First place to start is don't bill by the hour.
That is the bane of, everybody's existence for two reasons.
Number one, it doesn't reward you for being really good at
your job and are being more efficient.
And then number two, it automatically puts you at odds
with your client because the benefit for your client is to do
your work faster. The benefit for you is to take
longer, okay? So it puts you at odds with your
client unnecessarily. So in my opinion, the other
pieces to is in order to build by the hour, you got to track
time and there's literally nobody.
That's going to tracking time. So, value based billing is the
way to go. Hello, and welcome to design,
adjacent the podcast that talks about the Nexus of design both
today. And tomorrow, I'm your host, Ben
EF Johnson and today, our special guest is a CPA.
Yes, you heard me correctly when design adjacent.
Our Guest today is a CPA it's none.
Other than Chris her Bashan of Better Way.
CPA, Chris has a name Credible background in accounting and
Finance in working with small and midsize businesses.
He spent 10 years before starting his own firm, in
forensic accounting and corporate accounting working in
finance. With major organizations, he's
been featured in Publications such as accounting today.
American Express is open Forum LendingTree and the success
defined podcast, CMS wire and CEO Nation block Chris stays on
top of top industry trends It is often called a gun for his
passion for the accounting and finance industry, which is
evident by the number of extracurricular programs, he's
been involved in. He volunteers as a youth member
of the aicpa, he's led, the retention task force.
He's worked on both business and industry Affairs committees and
has been featured as one of the top 40 under 40 in the counting
professions by CPA, professional advisor magazine, a graduate of
Elon University with a degree in accounting.
In minor in finance. He's a certified public
accountant. So today I'd like to welcome
Chris to the design adjacent podcast.
Thank you for joining me. My friend, absolutely, thanks so
much for having me when we think about design.
And we think about design business is that design space?
We often don't think about accounting but the counting is a
clear critical part of any business adventure.
Talk a bit about what brought you into accounting.
Oh, holy cow! That's a great.
Russian. I always had a penchant a little
bit for entrepreneurship and math but not high level math.
Even more like the addition and subtraction type stuff that that
accountants do for the most part.
And, you know, certainly money and I've hustled pretty much my
whole life. So I took an accounting class in
high school because my dad said I was going to be a good idea.
He was an accountant to and that really didn't go well, so kind
of dropped the idea. And when I went to college, I
was going to Major in finance because I thought that that was
a little bit of a less strenuous path.
So to speak and I took my first accounting class because that's
part of the finance major and had a great accounting professor
and did really well on it. And then she just explain things
in a totally different way than what I had experienced in high
school. And my dad said me a look, you
can do anything that you want to do with in finance with an
accounting degree and then some and that would be really a path.
So you kind of talked me into it.
And when got my degree, Graduated from college and
about, let's see a month before his going to graduate.
I told him, you know look I'm going to go turn pro.
I was I played college golf a little bit and really really
love golf and play Junior golfer.
So I'm going to go turn pro said okay well you'll know you'll
know when you go broke and so sure enough he was right and
yeah then so I did that for about a year and a half and went
back to school and start long. Did that take before you went
broke and take? Didn't take long.
It was about five minutes in the grand.
Yuma things, right? And then when we're back to
school and got the hours, I needed to go and get certified
and pass the CPA exam. And, you know, I defy for a
number of years and here I am out of my own at this point but
not on my own for four years. Awesome.
So I asked this question, what are some of the lessons you took
from that transition to beginning Pro in golf to your
work today? Like moving from Hobby to
professional? That is it applies to your
realm? Now, you've got a, you've got to
work really hard. Hard on it.
I was one of those people who needed to spend hours and hours
at the range and play golf on top of it.
Play a lot of golf in order to be even reasonably.
Good obviously not good enough to even make money at it.
But, you know, you got to realize in it's a business and
you've got to work at it and you've got to be consistent
about it. So that's probably one of the
biggest lessons I took into entrepreneurship.
But, you know, the way that I worked through getting better at
golf, I used to use a lot of training AIDS and I took a lot
of lessons and I picked the Reins of a lot of people and pay
really, close attention to how other people were doing it, and
doing it. Well, those all of those lessons
translated over into Accounting in the way that we operate, you
know, we're having on automation which puts guard rails around
quality and that was born out of the way, I practiced, right?
So there's there's a lot of trans.
There's a lot of things that that translate over.
So one of the things I find interesting as you look at your
practice today is you've had a unique focus on vertical that
relates. It's a lot to our audience here
which working with marketing and through extension design
agencies. What led you to providing
virtual accounting and financial services for these groups.
So I did outsourced controller work for a, another firm that
was in New York. When I was basically just a
freelancer, I was working in my 9 to 5 and I was doing
freelancing, type of County work on the side and one of the
clients that I worked on was an agency and then when I went out
on my own when I decided to take the freelance business that I
Add and turned into my true 925 that person that owned that
haven't said, hey look, the CFO is for this business is leaving,
would you be interested in filling their own stuff?
Yeah. Sure.
It was like you know new the feed, the kids at that point
right. So my first agency client, I'd
work with them for a couple of years but not in a CF G type
role but so it was a little bit new to me.
And then one of my clients in my virtual, cipo practice was an
agency and then a second, or my third client was an agency and
it You know, when you start your business, out you here for a
whole bunch of people, like you really need to have a niche, it
has all these benefits. And so you kind of have that
idea in the back of your head but unless you know exactly what
you want it to be kind of search for it.
Well, in this particular case just kind of fell out of the sky
smack me in the forehead and that was it.
So I generally just like working with creatives or a lot of fun.
They appreciate what we do and how we do it.
A creative facet to accounting. Not because we do Creative
Accounting but because we are creative accountants and the way
that we deliver our work and the way that we do things.
So I think it just translates. Well, you know, it's been a lot
of fun so far really, really interesting to have it grow on
top of it and you talked about working with creatives.
What are the things that you see that separates your creative
clients? From those who aren't in a
creative space? Are there any things that stand
out their approach to working with you or the nature of the
business? I know there's some commonality
that you have in the accounting space, but there any things with
these agencies that you find unique to the space, I don't
know that I would say unique but there are certainly some common
issues that we see for sure. You know, one of them is just
understanding the tax system and how that works and when and how
and why they're going to pay tax on the money that they earn.
Like a lot of agency owners that we work with.
They got their kind of in a roundabout way and honestly kind
of the way that I got to where I am right.
But the difference between me and them is that I was trained
in accounting and I obsess over accounting.
So like these things are front of mine for me like, hey, you
need to pay quarterly. Estimated taxes and those sorts
of things, whereas, for folks who do creative work, maybe they
didn't necessarily come at it, any sort of financial background
or Financial Training or anything like that.
So just bridging that gap of. This is the things you're
supposed to work. This is why this this is why
accounting is important because it helps you to make rational
data-driven decisions in your business, to move your business
forward and just explaining the mechanics of all that and how it
works. And all of the things that need
to happen in order to allow even something as simple as to file a
tax return. You know, you've got to have
good clean accounting records and you got to keep track of
things. You have to have a separate
business and personal bank accounts like stuff like that is
really, you know, those are the common things that we say, you
know, to extend that question. What's the one question you wish
marketing agencies would ask you about?
What's the one thing that you wish they would talk about or
ask you about or new front and center?
But you don't see them asking about.
The one thing that I wish that they would do is take more
advantage of, okay. And a couple of different ways
so meeting consistently and talking about your financials.
That's the biggest one, the more, the more frequently we
meet with agencies, the more helpful we can be, it just makes
rational sense, right? We understand what's going on in
your business? We see what's going on
day-to-day. We understand how you operate,
we understand your personality, but a lot of those folks, I
mean, everybody's been slammed since the pandemic for sure.
So, there's a little bit of that.
There's a little bit of, you know, financials or kind of the
boogeyman. So it's kind of like going to
the dentist sometimes. So, one of the challenges,
Challenges. We have is trying to make it
more approachable and make it easier.
Or it's not like going to the dentist or just having a
conversation with somebody who's trying to be helpful.
Right? So there's a little bit of that
for sure. And then on top of that I think
it's important for folks who run businesses any business, really
to have people in the room who are willing to listen.
So what I mean by that is, we're not when we're talking with an
agency owner. We're not just the person who's
they're presenting the financial information.
Where we are the show. But then also having
opportunities to sit there with your leadership team and listen,
so we can get the full context and understand where you're
really coming from, because that's how we're going to learn,
how to drive your business forward, really interesting and
thinking about this and thinking about some of the parallels.
If your own entrepreneurial start, you mentioned that you
were doing this is kind of the freelance side gig but then
involved into the main that path is really similar to a lot of
design leaders and coming in and there they are having clients or
work that the They're doing outside of the nine to five and
then they find themselves transitioning where the quality
the quantity of the work evolves and they find themselves where
they're now running their own shop.
What advice would you have for if we have created for listening
to our call today and they're in this space because I think as
you mentioned it, you go quickly.
You go from having a side project to the next thing.
You know you're set up a full Enterprise right?
One thing that you should know if you are operating in that
way. Is that it's a really good low
risk. Way to see if it's something
that you like and want to do full time.
So you should know that that's a really good path and its really
good option freelancing to full-time as a is a great thing
to do. So that's one.
Number two is rip the Band-Aid off.
Really at some point, you're going to get to a point where
you just need to rip the Band-Aid off.
You need to quit the nine to five.
You need to go out on your own and just need to do it, and it's
going to be hard, and it's going to be uncomfortable, and it's
going to be different, but you just have to do it.
So that's the Second thing. And then the third thing is, to
have a coach or coach has super invaluable for sure.
Yeah, I had a coach, let's say I was I don't know six or seven
years into my business doing the part-time stuff, and then I
hired a coach and I which for six months before I went full
time and we went through at least two iterations of what my
business was going to become when I went full time before.
We finally landed on this and just having those a sounding
board, we've been working together for I don't know, four
and a half years at this point, just having that rational voice
who's a sounding board, and who's worked with other business
owners before it's super invaluable.
Now, where you're going to need expertise is in growing a
business and all of the various things that you need to do in
order to maintain that business and do it the right way.
So, that's one you need to have a good Financial mind.
If you don't have that expertise and then you need to have a good
legal mind if you don't have that expertise.
But you probably would guarantee the new business owner has the
legal expertise, otherwise they would be a lawyer.
Our right? So having a good accountant,
having a good financial advisor, having a good attorney there's
and having a good coach, good business coach those are all
people that you want to have in your corner.
What's really interesting? As well as you do, a lot of
speaking on industry Trends and and how to navigate it.
One question popped to mind, I think would be really
interesting for us from your perspective.
Was this question of how to make your data work for marketing
agency, to increase your profitability and scalability we
were talking Talking earlier, that growth is a top mindset for
all of us right now. Like how do we grow and how to
remarriage, but talk to me a bit about how agency owners can help
to make the data work for them to increase those measures of
success. Both profitability and growth
and scalability. Yeah I think sometimes there's
term sound a little bit scary. I think the more approachable
way to kind of frame that would be.
What are the questions that you want to ask about your business?
And what are the answers that you need to get back?
So what are the questions that we need to ask in order to move
our business forward the way to start there.
With a data-driven approach is how you design your systems.
Okay. So in my line of work, we're
focused on financial systems. So Financial systems is going to
include first and foremost your general ledger and general
Ledger's basically a fancy name for your accounting system,
which is you can probably think of that as like a QuickBooks, or
a zero or freshbooks, or a wave or something or Zoho, or
something like that. That's going to be your general
ledger. It's going to be the Hub and
spoke of the whole thing Financial.
You're also going to have an invoicing platform which may or
may not be the same thing, so maybe even Voice from somewhere
else, like a stripe or some sort of other payment platform.
Maybe you invoice, straight out of QuickBooks.
The just depends, right? So put your invoicing platform.
Your bill payment platform if you have one, if you have some
sort of a size and you have a whole bunch of invoices that are
coming through, the you have to pay, probably got some sort of a
bill payment platform, your bank super critical because you want
your bank to play nice with all of these different applications.
You want, you want the data to sink.
So you need all of these things to talk to each other and then
Once all of these things, talk to each other.
Once there's a common data language that's happening and
I'll talk about that here in a second.
Then you can start to layer on things like data, visualization,
analytics, and start to crunch some numbers.
Here's a really good example. So let's say time-tracking
software. Here's a great example, I see
this fairly frequently across our clients.
So let's just say, you track time, either for internal
management purposes or billing, please don't build by the you,
but let's just say that you do. So you track your time and then
you invoice you. So, let's say you just track
your time and harvest. As a good example and then let's
just say you invoice out of QuickBooks.
Well, the time that you track and harvest the clients that you
put time to those client names, don't necessarily sink over to
QuickBooks. There's no bi-directional sync
there. So you need to make sure that
the names in QuickBooks are the same as the names and harvest,
and then you can start to run analytics on where your time is
going, and where, and how much revenue you're driving.
And things like that. Phil rating that best example,
we were just taking revenue and dividing it by the number of
hours that you spent on that client or that project or
whatever it is. But if those two things don't
talk to each other, if there's naming conventions, are all
different between customers between projects and things like
that. We see this all the time, then
it's gonna be really hard to do that math and those calculations
in an automated way you can still do them but it's going to
be manual. So for you to be able to get to
the answers that you want to get to in your business is going to
take you a lot of time energy and effort and you're going to
be less likely to do it. So if you want all those
analytics to be automated so you have access to them on an
ongoing basis so you can make those informed decisions then
You have to do it in a way where your financial ecosystem and to
some extent, even your operational ecosystem all sinks
together and I'll plays nicely together, a lot of times, we'll
see clients who just go and they'll go by any old app, that
seems cool. But like, okay, that's great.
You got a new CRM, but it doesn't talk to QuickBooks.
Now, what are we going to do, you know, that sort of thing?
So, just being really intentional and being really
careful and having again, having somebody that you can lean on to
walk you through, how you get to the information that you want to
get to, you know? Isis question.
Just for those who are starting businesses, what are the
pitfalls that you see the top three pitfalls that you see with
with agencies that I've taught to designers and design Business
Leaders? Whenever we mention the
conversation of Finance everyone tenses up right?
And it's the necessary part of the business Ryan and you talk
about it, like having frequent conversations is really key.
What are things that you see that are the top pitfalls, I
love for our audience to see if it holds a mirror up to their
practices, right? Now, hmm, how long is it going?
As long as you've got knowledge. Go.
Yes, but now I mean that's the stuff that's really helpful.
Like sometimes it's great to hear like don't do X and you can
look in the mirror and go. Oh my goodness, we've been doing
next. Yeah, here's the number one
thing that we see is commingling using a personal type checking,
or savings or whatever Bank type account for your business.
Don't do this. Do not do the old.
No, you're not know the commingle commingling is bad
enough, commingling has all sorts of problems.
Like if you've got an LLC in your commingling and this is not
legal advice by any stretch of the imagination, that's why you
have, it should have a good lawyer.
But potentially your piercing the corporate veil you make your
tax return. Really, really difficult to
prepare because we've got to untangle all of these things,
right? We got to split it between
business and personal. At some point, you can't have
good information to run your business, which is all that data
and analytics stuff we just talked about There's a ton of
pitfalls with that. Now if you're using personal
type accounts for your business now it's hard for your business
to build credit. So when you go out to go get a
loan or line of credit, like now it's on you personally for sure.
So that makes that difficult. So basically keep the business
and the personal separate, the business should have business
type accounts that are solely business-type accounts.
That's the number one thing. The number two thing, I don't
know, probably just not paying close enough attention on a
Basis to financial information. And that comes with a whole
bunch of pitfalls to like, where are we spending our money?
How do we control expenses pricing is that big one.
How do we even price this work? You can go and sell work all day
long, but if you're not selling it for a price, that's high
enough, then you're going to lose money and you're not going
to understand why that's that's a good one, not paying attention
to cash flow. That's another one talk a bit
about pricing and that's one of the areas where, you know,
you're setting pricing for the first time and you may think
that you're charging enough, but if you don't have a Active of
the rest of the marketplace, you can completely be underpricing
your work. And I know many times creative
leaders are hesitant about charging their real market value
for their work. But what are some quick thoughts
that you've seen and ways in which you can get past that veil
of not charging enough? So, first place to start is
dulled bill by the hour into that is the bane of, everybody's
existence for two reasons. Number one, it doesn't reward
you for being really good. Your job and are being more
efficient. And then number two, it
automatically puts you at odds with your client because the
benefit for your client is to do your work faster.
The benefit for you is to take longer, okay?
So it puts you at odds with your client unnecessarily.
So in my opinion, the other pieces to is in order to build
by the hour, you got to track time and there's literally
nobody that's going to track in time.
So, value based billing is the way to go.
If you want to understand value based billing and you want to
get into my nerdy world of accounting go.
So redrawn Baker's book, implementing value-based pricing
is the Bible of value-based pricing and I have a tendency to
send that the clients as well. So value-based pricing basically
says that you are going to bill your clients based on the value
that you drive for them. A good place to start is to ask
your clients questions. What is important to you?
What is the result that you're looking to get?
If you're asking enough questions in your building, up
the value to them of what you were going to deliver, then you
can charge higher prices and you're going to get less
pushback than you are. Sighs.
What if you just say? Well yeah I can do that but it's
going to be whatever twenty thousand dollars or fifty
thousand dollars or whatever so implementing value-based pricing
but also having those conversations with the clients
to understand what it is that's going to drive value for them.
The other thing to think about, kind of that's not in the
pricing realm but it's sort of tangentially related is being on
some sort of a subscription-based model or a
retainer model, which is less good, but definitely better than
one. Type one time project type stuff
so that's kind of my Soliloquy on.
Revenue and pricing. And and those things much
appreciated in great info and appreciate the reference for the
book for audience as well. This is a very good and
informative list of what not to do.
Anything else, anything else you need to add to that?
I may have had to others. I lost one though.
So I yeah, the third one is understanding how when, and why,
and where you're going to pay income taxes and other taxes.
We see this frankly. Maybe a client comes to us.
They've got an S corp setup and it's because of the previous
accountant or bookkeeper told him that you need to get an S
corp like cool, that's great. But understanding how the S Corp
is going to pay tax. Which for the most part it's not
going to pay income tax. It's going to pass through to
you. Right.
There are a couple of states where things get weird, but just
understanding how those funds flow and then who and where
you're going to pay estimated taxes, what the timing of that
is going to be how those amounts are derived managing basis, you
know, all things like that. Just Understanding the tax
implications of the entity. You have, and how your operation
of that entity is going to impact all those factors really
good. This is the information as we
said. You know if you're a design
professional creative leader you've spent your career
focusing on honing, your creative facility this skills
around building it. But these are the spaces that
help to make break or lessen the pain of running these
Enterprises having this correct. And having a champion For
someone who has the knowledge as you mentioned in your corner, as
you build a business out. If you were starting a business
today as as a creative business, who would be your starting five?
What would be the starting five pieces that you would need in
terms of talent and advice in terms of talent and advice?
Holy cow, is that you've got to include yourself.
It's white so you got it. You got to include yourself in
financial Acumen is 1. So you got four other slots fair
fair. Yeah, so I would have I don't
have a good accountant in a good attorney for sure.
A good business coach, I would probably save a business coach
that is not involved in or hasn't historically been
involved with creatives. Somebody will with just a very
broad perspective so that's 3. 4 would be 4 is a little bit
difficult. I would waver between somebody
like let's go yeah, I'll talk about this.
Go with this, for be a banker. Somebody you have a Banking
relationship with which does not mean that you can't use a
technology enabled Bank, just means that what we learned
through the pandemic is when things go really, really bad
that it's good to have a relationship with a banker.
And that's, that's what we're seeing now.
And folks are trying to get like lines of credit and things like
that. You should at least have some
sort of relationship of the banker.
And then number five, will come back to that one.
Because I think that's at the start of the pandemic.
One of the most requested resources we put together was
Talk to your banker and we just sit in an important space.
So, you know, we can come back to that, but I'd love to hear a
number five. Who's your yep?
Number five, would be a friend who's done it friend or an
acquaintance or somebody in the industry who's done it, which is
part of it, like somebody who's done, what you're trying to do
with that, you can just like pick their brain or a community.
That would that would work to me, somebody, where you got
industry specific resources, where people, you know, they
understand where you're coming from exactly.
But having a busy than that, Works hand in hand with the
business coach to having a business coach to understand
business and how things should operate and having a broad
perspective. But then also having that group
or that one person who's done exactly what you're trying to do
and being able to balance the information that you're getting
from those two places that I think that that's invaluable,
for sure that's incredible. Starting five Fina for us to
think about how we run our organization.
We talked a little bit about what some of the other side of
kind of our pandemic moment in space as you prep your own
business and you start To think about what's next for your
clients? What are some of the things that
you're looking out for over the next 18?
24 months? What are you thinking about
these days? Holy cow, we're paying very
close attention to the economy. And we're paying, we're asking
our clients all the time. What are you seeing and feeling?
And in particular, what is it that your clients are telling
you because at all this stuff that flows Downstream we really
got ya. Yep.
So, we're looking at economic data, where and then we're
having these conversations with our clients.
What are you seeing? What are you feeling?
And the other thing that we're doing is Raising capital or
access to Capital as it were, if things, get bad and we get into
a crunch, we don't want to win. Want to lay people off or Miss,
bill payments or anything like that.
We want to have some sort of a stopgap, that's another one and
then thinking about different and or creative revenue streams.
So what are the places where we can add value, or create value
that we haven't necessarily explored, previously that are
going to be perhaps a little bit more recession resistant, that
sort of thing. Those are probably the big what
is it four or five that I just listed as a really good basis
for us to kind of think about you know what's Exhale for a lot
of organizations. Just kind of taking the breath
to make it through the last 24 months.
It's been, it's been the marathon.
But looking forward is something we don't want to miss out on the
opportunities as the as the world changes.
We're seeing a lot of creatives move from in-house positions to
entrepreneurial and actually the other flow as well.
During this time period. One of the things that the
pandemic it showed us as we've all kind of questioned, what it
is we do and how do we do it? Are you seeing Those type of
movements as well. It's you look at agencies, do
you see more books coming out or going in these days at the
moment? It's going out.
What we're seeing about a year ago or so.
We're folks who are going out and and freelancing and opening
up their own shops. And so, the conversations that
we were having with agency clients at that point where, you
know, around building a network of folks that you can Outsource
work to number one, but then also what you should be thinking
about when you have this Migration of folks who are going
into freelance type work, one of the concerns for us would be
that that would be deflationary. In other words, your agency now
is competing against somebody who's out on their own.
Who's going with this kind of eat what you kill type mode.
They're likely to drive prices lower because they're likely to
charge Less in order to get work to pay the mortgage.
That's that sort of thing. So you should be thinking that
maybe maybe that would be deflationary, we haven't quite
seen that. That but it's something to think
about. I think, maybe you had that
scenario played out a little bit longer than it, did we'd be
seeing more of that where we are economically right now, it's a
little bit, a little bit of a different story.
What we're hearing from clients is that because corporate
marketing budgets are kind of the first to get cut when things
slow down. We've got folks who are coming
out of corporate and who are sending resumes to agencies and,
you know, looking for work. So it'll be interesting to see
how that Dynamic plays out. But it you know like you alluded
to it's going to be it's not going to be next month is going
to be over the next 18, 24 months or so.
So to that end, when you look over the horizon, what do you
get most excited about these days?
What are you most excited about? In terms of possibilities are
opportunities. I think that the world is just
changing so rapidly. That the number of opportunities
that are out there, are there more numerous and they come at
you little bit faster and then There are also larger.
Yeah. So there's a lot more to take
advantage of than there was before let's see.
Next week it'll be four years since I've been out on my own.
When I went out on my own it was a very tax every practice we did
very little virtual CFO work now we're 75% virtual CFO work and
25% tax and I was getting calls from people like on the phone
and they would say hey I want to do my tax return.
I'm going to bring you my stuff like my shoebox full of paper
and stuff and I say no you know I work for my living room
basically. And You know, I don't do that,
you know, but I have an online portal for you to upload
documents. And they've got now, it's like,
if you know, I got it. I need to, I need to be the
sitting there while you do my return face-to-face, I gotta
bring you my paper, right? And so we would lose clients
that way, pandemic it. And that's not a thing anymore.
And like, when I posted my first job to hire my first person,
like, I think, I think was on indeed.
Like, I couldn't, I couldn't post with the location as like
virtual. It wasn't a thing.
And now I can post virtual jobs and get people from all over the
country and it's not that it's not that hard to do so that the
talent pool and the client pool and the you know just the
virtual environment is made everything much bigger.
So there's much more opportunity plus the world is changing.
It's never going to change slower than it is today.
It's always going to be faster. So you know, just the amount of
opportunity in the size of it is just enormous.
That's what gets any. That's an incredible statement
right there. We talked about being excited to
just realize that change is not going to get slow.
Our it's only going to get faster.
Hmm, for sure, for forever. It's just, it's not, it's not
going back. You know what, we thinking of
that? What's the one lesson added to
that, that you've taken from the last three years, one of the
last lesson for the last two years, or three years, you have.
And I think about it for your time, being on your own, you've
represented the majority of your time as a standalone business
has actually been during the pandemic.
Yeah, but we think about it, you know, it's Life outside of the
pandemic is, is the secondary for your business now.
So what what lessons have been taken from 75% of your business
being in the panda? Yeah, that's a, that's a really
great question and really made me think there for a second.
So, I would say, our Mantra right now is just be helpful and
that was born out of the pandemic.
For sure. I remember when the world
shutdown in March of 2020, And the conversation that we were
having internally, our team was three.
At that point, the conversation that we were having was like,
look, this PPP thing like nobody knows what it is.
Nobody knows how this is gonna work.
The economy is shut down. It's literally never like you've
never shut down the entire world economy before ever.
Like this. Can't be a good thing.
We don't know how bad this is going to be, but if we can just
sit here and have conversations with our clients, every Well
then that's what I did for two weeks straight all day.
I talked to every single client and just kind of run through.
Like this is our play book. This is what we think you should
be doing. This is what we are seeing.
This is what we're hearing from from other clients and from
Banks and all are in from the aicpa, which is a large
organization of CPAs and just have those conversations and
just be helpful. And not worry about like, well,
this client is in this tier and it doesn't allow us to have an
extra meeting. We and we're gonna have to send
them a bill and that sort of thing.
You just trying to pick up every last nickel for PPP applications
and for the time that we're spending and all this other
stuff, we're not worried about picking up every last nickel.
If we're just sitting here and having real conversations and
just being helpful, then these people are going to be clients
for life. And we'll just work on a Karma
system at this moment in time, and that's really what we
needed. I just went through this number
of my with my team earlier we grew two hundred sixty four
percent in the last two years. So, you know, it's worked and
just being helpful is really what it's all about.
And everything else will just kind of flow from that.
They've been a year on mute. So, funny that even in these
days where we think we have all our technology working,
sometimes your mute button, just clicks on.
That's right. That's the other thing that we
learned to learn from the pandemic is the politely tell
people that they're of you have to because because sometimes, I
mute buttons have minds of their own.
We haven't even pressed anything which is fun to have that
moment, but I was saying it's that, you know, being helpful in
which that moment right there really was, right is an
important strategic business practice, you know, as you said,
you talked about in terms of business Karma, but in being an
active listener, to be a helpful part.
Partner in growing your business which is what, you know, we
talked about from the very Beginnings, conversations what
your client need it, and it's great to get that case.
Story of how your business has grown because of that point of
being helpful. Well, this has been an
incredibly revealing and fun conversation about accounting
and design marketing and finance, all rolled in in
together. I'd love to leave you with the
last words, are there any things?
I know you do a lot in encouraging.
Young professionals to go in there.
So would love to hear if there are any thoughts that you have
for young professionals, whether they are on the finance side
marketing or design that are looking to craft their career.
In this post pandemic, landscape, any advice, you have
the best advice I have for Young Folks would just be just keep
after it and continuously learn investing in yourself, is always
going to be a good investment, but just keep after it be
consistent show up to work when you're supposed to show up to
work. You do the work that you're
supposed to be doing be helpful to your clients continuously
learn continuously upscale yourself.
And if you can do that you're going to you're going to be
totally successful. Well I think that's a wonderful
way to end our conversation here.
My friend, thank you for taking some time with us on design
adjacent and having a conversation to look at the
intersection of, as we said, finance and best business
practices, combined, with marketing design, and agency
work. It's just an important way to
think about, Who are your top five that are your support
mechanism? We encourage you to have Finance
to be a part of this conversation.
So thank you, Chris again, entrepreneur CPA champion and
really just all around a great business supporter.
Thank you, Chris, for joining us today.
And thank you all for joining us for this episode design,
adjacent, will we look at the Nexus of design running business
both today and tomorrow? Thank you, show notes for this
episode will be available on AIG a.org.
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My name is Li Shan Wang until next time.