, pricing and probably business models, and all kinds of things. But before we jump into, really, what we’re going to key on today, which is a pretty cool thing, the Woodard Ideal Practice Model, any hot topics that you are running into these days, or things that you’re finding that the accounting profession needs to hear more than others?

Well, we need to prepare for a massive merger and acquisition activity over the next five years. This market’s going to aggregate significantly. There are billions with a B, not millions with an M—billions of dollars in the plural, being invested by PE firms to aggregate this market. You’re going to see aggregations take place around existing multibillion dollar corporations on the very low side. You know, QuickBooks has this low end play, H & R Block has one, but now we’ve just seen that LegalZoom has created an offering under the leadership of two people who are Intuit veterans. 

So we’ve got the very small market—I would say, up to about maybe $200,000 to $300,000 in sales, Pilot, you know, all of those are also entering into the space. Bezos is heavily funding Pilot. So you’re going to see a lot of that become big box, buy off the shelf, mass-served industries. It’s a very underserved market right now, so I don’t think that’s necessarily a threat to accountants, as long as the accountants are doing what we’ve been trying to tell them to do, Randy, forever, which is to move up above that level. They need to be there anyway, where they can provide higher level valuable services. 

And I don’t mean to disrespect anybody who’s passionate about helping the startups—if that’s your thing, you keep doing it. You do it uniquely. You do it in a differentiated way. You do it in a way that helps them to grow past that danger zone that is a startup. But just understand that if you’re talking about record keeping for those folks, that’s going to become a saturated market really fast, and it’s going to be a market dominated by the Gods of Olympus throwing, you know, millions of dollars of marketing thunderbolts that he other, and I don’t think you want to be in the middle of that as a mere mortal. 

So that’s going to be market aggregation number one. Market aggregation number two is going to take place in the very—in the larger space. Larger being up above to say $2 to $3 million in revenues mark. Some of those are non credential standalone CAS, some of those are CPA firms. But that’s where the PE money is coming in. Not the multibillion dollar existing corporations, or those that have multibillion dollar founders or investors like Bezos with Pilot, Intuit, H &R Block and so forth—those are already well funded. But the PE firms are funding the inorganic growth of the Top 100, and that inorganic growth is going to be done by buying dozens and then hundreds and then eventually thousands—yes, thousands, I’m not exaggerating—of these $2 to $5 million firms. So if you find yourself in that space where, you know, hey, I’m a half million dollar firm, I’m a million dollar firm—something less than $2 million—there are still going to be offers first made to you, but just understand that that’s not most of the money flying around in the room. And you’re in a bit of a safe space combined with a danger zone, because a lot of your market’s going to get gobbled up from the above you and below you. But a cottage industry—Joe’s prediction—will form, and that cottage industry is something you can thrive in there in that middle sweet spot if that is your long term goal.

So I know that was a very long answer, but I couldn’t have an open ended question like that and not point at this Randy. It’s going to change the whole profession in a way that’s unprecedented and it’s never happened before, and it won’t happen again for another hundred years.

Yeah. See, I told you, every time we have a conversation, I learn something new, so I appreciate that. We had a really fun podcast a few weeks ago that was released about a smaller private equity firm that’s investing in smaller firms. I was well educated on that after that podcast—I learned a lot. It was pretty cool. We’re going to do another one coming up with Allan Koltin as well, where we’re going to talk about some of the big deals. He just did the big one with Baker Tilly, and so we’re going to talk about that. I think we’re going to do that on a LinkedIn live, actually. So, yeah.

Yeah. He’ll have a lot more to add to that, on that large firm space. He could really drill down on what I was just mentioning there.

Oh, yeah. The large firm space for sure. So I think that’s a great segue, because now what we really wanted to talk about today is this new model that you’re putting together. I assume it’s new, but that you’re—trademarking, is that the right term?

Yeah, that’s right! Yeah. But it’s, yeah, but it’s called Woodard Ideal Practice Model, and it’s not new in that it’s a—we’ve been kind of gestating this child that we birthed for five years or so. Seven, if you want to go all the way back to the inception of our coach program. This is a maturation process, and it’s matured into these seven disciplines as we have coached thousands of firms over almost a decade here. And what we have determined, Randy, is, no matter what your need set is as a practitioner within the accounting profession, it can fit into one of seven different practice development objectives. 

So the first one is “Ideal You,” which is a fancy way of saying brand, but we like this better. Randy, you know full well that brand is a story—brand is not a logo. So if you don’t know who your ideal professional self is and the identity of your practice, you don’t have a story to tell. So we start by that discovery, then we help them write the story. The story becomes the brand. Okay?

Nice.

So then the logo forms out of the story. You’re out of the brand. So when your listeners look at the Woodard logo, which they may see on your podcast page, or they go to Woodard.com, it just looks like a bunch of letters that we happened to pick a font. But there are subtleties there. There’s strength in the font we picked. It’s a bulwark. The entire logo looks like something you could lean against and depend on. Every letter is connected because of the networking component—we’re community oriented. But if you start by trying to build the logo and you don’t have the story yet, it’s a horse-cart problem. 

Okay. So then after you’ve developed your story and built your “ideal you,” you have your “Ideal Service Slate,” which reflects the brand because the brand has a promise. For example, Disney’s brand, and brand promise, is “We create happiness.” Their product is a memory. Well, until they understand that, they don’t even know what services they’re supposed to offer. They can’t possibly slate that. So these are cumulative—they build on each other—the services follow the brand. 

Now, once you have the brand and once you have the services, then you know the “Ideal Client” to purchase your services. For example, Disney would not try to market to somebody that isn’t a person of nostalgia, that didn’t grow up going to DisneyWorld, that’s a fifty-year-old adult with no kids and with no grandkids and doesn’t like chaos, who’s maybe an agoraphobe. Maybe that’s not the ideal customer for Disney. So once they understand their product’s not for everyone, then they can actually position the product to the correct market. So if your listeners are listening and you’re wondering why you always end up with these clients that don’t value you, don’t understand what you do, but somehow they always work their way into your practice—it’s because the brand’s story didn’t filter them, the service slate did not filter them, before they ever got to that front door. 

Now feel free to interrupt me at any time. I’m just rattling through it all. Do you want me to keep going, or…?

I have a question on that one then. So the client, what did you call this third, client profiling?

“Ideal Client.”

The “Ideal Client.” And so when you’re looking at an ideal client, when you’ve done your—the branding, the story, coming up with who you are and then the services that you’re offering, does this start then, funneling down to a niche when you’re coming up with an ideal client, or how do you see that plan?

That’s a really good question. Yes. And what I say is, there are riches in the niches, but there are leashes in the niches. So be careful, right? Be careful. It can limit you as much as it does help you. So what I would say is, in some cases, your brand story does necessitate that you go after a particular market segment. I would say that is not as common as maybe some of my thought leader peers have said that you need to, that it’s sort of like a table stakes thing to differentiate your practice. I’ve got a very specific answer to this, Randy, if I could just drill down for a minute. 

Yep. 

I say that if you’re providing services—this is the way I delineate it. I put it into accounting terms. If you’re providing services below gross profit, then offer your services to any client who understands the value of the service slate, and can buy into the story, meaning the vision that you have and the outcomes you’re trying to drive. An example of that would be, say, controllership services. I can put in spend to management services, budgets, purchase orders, spend policies, spend policy enforcements, maybe some intelligent spend cards, to help mitigate expense overruns—I could do that for a wide swath of businesses. Once I understand that my story is I protect small business journeys, and I understand my service includes controllership, why would I limit that whenever it applies to so many businesses? The only thing I’m limiting there is businesses where other people besides the owner are authorized to spend. Because businesses don’t need spend management if only the owner is authorized to spend. They might need a budget, but they don’t need spend policy enforcement. 

So I might have other filters for ideal client that aren’t niche. However, if I’m talking about services above gross profit, where I’m helping them to control costs, maybe even do some capital expenditure management—like forklifts or fleet trucks or warehouses, things like that—definitely, if I’m trying to help them with revenue and revenue management pricing, pricing strategies, maybe even helping them walk through their own brand story, their own service slate, their own ideal customer profile, well now I’ve started to get into pure advisory. And I think if you’re going to do that, you have to have a deep understanding of the way that business operates. That’s where your riches and the niches come from. 

Got it.

Above gross profit.

Alright. That’s a great explanation. Alright. “Ideal Client” then.

Ideal Client. Now sitting underneath the ideal client is the non price sensitive client—that’s part of the profile—and infused into the ideal service is the ideal price. So if you’re wondering where pricing is, pricing is underneath service, that’s where we place it. Okay. 

Now “Ideal Technology” is the fourth one. Once you have the brand story, the service slate, you know who you’re going to be putting this in front of, the right kind of buyer, you’ve gotta serve it out with technology. That’s everything from the client experience side, which should be mobile first, all the way through the automation layers that increase your efficiencies, profitability and scale. Then you get into the process. Now, technology and process don’t necessarily get deployed sequentially. These two are two sides of the same coin, right? And therefore, they’re done more in concert with each other. As you’re deploying your process, you’re doing your tech process, they inform each other, but they both do follow Ideal You, Ideal Services, Ideal Client. 

Then you have your “Ideal Engagement,” which is the actual mechanics of the engagement itself—how do you manage scope, how do you deal with the contractual obligations that you have, protections is where your lawyer would get involved, statements of work versus master services agreement, and managing client expectations—because expectation-reality gaps can destroy relationships. So this is interestingly enough, when we say ideal engagement, we don’t mean pricing, what we mean is, after you’ve set services, and price, and the client’s ready to buy, these are more of the mechanics of the engagement itself, and we can sink the ship on this one if we’re not careful. 

And then the final one is to build all of this through to the team. So you democratize the vision, the services, the client, the technology to process, and the engagement structure through systems, to the team, under a healthy team culture, which you’re talking about at Scaling New Heights.

I am.

So that you can scale this through various resource strategies, some of which could be outsourcing. Some of it could be permanent team members. Some of it could be a network of people that you partner with and refer to. A team can have a very broad meaning.

Yep. So a couple things, because I want to expand on them since you brought it up, since I am talking about, actually, firm growth and how culture ties into growth, I think maybe you agree with me? Maybe not? 

Oh, absolutely. You can’t grow a firm without culture. And if you could, would you want to?

Well, it’s funny. Dan Hood and I had a conversation on this. It was a really interesting conversation because I went in with this mindset that, you know, we want to create this great culture—a culture where people feel valued and feel like they’re part of something. and Dan was like, yeah, but you could actually build a firm with a culture of burnout too. And I’m like, well, I suppose you can. And there are some firms out there that do that, and then you go in knowing you’re going to be worked to—not literally to death— but you’re going to be worked 80 hours a week, and you’re going to only last a couple years, and you’re going to turn through it. And so I assume when you’re talking culture, it’s not that version of culture, the burnout culture.

But Randy, you really make a good point. Culture’s a neutral word.

Yes.

You have good culture, you have bad culture. So yes. And sometimes we do use it always with the implication that it’s a positive thing. It’s important to put the word positive, healthy, conducive.

Good, yes.

Right? Those sorts of things. I just finished reading Elon Musk’s biography, which is a fascinating read. I just couldn’t put it down. There was an interesting conclusion from John Oliver, by the way, and I know I’m digressing a little bit, but it actually does tie back to culture, and Elon Musk’s management style. After John Oliver read the biography, his statement—you know how whimsical he is—his statement was I have so much respect for everything that Elon Musk has accomplished for humanity, and I’m horrified that it is Elon Musk who is doing it. That’s a funny line, right?

Yeah!

Well, you know, and I drive a Tesla. I don’t personally have anything against Elon Musk, but I get the paradox of this. And what made me think about Elon Musk is, he does a great job casting vision, so he has no problem telling the story, but the culture is a culture of burnout.

Oh, yeah.

When you read the book, he burns people out, they last a couple of years, and they’re gone. So you have to be so careful that the vision is checked by a pace that is sustainable. That’s huge.

Yep. Perfect. And just as a side note on your Elon Musk story, a friend of mine’s son worked at SpaceX down in, you know, Southern Texas, and they brought cots into the office so people could sleep in the office, and so they could work more. And I’m like, man, that is not a culture that I want to be part of, but it is a culture, and that’s what you just said, that the culture they’ve created is that burnout culture, and they know they’re going to have people for two years. 

Burnout culture, yeah.

So let’s talk about—I’m so fascinated about culture and “team” in general that, you know, you already said it, but that is what I’m going to be talking about at Scaling New Heights. Let’s dig deeper into “team,” because that’s the part—that’s the one I really love. When we’re talking “team,” you already said that you could have an outsource, you can have internal, you can have part time, you can have remote. I’m sure there’s all these different things, but when you’re looking at the team aspect of the Woodard Practice Model, let’s expand on that.

Yeah, absolutely. We have a two week version, a four week version, a ten week version. So there are three different kinds of depths or peels of the onion on this one. But I’m just going to kinda surface out, because it would be two or three podcasts to completely unpack everything we talk about, right?

Yep. 

But I want to start by delineating when you’re leading a team there are two different words, and they are not synonymous: there is management and there is leadership. And leadership is the development of people; management is the measurement of people. And, unfortunately, Randy, what I’ve seen in most accounting firms is we’d neither lead nor manage. Meaning that we supervise, yes, we supervise, but we don’t measure. And if we are measuring, we don’t measure what matters. We measure things you know, like utilization, realization. I’m like, okay, not really what’s going to build a culture. 

Instead, what we recommend over at Woodard is, John Doerr’s Measure What Matters— appropriate title for the book, because I think he’s actually measuring what matters. And his OKR adoption, right? Objectives and key results. And then we have the people on the team help to write those objectives and key results so they have a sense of ownership of them from the very beginning.

The other thing we teach over here at Woodard, one of our bedrock principles—so first, we measure what matters, and we reward success in those areas. The second, and they’re inseparable, is we delegate outcomes whenever we can, we delegate tasks only when we have to. So once we have these objectives and key results, and people have bought into them and taken ownership for these outcomes, Randy, it’s my job as the owner of the company to serve people, to better their chances of achieving their objectives, rather than me barking orders so that they can assist me in accomplishing mine. And that’s a model called servant leadership, which is not a state of mind. It’s a methodology. It’s not that I’m humble or something like that. It’s that I have a servant leadership model, meaning that I serve the people that are on my team to drive their outcomes, which happen to be owned by my company. The outcomes are owned by my company. 

Now there’s a book called Servant Leadership by Hunter I would recommend you read. So I’ve dropped two books here. John Doerr, Measure What Matters, and I’ve got Hunter’s Servant Leadership. Now a little caveat to your listeners: Hunter does come at the servant leadership model from a spiritual perspective, but most people who read the book do not feel like that’s preachy. They just get to the concept underneath it, but I want to let your listeners know that. So they don’t think I have an ulterior motive or anything. It’s just a good business book.

Alright. So those are two of the bedrock principles. The third bedrock principle is sustainability, which comes through several different aspects. So I’ve got, let’s call this a drill down on sustainability of the team—the team as a whole: One is work-life synergy. We do not like the word work-life balance, because it implies there is always a compartmentalization. And in today’s world, it’s often best that there’s not a compartmentalization unless you’re on vacation in a laptop down mode. Synergizing has actually proven to be more healthy, less disruptive, not just for the business, but for the worker, except whenever you have chosen compartmentalization. So we like work-life synergy, as opposed to work-life balance.

The second one is the values of the company. The values of the company sustain the worker through all of the fog of war, through all of the times when they can’t see clearly. And the values of a company are not the ethics or morals of a company—this is where certain companies that we’ve seen out in the public space, I won’t mention examples, where they crossed the line on that, and they’ve actually disenfranchised customers from their brand story and their brand promise because they equated company values with personal moral ethics or religious mores. A value, a company value is simply nothing more than a company behavior. I’ve got a third book for you, Patrick Lencioni breaks this down in his book, The Advantage. And he says there are four different kinds of company behaviors, a.k.a. values, and everybody always thinks about just having one slate, and typically it’s the wrong slate. It’s a slate that’s kind of just PR talk, you know, like “Integrity First” or whatever, which if that’s yours, I’m not picking on you. It’s just typically, those are done because they make your company look good. What he would say is you have operational behaviors, you have accidental behaviors, you have aspirational behaviors. 

So the accidental ones are the ones that you behave and you wish you didn’t. I have plenty of those in my life. Right? I eat too much sugar. That’s an accidental behavior. I don’t exercise enough. So one of my personal values is an anti-value of exercise. That’s an accidental behavior. It’s not like I chose that when I was 30 and said, hey, I’m going to be against exercise, or against eating well. So just understand, you know, you’ve gotta have these goals that everybody in the company can get behind and go, okay, if we’re going to aspire to have a better behavior with something like, say, racial representation, then let’s all get behind it, right? And let’s make sure that that matters to us, or whatever it is that matters to your company. 

And then the fourth piece of that is coming all the way back full circle to the vision. When people are driven by the vision, but they have the guardrails of the values, they have the work-life synergy so they don’t burn themselves out, like the cot sleeping, or actually Elon Musk, I read in the book, slept under his desk many nights. So he practiced what he taught. 

Yep. 

But he would also burn himself out! And he would go through periods where he had to withdraw from his own company. So if you want to get off that roller coaster, right, so work-life synergy, you take all of those pieces together and you create something called sustainability. All of those are bedrocks of the ideal team, but there’s a whole building that’s built around those bedrocks. Maybe we could talk about that on a future podcast.

Oh, we could do that for sure. One question I had, because when you were talking about the values of the company and the books that you were suggesting, I was thinking in my mind, have you read, Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game?

I have. The Infinite Game, yes, which, by the way, I would tell everybody, start with, Start With Why, because it helps you to get in his head better, but The Infinite Game has a lot of that in it.

Exactly, that’s what I was hearing. And I’m a huge fan of The Infinite Game. I just love that book. I have it on tape and occasionally just start playing it again, because it’s just so good. And just this, I was talking to somebody, or I was introduced to somebody recently that, they wanted this individual to be on the podcast, and I went and watched some of the videos that this gentleman—seems like a really good guy, but he kept talking about winning, and winning business, and winning this. And I’m like, wait, wait, no. This is—I had already looked into Simon Sinek, and how that doesn’t fit into what we’re doing. And so but I am going to talk to the guy, actually, he’s really good. He just used the word differently than I would.

Used the word differently. Right. And that’s where we have to be careful. And any of these things that you’ve heard me talk about, Randy talk about when you come to hear his breakout at Scaling, you know, you can—you’re going to define things a little differently, like values equal behaviors, right? So we just have to understand that we keep our internal Google translator on, so when other people use different words, we kinda know what they mean, what they’re trying to say.

Oh, yeah. For sure.

If not, you become a little Sheldon Cooper-esque, right? You’re constantly correcting people on the nuances of language. If your listeners didn’t get that, that’s really on them, sorry.

No, I like that, and I didn’t even watch the show that much, but I understood what you were saying. I think I did!

He’s an iconic character.

Yep. So this is what I wanted to talk about today, this whole Ideal Practice Model that you’ve got. You said it’s been in the works for seven years, but is this like, a new rollout of it, or is this, like, you’ve just got it to a point where it’s like, okay, we’re going forward with this?

Well, it coalesced in a way that we now find the clarity to present it as a system. So we kind of built it from—it’s like Lego block building. We started with a big bag of client pain points—our clients are accounting firms—accounting firm pain points and needs. We threw them all on the table, and seven years later, we actually built something out of all these Lego blocks, would be the way I would explain it with a metaphor. 

So the concepts aren’t new, but they’re much more focused and organized.

Yeah, well, I think it’s awesome. I’m looking forward to hearing more about this, and probably not going to interrupt you during Scaling New Heights because you’re going to be pretty busy out there, but at some point in time, we’ll dig deeper into this as well. And the pricing models that I think you probably have some as well, because you’ve mentioned a few times in here, I’d be curious. And just that whole, where the pricing comes in before the—you know what? Let’s expand on that now. I got a little lost, not lost from a standpoint, but in my mind, thinking, okay, you’re saying the pricing model before you have the engagement structure. Can you explain that a little further to me?

Absolutely. Because the services are what you’re offering, so that would be accounting, controllership, advisory. The engagement is just the mechanics of how you’re delivering that over to the customer. So it is largely—and when I say mechanics, I mean, just really almost the hind end of the model. It’s where the lawyers get involved, it’s where the legal lease is infused into the master services agreements, it’s the issuance of the change orders. It’s all that mundane drudge stuff, which we surface up here as a separate ideal only because we’ve seen people wreck their ships against the rocks without it. We didn’t want to bury it under services.

Got it. Got it.

So that’s the answer to your question. Now, but I’ll tell you what I thought you were going to ask, and I do get asked all the time is, well, this is perfect if I’m starting a brand new practice, but I already have clients, I already have services, I already have technology process, I already have engagements that are in motion. I have team members that already exist. I already have a website, whether it’s telling the right story or not. So how do I take these? It’s almost easier if I’m starting from scratch, than it is if I’m trying to infuse these into an existent motion. 

So a couple of ways that we’ve addressed that, and one of them is the best way you can do it, Randy, is to create two different versions of your practice within your practice. So software companies call this Horizon 1 and Horizon 2, and then they internally disrupt themselves. So when Intuit launched QuickBooks online, that was the Horizon 2, the Horizon 1 was—because the one that’s closest to you is your Horizon 1—so that’s QuickBooks Desktop. Their Horizon 2 is QuickBooks Online. And so what Brad did was, as he was bringing the next generation or the next horizon closer to him, he disrupted the one that was right in front of him—he disrupted, and they’re continuing to disrupt QuickBooks Desktop. 

And, of course, when you’re talking about millions of users, it took them 20 years. If you’re talking about, you know, hundreds of clients or dozens of clients, it could take you a year or two to disrupt yourself. And then what you do is once you create your own version of your new firm, your firm 2.0, then you have a new product you can sell your existing clients. and if they choose not to buy it, that’s okay. You don’t fire them or anything. You don’t kick them out right away, but you move them closer to the back door. 

Yep.

So that when the positive pressure of all these clients buying your new better product—better for them, better for you—as that positive pressure forms into your practice, it just organically helps you walk those clients, gives you the economic courage to walk them to the back door. And then don’t just kick them out the back door, help them find a new account and nurture them. They’re humans. You know, people that you value. But it’s a slow bake process on this. And some people have just left that legacy practice—they just go ahead and create a bubble around it called “legacy practice,” and they leave it around for years. I mean, there’s nothing saying you have to kill it.

Right.

QuickBooks Desktop may still be an end to a product a decade from now. It’ll just be a legacy product, right? You could do the same thing.

Right. And do you see that—do you recommend they keep that around? I mean, is that, it seems like if you’re going to disrupt, you’re going to disrupt for a reason, because you like this new model that you’re putting together. And at some point in time, you’re just not going to want to service that old model anymore, but you find some people are still continuing to service that. 

And they do it for noble reasons. They don’t do it because it’s necessarily the best business case. They do it because they’ve gone through the fire with this business, their friends, there’s a personal connection, or maybe there are people that have worked with them, and they wouldn’t be where they are without them, and they want to be loyal to those team members. But the team members are not going to get on board with the 2.0 practice.

Yep.

So they actually make those legacy team members the head of the legacy division. And now the clients are happy, the people are happy—it’s still a profit center. You know, so it’s I would say, Randy, in the purest business case since, not a smart or shrewd—I’ll use the word shrewd—not a shrewd business decision. In the human sense, it’s often a wise decision.

Yep. Got it. And then is there any reason or mechanics to say, hey, when we start this new model, let’s start a new LLC or something as well, or is it okay to commingle these all under one organization, or it doesn’t really matter?

I would recommend commingling just because when you start separating out the ballot sheets, and you start bifurcating the team across those multiple corporates and the inter companies, it gets unnecessarily complex. But you definitely want to make it different departments, or what QuickBooks would call classes, right? ’Cause they each need to have their own P&Ls.

Got it. Alright. It makes sense. I didn’t see any reason other than if you want to sell that old legacy version at some point, that’s fine, you can do it.

You sell the asset.

Exactly.

People buy assets anyway. Nobody buys companies, not at this level. They buy assets.

No, exactly. Alright. Well, we can go on forever, and we will do this on the next version. We will expand on another portion of this, or something else. But any, before we get to a couple of final questions, any wrap you want to give on what we just discussed?

Well, just the final thing I would say is if you are imminently going to retire and you’re interested in this M&A thing that’s coming up over the next five years, then you may not need all seven. I would focus on services, I would focus on client, and I would focus on engagement because whoever buys you is going to have their own brand, their own process, their own team, and their own technology. So focus on tightening up engagement legalities and engagement letters, have a good service slate priced right, have a good slate of clients that somebody would want to adopt and take good care of, and you’ll position yourself well to sell that book of business. So that’s kind of, to tie it back to the first thing we talked about.

Yeah. And that’s and that’s cool too because what people can look at things like this into the seven step process or seven things they need to do and start to get overwhelmed. And you can start with one or two, or even only implement one or two, especially depending on what your future holds. I love that.

There is joy in this journey, Randy, and it does take years, but you start making more money. You start having more fun as you go.

Perfect. Perfect. Alright. So, a couple final things then. And you and I talked about this last time, but every guest gets this question. And I don’t remember your answer from last time, and, we’ll see if you recall, or if you have a new one this time. But, big fan of culture and people and that people are more than their job title. So I always like to ask the question is, you know, when you’re not out educating and helping the profession, what are your outside of work passions? What do you love to do that’s not work related?

Well, right now, it’s a hundred percent about being a dad. So I’m my daughter’s dad, and that may be a little bit different answer, because we haven’t talked in so long, and she was more like, I mean, I was still my daughter’s dad, but now it’s a full time job. Volleyball, travel ball. I just got back from Orlando yesterday for a three day tournament. Just the coaching you have to do for a sixteen year old girl at all, at any age of humanity, but in today’s world, social media, and all this other stuff going on, I feel like I’m a full time life coach to my daughter—and also protect her, you know? Not overprotect, but, you know, she’s my daughter. You don’t mess with her. So right now, that’s my answer. 

Now after she’s successfully off at college and settled into her dorm room and succeeding it life and checking in on me with me every Sunday or so, I may have a different answer for you. I may get to play golf again. I don’t know.

Well, that’s nice.

Now it’s her. Right now it’s her.

And we, that’s one thing that my wife and I miss is our one of our sons was a volleyball player, and it was, you know, and I’m sure the same with you is, you know, 10, 11 months a year. Pretty much nonstop volleyball. You got school. You got travel. You got club. You got all the stuff. And that was so much fun just to have that moment in time. So you are enjoying it, but my advice is don’t take it for Crabtree. Because it is such a cool time.

Thank you for that, Randy. Good advice.

Alright. And then last thing—so we mentioned a couple things. We mentioned Scaling New Heights a couple times—that is coming up in June in Orlando. Do you have the dates?

Yes. It’s the 16th through 19th of June—that’s a Sunday through a Wednesday. It’s going to be at the Orlando World Center Marriott, Marriott’s largest hotel and convention center in the world. We’re going to consume that place. It’s going to be, like you said—it’s one of the three largest conferences in the country. It’s the largest technology exhibit floor in the country—technology exhibit floor in the country, specific to accounting technology. So that’s a very specific bragging point, but we like it. 

Yeah. Yeah. It’s very nice.

Yeah. So if you want to come and support counting technology, that would be the place—150 exhibits, over 100 breakouts, one of which is Randy here, talking about teams and culture and how those are integral to growth, so catch that. And that’s, you can find out more about that at Woodard.com. So, W-O-O-D-A-R-D dot com. If you put the second w in there, I don’t know where it goes. It’s not it’s not Woodward, it’s Woodard. 

Woodard. And we will have that in the show notes, and the link to Scaling New Heights as well, and looking forward to seeing you there and and enjoying Orlando for a handful of days in June. Should be a good time. 

Yeah. We’re going to have a great time.

I want to thank you for being on the show again. It’s always a pleasure and, look forward to the next time.

Yeah. Have me back anytime, Randy. Thanks.