Today, our guest is Randy Crabtree. Hello, everybody. You may recall that 100 episodes ago, I joined you—this is Justin Grant, the producer of The Unique CPA—I actually joined you for two episodes, 100 and 101, when we reached that milestone, and this is another milestone. Somehow, Randy, we have reached 200 episodes.

That’s really unbelievable, actually.

It is! It is, and yet it isn’t, because it’s a good show that has become a great show and a community, not just a podcast. I think that’s exactly why it’s sustained itself as long as it has.

You know, that is pretty cool though, the community aspect of things. I’ve met so many people because of The Unique CPA Podcast and built so many relationships. In reality, you know, the conference, the Bridging the Gap Conference, wouldn’t exist without the podcast, and those together have really created a community. The exciting part for me is that community, at least the Bridging the Gap portion, which is tied to The Unique CPA, now has its own Facebook community, its own page. It’s cool to see the people that are adding themselves to that Facebook page on a daily basis, and seeing who’s being involved on it is just like, every time I look at it, I start to smile because there’s another person I really like, and they’re going to start interacting here too, which is cool.

That’s very cool, and we’re definitely going to be sure to get that link in the show notes because I know not everybody knows about it. They’re going to want to get on there and join everybody that we’ve got participating. Yeah, 200 episodes is really quite the milestone. 100 was, and it’s a trite question, but it’s one that’s necessary: Did you ever foresee anything like this? And if not, because I know the answer is no, what did you foresee happening all those episodes ago?

Honestly, the journey that The Unique CPA Podcast has taken me on, I never would have guessed in a million years what it’s done. So, you know, I had zero expectations. I was like, maybe somebody will listen someday? You know? Maybe I’ll get a guest that’ll come on and be with me. Honestly, I mean, I know this sounds weird, but I pretty much can get anybody—I don’t mean it like that, but people will get on any podcast in reality.

I know what you mean.

Yeah. So at the beginning, I was super surprised. I would reach out to somebody like Richard Kopelman, who was one of the first guests, and he said yes. John Sensiba said yes. Allan Koltin said yes. Kimberly Ellison-Taylor said yes. Jennifer Wilson said yes. Like everybody I reached out to, I just felt so honored that they would take time out to be a guest or at least have a conversation with me on The Unique CPA. I never expected that. I figured I’d have to be hunting for guests, and there are just so many cool people in this profession that want to help—I think that is really the key.

Yeah, that’s that community aspect just of the profession overall.

Yep. I say this often: we are such a collaborative community as a profession. It’s fun to see. Because we’re not cutthroat. We’re not going to say, “Hey, you’re going to take my client. I’m going to take your client. We’re not going to share ideas.” We share ideas nonstop in this profession, which I really enjoy seeing.

Agreed. So recalling that 100 episodes ago, we tried out a new format; we did The Unique CPA Happy Hour together, and that was fun. 

Yes we did.

We sampled some beers from around the world, including Scotland for me because that’s where I was, and of course, you were in Chicago at the time. And that was nice, and it followed on well from the Beer Temple special episodes. However, we said we were going to be doing that here and there, but we have never, ever done a Unique CPA Happy Hour again.

No, we have not. It was a good idea. It was fun. There might have been the beer talking, I don’t know.

Well, it was definitely something talking. We decided this time, seeing as it’s nine in the morning where you are presently, maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea on this occasion. But we do want to discuss a little bit about some changes to the format that we’re looking at. So o ne of those is that you’d like to get a little bit more into the technical tax talk. Now, the ERC is, alas, long gone at this point, and it provided a lot of that during its heyday, especially with all the fraud that came out of it eventually as well. You had Dan Chodan on a couple of times. You had Nick Pantaleo of Tri-Merit come on. These days, now that we’re fully in the tax season for last tax year, 2024, I know that you want to hit on a couple of possibilities and things you’ll be looking at over the coming months. So why don’t you go ahead and fill us in?

Yeah, it’s funny because when we originally started The Unique CPA Podcast, Dana Plotke, who was our marketing person at the time, came to me and said, “Hey, we’re going to start a podcast.” My thought was, okay, great. “And you’re going to host it.” I was like, “No, I’m not going to host a podcast. What are you talking about?” Then I started thinking about it, and this was instantaneous, it wasn’t weeks or days I was thinking about it. I was like, “Okay, I’m not going to talk about taxes because no one wants to listen to taxes every episode. I’m not going to talk R&D tax credits, which I love and I’m passionate about, but I’m not going to talk about that every episode. It just doesn’t make sense. So what are we going to talk about?” Well, you’ve seen where that’s gone over the years.

Hey, key words, every episode, right?

Right, every episode was not something I wanted to do. But especially right now with so much uncertainty with what’s going to happen with taxes, and we’re really getting news constantly on either somebody thinking this could happen, or we’re seeing that this does happen. So what we decided to do, and this is again in the works, maybe it’ll be in episode 300 and we’ll go, “Oh, remember when we talked about the fact we’re going to start talking about tax a little bit?” and then we never did it, just like the Happy Hours. But I think we will. I think probably once a month, maybe—maybe even less, or as something happens, we’ll have a topic. Let’s give a good example here: renewable energy tax credits. There’s uncertainty right now about where renewable energy tax credits are going. When news comes out, we’ll probably record an episode with “Hey, here’s what’s happening. These are the changes. These are the changes that are going to start next year. So if you are going to do a project, start them in 2025,” that type of thing. That is still super exciting information to me: seeing what’s happening, seeing it evolve in real time, or as quick as real time can be with us, it will be like a week, maybe.

Yeah, right. At the most.

That’s a good call, from time recording to time release. Most of it will probably revolve around tax credits and incentives, because that’s what Tri-Merit is. But there will be other things. We’ll see what happens with the Tax Cut and Jobs Act 2.0, and when that comes out, maybe we’ll put together an episode on what to expect, here’s things you should be thinking about, here’s things you need to accelerate into 2025 or delay until 2026, that kind of thing. So that’s what we’re looking at. It’s evolving. It is a discussion that’s happening weekly inside Tri-Merit right now on our marketing and sales team calls. So I’m pretty sure we’re really close on getting that information out so we can start to record those episodes.

Fantastic. And we are looking forward to that. It’s nice because it’ll make the podcast, you know, it’s already a go-to for issues within the profession, but this is, you know, you want a little quick update on something probably your firm doesn’t have the highest level of expertise on? This could be really helpful. Just keep your ears open.

Right. And we’ll announce it, obviously, we’ll market it, we’ll get the information out there. But yeah, it’ll be fun. It’ll be a change of pace. We’ll see if I get bored after two months and maybe we’ll stop. But if I don’t… That’s my problem: I get bored easily. So I need to keep things exciting for me. Sorry, we try to keep them exciting for the audience too.

Thankfully, that tends to intersect pretty strongly, and I have a feeling every month and a half, two months, or whenever news comes out, it isn’t going to bore you because it’s going to be a nice little change of pace out of nowhere. So there you go.

That’s true. Hey, I’m just honest. I say what I think.

That’s all we need, exactly. Speaking of changes of pace, we thought it would be fun for the audience to get a little behind-the-scenes look at The Unique CPA because, believe it or not, what you, the end user, receive in your ears every week is not in any way, shape, or form even relatively similar to what I receive in my ears. 

So Justin’s saying, my episodes are messy, and then he fixes them up and makes them sound really good.

I’m being hyperbolic here.

No, you’re right though.

No, I am being. However, we have fun with it. And even before the 100th episode—I have to own up to this one—Mark Reese, who’s part of the marketing team at Tri-Merit, said, “You know what would be a really cool idea? If you kept a blooper reel.” And I completely did not do that for the longest time, so it’s my own fault that all the bloopers that I have for us today, that we’re going to look at, are from like the last three or four months. However, I am grateful to you, Randy, because you always make sure to keep the supply of them coming to me.

I’m good at it.

I’ve still been able to come up with a nice selection here. So what we’re going to do, we’re going to make a little game out of it. I was careful to cut away the guest’s voice so you won’t get a hint from hearing them, which episode it’s from. So let’s see if you can figure out which episodes we’re talking about. 

Oh boy, pressure on me. 

Alright. On this first one, let’s just run right into it. Here we go.

So you’re hearing it anidote—anecdotedly, at least. I’ve said the word wrong, I think, but you guys all know what I meant. Anec… Anecdoted. I’m going to keep going until I get it. We’ll let it go. You’re hearing this… 

[laughter] Let me see if I can say it first. Anecdoted… I can’t say it..

Still gotcha, huh?

Yeah. That’s a word I will not say anymore. Let me think about that. Who would that have been? It feels fairly recent, like you said, the last three months, but some of those shows that were released three months ago, I recorded eight months ago or so, or, you know, a year ago almost in those cases. That was, I think, a fairly recent recording. I’m just going to say that I don’t remember any guests I have ever had on the show. I’m going to go with David Lane.

Well, David Lane was just released last week. It was not David Lane. The answer is Dan Berenholtz in episode 187.

Okay, that was recorded a while ago.

It was for you a pretty long time ago, but the air date was pretty recent. The funny part about this one and one of the reasons I picked it was that not only, Randy, is your energy and your enthusiasm and your go-get-’em attitude contagious, so are your mispronunciations. Here we go:

We don’t know what the completion rates were with the PDF organizer. Obviously, that’s just anecdotedly. 

Hey! 

I’m not sure if I said it correctly. [laughter]

What do you know? It’s spreading!

Nice! Did he say it right?

No, he said it wrong too, so absolutely perfect for this segment.

Yes. Alright. I’m looking up that episode 187. There he is. I’m just looking on another screen over here. Now I’m going to cheat because I’m going to pull up some of these episodes.

No, that’s fine. And in the final cut, this is the other fun part about this: The listeners will not have heard that. They heard—I made it sound like you made a little joke out of not saying the word right and then just moved on instead of that 10, 15 second sequence. So it’s cool, we get to peer behind the curtain here. 

Nice. 

So let’s go on to the next one. I did leave this one entirely alone, actually. So everyone’s heard this before because you actually, you made a pretty good joke out of it. So here we go.

So you’re a sussess, sukess… Hold on—success. Got it. So you’re a success story then for the profession, left and came back. I kind of like that, so…

Yes. I remember this episode too, and this was a fairly recent recording. I guarantee that I’m going to put money on it: It was fairly recent and it has been released though, right?

Yes, all of these have been released already.

Oh man. It is not something that’s… I remember that for a fact, that this was a person who left and came back, which is not a story you always hear. It’s usually they leave and they’re done. I remember being, oh, you know what? I’m going to go with Dave Hartley.

That is correct. Well done! Alright! Ding, ding, ding. So yes, that was David Hartley of Anders. episode 193 on that one, six, seven weeks ago.

Oh wow. Crazy.

Yeah, I know. Very nice. So moving on to clip three now, this one…

Wait. Before you do that. Sure. Just to remember, look and see how my memory is. I recorded that one a while ago. I did not record that recently.

It’s true. You did. And you still got it, and that’s impressive.

Well, it felt like it was recent. That’s why. But no, that was recorded. I don’t even know. That was eight months ago, I bet we recorded that, if not longer.

I’m pretty sure it was before Bridging the Gap or immediately after it. 

I think it was before.

I think it was before too, because I seem to recall I had to finagle a little bit on you guys referring to the conference “this year,” quote unquote, and so I had to, yeah.

Those are the other things you do, make them timely when I don’t make them timely.

Right. Alright, so in the next one, this is fun because you may be—in fact, if you don’t mind telling the audience, where are you?

I’m in Healdsburg, California currently. I’ve been here for… yesterday was four weeks and I got a week and a half to go. Kathy and I hang out in warmer weather than Chicago for the winter.

Yeah. And so, resultantly, you may be one of the most well-traveled podcast hosts as far as recording locations in the world, and that’s not really an exaggeration. Although in this case, you might have been at home—I don’t know—but no matter where you are, there can always be practical issues that you have to deal with in the middle of recording. So in this instance, the forces of nature were conspiring against you.

Now, let’s go back to our regularly scheduled program. We were talking about… give me a second. Justin’s going to have to edit for a second. I lost the video. There. And the sun is in my face over here. Let me see if I can get these blinds down. Why can’t I get these blinds down? I’m going the right way. Sorry, Justin, you’re editing again. Oh, maybe on the other side. Nah, I’m just going to leave it. I’ll just keep moving myself. Alright, I’m gonna start back up again.

I vaguely remember that, but I have no clue. I’ll guarantee I wasn’t at home when I did that, because I don’t have sun issues in my office at home. And wow, this is weird because right now, well this was probably recorded at the old house. When I was thinking about this, the sun, I’m thinking about the old house because we recently moved. In the new house, there will never be a sun issue because I’m kind of up in a loft area. So this wasn’t home though. I had to be on the road somewhere, but I’m just going to take a wild guess and say it was Michael Haynes.

You’re not far off timewise as far as releasing—however, it was Liz Farr.

Oh, that again was recorded a while ago.

I know. Globetrotter as well, Liz Farr, who of course made an attempt at walking across England and was unfortunately foiled by her ankle.

Yeah, when I met Liz for the first time it was in New Orleans in 2022 is my guess, and she was walking with a cane because she had recently hurt her ankle. So, yeah, Liz Farr episode. Alright, I wonder where I was when I recorded that. I wonder if we can look, but I vaguely remember the sun issue. And obviously I don’t know how to use blinds very well.

Yeah, and I was thinking they’re probably new blinds to you, so it’s no wonder you couldn’t deal with them.

Yep! 

Alright, and we’ve got one more. Sometimes, this happens to all of us, we forget what we were saying five seconds ago. In this instance, it was you. Let’s check out this bit of self-inflicted déjà vu that you shared with us.

What’s going to differentiate you is these  soft skills, these leadership, these communication, these relationship building skills, the leadership skills, the communication skills, and that, that is what’s going to differentiate you in this profession, because that’s what really puts your personality out there, which is what attracts people to what you’re doing…

Okay. So I said a couple of words twice there apparently. I assume you fixed that before it went out?

I did, and lucky us, I have the clip of it fixed so we can compare it.

Okay, let’s hear it.

What’s going to differentiate you is these soft skills, these leadership skills, the communication skills, and these relationship-building skills. And that is what’s going to differentiate you in this profession because that’s what really puts your personality out there, which is what attracts people to what you’re doing.

That was really well done, Justin! 

Thanks! It’s what I do.

That sounded good. I tell people often, and they don’t hear this in the recording or when we go live, before we start recording, I say, “Hey, you know, Justin’s going to make us sound really good. So don’t worry about messing up at all. He’s going to take all the ums and uhs and pauses and stumbles and all that.” And that’s an example of it right there.

A little bit of sleight of hand and the glitch in the matrix was fixed right up. 

So let me think then. I need to guess who this was. I’m not getting it at all, but this is somebody, obviously we’re talking about soft skills with, at least that was part of the conversation, maybe not. I’ll just say it was Lisa Simpson.

No, it’s a good guess, but it was Greg Adams.

Oh yeah, that makes sense.

Episode 197. So boy, we only got one out of four. You got David.

I don’t listen to this show. 

I know. That will make a difference!

And Greg was fairly recent. I think he was November or December.

I was hopeful you’d get it because of that, but no, you went back to David Hartley from May or whenever it was, but not this one.

Yeah. I thought that was something I would have talked with Lisa Simpson about, though, to agree.

Agreed, yeah, it’s a logical guess.

Well, that was fun. 

Yes! Enjoyed that. And before we close out, I know you also wanted to take a look at what you kind of feel will be the big issue of 2025, and that is private equity.

Yeah. Every time I talk to somebody about private equity, I learn. I’m no expert.

No, but it’s happening more and more, isn’t it? You’re hearing more and more.

We’re hearing more and more. We recorded an episode with Allan Koltin. Boy, that was a while ago when the first private equity deal happened.

Oh yeah, that one was ages ago, but you had him on back and discussed it a little more. Didn’t you?

Did we do another episode? Wow, look at me losing my memory.

Or, I do more than one show, so I may be thinking of another show.

Yeah. I remember talking to Allan, and this was the first big deal or first set of deals. I think it was EisnerAmper. Allan basically said this is not done. We’re just at the beginning. We’re going to see, and he was naming top twenty firms or top hundred firms that—not firms by their name—but how many deals we should see.

And that was incidentally episode 54 with Allan.

Wow.

That was a while ago. In my mind, that was like October of 2022 or something. Or ’21.

It was ’21—November of 2021. So there you go.

That was 2021. But I remember Allan. Allan’s great, a good friend of mine. I always love talking to Allan.

He was of course on at The Beer Temple too.

Yes, that’s true. He was on the Beer Temple episode where actually I think Kenji Kuramoto got to interview him quite a bit. They were on a panel together and Kenji was asking questions of Allan.

That’s right. 

That was a fun episode. We’re digressing, but that was a lot of fun. That was actually the pre-cur… Now I’m going to digress, we’re going to go on a tangent here.

You said though, you weren’t going on tangents anymore. You said this last week.

No, but I changed my mind. [laughter] I’m actually working with a speech coach right now. I’ve written all my own stuff forever pretty much, and I do a lot of presentations at conferences and that. So for the first time ever, now, I’m actually working with somebody—at age 62, I realized that I could probably learn from others as well. And I was talking about the tangents I go on, and he said, “No, your tangents are great. You don’t have to call them out. You don’t have to say I’m going on a tangent because what you’re saying isn’t a tangent. It ties in with the topic you’re talking about.” So maybe that’s what I was thinking: I don’t have to call it out as a tangent, but I still like it. I kind of like being—I think I’m self-deprecating? Oh, there’s almost a blooper there.

You caught yourself. Yeah, that’ll be an easy edit. 

No, we can’t edit. We’re going to show that I’m not perfect. Obviously, I’m not perfect. Well, you make me sound that way. I didn’t mean to say that I’m perfect. Now I lost my train of thought. Oh, the tangents. So, we did that. Allan was great. Then we had Tim Petrey. Tim was on talking private equity because they had done a deal recently. I actually recorded an episode on private equity that hasn’t been released—it’ll probably be released, maybe two months after this episode, with Alex Drost, and Alex had really keen insights on what’s going on. The way he said it is that we’re in the second inning right now of private equity. So, we’ve passed the first. 

We’ve probably got a long way to go, apparently.

Yeah, a long way to go in this. I think Allan would agree. I really do want to get Allan back on—he and I have talked about it already. After the Citrin Cooperman deal, where they did the second round of private equity recently in the last month or so, I talked to Allan and said, “We should really get on and talk about what’s going on again.” So we probably will do that. That’ll be an episode that we’ll try to get scheduled soon. Now I’ve put pressure on myself because I just said it, so we have to do it.

Exactly.

But yeah, I’m curious to see. In my impression with private equity, there’s definitely positives for the current firm owners from a financial standpoint. I’ve talked to people who have done it where they’re almost immediately not happy with the deal. I’ve talked to other people who’ve gone through it and are very happy with the deal, like when we talked to Tim. It’s something that, some friends of mine just did a deal. I don’t think they’re technically announcing it yet. They said it’s not private, but I’m not going to announce who it is. But they’re happy with the initial portion of the deal, and we will see what happens there. 

My biggest concern—I have two big concerns about private equity—but I don’t begrudge anybody for doing it. There’s reasons, and there are a lot of positives. There’s the influx of money so you can increase your technology footprint, to become more efficient. And efficiency is going to be key because we’re lacking individuals coming into the profession, which I’m not going to say this is a tangent, but I did see an announcement where there’s been an uptick in enrollment in accounting. So that’s a positive sign. 

It is.

But also, you and I talked about this a few weeks ago. There are people looking to move jobs or get jobs in accounting specifically saying, “I’m not going to work for a private equity accounting firm.” So I’m curious to see how that’s going to play out in the coming years, not immediately, but in the coming years. The other thing I don’t know with private equity is just what the end game is, because you can’t keep flipping the firm indefinitely. At some point, we’re just going to have one accounting firm, or we’ll all turn into public companies. We are public accounting, but I mean on the stock market.

Publicly owned, yeah.

Yes. So yeah, I’m just curious to see. When I talk about private equity, I have a little bit of a negative bent on it, but I think that’s because I’m concerned with the culture aspect of it. I’m very people-first culture, and I just don’t see that historically has been private equity’s way. I did talk to Allan Koltin about this, and Allan said this new wave of private equity, which we talked… three and a half years ago now, he said they’ve learned. They understand that accounting is a people industry.

Right, because this is not their first bite at this apple by any stretch.

Right. They’ve done it before. I try not to be a naysayer, but more concerned, moreso about it, because one, it’s probably something—there are positive aspects to it. There’s things that have to happen in the profession, it helps us get out of that hole. When I often say the SALY mindset, Same As Last Year, ‘cause private equity is going to come in and they’re going to make changes and hopefully a lot of the changes are for the positive. So we’ll see. I’m curious to see. We’ll probably do more episodes. Like I said, I need to get Allan Koltin back on, because he has his finger on the pulse. Dan Hood from Accounting Today, he had a whole conference on it this past year that I went to, met a lot of really cool, interesting people.

And it would be great to have him back on the show too. 

Yeah, Dan and I were texting recently, and we do want to do an episode, probably both on his podcast and on The Unique CPA. We’ll probably talk about the survey we did, you know, we did the Accountant’s Professional Satisfaction Survey. We’re just wrapping up the summary of it, but not just the summary of the data, here’s where we feel you can make changes to increase satisfaction levels within the profession.

Nice, like a practical analysis.

Yes, practical analysis, that’s—see, you should host the show!

I am, actually, right now.

You are hosting, you’re right. I thought you were saying you’re much better, which you are. I thought I had a big ego. 

Oh no! See? I’m not any good at this.

No, you are. So that’s one thing we’re going to talk about. Those are the types of things that The Unique CPA Podcast has created, because those are the things that I learned from others, and then like, “Hey, how can we amplify or build upon this?” Or “how can we build upon this?” And finding out what creates satisfaction levels—and creates dissatisfaction levels—within the profession, we felt was super important. Now hopefully, we can take this data and make a little bit of a dent in satisfaction levels on a positive aspect for people in the profession.

Love it. Well, that right there rounds off quite the roadmap for the show for the next few months to a year, and what a time for it, with Episode 200. I still can’t believe we’re here, and we’ve just pretty much wrapped it up.

Yeah, 200. 300 will be two years from now? Man, that’s a long way off.

Roughly, yeah. I know, and so did 100.

Yeah, I know. I’ll be really close to turning 65 at that point. How long am I going to do this? 

I’ve got nothing on my calendar, so…

Alright, well, I’ll keep going then.

Okay. 

I’ll see you again in 104 weeks from now.

104 weeks from now, yeah, something like that. Well, I guess not 104 because that would be episode 304.

Oh, yeah, you’re right. I was thinking two years from now! Alright, we’ll see you in 100 episodes from now.

Sounds good. Thanks, Randy. It was good to join you, and we’ll catch you next time, everybody!