Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Want to grow your firm’s Client Accounting and Advisory Services (CAS)? The CAS Cache unpacks what works (and what doesn’t) in CAS based on real-world experiences. Tune in for expert insights, success and failure stories, and strategies to help your accounting firm build a stronger CAS offering.
Welcome, Chad Davis, to, the cast Clarity in five. Appreciate you joining us. This series to help kinda highlight what accounting firm leaders are doing behind the scenes. So we'll dive in here in a bit, do five quick questions, but love to hear for you just to give a quick overview on kinda what your what your firm's like, team size, services you offer, and if you don't mind, a revenue range.
Chad:Cool. You have to promise me never to call it a leader again. We're all just doing our best. Okay. So firm size is 60 people.
Chad:We got up to a 120 people about three years ago and then are back down to 60. I think that's a whole other discussion. But the revenue range for customers is, you know, a million and a half and above. We only serve businesses and the owners of those businesses for their personal tax. In terms of services, we stop at controllership.
Chad:So we don't do CFO work. We only do the sort of repeatable, reliable stuff that people are either having a hard time hiring for or maybe should hire us because they can't find all of those things in one person. So accounts receivable, bookkeeping, accounts payable, payroll, bookkeeping, if I didn't say that already, and tax and controllership. So all that kind of stuff wrap wrapped up into one really helps people when they're stuck with with hiring. I know I said that before, but really it's our tagline is essentially, you know, a full finance team for less than the price of a full time hire, and that kinda lands with companies that are having a rough time either, you know, hiring for somebody or they they want a portion of that outsourced, but they wanna keep their person in in house.
Luke:Before we dive into questions, since this series is powered by Fendaly, a tool to automate financial digest of your numbers, how often do you check your firm's numbers?
Chad:You're gonna hate this. I kinda wish I had
Luke:know what your answer is on bank balance.
Chad:Well, because we've talked about it before. It's really funny. Like, I think because we run on EOS and we have the right people in the right seats and we have all the metrics that we're looking at every week, it's funny. Like, bank balance is not a metric that I look at as an owner. I look at all the sort of underlying things together and then, like, assume that if someone's looking at the bank balance and it's not appropriate, then, you know, actions will be taken.
Chad:So I I probably look at it once a month, maybe. Yeah. So when we look at our financials but, yeah, it's I I could see how a finance person and someone else would probably wanna see him a a lot more frequently than that.
Luke:Yeah. Awesome. Alright. Well, let's dive into the five questions. So what is the overall arching goal or mission of your firm that's driving you?
Chad:I mean, again, I keep hating hating to say this about EOS, but it's very simple. Like, we you you pick something. You, you know, you have your your your core focus and your purpose to kind of lead all the decisions that you're working through, and ours is a high high impact work and a meaningful life. And with both of those together, like, why even do this? So we my business partner and I have had pretty nontraditional lives, you know, him living in South America and overseas and me kinda traveling in the RV for eight years now.
Chad:We wanna make sure that the people that are joining us recognize that they're joining a company that is really focused on, like, their life just as much as their professional life. And it's okay to work away. It's okay to work from home. Right? It's okay to have that type of set of kind of freedom in the way that you live your life, and we just wanna promote that as much as we're promoting a healthy business.
Luke:Awesome. Awesome. So on to the next one. What's what tech tool are you currently using that saves you the most time?
Chad:It saves me the most time. This is the easiest answer, and I'm you're probably gonna get this a lot, but it's ChatGPT because I use a project every day, probably four times a day as part of my sales work that helps me organize summary emails, proposals, making sure I don't miss anything, looking at transcripts. And when I put a few different things into that project, it probably saves me forty five minutes off of every sales call. And it's just gotten better and better and better over time. And I I don't know.
Chad:I would hate to have to I would hate to not have it.
Luke:Mhmm. Agreed. Yeah. It's probably my favorite as well. So we kinda hit on this a little earlier with the EOS, but what's your favorite KPI and why, either internally or externally?
Chad:Oh, for me, my favorite one is actually future MRR. And I know a lot of cast people, you know, they get in the the weeds with, like, net retention and gross retention and all kinds of funky formulas for SaaS work. And, like, it's it's kinda funny. We have those, but they're not my favorite because as part of, like, our one year goal and part of, like, moving to the next year and hitting hitting every target where we're heading, knowing what the future MRR is is, like, the number I look at every single day, multiple times a day. That's my bank balance essentially for for for other people.
Chad:So I know that if that's not gonna be on track to be where I need to be at the end of the December, which is our fiscal year end, I know we have a problem. And looking at, you know, expansion and new versus contracted and canceled MRR, like, you have to look at it all together. And the way that we've created our systems is such that we have it all right in front of us, and we can see out into the future as far as we want or right up until December to see kinda where that future MRR is.
Luke:Awesome. Love it. So when you're stuck on either client decision, growth challenge, or even just something personal, how do you get unstuck?
Chad:You're gonna laugh at this, but it's like, I'd probably, like, move because we're I we're we're very, like, transient. And I find, like, when I get stuck in things, I can literally just pick up my house and move it somewhere else. Like, that act of getting out of whatever rut we are we're in in the business, I, like, I switch cities. And for some reason, that just, like, resets myself. We have to pack up the whole RV.
Chad:We have to pack up our entire lives, which only takes, like, an hour essentially every time we move. And then we get to go to a different place. We set up. We reset. You know, you go for a walk.
Chad:You see what it's like, you know, the restaurants are like, what it's like for the kids, and I'm just gonna reset. And that reset always kinda helps me with whatever is kinda blocking me in my head.
Luke:That's awesome. That's awesome. Last question for you. What's the one thing you wish you did sooner in your firm?
Chad:The one thing I wish I did sooner in my firm was focus on capacity planning with a business model in mind. Because anybody can focus on capacity planning for kinda where you're at. But as soon as you start hitting the limits for one or two people in your firm, you have to decide, like, are you gonna invest in that area? Is it better for your business model if you do that or not? And, like, that's a real big conversation that we had when we went from a 120 down to 60 because we were like, what level will actually give us the most stability, the most predictable profit, the less least amount of stress, and, like, the biggest amount of happiness for our clients and for our team members?
Chad:And for us, that was 60. So we kind of worked towards that. And, yeah, at the end of the day, we were able to build a capacity planning model around that so that we know exactly how many hours we can put towards a service internally without stressing out our team. Like, that's that's probably something I wish I did ten years ago. Yeah.
Chad:But but it's kinda neat. Like, we've we've recognized that different roles, like like, some some of them will only ever work ninety hours out of a 160 a month towards client work. Others can be as high as a 120 out of a 160 or so. And we just wanna make sure that there's enough time for vacation, for, you know, internal education, for meetings, for sick days, for all that stuff, with the goal of just giving people lots of vacation, lots of time to live their life, and kind of to go back to that mission of leading a sort of high impact work with high impact life.
Luke:Awesome. Awesome. Well, this is your time. So is there a tip, a story, an experience, or something you're working on that you think would be valuable for the accounting community to hear about?
Chad:I don't know Valuable, but I am spending time outside of the firm in this thing called automation town, which is a place where accountants can kinda geek out on AI and automation in a very safe place. There's all kinds of weekly meetings and videos and posts about people talking about what they're building, and it's kinda cool. One of my favorites is the live builds where people just kinda show up. They go live, and they are like, hey. I need to connect Ignition with, you know, my Google Drive, and I need new folders, and I need all this stuff set up.
Chad:And we'll just build it live with them, and the whole crew will just help each other out. And by the end the day, this person would have, like, a working automation automation that they can use inside their firm, and other people can learn from it. And they're all recorded so people can watch them afterwards.
Luke:That's awesome. And Chad's too humble. The people he has in automation town are absolutely incredible and very smart and gifted people. I've seen I've seen the inner workings of it, and I know a lot of them personally. So great work on creating that community.
Chad:Thanks. I think my favorite thing is just, like, there's a bunch of agencies in there that sell and kind of only work with accounting firms. So that matchmaking is awesome to see because you'll see people try something on their own, and they'll be like, oh, this is way too much for me. I'll just hire this person. And then they'll see what the agencies can kinda work and who they've worked with in the past and pick one, and then they go work.
Chad:And they come back, and they've got this, like, crazy dashboard build and these automations built that just save them, you know, 20% of a person's, like, FTE. So it's it's actually cool seeing the real use cases and not just the stuff you see on LinkedIn.
Luke:Mhmm. Awesome. Well, I'll put a link to that, where we share this. But anywhere else people should follow you?
Chad:No. I mean, connect on LinkedIn if you want, but I'm forewarned. It's like daily videos and some of them are really bad, so totally up to you.
Luke:Awesome, Chad. Well, I appreciate the time.
Chad:Thanks, Luke.