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Chad Davis is a co-founder and partner at LiveCA LLP, who decided to pursue a career in accounting at a very young age. Join Chad and Stuart as they discuss the origins of LiveCA, the philosophy behind it, and how helping competitors might be beneficial for your company. Accounting aside, they also talk about living and working from an RV, non-traditional schooling for kids, and growing a beard while traveling.
Join Stuart McLeod as he interviews the world's top accounting leaders to understand their story, how they operate, their goals, mission, and top advice to help you run your accounting firm.
Stuart McLeod 00:00:05.819 [music] Hi. I'm Stuart McLeod, CEO and cofounder of Karbon. Welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, the show where I go behind the scenes with the world's top accounting leaders. Today, I'm joined by Chad Davis, cofounder and partner at LiveCA. Chad got into accounting at a very young age when he worked with his aunt, who was a bookkeeper at his grandfather's topsoil plant. And after being exposed to how money moves around in a company, Chad decided that accounting was for him. He cofounded LiveCA, LLP. He now leads the development team at LiveCA, and works on building new tools for the firm and its customers. He travels around the world in his RV with his family. It is my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast the amazing Chad Davis. Chad, I miss you, man. I miss you.
Chad Davis 00:01:00.088 I miss you, too. I know it's been years. Remember your house and the barbecue you had and the view? Holy cow, the view. Do you miss that?
Stuart McLeod 00:01:08.991 I do miss the view. I do miss the view, and the aspect, and the outlook of what we had there. That was the saddest bit to leave. But there was a lot of reasons that we sort of-- we had some amazing times, and amazing parties, and we've still got probably some of our best friends from that era. But yeah, I mean, to be honest, and might as well be honest and transparent, Karbon was sort of struggling for a year or two. And that put a huge strain on our finances. And the property taxes in California, and particularly around Marin, made it very difficult to sort of keep going. Also lifestyle. Mill Valley is a very interesting place, very interesting. And we were sort of struggling a bit. And so made the move up north to Tahoe and haven't looked back. We love it up here.
Chad Davis 00:02:06.946 What's your favorite part about the move?
Stuart McLeod 00:02:09.328 Probably the summers, I think, out on the boat, and family time, and seeing the kids with their friends in unstructured play. Kids get sort of structured within an inch of their lives these days. And I think it sort of can hamper growth a bit. So when they're out skiing in winter, or surfing behind the boat in summer, well, I hope that it creates independent, resilient girls and women, in particular, which are our two oldest. And eventually a well-adjusted three-year-old today. That's our theory, anyway. I'll tell you in 15 years whether it works. [laughter]
Chad Davis 00:02:52.129 Even then, if you can. Yeah. You're preaching to the choir of the nontraditional schooling and upbringing group. [laughter] Definitely happy with the decisions we've made there, too.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:03.013 Tell me more about that.
Chad Davis 00:03:04.322 So my daughter is 10 now. But when she grew up, her first school was public school, kindergarten. Then grade one, she did private school. And then we left in the RV when she was in grade two. I mean, she's in grade five now, so she's spent the majority of her schooling days unstructured, trying different teachers, trying different schools, interest-based learning, learning to draw, just the things that you'd hope a kid would learn and latch onto. And I really am thankful that she spent the first couple of years in school. That structured reading, I mean, just incredible. It was what got her going. And then she took off and did what she wanted to afterwards. But we have another little boy. He's six. His name is Charlie. And he's a little slower on the uptick because he's known nothing except for this trailer, essentially, his whole life. So it's hard for him to get that structure that she got to. So he's just a little bit behind on the reading, but he's picking it up on his own pace. And we've got a couple of different online schools we're into, and self-paced schools, and apps. Like anything, you spend some time on it, and you get better, if it's somewhat interesting. So kudos to these programs that can keep users on a monthly subscription on a school curriculum. Because it's so easy to change. And when you've got there 20 to 100 dollars a month and attention for over a year, you know you've got something good. So we're pretty happy with a couple of the tools we're using now.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:47.460 Would you consider your kids home schooled, or geographically diverse?
Chad Davis 00:04:53.764 [laughter] I think words are important, but I'm not sure what the right words are for what they're doing is. Yeah. You'd call it home schooled. There's a lot of labels out there, like unschooling. That's not what we're doing. And a whole bunch of others that might fall on the alternative scale a little bit heavier. But we're trying to get the core math, sciences, language, art stuff just kind of dealt with, and anything extra, like reading and interest-based classes, is what we're really pushing them. So my daughter is in taking public speaking classes because she's terrified of it, and she wants to get better. And improv for 7 to 10-year-olds. And acting classes. It's really just to be comfortable again with something you're uncomfortable with. So we're trying to say one uncomfortable course for one really comfortable course.
Stuart McLeod 00:05:48.530 Yeah. Yeah. It's the debate around expand your strengths or lessen your weaknesses. Right? But does she love the spotlight, or is that not something she's comfortable with?
Chad Davis 00:05:59.128 Not comfortable with it. So she wouldn't be a good CEO of Karbon. Maybe she would.
Stuart McLeod 00:06:05.927 If you find one, let me know. [laughter]
Chad Davis 00:06:09.853 Speaking of that, I mean, you've had to keep that quite tight-lipped, that big raise, for a while. What have the last few weeks been like for you?
Stuart McLeod 00:06:16.322 The first word that comes to mind is probably pride or proud. Proudness. I think that's the plural? Just so thrilled for the team that our perseverance and resilience is paying off. And we've created an amazing and enormous opportunity for ourselves where, in Dave's words, market leader. And we find ourselves in a position where the incumbents have sort of forgotten how to write software. And this happens in every industry. And we're just lucky that, hopefully, over the next couple of years we can really take advantage. I don't want it to be about us. I love you and all our customers equally.
Chad Davis 00:06:55.144 [laughter] They're all our favorites.
Stuart McLeod 00:06:56.951 Our hypothesis that we commenced with, it still holds true today. Which is accountants are, ultimately, underserved and primarily used as a channel to your clients. Right? You get [assaulted?], correct me if I'm wrong, you get [assaulted?] 10 times a day.
Chad Davis 00:07:16.732 Easily 10. Easily 10.
Stuart McLeod 00:07:17.718 Easily 10 times a day for access to your amazing client base. Right? And what's in it for you? Occasionally, one might make your life a bit easier. But 9 out of 10, I imagine they're just trying to create a channel where make their life easier, not yours. Am I off base?
Chad Davis 00:07:37.712 I can't stop thinking about all these cheesy, computer-generated GIFs and pictures that these sales enablement systems are throwing out these days, trying to get cold calls. It's getting to a point where it's almost comical. And you kind of want to get them to see what they're putting out next. How many of those do you get?
Stuart McLeod 00:07:58.991 About 40 a day. But the irony is nobody picks up the phone anymore. Right? Email selling is dead. You cannot sell a single thing through cold email unless it's a miracle. Right? Because nobody reads it. If you even read it, and it's unlucky not to be filtered out, you can't hit delete quick enough. Right? Who's got time for that shit?
Chad Davis 00:08:23.483 No one loves it. I don't know. What was the last thing you bought off of an ad?
Stuart McLeod 00:08:28.092 I was going to ask you the exact same thing. What was the last thing you bought off a cold email? I can't even remember. I don't know. Maybe a $20 LinkedIn tool or something. I don't know. I don't know.
Chad Davis 00:08:42.975 I got one of those Ridge wallets that you see off of Instagram ads all the time, and TikTok ads. Those little wallets that hold six to eight cards, and you can pop them out with your finger, and they can sit in your pocket. Because all my cards were going bad because they were just rubbing up against each other. So it's my advertising thing that worked.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:05.546 How much is a wallet? They probably paid $30 for your click.
Chad Davis 00:09:09.725 Well, come on, you know how this works. You take the name and you search yourself, and then you find the right one that you want. And no one [crosstalk]--
Stuart McLeod 00:09:16.019 Yes. Yeah. Unless it's your competitor. Right? The number of ads I've clicked on for Canopy is--
Chad Davis 00:09:24.645 [laughter] I was going to say. Stuart, who has time for that?
Stuart McLeod 00:09:28.028 Well, every now and again I'll get retargeted. Right? So--
Chad Davis 00:09:32.882 That's funny.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:33.498 --it's just my duty to make sure that their retargeting attributes are increasing.
Chad Davis 00:09:41.152 Is this what they say RPA is for? A real good real world use case of some bots?
Stuart McLeod 00:09:48.052 There you go. Course, your competitor probably do us a disservice in the end if I jack up their [crosstalk]--
Chad Davis 00:09:54.859 Oh yeah. Their price for click for the industry would go up.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:57.598 --by inference. Yeah. Someone [crosstalk] too.
Chad Davis 00:10:02.345 [crosstalk]. Yeah. Exactly.
Stuart McLeod 00:10:06.174 Somebody that annoyed you in a past life. That's okay. In this world, I think you got to stay positive. We don't worry. Probably like you, we don't worry what other people are doing. We just focus on what we're doing. And make sure that we're offering the best.
Chad Davis 00:10:22.618 Yeah, the best service. I spent today on a call for about an hour with a potential lead. And about 10 minutes in, we could tell it wasn't the right fit. We would have needed to charge twice what they were looking to pay. And they had some really good offers from some local firms. And we probably spent 30 minutes crafting the right questions to go ask the other firms, and which they should prioritize. So it was a really good sense.
Stuart McLeod 00:10:52.077 "Here's how you go to our competitor." [laughter] Here you go. You should charge 1,000 bucks for them to pick the right firm.
Chad Davis 00:10:58.816 Oh, it's like buying friends.
Stuart McLeod 00:11:00.122 I'm sure they appreciate your transparency. Yeah. Buying friends. Well, there you go. There's a question for you. If they've come into your funnel a little bit unqualified, can you improve your funnel optimization so you improve the quality coming through to calls?
Chad Davis 00:11:14.493 I mean, look who I'm talking to. This is the king of knowing every single possible app in the world. I always looked up to you for that, Stuart. But I'll tell you what, we tried not to take a funnel algorithmic approach to this, and allow everyone to contact us. And then we can then push them out warmly to the right people. And we found that that creates a better experience for our reputation and for them. And I mean, if people want to get their password reset because they think we're Hotmail or something, we'll ignore that, or provide them with a little text expander snippet. But most likely, if we do end up taking somebody on as a call, it's fine. And it's great. So I actually don't mind the extra communication in the beginning. But again, over the years, it's mostly been emails and canned email responses to certain types of things, instead of automating it. Because you never know who's on the other side of those. And your whale, who has a $20 million company that sends the one-liner email that just says, "Looking for [crosstalk]--"
Stuart McLeod 00:12:25.265 Or 15 of them, or something. Yeah.
Chad Davis 00:12:27.005 Yeah. And then you google them and you're like, "There's only so much [clear bit?] can do." Right?
Stuart McLeod 00:12:30.672 [crosstalk] comes to mind. [laughter]
Chad Davis 00:12:34.649 Yeah. Yeah. [That's the thing, too?].
Stuart McLeod 00:12:35.904 No. That's fair enough. What sort of inbounding, or level of inbound inquiry, do you typically field in a week or a month? And tell me to piss off if you don't want to give those.
Chad Davis 00:12:46.637 No, no. We have all the stats and stuff inside of Airtable. So here you go. Give me a second. It's loading up. All right. So over the last seven days, we averaged 8.8 leads a day. Not bad.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:03.690 Yeah. Right. That's up there. Yep.
Chad Davis 00:13:04.457 And then, over the last month, we've averaged 7.9 leads a day. So again, it seems like it's picking up a bit. But we only take on a few customers a month, so the majority of them are sent to other firms and other resources.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:22.207 You should start up an affiliate program for your competitors.
Chad Davis 00:13:27.578 You laugh, but maybe that already exists.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:32.270 Well, there you go. There you go. I'm behind the curve.
Chad Davis 00:13:36.133 How else do you think we--
Stuart McLeod 00:13:37.225 Yeah. No. We'll get to that. Your story is inspiring and hugely successful, and just an amazing model for the industry. And you've done enormous service to the industry in terms of proving that your remote and cloud first approach not only works, but is best in class. Why don't we start at the start? What was the founding story for the firm? And was there an aha moment that this is going to work?
Chad Davis 00:14:13.227 Why don't we start at the end? We just surpassed 100 people.
Stuart McLeod 00:14:17.173 Congratulations.
Chad Davis 00:14:18.155 Yeah. You know what that's like. The new departments we're pushing out are having some really great impacts on the livelihoods of the existing team members. And we're starting to get to have similar aha moments like we did back in 2012. That's when Josh and I both started our own independent companies. Mine was April 2012, and his was right around the same time. And then we had operated for a little less than a year with our own companies, and just doing our own thing. But January 2013, we had met through Will Lopez, of all people, and ended up connecting, and pretty much just the rest is history. And with a lot of great people along the way that have made LiveCA what it is today. There's sincere and huge thanks to everyone who's still here, that has been there from the early days, and to those that have departed and still made their mark.
Stuart McLeod 00:15:22.604 Yeah. And what was the approach when you sat down with your co-founder and sort of said, "Okay, this is what we're going to do." What philosophies sort of were talked about or valued?
Chad Davis 00:15:35.877 We didn't know we were doing. So when it comes to-- you looked at people who you think have their stuff together. Right? And I think that we're all guilty of that. It's the right thing to do. So we ended up, essentially, saying the aha moment was tech and tax.
Stuart McLeod 00:15:50.742 Tech and tax. Back 2012, there were so few firms that had proved-- well, no firms that had really proven out the model. Right? I mean, you and a couple of others in Aussie were groundbreaking.
Chad Davis 00:16:02.733 Yeah. I mean there was-- yeah, you could name the few. There was Blake doing his thing. And there was Guy doing his thing. And saw a lot in New Zealand, actually. Remember DJCA and all those guys? And Sidekick, early days? Change and RightWay? Yeah. Greg and Paul and them.
Stuart McLeod 00:16:23.869 [crosstalk].
Chad Davis 00:16:25.598 You got Melanie over there, and Steph. All your friends. So we ended up chatting with a friend of Karbon, Mr. Jason Blumer, and he introduced Josh and I to the whole options pricing game. And you could say that from day one, that influenced us a lot. And we just kind of went with fixed pricing, and under the guise of a little bit of value pricing since day one. And then we had always kind of worked from my basement. Well, I did. And then Josh worked from wherever he was. And then we never really ever had an office. So it was just everybody that-- the first person we ever had to let go, Josh and I flew to Toronto and took the poor guy out to like Tim Hortons afterwards. It was pretty bad.
Stuart McLeod 00:17:22.965 "We love you. Here's a free coffee. All the best."
Chad Davis 00:17:26.490 Yeah. Yeah. It's funny the things you learn doing that remotely for so long.
Stuart McLeod 00:17:30.683 It's the most expensive termination you've done, with the flight. [laughter]
Chad Davis 00:17:34.302 Yeah. Well, not only that, I remember a really great customer for a long time with us was in downtown Toronto. And he had a year's worth of receipts that he needed to scan. So I ordered a Fujitsu scanner to his house before the flight landed. I flew from Halifax to Toronto. And I stayed there for three days and I scanned. I'll never forget that.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:04.910 Putting paper into a scanner. [laughter]
Chad Davis 00:18:09.100 Yeah. That's the early days of cloud firms.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:09.859 You never want to see another Fujitsu scanner again. Right?
Chad Davis 00:18:13.858 [laughter] Well, let's just say it was the last time that ever happened.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:15.898 Yeah. I'll bet. I'll bet. That's probably pre-Hubdoc, pre-Receipt Bank. Right?
Chad Davis 00:18:20.930 It was pre-Hubdoc, for sure. It was not pre-Receipt Bank. Because Receipt Bank existed-- remember when Michael and whatever, they took it over right around 2012-ish right? Or earlier? Maybe 2010. I forget when they took it over. But it was pretty small. And I remember I was in the Cayman Islands working with the company I was with then. And I had a call with Receipt Bank to say, "Hey, I'm thinking about coming to Canada and introducing Xero. And I'd like to introduce Receipt Bank along with this. What can we do?" And they had nobody in Canada. It was Sophie, Alexis, and Michael. And Nelson hadn't even started yet. And it was great. And they helped me through. They thought I was nuts to think I could just do this by myself. And they were right for awhile. But then as soon as we started bringing in 20 subs, and 50 subs, and 100 subs, they're like, "Oh, maybe not."
Stuart McLeod 00:19:24.967 Yeah. "Oh, hang on a sec. This guy was perhaps making it up and now he's not."
Chad Davis 00:19:29.708 Yeah. It was fun. So yeah, early days. I do kind of miss that, where you have such a connection to what's being built. And I guess I've got-- you know what this Unroll.Me subscription might be? It's a little service where you can add emails to a daily or a weekly roundup through their app, and then it just kind of gives you one email. I haven't added Karbon to those. And the email that you just sent out today was a good example. If anybody's taking newsletter hints, yours is really good. Because it gives you everything at the top. And then it gives it to you in nice headers. And it's not too long. And you can digest it inside of 20 seconds to see if you like it or not. So you definitely have some good people making those things up.
Stuart McLeod 00:20:14.263 Well, that's [inaudible]. That's Jess in Melbourne, and since she arrived, she's taken over that, and has done an amazing job, led by [Lachy?]. And we've always taken an authentic approach, perhaps, is the best description to our content. We don't want to tell you how to suck eggs and do your job, but we think we have a valid opinion about the industry and our place in it, and where we can add value, and help improve your life and the lives of our customers. And that's kind of the impact that we have. And content is our voice. It should show through in our content, in our app, in our marketing, in our events. And you didn't even ask a question, but that's the long answer to hopefully why our content is so good.
Chad Davis 00:21:06.187 Yeah. It just reminds me of-- it's nice to get those updates, but it also is nice to get the technical updates, too. So when you log into the app and you get to see the notices in the bottom right every once in a while, it's nice to see that.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:20.278 Hopefully, it'll be more frequent than once in a while. Pretty soon, we're looking to increase releases to sort of once a week. And then eventually, perhaps, even as often as we like. It's a lot of infrastructure change. And the app is getting so big now, and we got eight product teams by the end of the year. And they want to be able to release as often as they can. So there's a lot of change going on this year under the hood.
Chad Davis 00:21:45.812 Would you say that's why it's not an easy answer to say, "I'd like to release this endpoint on the API," or, "I'd like to just release this one feature." Because there's a lot of technical cleaning that you want to do before that goes out?
Stuart McLeod 00:22:04.582 Yeah. I'm not involved in release cycles. But I have a comp sci degree. I know enough to be dangerous. Yeah. Our release cycles are a fair bit of overhead at the moment. It's every three weeks. And we wrap up all the code that's sort of done in the previous three weeks, and we bundle all that together. And we have to test it all. And it goes through a couple of releases on different environments to ensure that, hopefully, nothing's going to break. There's also data migration that we go through. So today, as we speak, it's hard to release a line of code. Not impossible, but hard. And we want to get to a stage where it's really easy. It's just sort of automated testing, automated releases, very efficient and effective release process, managed. We got six data centers now, Chad. You can't just release in-- well, you can, but it's not effective to sort of release in Canada and not in the US. Right? Like we've got a single code base for every customer and [crosstalk].
Chad Davis 00:23:05.329 That works for some green giants in the early 2000s.
Stuart McLeod 00:23:09.580 Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So there you go. That's the answer as to why it's sometimes a little bit frustrating to get small things out.
Chad Davis 00:23:17.399 Yeah, it must be frustrating. I guess that's right. Because all you hear is the customers. And unfortunately, sometimes it's the loud ones that you hear of the most. What are you excited to start out--
Stuart McLeod 00:23:29.090 The vocal minority. Right?
Chad Davis 00:23:31.371 Yeah. It's horrible. That's why I only try to send maybe one email a year asking for something. When you think about the next few--
Stuart McLeod 00:23:37.390 We appreciate it.
Chad Davis 00:23:39.629 --the next few months, I guess, what are you excited to release there?
Stuart McLeod 00:23:43.253 Oh, yeah. Well, lots and lots. So firstly, the primary goal for the year is to finish the traditional practice management platform. Right? So we're pretty good at work, while we're very good, I think. I don't think that's too hard for me to say around the workflow management, the email integration. Client communication isn't too bad. The lead process is okay. Scheduling, budgeting time is pretty comprehensive. But that's only about a third of maybe, I don't know, three-eighths of practice management, maybe. So we're tripling our product development team this half of the year from three teams to six, and then eight by the end of the year. And so we've done enormous amount of research on invoicing, billing. So you'll be able to go from, essentially, the whole customer lifecycle before the end of the year. So from lead to work scheduling, budgeting, time. Recording, if you want to do it, if you don't want to do it, it's fine. A combination of fixed fee and time-based invoicing. 80% of the customer base is a multi-billing approach. Invoice write on, write off. Invoice presentment. And ultimately payments, or at least integration with payments. We don't want to take away from the experience that PI and GoProposal do. They're not mutually exclusive. If you want to use that, that's great. We love that. If you want to use ours, that's great. We love that, too. So the AR integration into the general ledger, [Intuit?] is first, and into the QBO product. For others that we don't integrate to, it will be a journal, just a monthly journal, which arguably is actually easier. But so by the end of the year--
Chad Davis 00:25:25.664 I was going to say, if you could take that data and expose it, that would be nice. And then people that may want to write their own integrations could do that.
Stuart McLeod 00:25:33.174 Yeah. I would love to have a very comprehensive development platform that anybody can sort of write up against. And then the other thing that I'm really excited about, and hopefully we can-- well, the plan is, I'm giving away all my secrets now, but at [Karbon X?] in June here in Lake Tahoe, we want to release the first phase of the Karbon industry cloud, which is called Karbon Practice Intelligence, which hopefully will answer all the tough questions that practices want to ask, and have never been able to resolve easily. So things like, what are my most profitable customers? Who are my most productive employees? What is my realization, utilization, if you want to know that? Churn, upsell, cross-sell opportunities. If you want to look at your firm like a SaaS business, we're all over that.
Chad Davis 00:26:26.153 That's really interesting. I mean, it would be really nice to have those data points available for us to run our own analysis on, too. So that if you're providing the carbon data, we can provide the non-carbon data and come up with some pretty interesting, compelling information. I mean, that did bring me to not the necessary reason why we're chatting today, but I remember last year there were some emails back and forth between us. And you were really excited about the new people that were coming on to help sort of work with the API, and to help with partners, and to start exposing some stuff. How are you feeling about that progress?
Stuart McLeod 00:27:07.446 Behind. But we'll catch up. Like anything, hiring is hard, globally, for accountants and for software companies. But as you know, we just added a fair bit of cash to the bank, and pretty confident that we can compete in mainly the Sydney market with the best of them, and offer a pretty compelling employee experience. So we seem to be doing well at attracting more and more product and engineering and design. And we've actually opened an office in Halifax, of all places, to work on that product, the Karbon Practice Intelligence products. So that's doing a great job, and building a team up there, and maybe in Toronto or Waterloo as well, where we got to find the Canadian talent. Right?
Chad Davis 00:27:53.387 Did you know I was from Halifax?
Stuart McLeod 00:27:54.924 No. No, I didn't. But you can go and see [Sadat?] and sit down with him and say, "This is what I want." He'd love [me?] to say that.
Chad Davis 00:28:02.434 For the few months that we're actually in Canada, in Halifax. Yeah. We've been spending our time in the summers on the south shore of Nova Scotia because there are no forest fires from out west. There's no heat waves because you're right on the water. And you're just kind of missing all of the tornadoes and hurricanes and things that tend to pop up around the middle of the country. So it just feels like a little nice isolated bucket to be in if you have to be in North America.
Stuart McLeod 00:28:31.031 Yeah. Choosing your location around climate change A, is sad. B, is not easy. Right? There's not many locations in the world that are unaffected by climate change these days. But the last two summers here, we've had pretty bad smoke sitting in the lake so that it forms like a bowl with the Sierra Mountains around it. And then even to the point where we evacuated last summer because it was just getting a bit too close for comfort. And growing up in Aussie, where just horrific fires and everything, there's nothing here. I've got my passport. There's nothing here I need to save. We're out of here.
Chad Davis 00:29:12.464 Yeah. It's true. We've been trying to chase this weather for the last four years or so. And we found that the summer on the north-- sorry, on the east coast of Canada, between May and September, it's just perfect. And then between September and October, you can pretty much go anywhere. So drive across Canada, go to Vancouver Island, BC, just gorgeous. And then Oregon in November. December, California. January, February, March, Arizona. And then April, May, just avoid Tornado Alley and drive back to the east coast of Nova Scotia. And that's been the last couple of years for us.
Stuart McLeod 00:29:56.124 There you go. You got it down. And you're the expert. So there's no Mexico, or sort of Lat Am in there. Is that on the cards at all?
Chad Davis 00:30:04.775 No. We're one of those types of people that are happy to pay for insurance. And if things go bad, I'd like to lean on insurance. So a lot of the stuff that we have insurances for don't cover Mexico. So we had a trip planned, but it came down to this really weird stipulation that if you unhooked your truck from your trailer, it would not be covered for theft. And everything else was kind of going well, but not that. So we just said, look, big truck, shiny. Probably a good target for some people if they really wanted it. So it wasn't worth the risk for us.
Stuart McLeod 00:30:45.963 Maybe the wheels [inaudible]. It's wheels up on blocks.
Chad Davis 00:30:52.185 So true. But you mentioned hiring. I mean, I know you're a little bit of a lag. But we put this new development team in place last year. And it's been life-changing for us, trying to learn new tools and help customers with problems we didn't even know we could help with. And with your comp sci background, you kind of know all this stuff. And it's probably hard to say no to a lot of projects. But we're in that stage now where we're prioritizing a huge list of things we've identified and built. And one of the ones was to try to build at a job board just for firms like typical carbon users that want to attract people with more than the standard job description. So being able to search by salary range, or perk, or app. And if they wanted to search for all the jobs in the United States over 70 grand that use carbon, and it's remote, and it's part time, they could set up an alert. And then all year long, as long as one job ticks those boxes, there's a transactional email that goes out five minutes later to everybody on that list. And it's good. So we're just trying to help the industry out a bit and match the right people with the right firms.
Stuart McLeod 00:32:11.286 Is this a Trojan horse for a LiveCA? You get first pick of the bunch?
Chad Davis 00:32:17.347 Well, what we're hoping to do is let people know that firms like this exist. Because there's still a lot of the people that we work with that have never heard of us, and never heard of similar firms like us, whether it's in Canada, the US. And it's just a good reminder that less than 10% of firms probably consider themselves extremely techy, and alternative to the norm, and can offer something really unique. And there's not really--
Stuart McLeod 00:32:45.824 It'll be the normal [inaudible], Chad, don't worry.
Chad Davis 00:32:47.848 Yeah. Exactly. So while we're there, it helped us learn how to build a tool, build an app from, essentially, scratch. And deal with user managements, and transactional emails, and public APIs, and all that stuff in a really quick turnaround time, like inside of a couple of weeks. And this isn't meant to be a moneymaker or anything. But it is meant to say like, "Hey, if we're going to post a job, and there's people that are looking for jobs like ours, why not give them an opportunity to do that?"
Stuart McLeod 00:33:18.081 Yeah, we should plug that. Because I was just giving you shit. I'm sure that you don't poach the best out of the top.
Chad Davis 00:33:26.349 Anybody can visit it. Yeah.
Chad Davis 00:33:26.879 It's cloudaccountingjobs.com. Right?
Chad Davis 00:33:29.796 Yeah. Actually, the first Aussie--
Stuart McLeod 00:33:33.035 Cloudaccountingjobs.com.
Chad Davis 00:33:34.971 Andrew from Illuminate was the first Aussie to put a job up there. So if you search for Australia on this thing, he's the only one [laughter] right now, which is pretty great. Pretty indicative of him. Right?
Stuart McLeod 00:33:45.800 Are you trying to challenge him in the beard stakes? Are you growing that out?
Chad Davis 00:33:49.669 I don't know. I did it long for a little while. This is medium. He's got a stellar beard. Bbut he also has more culture and class. He's a big whiskey guy. Right?
Stuart McLeod 00:33:58.893 Yeah. He is. But terrible visuals for podcasts. But I admire both beards. How's that? [laughter]
Chad Davis 00:34:07.948 You don't discriminate against the beards. Yeah. This was nothing more than the result of being in a trailer and just being like, "You know what? I'm good. I don't want to shave anymore."
Stuart McLeod 00:34:18.001 I can't be fucked. Yeah.
Chad Davis 00:34:18.949 Let it happen. Yeah. Exactly.
Stuart McLeod 00:34:21.985 I'll get it. I'll get it. I can't grow one like yours. But I don't bother on vacation. But I try and make myself presentable and shower when I'm working. Going back to jobs, how long have you had that site up? And are you gaining a bit of traction? Have you seen more and more interest in firms like yours from the younger, or older, part of the industry?
Chad Davis 00:34:46.723 It's been up for less than a month. It's free. It'll be free for a long time until there's mass adoption there. Yeah. I mean--
Stuart McLeod 00:34:54.524 There's not much [crosstalk] there.
Chad Davis 00:34:56.249 No. There's a few people up there, but this was just more to see if there was appetite for it. And there is not a ton. But there's also not a ton of advertising. So that's one of the reasons to just kind of put things out like this, is just to say if people sort of believe in the same sort of things around salary, transparency, and choice, and bringing up the industry together, then this might be something that firms might want to at least throw it up and see how it works. We also keep all the stats on which ones get the most clicks. And so far the techie jobs are getting the most clicks, so the onboarders and the tech leads and the things like that.
Stuart McLeod 00:35:38.686 Well, [Lacky?] is going to kill me, but if you want us to sponsor a bit of advertising and generate a bit of traffic, we'd definitely be happy to do so. Because we serve the same purpose. Right? We would love to promote tech forward firms and the jobs for which they support. Sorry, [Lachy?]. Let's give Chad some money-- well, give Google some money. Don't give it to Facebook, though. That's my only stipulation.
Chad Davis 00:36:06.700 Promise you. Promise you.
Stuart McLeod 00:36:08.835 Thank you.
Chad Davis 00:36:09.261 I actually think conversations like this are the best ones, I think, just where the right audiences are. And they actually kind of want to be a part of stuff like this. Somebody tagged me the other day on a problem somebody was having, and they just couldn't make something work. So built in like eight minutes, sent over the [loom?] video on how to do it. It was like, "Oh, this is what it kind of felt like early days, just trying to help each other out and work through problems." And it feels like the pandemic has brought a lot of us closer together again. And it's not so much about who's growing and who's doing what. Most of it's all vanity anyway. But yeah, it does feel a little bit more collaborative in the space in the last 6 to 12 months. And it's just nice to see again.
Stuart McLeod 00:36:57.774 Yeah. Well, I think accountants have copped it left, right, and center during pandemic. Right? You've been therapist, psychologist, accountant, government distributor of funds, late night crisis counselor, and on top of all your normal work. So most haven't been paid any more to do so. And I think that is solidifying in the industry. I think it brings peers together. I mean, accounting has never been a traditional competitive. Right? I've always experienced accountants sort of being quite open and friendly as peers. And I think I've seen more of that during the pandemic, sort of band together type thing.
Chad Davis 00:37:36.311 Yeah. Tax Twitter is a pretty special place, eh?
Stuart McLeod 00:37:38.802 That's funny. I see Karbon come up on that. We get the feed. Luckily, I don't get mentioned much in Tax Twitter. I think that'd be peak career if I do. [laughter]
Chad Davis 00:37:50.900 That's funny.
Stuart McLeod 00:37:51.630 What else is on your mind, Chad? What can I help you with?
Chad Davis 00:37:55.364 Well, Ian and a few others are working on exposing some of those API endpoints. Are absolute gems in our eyes. So thank you for having such a good team there to listen, and to hear us out whenever we have those questions. I'm excited about the next year. Because you're right, that funding is going to increase the number of teams. Those number of teams are going to need to work a lot cleaner together, and quicker together, to make it really-- so the infrastructure is only going to get better. And then the hope is that, if they're able to work better, we're able to access the things that we're really hoping to get access to. And just make it even an easier way to use Karbon, alongside of all the other things that we're using. So 2022, hopefully, will be a pretty good year.
Stuart McLeod 00:38:49.408 Yeah. Look, I mean, there's a long lag time between hiring and product. But I think you'll see an enormous, a massive change in the second half of the year in terms of the product, the volume of functionality available. And as I say, we love building for you and your peers, and pushing the industry forward. And I do want to say how amazing your support has been over the years for Karbon. And you're one of the first. And you've stuck through us through thick and thin, and always been a great supporter. And we appreciate you and all the team at LiveCA enormously.
Chad Davis 00:39:27.058 Thank you. However, remember how we kept saying no for years? And remember those prices? I'll never forget it. Ian offered up, it was $5 a user. Do you remember those days?
Stuart McLeod 00:39:39.541 Oh, wow. Oh, God. I tried to block them out. Yeah. [laughter]
Chad Davis 00:39:46.147 I'll never forget it. But yeah, we held off for a while. And then I'll never forget--
Stuart McLeod 00:39:50.096 Too expensive.
Chad Davis 00:39:51.807 Yeah. Yeah. Too expensive. Yeah. So once that came around, there's a woman named Baalqis. She's in Ottawa--
Stuart McLeod 00:39:57.907 Oh, yeah. I remember her well. Yes.
Chad Davis 00:39:59.979 Yeah. She ran the Karbon for LiveCA. And still to this day is running lead on all major Karbon projects. And I just can't say enough about how thankful we are that she was able to carve off time from her job to do this project. I mean, it's really changed the way our firm has operated for the last half a decade. So thank you. Thank you, Baalqis.
Stuart McLeod 00:40:23.606 Well, I think we've got shares in your RV. Because we've enabled that travel. Save us the back corner or something for a bumper sticker, a Karbon bumper sticker.
Chad Davis 00:40:35.678 That's kind of cool. That's a good idea.
Stuart McLeod 00:40:37.906 We can't thank you enough for your support. And the industry can't thank you enough for your leadership and drive and inspiration. And congratulations on all your success at LiveCA. You deserve every bit of it. And you've got a fantastic team. And we love working with you.
Chad Davis 00:40:53.857 Yeah. I was going to say the same thing about you. Thank you for putting a product that fixes so many problems. And we're not the only ones that believe in it. Obviously, there's a whole bunch of people that are involved in your company and in the last raise, that also super, super believe in it. Yeah. I'm stoked for you, just to be able to put that money to good use, and to build what you were hoping to build. So good luck. And I hope you get even half of what your brain wants you to build. Because I know it's a big one.
Stuart McLeod 00:41:28.444 Chad, it's been amazing. Thank you.
Chad Davis 00:41:30.693 Thanks, Stuart. See you later. [music]
Stuart McLeod 00:41:37.649 Thanks for listening to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting fun, you'll find lots more to help you run a successful accounting firm at Karbon Magazine. There are more than 1,000 free resources there, including guides, articles, templates, webinars and more. Just head to carbonhq.com/resources. I'd also love it if you could leave us a five-star review wherever you listen to this podcast. Let us know you liked this session, and we'll be able to keep bringing you more guests for you to learn from and get inspired by. Thanks for joining. And see you on the next episode of the Accounting Leaders Podcast.