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Leaders of the Ledger from CPA Practice Advisor in partnership with Rightworks spotlights the people and ideas shaping the future of the accounting profession.
Each episode host Rob Brown interviews influential firm leaders, innovators and rising stars to uncover how they are tackling today’s biggest challenges whether it is client advisory services, AI and technology, talent strategy or firm growth through M&A.
Built on CPA Practice Advisor’s trusted recognition lists like the 40 Under 40 Influencers in Accounting and other collections of prominent professionals, this show goes beyond the headlines to share practical insights, personal stories and proven strategies from those moving the profession forward.
If you are a firm owner, leader or ambitious professional who wants to stay ahead of the curve Leaders of the Ledger is your inside track to the conversations and connections that matter most in accounting.
Subscribe now to hear from the voices redefining what it means to lead in the profession.
Speaker 1 (00:00.076)
If you are wondering who the influential people are in the accounting world, we've got you covered because there are so many of them doing so many different things. This is leaders of the ledger on behalf of CPA practice advisor. I'm your host Rob Brown and we are shining a light on professionals, experts, influencers in this accounting world that are making a noise or making a dent in the universe as Steve Jobs might say and trying to make a difference. I'm thrilled to have with me today from Madison, Wisconsin. It's Taylor Hart. Good day, sir.
Good day. It's great to be here.
Tell her what makes you an influencer. Do you feel influential?
feel like I have a little bit of imposter syndrome about that. So it's hard for me to say, but yeah, I think I have a little bit of influence and I love to talk to people and I think the community is a big part of everything I do and it's helped me kind of grow as a firm.
I speak to people who have been on the CPA practice advisor 40 under 40 list, which is where a lot of our guests are coming from as we launched this show. They do feel similar to you in that accountants are not known for their bravado and their personal marketing and ethical bragging, whatever you want to call it. But I'm fond of Quentin Muhammad Ali, the boxer who said it ain't bragging if you've done it. So you've obviously done something, right? You've done something that's caught people's attention. What do you feel it is that Taylor Hartman might be known for?
Speaker 2 (01:09.43)
If I had to pick one thing, I think it's probably my authenticity. Okay. I like to share like the raw real stuff online quite a bit. And I kind of put myself out there and I'm a little bit more vulnerable than accountants typically are. I think we're a lot of perfectionists and I kind of show the mistakes I make. I don't know. It's because that's what I like when that's what I like in other influencers. I think I like to see, I read biographies and I, you know, I want to see every detail of someone's life. I don't want to just see the things.
Why do you do that?
Speaker 2 (01:37.474)
that are going well. I want to see the bad things. I want to see the emotions. I want to learn everything. So I think I started with that and that's kind of where that comes from.
with the social, the digital world that we're in right now, everyone has a platform, don't they? So you see people's lives portrayed out there, but I think what you're getting at is that a lot of what we see on there is the best bits of people's lives. It's the high-light reels, isn't it? And we know that's not real, but we don't know what the other side of that looks like.
Right, exactly. Yeah, it's like Instagram. You just see the pictures of when people go on vacations and then you don't see like the day to day at all. And I love the day to day. That's my favorite part.
You sure? Is it about accounting stuff? Is it about Taylor the man? Is it about something different? Talk to us about your content. think-
My content is usually just about things going on in my life, which is, you know, I run Solarity, so it's a lot of running my firm. But I, last week I posted about hiring a coach and that, you know, that did pretty well. So I think it's just whatever's kind of interesting me at the moment, but usually accounting specific and usually technology and tools too. So a lot of my life is a Yeah. So we're a cast firm. have a team of five currently, and we're in the process of hiring somebody right now.
Speaker 1 (02:38.296)
Toxas of afcel- Toxas of afcelerity
Speaker 2 (02:48.154)
And we do everything from bookkeeping up to CFO services for mid-market companies. And we don't necessarily have an industry niche, but we niche on QuickBooks Online and NetSuite. And that's served us really well because not many people work in NetSuite. So that's kind of where we stand out.
Give us a feel for the journey up to here. What was Taylor Hartman doing at 16 and what did you want to be back then?
Oh man, when I was 16 I was probably only concerned with sports. and track and field and I powerlifting back then. And then, yeah, I don't think I knew what I wanted to do. Who does? At all. Yeah. I just knew, I think I knew I wanted to help people. So I went to college after that to be actually a firefighter before I wanted to be an accountant. I kind of switched from firefighter to an accountant and then kind of worked my way up through there. Made a mistake in past.
over that pretty quickly. Firefighter to accountant, that's quite a big leap from two ends of a spectrum.
Yeah, I thought I'd get bored eventually. I wanted something more mentally challenging. not that I'd be bored saving lives, that sounds incredible and that's super cool job still, but I think I wanted, I knew that I needed something that would mentally challenge me a little bit.
Speaker 1 (03:52.75)
There's a lot of down-timing
Yeah, yeah, which to like a 16 year old sounds great, right? A lot of downtime, you can go work out, hang out with people.
I'm of an older generation than you, Taylor. You're one of the young guns, but we wanted to be astronauts and train drivers and things like that. There were really aspirations, but probably pretty boring jobs with a lot of study. so what attracted you about the CPA line of work?
I I just love helping people and I love the variety in business and it's so rewarding to, you know, help someone have some visibility into their business so they can actually make good decisions. And now like owning a business firsthand, I can kind of see how much I was actually helping those people on my working my way up to where I am now. So I think I just love helping people partnering with them to make good decisions and like grow their business.
People don't make good decisions, do they? You probably heard of this term proximity bias where you get so close to what you're doing, you don't see it as remarkable and you don't often see from a perspective. So that sounds like that stimulates you.
Speaker 2 (04:52.248)
For sure. And sometimes it's frustrating because they don't always listen to you with clients. But when they do and things go really well, it's so rewarding.
How did you cut your teeth on running a business? Did you work for somebody? Just guide us up to the celery, celerity, sorry, the celerity moment.
Celery, celebrity, yeah. So I took an AP accounts payable job right out of college and kind of worked my way up to senior accountant in private for the first like six years of my career. And then I took a job at BDO doing outsourced accounting and that's really where I learned the ropes for what I do now.
So I got to do the bookkeeping, do this controller level work at BDO with bigger mid-market clients and help sell to those clients, upsell those clients, etc. And kind of learned everything that I'm doing now. So I learned in private originally, moved to BDO, kind of learned the public life and then became a lot more well-rounded through that and then kind of started celerity after I left BDO because going back to private after working public is pretty boring.
Talk to us about the transition BDO, obviously very well known for a huge international organization and an alliance. You'd do very well there. You would make partner. You'd have been on a fast track that have expected high things from you. You'd have been emerging talent and they were probably promising you a great career path, but you said no to that.
Speaker 2 (06:06.978)
Yeah, I'm not very good with structure, rigid structure. So the big firm, wait in line, wait your turn, wait three years to become manager. the game, huh? I don't like playing the game. I like to break the rules. So, and I'm glad I made that transition now, looking back, but I think that's ultimately why I left. I didn't want to follow the same route that everyone else was taking.
We have an interest in parallel, you and I, in that I'm a former high school math teacher. did four years in UK, four years in Hong Kong at an international school. And I didn't like the rules either. I was the kind of guy that would play music in my math lessons and get the kids stretching and doing a bit of yoga halfway through and running around and playing games. And it didn't go down too well with the establishment, but I wanted to shake things up because you know how kids get bored these days. okay, you woke up one morning and you thought, okay, this is the end of the line for me at BDO. Or was there a gradual...
dawning on you that there was another way.
Well, I took another job after that at a private company, mainly because they offered a lot more money. Okay. So that was the real reason I left back then. And going to private after that and going back in office after COVID, it was post COVID. So working, I got to work remotely at BDO. I was out of the Chicago office and will live up in Madison. So I was mostly remote. Most of my clients were all over the country and going to private and it was just being in person. I had a puppy at home. It was really stressful to go back in the office just because, and it was so boring to sit there and twiddle my thumb.
because it was like going to work for one client and then you have the first two weeks of the month are really really busy and you get everything closed and then the next two weeks it's like what do do so a lot of water cooler talk type stuff and I was just starting to get bored and I had student loans that I wanted to pay off so I started getting clients on the side with cleanup jobs etc on Upwork
Speaker 2 (07:46.894)
which is a website for freelancers where they can go apply to jobs online. And I would get clean up jobs, I clean the books up and they'd be like, hey, can you just keep our books clean on a monthly basis and we can have like a conversation once a month. And then I'd lock down like 2000 a month, a couple of thousand a month. So I had like two or three of those within a couple of months of freelancing and up work enough to where I could almost make the decision to leave my job. And that's ultimately the transition into celerity.
That's interesting. You peel back the curtain a little bit on that. I interviewed one guy who, he said, I knew I wanted to leave my job, but the first milestone I needed to make on the side was 2,400 a month for my health insurance, for me and my family. And that was his get that he needed to approach. He once I got close to that, I knew I could give up my job and just uplift it from there. So you need a couple of thousand bucks as much to prove that you had something here as to pay the bills. Right. And that got you started.
Exactly. And luckily my wife works in government, so we had the healthcare thing taken care of, which was really helpful.
Funny, so many different kinds of influences in the accounting world. Some people are really happy working for the firm, being a voice of authority and having a say in the structure, the process, the strategy of a bigger or even a mid-firm. Some of them are entrepreneurial like you.
be in charge, want their hands on the steering wheel of things. Talk to us about some of the red flags or the warning signs that maybe our viewers, our listeners might want to look out for if they are getting an itch to move out of a secure job and maybe go out on their own, Taylor.
Speaker 2 (09:17.634)
Yeah, I guess some things maybe that I would, I would maybe think really hard about how much do you want to do the other stuff outside of accounting? Because I think owning a business, especially a new business where you don't have any employees, you don't have any contractors helping you out, do you want to do marketing? Do you want to do payroll? Do you want to deal with people and managing people and like potentially dealing with your own mistakes on a regular basis? And then you're also taking the risks of working with clients that if they leave that
could be potentially that could be your well-being could change the second the client leaves or the second you get a client you might have to hire somebody and if that client leaves you might have to fire the same person you know so it's putting a lot of weight on your back for not that much more income even if you scale the firm really quickly I think there's you're gonna need that money for other things like hiring other people or you know paying for Google Ads and stuff like that so really think hard about
much effort you want to put into it and is it going to pay off in the same way as if you just stayed at like the public accounting firm. If you stayed for four more years and you became partner at BDO, for example, that might be more lucrative and less work than, you know, starting your business and taking a risk. But if you're the type of person that wants to do all those things, I definitely recommend it. It's been, to me, I can't even imagine going another path at this point.
way you paint it, I don't know if many people would want to do all of those things, but they'd certainly want a lot of what all of those things would bring them, which is the freedom, the autonomy, the flexibility, the choice to say no to certain things and certain kinds of clients and certain kinds of work. Just tell us about the upside of running your own game.
Yeah, so I think there's two perspectives on this too that I definitely want to point out. I think there's you can have a lifestyle firm and you could do it just to make enough money for your ends to make your ends meet and to like make a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand. I think you can manage that with maybe just you or just you and a person. And I think that is very lucrative. And if you're OK with that, that's amazing. And that's more money than most people would make anywhere else.
Speaker 2 (11:12.27)
So I think that's one way to do it. At a year and a half in, I kind of decided that I would get bored with that. So I decided I was going to scale up. And when you scale up, that's where lot of the that's where things get a lot harder, I would say. So I think there's two different perspectives on what type of business you want to run. I mean, the upside, yeah, it's unlimited potential. It becomes an asset that you eventually could sell or sell to your employees in the future.
I think in the first year for me, we made, I think we made over $200,000 in revenue the first year. And I think on average, I work 20 hours a week. The value you can provide and what you can charge with cast clients specifically. And if you got five clients, you're getting all of that revenue instead of the firm getting that revenue and paying you your salary. You're getting all of that money and that might be able to be enough money for your family. So I played a lot of video games in the first year.
And we still made really good money. I mean, when I left my job, I was making around $100,000 and I just wanted to survive in the first year. So 200,000, I think is realistic for a lot of people, especially once you're at that manager level or higher, if you can get those clients. So I think you get a lot of work life balance if that's what you want, but ultimately you get the freedom and that's the best part for me.
Well, you spoke early about your willingness to be vulnerable. You're certainly being honest and open with the numbers and the audience will appreciate that because not many people talk about it. I'm curious about brand Taylor Hartman when you were in BDO. Did you build up for this? Did it help you to have a brand or did you start anonymously when you branched?
I had no brand. Yeah, I think back at BDO I was like, I had social anxiety. didn't I didn't I talked to clients but like I was not going on selling the clients very often or anything like that. the brand part came after the celerity.
Speaker 1 (12:45.198)
Because it's sometimes harder, isn't it? When you work for a firm, there's a corporate brand you've got to adhere to. can't put anything you like on your LinkedIn profile and have your own website and write your own blogs. are constraints. So that is common that you try and build up an influential brand internally and externally so that when you...
you go out on your own, you've got some kind of platform, but you pretty much started from scratch then. You said you had a couple of clients, you're cleaning up the books and you, so did you wake up one morning with that and think, right, I need to put some stuff out there. need to be found.
Yeah, and I think it honestly came from being so lonely early on because you go from working at a big company or even a small company and you have coworkers to being by yourself and working from home. It gets really lonely. So I sought out communities and I mean, it was X or Twitter. I started posting on there, just trying to get opinions from other people. And then like I joined a couple of online communities like Futurefirm, Accelerate, and I think Jason Stats has a community called Realize. I was on those kind of posting on those.
forum type places trying to make friends. So I wasn't so lonely doing the work by myself every single day. Cause I think there's it's even though you talk to your clients, it's still kind of lonely to not have like a second opinion from other people and be able to bounce ideas off of people. I was kind of, had an urge to do that. And that's kind of where I started posting online.
That's very wise. wrote a book called Build Your Reputation, which is on Amazon and precisely for people that are in professional roles and they don't feel comfortable with their personal brand, but it doesn't pay you to be a well-kept secret. And technical expertise is not good enough these days because everyone's technically strong and you're not in there on that one. But I'm fascinated today you talk about community because when you're out there, it's not good to be isolated.
Speaker 2 (14:19.774)
No, and I think going to conferences, being on online communities, I think that's changed the whole trajectory of my firm. In what way? Because we get most of our referrals. I mentioned the NetSuite thing. Not many smaller firms are US-based NetSuite niche firms. They're either huge firms and they mostly outsource, or they're like one or two people who are just specifically doing that as like...
consultants and my firm is kind of out of the ordinary there and not many people know other NetSuite firms. So I go to conferences, I meet people, we have fun, we go to dinners, etc. And then they think of me as a NetSuite guy. So if they get a NetSuite lead, they refer it directly to us. So, I mean, I think last week we got seven different NetSuite referrals. Yeah, yeah, specialization is I didn't want to early on, but we kind of fell into this NetSuite thing and it's been it's been really good for us. on top of the whole like
specializing right?
Speaker 2 (15:12.792)
getting second opinions from people, you know, being able to bounce ideas off of different people. That's been so good for me, especially with those decisions that are hard to make, like terminating somebody or when it's the time, when it's a good time to hire or stuff like that. So.
Track GPT will only tell you so much about how to make that first hire or how to fire somebody, won't they? I completely get that. Yeah. I'm, one of the things I do when I'm not podcasting is I work with a few accounting firm owners and leaders too. I interview them once a month, Taylor, and we turn that into thought leadership pieces and video snippets because they want to be more well known out there. One of my clients is a guy called Chris Johnson, works out of San Antonio, Texas. He's fam, they only do 401k audits and they only work in the construction sector. Nice. that's very space-wise, isn't it?
that to nail your flag to NetSuite, QuickBooks, whatever you're doing. You've got to be brave and say no to stuff, haven't you?
Yeah, exactly. But I turn it into an opportunity to refer to somebody else and build that referral kind of relationship. So I never think of it as like a bad thing. think early on I might have, but I'm learning that it's kind of like an ecosystem where we can kind of benefit each other.
What advice would you give to accountants of all ages, tailored that are engrossed with the technical side of the job? And indeed that's what they're known for, but they feel there's something more. They want a voice, they've got opinions on things, they don't quite know how to start, or they're perhaps a little bit scared of putting something out there, maybe on LinkedIn and it being tumbleweed or no engagement. It's quite intimidating.
Speaker 2 (16:35.692)
Yeah, I think the soft skill side of being an accountant is going to be the most important value add and differentiator in the future, especially with AI. So I think just starting with a little thing, something you're comfortable with and just being yourself. think everybody's using AI to post online right now and it is becoming so generic and so boring to see the same thing over and over again. It's going to be different. It's different already, I would say, just to be yourself and be authentic when you post. So just like keep it in mind. And if something happens with the client, I wouldn't complain.
hard about clients. I used to do that a lot in the past. I don't think that's a good idea because they could see that. But if you have like an interesting situation with a client or something that you find interesting and you want to post about and you feel a little bit strongly about it, I think posting about it is a good idea because if you're not posting, then you're invisible. Basically, you don't exist if you're not posting online. So putting yourself at least a little bit into existence is going to help you with whatever your goals are.
It might be finding clients, it might be hiring somebody. I think my personal brand has helped me find more people to hire. So I think there's a lot of benefits to it. And I think if you're not posting online, it's just, there's no chances that you'll have a serendipitous interaction with somebody because you don't exist.
very well put. What about the people that say, well, I'm way too busy to post stuff Taylor. I'm way too busy to write stuff. How do I even get started? My life's so overloaded right now. We hear it a lot, don't we?
Yeah, yeah, I think accountants especially say that more than anybody else. you are too busy. It's, yeah. Well, I mean, that's a whole nother conversation. I think we like to be busy and we overfill our schedules and we try to be as profitable as possible. And I think, like, I don't know how many networking events you go for, like accountants specific ones, but if you ask somebody, how's it going? They all say, I'm super busy. And it's like, if you don't say that, you're weird because you should be super busy because all accountants are super busy. So yeah, I think.
Speaker 1 (17:56.664)
Justified we are.
Speaker 2 (18:21.974)
Make time. If you're an owner, especially of a firm, like you're not growing your firm unless you're posting online and your firm doesn't exist unless you're posting online. So I think you open up a ton of possibilities if you'd make the time to do it.
It doesn't Taylor, if you're posting and you're getting engagement, is that necessarily the validation you need or is it the posting itself that does it for
I think the posting itself, one, because even if people don't engage with it, it's practice and it's content that they can engage with later if they do find you. Cause I mean, I go on and I'll look at some, if I'm looking to buy something from somebody, I'll go and look at their old posts and kind of see what their vibe is before I buy from them. So even potential clients, they'll look at your LinkedIn and scroll down on your posts and go look at some of the older stuff you're posting too. So I think it's good practice and they might eventually look at it later. So always keep that in mind.
encourage people as well to grow their influence, their personal brand. Accounting types, people in our world, Taylor, they're lurkers, we call them. So they're not necessarily engaged, but they will look, they will read, they will watch. your name will be known, even though you don't get that acknowledgement that they've seen it, liked it and commented on it. So there's hope there, isn't there, that it's been seen.
Yeah, there's tons of lurkers. Sometimes people message me out of the blue. I'd be like, I've been following you for two years and this is so refreshing that you talk about this. I'm like, what? You've never interacted with anything on any of my posts, but I've like somehow influenced this person. So yeah, you're 100 % right about that.
Speaker 1 (19:44.47)
I feel I need to ask you about mental health, mental wellbeing, because it's talked about a lot. We've been through the pandemic. It's changed the game. Obviously you seem like the kind of person that wouldn't hold back on talking about a bad day or a bad experience. So just speaking to mental wellbeing, mental health for us in this.
Yeah, I think.
A lot of accountants specific, I talk to people about this a lot, especially firm owners at conferences and stuff. I think early on in my firm journey, I had a lot of mental health stuff just because I think we're all kind of attached to, like we take a lot of value from being really productive people. And I think when you lose the control and structure of working at like a big firm or working somewhere else and like you start talking about it in high school and college, like I'm going to get a good job and we'll work my way up the partner or whatever. And that kind of goes away. It's hard from a mental health standpoint to kind of see
own value. I think this is, yeah, this is so important. And I think Randy Crabtree talks about this a lot. And he had a conference recently called Bridging the Gap and they had some really good conversations around it. think we just have to make time.
stroke survivors, Randy and I, so we've had done a podcast on that. So great shout out.
Speaker 2 (20:48.93)
That's a yeah, that's amazing. He's like the person I think of when I think of mental health in our space. But yeah, I think just like you don't have to work eight hours straight without a break. For me, it's I block my schedule. I know that I'm to be like super stressed and stress kind of compounds for me. So I make time for myself. I don't immediately look at email in the morning. I try not to look at my phone in the morning. I make myself take lunch. I walk to go buy lunch most days versus going and driving or like having an Uber Eats delivered or something like that. So I think a lot of accounts just
it's so busy, so stressed, especially during busy season and put that secondary and I think we just need to prioritize it way more.
You're a storyteller and Taylor, put narratives together to express emotions and explain scenarios. Tell a good story about the profession of accounting. It's not talked up enough. And probably like you, I'm an advocate of the brand of accounting as a career choice, but it gets a bad rap. And there are certain aspects of it. They get amplified to the detriment of a career choice in accounting. Tell a good story about why accounting is a good game to be in.
I think accounting is a great game to be in because accountants are first and foremost, we are the person that partners with you to be your trusted advisor.
And I think trusted advisor is a lot of it's on a lot of different accounting websites. But to me, that just means we're the person you can trust to do whatever. And that it usually is an accounting thing, but we're also really good with technology most of the time. And we're really good with, we're not good with change, but we're getting better at that. And we're also not really great conversationalists, but we're also getting better at that. And I think if we're kind of transitioning into a new role with AI and technology, but I think.
Speaker 2 (22:24.792)
First and foremost, we are like the trusted person. You can rely on to kind of help you make good decisions and rely on to, you know, get you really quality data and help you grow your business. So I think every business needs somebody in the accounting space to kind of back them up. And I don't think business exists without accountants at all.
really well said. This is leaders of the ledger on behalf of CPA practice advisor and right works who have a brilliant community of accountants and influencers. That's definitely worth taking a look at. We've been shining a light on Taylor Hartman.
He's making some waves in Madison, Wisconsin and all over the world with his Kaz business, Celerity. Taylor, just leave us with a few final thoughts. There's a call to arms really for people out there to be more intentional with their brand, with their influence, just not to rely on how good they are at a job or be hopeful that good things will happen. They need to be a little bit more purposeful. What would you say to them in closing?
I would just say there's so much potential for serendipity if you put yourself out there and you have no idea the opportunities that are actually out there online. So put yourself out there, take some risks and try and be a little bit different.
Put yourself out there. This is Leaders of the Ledger. We've been talking to one of them today. Taylor Hartman, thank you so much for your passion and your insights.
Speaker 2 (23:30.936)
Yeah, of course, this was super fun. Thanks, Rob.