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All right, so Jesse and I will probably argue a little bit. So you might have to be a little bit of a mediator between us. We like to chop it up a little bit on here.
Cool. I mean, you and Jesse both have been running firms for nine years, so definitely want to talk about some stuff about kind of like what's changed in the landscape over the next, over the last nine years or so, but, I want to talk about growing CAS first, because I feel like I've seen you talk about cold email.
You guys have been on cold email and I've done cold email. We've done cold email. And I feel like that's super rare in the accounting space. I actually feel like accountants hate it. And when I've polled accountants, even accountants out like me and like us, that we don't do cold email. They look at me like, with disgust and disdain. Like, how could you possibly be doing that? So what was your like – when did you guys start doing cold email?
When did I pop the cold email virginity that I had? When I started Reconciled, I didn't want to approach building Reconciled like an accounting firm. Honestly, I don't have an accounting firm background. I don't have a public accounting background. So I didn't run a firm, I really hadn't worked at a firm.
So all I knew was about sales and marketing processes, a process that businesses and best practices at businesses that I had been controller or CFO at. And so obviously, one of the practices that is pretty common in the software as a service world, is cold email marketing. Cold email outreach, right? SDRs would spin up email accounts and do cold email reach, at volume and try to personalize as best as possible.
And there's all these tools out there. So I was like, well, if it's working for SaaS, why can't it work for the services I want to provide? Because I'm trying to provide these services remotely, online, at a fixed monthly price – sounds like what a SaaS company does. And so that's really how I started researching and getting into it.
I could talk about cold email for-
I almost said when he said if it works for SaaS, it should work for AAAS.
It should work for anything. It should work for AAAS. I mean, if I'm getting emails for Viagra and offshore Indian development all the time that I ignore but they keep sending them, it obviously works.
Did we just invent a new app, like instead of Hinge? It's just like cold emailing people, like that's it. Yeah. I think we just cracked the case. We'll be the next Bumble. Are you guys still doing cold email?
Yeah, we've been doing cold email since the second year of business. Pretty much. And it's had its changes for sure. I think it's gotten harder and more noise because once generative AI came out. All the tools that came out about it. So Google and Microsoft are combating, those are the two most active email accounts and Microsoft in the accounting space.
But they're combating generative AI and generated email and generated tools. But you can't help it. Email's still some of the greatest return on investment in regards to marketing spending cost because acquisition costs. And we're just adding cold calling now, we haven't really done cold calling in the past, so we're just adding cold calling because that's probably still surprisingly performs the best out of all channels of B2B. But we hadn't ever really done that. So email's just so affordable for outreach that we focus on that.
Yeah. We did email for CAS before we pivoted to SaaS like now, but before we launched the SaaS. And then we started doing cold email for SaaS. And it worked really, really well in the beginning for sure. Like some of our best leads, like you said, are still email leads for sure. But I'm curious about the personalization element. Like if you guys embraced a lot of this AI personalization, I feel like I have like super hot takes on personalization via email. But I'm curious, like, are you really leaning into that?
We hadn't gone that way. One is because, I’ve said this joke a lot - I have a hat and a shirt that says AI equals Asian intelligence. And so before generative AI, AI was really Asian people in the Philippines and India, 24/7 call center. So I really didn't jump on the general AI bandwagon, like implementing it a lot until I started seeing actual, you know, use case tools that are helpful. So on the personalization level, like for example, if you go on LinkedIn, you'll notice I have like a fire emoji before my name, and it's not because I think I'm hot shit or anything like that, it's because I know is somebody is using a bot or a tool because they have an emoji in front of my name.
I don't have an emoji in front of my name in real life. Right. So they obviously are using a tool that's just pulling my name from LinkedIn and not removing, not actually typing it out. So I know it's a bot.
That's the only reason I do it. I could have a cat. I could care less what the emoji is –
Quick interruption, two points for Tom for telling me to put an emoji at the beginning of my name.
I stole it from him. I saw Michael, Dan Luthi, Roman having emojis. I was like, what's going on with that? And then I was like, oh, it's definitely so when you scrape it –
It’s bot bait.
It's bot bait. It's like, I know who are bots and who are real and who's actually read through my stuff because the bots can't for some reason can’t remove an emoji. I don't know why. It's like they're that dumb still.
It's like Terminator. Do you remember the movie Terminator? How dogs could always tell when there was a Terminator, the dogs would start barking. So they use dogs to detect the Terminators.
Emojis are like the dogs.
Emojis are LinkedIn’s bot dog.
Jesse wanted to use the eggplant emoji as his. And I was like, dude, come on. Relax.
It's purple. It's on brand.
Yeah it is. He's like it's a purple emoji.
It has a lot of other connotations you might not want.
Now I'll get emails that are like, or I'm sure Jesse, you've got them where it's like, "Hi Jesse. Wow, seems like you're doing a great job as founder and CEO at FinOptimal. We should connect and talk about synergy." I'm like, dude, what is this?
This is not how a human being talks.
So crazy. So like even the email that we still do, we don't personalize it. We use your name. The personalization is like breaking down to list segmentation. If copy will resonate with them. But I'm not going to try to fake guess like, "Hey, Tom, so you went to Binghamton. The Bearcats really had a good game over there." I'm like, I don't give a shit about Binghamton's soccer team. Like, that's horrible personalization.
The one personalization I got – and it looked manual, but – somebody wanted a meeting and I was like, oh, this is interesting. This was a LinkedIn outreach. So I said, yeah, we want to meet, but I didn't send my calendar yet. And then he sends back an emoji and it's like, "the timing's unbearable" and it's a picture of a bear on a parking bench. I thought that was funny.
So I sent that meme to all of my salespeople and said, you guys can use this if you're waiting on a reply. I think it's actually pretty funny and made me laugh. Certain memes make me laugh and I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. But I think even the bots can't even do the right memes yet.
AI humor - they're not funny. I'll say this a lot about memes, then we’ll move to a real topic. We actually copy this from my cousin who was a BDR at ramp. Shout out Larry. The Kermit emoji. So like when people aren't answering, we'll just send like the sad Kermit and we'll just hit them like two, three, four sad Kermits. And then people will reply, like, all right, you got me. Even if it's a negative reply.
I remember we saw somebody else do that too. We're like, I love that idea. Let's do it.
Yeah, I copied it from him. He started that and it's just, you know, dumb ideas run in our family i guess. Anyway, let's talk about these firms, because you guys both started your firms around similar times. Obviously, at this point, FinOptimal is both a firm and software company and I think Reconciled that you guys continue to really push the envelope on what it means to be a future forward firm.
Here's like what is maybe the biggest or most radical change that you've made in the last nine years for your firm, something that maybe like when you started, you're like, we're never going to do that. Like we're always going to do it this way. We're always going to be about this. And now, nine years later, you're just totally different. Jesse, I'll let you go first, because I've just been dominating this conversation so far.
I think I started with the mindset of I'm only going to hire superstars. And I want all of them to be able to do all of the things. I just want people who are five tool players across the board to do everything from AP data entry to bank reconciliation, to process design, to monthly closes and client service.
And over time, I shifted to, all right, I'm going to have people who just do bank recs, and if they want to move up from that, great, we'll explore it. But at the beginning, your job is AP data entry and bank recs. And these people over here are responsible for closes and owning these relationships and these people over here are responsible for implementation. A little more division of labor, which seems like it should be intuitive.
You wanted to be the Yankees, and then you decided to play Moneyball, and that's basically what it comes to.
Well, I couldn't have put it better myself.
That's what I'm here for. Michael, what do you think? I'll translate your-
You're like my Derek Jeter.
I think that's a good thing. I know Hannah Jeter, which is very nice of you, so she’ll be very happy that you said that, so thank you Jesse for your compliment.
I was very hesitant on using any labor outside of the US, especially with so many people pretending that an Asian call center is generative AI. I now use nearshoring. I started it two and half years ago, working with different vendors across South America and Central America and Mexico, like Spanish speaking countries in the same time zone.
And we concluded that Argentina worked the best for us. Mainly because the vendor we first partnered with beat out all the other vendors and all the other countries and sent us the best talent, the hardest working talent. And they're super competent. So now a quarter of our workforce is actually in Argentina.
Who's the firm that you use?
It's called South Offices.
Yeah, they're actually at QBC. We're doing our friends at FinOptimal thing where we're giving certain people a little bit of booth time at our booth.
Michael, I don't know if you know this, but I met Nick from South Offices at a lunch right before your talk on coaching at last year's Intuit Connect. And he was like, which session are you going to? And we both were like, oh yeah, going to see Michael. And I was like, he’s a client, and we both just went to that session. And then afterwards, he wanted apparently to talk to you more than her wanted to talk to me. But yeah that’s funny.
I found Nicholas during the pandemic, in early '22. And he has a firm with his dad in Argentina in Buenos Aires. During the pandemic, he had built this database of accountants. And he always wanted to do outsourcing or nearshoring to the US but didn't know anybody. So he's part of a national group called Vistage that I'm a part of as well.
So I went on the Vistage forum and said, does anybody know any vendors in South America? Well, there's a whole Latin market for Vistage. And he said, hey, I'm an accountant, I own a firm with my dad, and I've always wanted to outsource. So I said, I'll be your first client. So we were his first client and we've pretty much gone in almost every client he has now, because I talk about it so much.
And I mean, they're a quarter of our team. Obviously I have a vested interest that his company is successful because a quarter of my team is the resources we found through him. He employs them for us. He's our EOR down there and I would consider him a good friend now. We are trying to do other business stuff outside of accounting together as well. He's really opened the world of Argentina to me. It's amazing. It’s an amazing place.
Yeah, that's a big one for us too. I mean offshoring. That was two years ago when I joined and we were not offshoring.
We were dead against it.
Absolutely refused it. And yeah, I think it's been a no brainer since.
Where are you offshoring to? Where are you finding people?
South Offices.
That wasn't our first actually. We have some people in India and we have at least one person in the Philippines. But yeah, I think that remote work in particular, since we're talking about – at the beginning, we were only remote work. What are you thumbs downing me for, Tom?
That was literally the microphone in my hand moving. But it's also funny.
I feel like that was subliminal. Like, if you want to go work for Michael? What’s the deal?
It was subliminal. Michael, do you need someone to shitpost on LinkedIn for you? Honestly, yeah that’s fine Jesse. You want to put me up on the trade block?
Sorry, I’m gonna redirect here. I was only remote. And then I started doing this full time – this was a side hustle in the beginning. And then when I started doing it full time, I was like, alright, I'm in the office. Everybody's going to be in the office. We're only hiring office people. And now we've more or less gone all the way back, especially because we're offshoring and nearshoring because, look, the labor market has spoken.
Remote work all the way. I don't care if I'm in the office, other people need to be. I care more about let people do what they need to do to make work-life harmony work. And I want to be able to have that because, what happens obviously, as you know, as business owner the moment we start getting bigger, then you're like, well, I'm the owner, I could make an exception for myself and go work from here.
I'm not gonna have any exceptions. And also you end up fighting two cultures. You have your in-office culture, and then you have your remote culture. And the people in office feel closer to you because they're in the office with you literally. So you can go for drinks with them, you can go for lunch, and they're top of mind. Often you get to know their families, but it kind of puts a separation to the remote workers who you don't get to go out for drinks with them regularly. You have to be intentional about that, to see them. So we've always been remote and we've enjoyed it, but now it sounds like I need to host a conference in Argentina for all of the different firms that Nicholas is working with. It would be great to do that.
I love the rebrand of offshoring to nearshoring. It's such a subtle but like it's like when we used to call it co-sourcing instead of outsourcing and hiring people. It's like, oh no, it's better because it says co in the beginning and you're like, you know what? We will do that actually.
Well, but there is a distinction.
Yeah yeah yeah. But like okay if you're in Washington right, how near is Argentina?
That's at least five. I think that's five hours to Argentina.
Here's the deal. Here's the decision I make - you can literally drive to Argentina. You can literally drive a car and or fly. And the flying actually is fairly quick. It's not that hard to get to South America or Mexico. And the time zone is the same. So you could still be working. And what's great about South Office is if you want a resource to work on West Coast time, they'll find those people. Or whatever time zone you want them on, they’ll find those people.
Well then again you can drive to India. It has to be an ice age, though.
Are you going Bering Strait? Because I was about to do a Bering Strait bit. Is that what we're doing?
Yeah I was thinking that, how else are you going to get there.
I was going to do a Bering Strait joke.
Pretty sure you can't do that anymore.
All right, I got another one. So we're talking about – it’s great. We're all growing and we're making changes and we're doing all the good stuff that everyone tells you to do. But like, what's something that is a little old school or traditional or legacy that you guys are still doing that you think other people are trying to throw out or people are like, we don't do that as a firm anymore. But you're like, you know what? Like that still works for us. And we're going to keep it as part of our culture, even though it might be a little bit old school or legacy. Jesse, I'll let you go first. I know it's a tough question, so I'll make you look worse if you don't have an answer, I'll let Michael think about it.
We track time. We charge by the hour,, but we do track our time.
You mean we charge flat fee, but we track.
We charge flat fee. We don't bill hourly, but for insight into our own profitability. You know, our client profitability profile. And also just because as full time employees, we are selling our time. That's the fundamental bargain. And I'm not super annoyingly meticulous about looking at every hour. But I look at the trends from time to time. And usually it's helpful to detect a problem with a client more than a problem with an employee. But every now and again, you see somebody just not doing irl. They're just not tracking their time. And if they can't follow some instructions, that's a red flag at the beginning. I've been told that it's an unpopular practice. I think a full time employee should be prepared to account for their time. I include myself in that I track my time too.
We do the same thing for employees that have billable client work. They're on client delivery. We need to do that because we need to see trends. We need to keep our sales team accountable to go - did you guys sell this right? The scope right? And are we making the money we want to make?
And also if you don't track time, you'll have one employee be super overwhelmed and they're managing $5,000 a month only. And you want to get them to like five, ten, 15,000, 20,000. And you have another employee who's managing 16 and they're like, give me more work. What is the difference between these two employees? The only way you're going to tell is where are they wasting their time? Which clients? And how would you know if you don't track time?
So we track it not just by client, but by task.
That's even closer, that's even farther than what we do. That's amazing. But again, there's no way to have that objective conversation to go, okay, one person's feeling overwhelmed, the other one's literally asking for more work. You know, and it also gives you insight of, oh, well, this person has five clients that are big versus 20 clients that are small.
So there's all these different insights or you said task. This person's doing just data entry and they're just flying through it with OCR or whatever. And this one's doing customized manual journal entries for payroll and doing hundreds of them. So those are things that are all really insightful.
We also use a tool called Combinely. It's a fairly new tool. We were the first U.S customer and Combinely allows – it actually syncs into your email and it reads it. What it does is it tracks sentiment of all your employees and all your customers. So it actually can pre-determine if they're going to churn, the customer and if there's negative conversations going from your customer or the employee.
So we monitor that weekly and go, hey, which customers are having negative reactions to our employees or to us in general and which employees are communicating negatively? Maybe they don't know it. Maybe they're having a hard week or they're just being terse. And it's using general AI to just tell us, hey, red flag, this client's likely to churn because of these conversations or this employee is likely to quit because they look burned out. So time tracking was a big one.
And then I'm really bad at scanning receipts. I keep physical receipts for a while and then I just go – like I spent a day scanning all of them and then I can throw them away. So I’m really bad at that.
Why don't you take a picture of it?
That's what I mean. I mean taking the picture, I'm really bad at just doing it on the fly. So I keep them in my pocket and then put them on my desk for the week or the month and then I try to just scan them in. I'm just bad at that. It's such an old school thing, but I’m so bad at it.
You got to get a receipt policy. I guess we've just moved to corporate cards for everything, and now we just don't do receipts. But we probably should do receipts a little bit more.
Yeah, I don’t know. The card’s probably capturing it all.
Out of pocket, out of pocket. There’s not even that many of us that have expenses, and I feel like we’re all not doing out of pocket anymore anyway. It's interesting to me because I think in this day and age of every single app is telling you they're going to save you time and make you more efficient, it's just like, how do you even know which one to go for first? Like, you should really be attacking wherever your team is spending a ton of time, that represents an opportunity to make a meaningful impact on the efficiency of your business. And if you're not tracking time, then you're either listening to the squeakiest wheel who may not actually represent your company, or you're just picking based on what, like vibes? You’re just like, nice, yeah that’s a cool color. Like I’m gonna pick that one. I just fundamentally don’t understand how people talk about running a modern accounting firm and embracing automation and embracing technology, but just having no idea where their team is actually spending money.
Well, at the end of the day, we still – the main metric we’re holding people accountable to is – if you're a client delivery person, there's this much MRR you have to manage. And you have to have a reason why you can’t get there. So if you have other ways to show us you can't get there, and time is not one of them, if there are legitimate reasons, okay, great. But obviously time is a component. Most of our employees that are having challenges show us like this client just tripled in the past six months. And the volume increased. Well that's really hard to pick up without tracking time. Or without literally counting bills that you’re doing, so there’s some king of tracking that’s occuring. Even with all the tools, they're not giving you a quickly accessible – what's the volume of bills my team has done today or this week? It’s not just accessible like that. It’s like, a report and counting and stuff, and Jesse knows this – you can’t just see this kind of data quickly. You’ve gotta go to somebody to put it all together, and then it’s dated by the time they bring it back to you. And then you go, how do I make an objective decision? So MRR is like the biggest one for us.
Do you try to hold to - I mean I recognize comparing clients is definitely not apples to apples - but is there a profitability objective that you try to hold your team to there as well?
By default, the profitability is there because of the MRR, and then we know the average compensation rate for doing financials. Therefore we know our profitability, our gross margin, our contribution margin on every single team member. So I'm not really having them focus on that. It's really get that MRR right for everybody where they don't feel overwhelmed all the time.
So we have those metrics for every single team member. And it grows as the longer they stay here. We can't have somebody who's starting out with us in the first year have the same MRR quota as a second year, three year person.
Does just one person oversee MSR even if multiple people work on the account for a given client?
Oh, I see what you’re saying. We have very few clients that split up. And then if we do split them up, we assign MRR amounts on the split up.
What I meant more was, for our team, we have one person who reviews the closes and gives direction to the people doing AP and bank recs. And in some cases, if workflows need to be redone, to the person implementing that workflow. But they own the relationship and they have to make decisions. They can't see everybody's compensation, but they can see how much time the other team members are spending on their clients. And they're responsible for letting us know, hey, we're not making money on this client or keeping profitability high.
We have that at the director manager level. Not by client, but more if I'm your manager and I'm doing check ins and I go, hey, there seems to be something off with these two clients you have. You're spending a ton of time and the MRR is super low for them. So let's have a conversation and then our account managers, our sales team is actively – every six months reviewing those times collected. And then deciding, do we go back for upsells? Do we go back for price increase? Do we just do a standard price increase because we do have built in our contracts standard 3 to 9% price increase, no questions asked. We don't have to ask the client for permission. We just do it. If it's above 9%, then we do want to go back and rescope. And so that's also been helpful as well.
Interesting. Outside of just time tracking, I think another thing that has helped me identify inefficiency not really within FinOptimal, but within other firms or companies that we're helping - like say, somebody comes to us and goes, I have this problem with this client. And we would like you guys to implement some of your apps either set up like Booker and Wrangler or set up other stuff that's not released yet. I'll just walk me through the process, like show me a video of you doing it, and I'll watch them do it. And I'm like, oh my God, you don't know about like command C, command V, or control C, like you don't know how to copy and paste.
They're not using computer functionality at all.
That to me is another underrated way. I forget who talked about this. It might have been Jason Staats, who was like one of the best things to do in an interview is to just watch somebody use a computer for 30 minutes, like give them a case study and be like, go do it in Excel. Like because we've done Excel case studies as part of our accounting hiring process, and we're always looking for like, how did they approach it? Like, what are the formulas look like? Right. You actually don't know how they did it. Like you see the output, but watching somebody fumble around a computer screen, it's great. It’s such an indicator of, holy shit there’s probably so much time wasted.
We should do that. When we give them our challenge, we should just make them do it in front of us.
But I also think that people can be nervous, right? Which I do appreciate somebody getting stage fright. I would get stage fright.
But what about just recording your screen while you work on it? Hey, you got to work on one screen.
It's like Ctrl C, Ctrl V. It's amazing how many people don't use it. Or selecting a set of files and moving them in batch. Like I see you're holding Control and clicking one at a time or moving. You're like, hold shift and click.
It's what training have you had in computers like in college and younger? And remember we're now going to face a generation of employees where they only learned on tablets. They didn't learn on laptops. So all those control functions literally they don't know exist. And that's what's crazy to me. They've never even opened up a physical computer. They've only worked on laptops or tablets or iPhones. So there are going to be some challenges probably five years from now where we see the 27 workforce. They're not going to know any of these functions or tools.
That's fascinating. That's actually where I was going to go next. My final question about the accounting firm transition is like, what are the new skills or experiences, or personality traits that you're looking for now compared to nine, ten years ago, like when you're hiring an accountant, what are you looking for?
I think the two top skills are, are you able to learn, are you able to figure it out and learn? And second is do you have – are you the type of person I can put on video and you can talk to a customer? Because at the end of the day, like only 25% of their job now is actual technical accounting that they have to think about accounting.
The rest is all done by the software. So how often are they really doing a journal entry, or are they really fixing a balance sheet or whatever it is? Instead of can you get an invite to a piece of software and just figure it out? Or do you have to be baby handheld through every single step of the process?
If a client asks you, hey, I'm not sure where, I got this new car loan, I don't know what to do with it - can you just figure that out? Do you have to be so just that bedside manner of being able to smile, be happy in front of a customer? Get a customer and talk to them and then just learn stuff. Like okay, do you know basic accounting? Sure. You'll learn a lot of that stuff along the way. But I need you to actually have a good bedside manner and respond to clients and figure things out.
It's interesting because I think you look at Gen Z and the younger generations below that, and they're going to come for me because I'm a millennial, I guess, technically. And they're so tech savvy as a generation, but they just have like iPad kid brain where they don't know actually how to look somebody in the eye and make conversation. How to just kill time.
We used to talk about at Protiviti the layover test, like, would I be stuck in an airport with this person? Like, if I was, would I be okay? Yeah, I could have a couple drinks at the bar while I wait for hours. Or am I going to literally be texting my wife on the side, like I'm stuck in the airport with James, I cannot believe I'm with this person.
And like, if you can't just kill four hours and make a friend, I think that skill is kind of gone away. Now people are like incredibly young, they don't make eye contact, they're very awkward, they don't know how to smile, they don't know how to deal with an uncomfortable situation.
I think the service industry is a phenomenal way of really learning that, because a lot of the time you actually aren't wrong. And people are mad at you for no reason, and you just got to sit there and take it and smile or try to laugh or joke your way out of the situation. And that skill set is dying.
So as much as they're embracing tech, the soft skills are really tough. But the ones that do have it, I think are just going to excel far beyond their peers because they're tech savvy and the ones who can still talk and chop it up are going to stand out. But Jesse, I'm curious, what's your skill?
I think mine's related. It's funny, Michael, I used to give - maybe we still do this - a six question quiz that had some questions would be on everybody's. And then we had three rotating questions to kind of and one of them was always sort of a situational thing where it says the client emails you this, do you take this irreversible step or do you just toss and then you make - for the answer is so obviously stupid, and so many people will still just - it's like, that's a great filter.
It's that bedside manner filter. I'm a big believer in that and totally agree on that point. I think over the years I've started to more value, in addition, not more than that additional value - the ability to give, get and internalize feedback. I think a lot of employment relationships strain on feedback not given or not given well, not received well, when people internalize it or they choose to say, yeah, that doesn't make me bad, that just means this thing that I did isn't working here.
And I think that the best organizations in the world figure out how to give and get feedback more effectively than the average one. I feel like we're still striving to do that because it's very hard to give somebody feedback, hey, this behavior of yours is not working for me. And for them to have the confidence to say, I appreciate that. But here, boss, is what you're doing that's not working for me and for me to be able to sort of grin and bear the slap in the face that that always is whenever you get negative feedback or opportunities for improvement, whatever you want to call it - to take it and make good use of it is really kind of a higher order skill, too. That's something that I think about a lot.
That makes a lot of sense. I have to ask about the shirt. Is that for like a tampon company or like, what's that about?
We get that a lot. When you use our app, which is called Accruer, that’s our app that's been out there the longest – in the QuickBooks description, the line description, “for the period.”
Oh, for the period. Yeah.
This is what happens when you only have-
I thought he was a customer. You're bringing people on this show that aren't customers?
He is!
Hey, I just told you I don't do my monthly closes. People do that for me.
Not many people at Reconciled are using it, because only Michelle would get it. Actually, it was a 45-minute podcast, just to tell you, you have to use it for all your other clients. What the hell is going on?
Yeah! Weren’t you say something about upsell opportunity? Can we raise it more than 9%?
This wasn’t even plugged in. This whole thing has been a ruse.
I love it.
So I have one that I - maybe it's just because I feel like I can do this, but I think it's a really important skill that sits somewhere in between technical and soft skill. And it's the ability to break down process quickly, like to not just understand the debits and credits, but like to visualize steps of your month end close into if thens.
Like to really just break down the decision tree so that you can think about should I tweak something? Should I put some tech in here? Is this even possible for there to be automation in this process? And I think that people don't do that - they either start that process and they just immediately focus on edge cases or they lack the ability to understand, like, okay, this system has this data and this system has that data.
We want them to have the same data, right. How is it getting in and then how is it coming out the other end? And what are all the little things that are happening in between and where can things go wrong? And like let's just pay attention to where the things can go wrong. The amount of people that I see signing up for Accruer where they're like, well, I'm going to keep my manual schedule on the side for three months to make sure that it's working. I'm like, you could design a much better control to figure out if it's working or not, and it's going to be working, but you don't trust me, right? Like rethink the process. Don't do things manually just because it makes you feel good.
I think if you think back on the environments most people in accounting have worked in and the introduction of cloud tools - most people, especially above a certain age, they spent most of their career, or at least the first 5 to 10 years in desktop based, isolated pieces of software doing accounting work.
So it was like QuickBooks desktop and Microsoft Outlook isolated. And then you go to this other module, isolated. They don't talk to each other, and I send it over to sales or to supply chain manufacturing. And those are isolated systems. And then now, the past ten, 15 years, all of a sudden, cloud tools come - Google Docs and Microsoft 365.
How long did it take Office 365 to get you to go online where you don’t have to download it and use it on your desktop? So all of a sudden these tools are like, wait, they're all talking to each other in real time. We're all sharing real time. That's still a fairly unique, new skill and idea and concept for the majority of the workforce, especially if they're over 50, right?
That workforce is one of the largest segments in history. And then you have to workforce that’s under 40 or 45 and under. And that's the millennial group and Gen Z. And they're used to that reality. But the older group still, when something broke, there was an IT professional that you went to a call desk and said, oh, hey, Outlook's not opening anymore or QuickBooks, can you change my password?
You don't do that anymore. We don't even have IT help support. Like I'm it, or my director. They had to figure out how do you go into reset the password in Google Workspace. That world did not exist before these cloud tools. Troubleshooting - there's no troubleshooting and we all have to troubleshoot ourselves.
There's no troubleshooting skill above that age. That's such a good call.
Troubleshooting and signal flow, that's the other thing. Signal flow is, hey, what talks to what in what order? And so if there's a wrench in the spokes, how do I - that's where troubleshooting comes from. You have to have knowledge or a concept of signal flow to be a troubleshooter. When somebody’s like, maybe I’ll just control alt delete, maybe I’ll just turn off the workflow and turn it back on. And it might work, but…
And that was the way it used to be with computers. Just reset the computer, and then everything worked.
But people don’t even try that. Some people don’t even try that. I’ll get emails where they’re like, this isn’t working. And I’m like, I just went in there and it’s working. And they’re like, oh. I didn’t wait 20 seconds, sorry. And I’m like, yeah I know that it’s magic, but can you just give it like, 20 seconds?
It’s gotta go into space. You’ve gotta give it time to come back from space.
So the one skill - I don't know how many times I'll say "Did you pick up the phone and call them?" You tried everything else. No email response, no text response, no slack response, no whatever. Did you just call them? Like we have their phone number. “Ohh…” And the number of people that are so against just making a phone call. It’s so hard. And I’m like, you could have solved this a week ago.
How old are you, Michael?
I'm 43.
Okay. I'm 46. We're about the same age. Below that, it's like, give them a call, and it’s like, “why would you do that? What if they pick up?”
If you're under 40, it's like, what if they pick up?
But to be honest, like, I'm 30 and, like, growing up, I had to pick up the phone and, like, call my friends' houses probably until about fifth grade. So that 10-11 years old. Even that like that gives me a little bit of an edge over the kids who never had that. And I do it for this job but I hate it every time I have to do it.
At Limewire there was a joke that said if the phone rings, it's Jesse. I was the only one.
That's awesome.
That's a huge skill that's lost these days. There's actually a comeback. There's like a bunch of really funny cold calling kids on LinkedIn that are like, just posting about their cold calling journeys. So I feel like that skill is like, that's another one for the Gen Zers out there or what's below them, Gen Alpha - if you can pick up the phone and call, you will stand out compared to your generation.
Oh yeah, for sure. Just call. Just call. And I think that's the thing is, how many things could we solve very quickly? Just make a phone call. You can't reach them, it's been three days? Call them. Just call them. And they're probably just busy.
Then your dynamic range is much wider. You could have tone of voice instead of just caps or lowercase.
This is a weird thing for me. But if I'm going to call somebody, I need to stand up. I know that's insane, but I literally have to stand up. It gives me more confidence that, like, okay, this is fine. Like, I'll put my headphones in. I'll just like, even walk around my apartment if I'm going through a list of calls and it just gives me a totally different – something about like sitting still and just calling someone. I'm like, oh God, if I really have to do this right now. They’re gonna hate me for calling. It really comes down to, they’re gonna hate me for calling them.
I think it’s just because Jess and I had a long number of years in our lives where, that’s all you did was call people. Because there was nothing else to do, so you made phone calls to reach people.
I just project my own hatred for getting calls onto people. Like, I realize that's a flaw of mine, that I hate getting phone calls. So I'm like, this person is going to hate this just as much as I would. Like, I'm so sorry that I have to call you right now. But maybe they don't. Some people I’ve definitely called and I can hear immediately in their voice they're like, oh, no, like, the sales guy got through to me, damn it.
The messed up thing I'll do is with people in my life. It could even be like employees. I will call them randomly, not just by phone. I'll use other apps to randomly call them, just randomly to say, hey, just checking in. So I'll do a slack call, just not even warn them, or I'll do a WhatsApp call or a Facebook messenger call. Instagram. Just to mess with them. It could be a friend I only text with. I'm like, I'm going to just call them through WhatsApp, just to mess with them and see what happens.
It can save a relationship that's otherwise on the rocks.
100%.
But I have friends that will call me and I'm like, dude, it's 2:30 on a Tuesday. Like, I'm not picking up. I'm busy. Or like, I'm watching a movie and they're calling in. I'm like, dude, I'm not - yeah, let me just pause everything so that you can tell me about your day. Like, dude, you're 30. I'm 30. Like, you’re my guy friend, text me bro.
Or maybe they want to ask, why are you watching a movie at 2:30 on a Tuesday?
Those are separate instances. Those are separate instances. There's definitely no way I’m watching a movie at 2:30. All right, that’s good though. Good stuff. All right, last question for you guys. If you had to rename your firm right now, what would you call it instead? Who wants to go first?
Reconciled. Oh shit. Let me think. All right, I have mine. I'll let Michael go first if he has his.
I’d call mine Asian Intelligence. That’s what I’d call mine.
That’s good, I like that. AI? Yeah Jesse, what’s yours?
I would call it what I originally planned to call it, which is Finomenal. But who took it Michael, why didn’t I call it that? When I was picking out, looking for the domain name, there is a fishing, a charter fishing boat company – a fishing expedition company called Finomenal. And I called them, I'm like, maybe I can buy the domain for cheap. Couldn't reach them - some company in Florida that has the name of the company that we should have had.
You could have done like the Linkin Park thing. You know, like they were supposed to be Lincoln Park, just like L I N C O L N Park. And it was taken so they changed it to Linkin. Yeah, and everyone was like, oh yeah, that's it.
Oh, we could have gone with like get-finomenal, I don't know.
No no no, don’t do that.
Be-finomenal? Well thanks guys, this has been great. This has been fun. I will see you guys in Vegas.
Michael be great, good to talk to you.
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