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Kyle Bryant is the Managing Partner of Market Street Partners in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Kyle oversees the firm’s operations and has provided assurance, tax, and business consulting services for over a decade. In this episode, Kyle and Stuart discuss the rapid growth of Chattanooga, what attracts businesses to invest in the region, and what the projections are for the future. As a manager of the largest transaction in Chattanooga’s history, Kyle is a top-tier professional in his city and gives an insight into how accounting is developing the Tennessee market.
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 00:00:06.687 [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. [music]
Stuart McLeod 00:00:21.208 Today, I'm joined by Kyle Bryant, the managing partner of Market Street Partners in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Kyle oversees the operations of Market Street Partners, has provided assurance tax business consulting services more than 10 years. After graduation, Kyle worked in auditing, but eventually joined Access America Transport in the Lamp Post Group, where he discovered his passion for helping small businesses. He managed the sale of Access America Transportation to Coyote Logistics, which happened to be the largest transaction in Chattanooga's history. It's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, Kyle Bryant.
Stuart McLeod 00:00:57.810 Kyle Bryant, welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast. Great to meet you.
Kyle Bryant 00:01:02.689 Yeah, thanks for having me.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:03.889 Market Street Partners. So give me the pitch. Tell me the type of clients that you serve and how long you've been doing that.
Kyle Bryant 00:01:11.127 Yeah. So we are six years old, which seems like a short time and a long time altogether. So we started in 2016, my partner and I, Kevin Rose, kind of on a-- not on a whim, but kind of in a strategic way, where we were kicking around the idea of starting a CPA firm that just does things a little bit different. And our main focus out of the gate was-- here in Chattanooga, Tennessee, we had a little bit of a start-up buzz at the time. So there was all of these companies kind of moving to Chattanooga, doing fundraising, kind of all of the sexy VC things. And we had relationships with a lot of those companies through a group I used to work with and just noticed that a lot of the CPA firms were having trouble keeping up with-- I mean, frankly, the lingo was a little overwhelming. It's kind of got its own language.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:02.792 A bit of a different language. Yeah.
Kyle Bryant 00:02:04.642 Yeah. Different acronyms that are thrown around. And so we understood that space pretty well and started with a team of eight kind of doing back-office accounting work, tax and compliance, audits, things like that. Helping with investment decks and helping with projections around fundraisers and things like that. And so I feel like we started on first base with a great kind of roster of clients.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:28.680 So where were you before that? How did all that sort of come about then?
Kyle Bryant 00:02:32.887 Yeah. So I worked at a traditional CPA firm out of college. Did a little bit on the audit and tax side. Enjoyed the CPA profession, really. Kind of, frankly, got a little burned out with the travel and some of the other things that went along with CPA firms. And a common theme among people is when they get to that management level, it feels like they've got to decide if they're going to stick it out or go private.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:57.306 Yeah.
Kyle Bryant 00:02:57.764 And I made a decision to go private and ended up working for a group here in Chattanooga that had started a freight brokerage and had been very successful. And there were three young guys that made quite a bit of money and decided they wanted to enter the investment game and do some investments in start-up. They were really excited about Chattanooga. And their pitch to these teams was, "Hey, we will provide seed funding, help you get a start, and then we expect you to move your team to Chattanooga and work in our incubator."
Stuart McLeod 00:03:26.652 Right. Okay.
Kyle Bryant 00:03:27.562 So this was in 2012. And so our team-- it was called the Lamp Post Group, and our team was tasked with basically helping these groups that came in with all things financial. So from setting up their chart of accounts, handling their accounting, to introducing them to banking relationships, helping them with projections and budgets, forecasts, all of those things that they needed. I did that for several years, built a great team. We had a lot of fun doing it. I learned a ton through that process, just kind of trial by fire, honestly. We were all doing things that were nontraditional, and we weren't necessarily trained to do them, but we were figuring them out. And frankly, there's no real game plan around customized accounting processes. And so we continued down that path for a while. There was a financial commitment, and when all of that had been deployed, I spoke with the principals that had started the Lamp Post Group and kind of pitched to them this idea of starting a CPA firm that specializes in consulting and kind of took away from what we learned at the CPA firms and just try to do a little bit of a different spin on it.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:32.535 Yeah. And so you started with eight and you picked up those sort of firms that were in the portfolio. Is that kind of how it worked and went from there?
Kyle Bryant 00:04:42.024 It did. And so we worked with those groups and continued and added a lot more just through our name and kind of recognition in the market. And as we continued with those groups, we realized-- occasionally, we would go work with a non-tech company, a traditional business that's been around for 40, 50 years, kind of a legacy company in town, and realized that there was a lot that they needed as well they weren't necessarily getting in-house or CPA firms weren't providing the services that they needed. So since then, I wouldn't say we've pivoted, but we've added kind of a new sector of a group of clients that's kind of in that middle market, your traditional companies like your manufacturers, your real estate groups, your construction groups, distributors, just good operating businesses. And we've kind of made our mark in that territory.
Stuart McLeod 00:05:31.342 Yep.
Kyle Bryant 00:05:32.281 What we say is there's a lot of one-man CPA firms and there's a lot of big firms, but there's not a lot of firms kind of playing in that middle space, and that's where we're trying to live.
Stuart McLeod 00:05:41.101 Yeah. And so how many staff now? What does the profile of the firm look like?
Kyle Bryant 00:05:45.641 Yeah. So we have 42 full-time staff right now--
Stuart McLeod 00:05:49.339 Yeah, great.
Kyle Bryant 00:05:49.698 --and we are on track to be at 50 by the end of this year. It feels weird to say that we did well during COVID. I wouldn't say that we did well--
Stuart McLeod 00:05:59.346 Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Bryant 00:06:00.375 --but we were able to provide a lot of service to people around PPP funding and employee retention credits and kind of just really walking side by side with our business owners that were in unprecedented times.
Stuart McLeod 00:06:12.861 Yeah, no, I understand. And so the types of clients, are they sort of still the VC-backed or the private equity-backed customers that you were picking up originally or has that sort of evolved a bit? How's the client base changed over the years?
Kyle Bryant 00:06:32.049 Yeah, that's a great question. And I think kind of what we've noticed is those VC-backed companies and the start-up groups, they evolved pretty quickly. And they will raise their next round of funding and a big four firm will come in and someone on the board will ask for a big four audit or something like that. So a lot of times, we will pass that assurance work or tax work up to the bigger firms. So we still stay on as consultants, which is what we like to do. We still get to kind of work in that middle market. But to your question, I would say the majority of our growth has come from the second segment of clients that we've been adding. It's the privately held partnerships, groups in town that-- kind of in the Southeast that are privately held and just need good financial accounting advice.
Stuart McLeod 00:07:21.559 So all your staff sort of local, more or less, or fully remote?
Kyle Bryant 00:07:28.096 The majority of them are. We have a handful of fully remote, which has been a bit of a learning curve for us. But it's been great, honestly. It's given us access to talent that we wouldn't have had otherwise. And I think COVID kind of expedited that process, so got us comfortable with it. Thankfully, we invested heavily early on in technology and wanted to be a cloud-based firm. So all of our systems are cloud-based. All of our internal software is cloud-based. So it's very easy for us to work wherever we are. We do like working together. We do like collaboration. We're finding that you can do that if you're intentional about it virtually.
Stuart McLeod 00:08:05.923 Yeah. And so what about competition, then? As Chattanooga has sort of expanded its, I guess, perception or marketing capacity to attract venture-backed firms, have you seen more accountants spring up over the years?
Kyle Bryant 00:08:25.540 Yeah, it's funny. We've seen a lot of-- are you talking about people that we're hiring or accounting firms entering the market?
Stuart McLeod 00:08:33.080 Local accounting firms. Have you sort of seen-- as Chattanooga has got more popular, have you seen sort of more firms come into the market and go, "Oh, well, this is a good idea"?
Kyle Bryant 00:08:40.755 Yeah, we have. We've seen big firms come in and buy some of the existing firms. We've seen firms come in kind of out of town and hang a shingle. So there has been internal competition. But as we're growing, we're expanding outside of Chattanooga and, kind of as I mentioned, throughout the Southeast. So we've got a decent presence in the Birmingham area, in the Nashville area, and plan to continue to move South to provide kind of a new take on a graying profession.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:09.704 What about the new offices, then? Do you think a Nashville office or something like that?
Kyle Bryant 00:09:15.351 Yeah, that's definitely in the cards. We're finding that it's not as necessary as it once was to have a full brick-and-mortar--
Stuart McLeod 00:09:20.459 Yeah, that's right.
Kyle Bryant 00:09:21.447 --office there. It is nice to have a presence, a place to meet clients and things like that. So that's definitely in the plans for future.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:27.845 Yeah. Well, setting up shop in the coworking space sort of has an advantage where you can be picking up work throughout the people that sort of float through those kinds of things, right?
Kyle Bryant 00:09:42.524 Yeah, absolutely.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:44.263 Some of them are--
Kyle Bryant 00:09:44.519 Absolutely.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:45.107 --pretty nice these days. What's the mission of the firm? What do you think people enjoy working for Market Street?
Kyle Bryant 00:09:52.684 We've got kind of our motto. We call it the three Ps. We want to be professional, proactive, partners. So we've kind of taken a different stance on professionalism. I mean, historically, that's been you wear a suit and tie to work and you use good manners. In our mind, professionalism is being available, being courteous, doing what you say you're going to do.
Stuart McLeod 00:10:12.902 You can still have good manners.
Kyle Bryant 00:10:13.612 So we're trying to kind of-- that's right. That's right. You can certainly do that. Being responsive, being there for people when they need you. And then from a proactive standpoint, we're always trying to think about the net, how what we're doing today is going to affect the future. So what strategies can we be implementing that are going to pay off down the road? What can we be doing to proactively prepare you for the future? We're seeing kind of a generational shift. Maybe get into this a little bit later. But as the boomer generation is retiring, we're seeing kind of the next generation come up. And so we need to be proactive about that. We need to be thinking about who's going to take over this business one day. Is this business going to sell? Are we going to just shut it down?
Stuart McLeod 00:10:53.888 Oh, don't do that. Are you into golf? What's retirement look like for Kyle once you sell it for a couple hundred million?
Kyle Bryant 00:11:00.889 I don't know about that. I love what I do, honestly. It's in my family. We all work hard and we all kind of find our passion and our mission through that. And so I don't know what retirement looks like. I do play golf. I'm terrible at it, but I enjoy it. I've got two young kids now and just trying to invest in our future and look out for us in the long term. Retirement is not even on my mind, honestly.
Stuart McLeod 00:11:28.958 What about in terms of marketing and go-to-market? What's your view of sort of being able to attract new clients and the methodology for that? You've obviously grown pretty substantially during COVID to sort of get up into the 40s of staff numbers. So how do you view the sales process and the marketing process? Have you got full-time marketers? What's your methodology?
Kyle Bryant 00:11:56.817 We've grown kind of organically. We've let our work speak for itself. We've networked really well. We know a lot of people. We've found that just doing really good work and letting our clients brag about us has helped more than anything. We do have a PR team that helps us with what we call earned media. So we take a strategy of-- we want to be providing value and pushing content that's useful to people, and we've found that that's been an attractive method to gain new clients. If we can give some guidance around new legislation that's coming out or something like that that they can take and learn from, they're likely to call us with follow-up questions.
Stuart McLeod 00:12:37.505 Well, all right, let's talk about earned media. Is that sort of a local strategy, you reckon? How do you go about that?
Kyle Bryant 00:12:45.045 We've got a great team that's constantly looking for opportunities for us to go tell our story and to be kind of the experts in areas that they think we can add value. So we're in constant contact with our PR and marketing team, telling them, "Hey, these are the five things that we need to be on the lookout for." And they're looking for opportunities for us to go tell our story or to speak or to provide value in some way to people.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:11.624 Is that predominantly local? Is that where you get most of the referral?
Kyle Bryant 00:13:16.814 Yeah, we have done-- most of our growth has been referrals locally just because that's been what's there. And so we've had a lot of opportunities outside of Chattanooga as well. But until our growth slows down here, we're going to stay focused kind of in the Southeast.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:30.574 Yeah. If you had a surge of customers, clients, can you take them on?
Kyle Bryant 00:13:34.305 Well, that's the plan. I mean, that's why we're always hiring up. We're always trying to be overstaffed. It's a weird thing. A weird phenomenon in this profession is you're either looking for staff or you're looking for clients, and it comes in cycles. So our growth stretched us pretty thin early on, and so we've decided we're going to invest in efficiencies first and foremost. We're going to try to do things as efficiently as possible. We're going to try to be the leader in technology and infrastructure and have system processes. So that helps with the workload. But to your point, I do feel we're hiring up with the anticipation of the-- last year, we grew 70%. This year we're already up 40% on that. And so staffing has got to come in proportion to that.
Stuart McLeod 00:14:18.973 Tell me, Kyle, why do you think accountants are reluctant to put in a go-to-market emotion that incorporates business development and sales?
Kyle Bryant 00:14:30.122 That's a great question. I think there is-- it's just not in our nature a lot of times. Accountants just don't want to be out. They'd rather kind of be behind the scenes, doing the compliance and checking boxes and making sure things are done the right way. That would probably be the biggest hurdle. And I think, frankly, our profession has stretched pretty thin as well, and so there may just might not be time for it. They may not need to. They may be making plenty of money and just want to kind of sit back and take things as they come. But that's certainly not our style, and it's not a financial motivation. It's a desire to help and desire to add value. And so we're constantly looking for new ways to do that. So we can't help but talk about what we're doing. We can't help but be out promoting our brand.
Stuart McLeod 00:15:15.499 So if you're growing substantially in the way that you want to, what's next? Is this sort of the plan for the next, say, four or five years?
Kyle Bryant 00:15:25.537 Yeah, I think this is the plan. I mean, we're lucky to be where we are, and we recognize that we wouldn't be here without the trust of our clients. So we're going to make sure that we don't grow too fast and lose that and lose the ability to serve the people we have and the promises we've made. But for the next four to five years, I think this looks like potentially opening up new markets, finding new places to go that are like Chattanooga, that need kind of a fresh approach and need some new blood in the market and need some people that are able to help with the things that we're able to help with.
Stuart McLeod 00:15:57.227 All right. Well, in terms of the local area, are you seeing further businesses come into the area, open in the area, expand into the area? What's the local economy like, and how do you think it'll fare in the inflationary environment?
Kyle Bryant 00:16:16.628 Yeah, I think you're seeing the flood kind of to the Southeast, and then I think Texas and Tennessee are kind of the two hot spots right now where people are going. We've got new residents popping up all the time. Like everywhere in the states, there's a housing inventory shortage. People are moving here. New businesses are locating here. Chattanooga is unique in that it's kind of a central hub to several different places. So you're within two hours to Atlanta, two hours to Knoxville, two hours to Nashville, two hours to Birmingham, really close to Louisville. It's kind of a gateway city, and so it's become a hub for a lot of transportation companies. There's two publicly-traded trucking companies here. And around that, there's a lot of services that pop up. So logistics and transportation is certainly in my background. I've worked with a lot of trucking companies and a lot of great brokerages and so I know that space pretty well. So we're seeing that pop up. And then I think with Tennessee being a-- cost of living is really low. There's no state income tax. And so it's become an attractive place to move, especially Nashville. I think it gets talked about a lot. A couple years ago, it was the host of the NFL draft. It's a hotspot. And so there's a lot of people moving to Nashville, and we're getting some spillover from either Nashville people moving to Chattanooga to escape the big city or people coming to Nashville and kind of finding other places in the area.
Stuart McLeod 00:17:39.176 So you think it'll stand up well? I think there's definitely a big migration going along--
Kyle Bryant 00:17:44.573 Absolutely.
Stuart McLeod 00:17:45.404 --in the US. And I don't want to get into politics, but people tend to be sort of polarizing red and blue, and Texas and the Southeast is certainly attracting those people that feel a bit disaffected from the western states. I get that. And there's the opposite occurring. So there's certainly a lot of geopolitical movement going on in the US, and that is going to affect the types of businesses and the types of people that congregate. And that's certainly going to mean new businesses coming into Chattanooga and the Southeast, which is great for you guys. How do you think the types of businesses are going to evolve? Are you seeing sort of a different type of business? You're seeing more venture companies sort of coming into the Southeast and taking advantage of that geopolitical movement?
Kyle Bryant 00:18:40.502 Yeah, not necessarily venture companies. We're seeing a lot of-- venture companies have been here for a while. They are coming, but we're seeing a lot of private equity moves here. There's a lot of-- and that kind of goes back to what I was talking about earlier with the generational shift. There's a lot of changing of the guards going on. A lot of people kind of got through COVID and decided, "Hey, I don't want to do this again. I'm ready to see what my options are." And so we're seeing private equity groups come in and either buy companies or take a majority ownership and help transition the old owners out or provide them kind of a path to retirement, things like that. I think we'll continue to see that.
Stuart McLeod 00:19:18.840 There's certainly a great deal of accountants on the back end of their career. Let's put it that way, right? And how are you seeing it? Do you feel like that there's younger accountants coming into the industry out of college?
Kyle Bryant 00:19:34.630 It's definitely a shrinking population of graduates. We're seeing that. And we talk with a lot of universities in the area, and they're noticing that as well. I say the millennial generation. I'm a millennial. I'm on the top end of it. But we work a little differently than the former generations. We aren't as willing to give 80-hour weeks. We aren't as willing to sacrifice things the way that other people did for money or for whatever you want to call it. It's kind of a shift. People want to find purpose in what they're doing. And so that's one of the reasons why we stick to our core values and try to find purpose in what we do. We try to add value. We try to give people a fresh approach. And doing things like implementing technology or letting people work remotely or doing other things like that certainly helps. But that is a systemic problem we're all facing. And this labor shortage, it affects accounting as well. And I think accounting is a very safe profession, obviously, but it doesn't have to be boring.
Stuart McLeod 00:20:38.181 What about the area? Are you sort of feeling like it's energized, it's got new and different people moving in?
Kyle Bryant 00:20:45.090 Yeah, definitely. I think Chattanooga is really growing, and we're excited about the growth we're seeing and feeling. And there's willingness to invest in the growth. There's willingness to invest in the future through several different areas, right? I don't see that slowing down at all.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:02.321 And what about family in the area? What do you do in your spare time?
Kyle Bryant 00:21:07.740 Yeah. Like I said, I got two small kids. And so when I'm not here, I'm with them. My wife's great. She stays home with them and has the hardest job of anyone in our family for sure. There's working from home. We had our two-year-old in the middle of COVID, so it kind of changed my perspective on what she does day in and day out. So there's a great appreciation for that.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:28.550 Have you lined them up for the succession plan?
Kyle Bryant 00:21:32.101 No, I'm going to try to talk to them about potentially selling insurance or something like that. Maybe take the pressure off.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:39.740 Back to the business a bit. What's your tech stack look like? What are the systems that you use? And keeping 40 odd people together and trained and working well is probably going to be not that easy. So how do you view operational efficiency and systems in your practice?
Kyle Bryant 00:21:57.719 Yeah. Well, like I said, we've invested heavy in it. So we've kind of got three different segments. Our consulting kind of bookkeeping is very tech-heavy. We invest in the cloud-based softwares there. We require all our clients to be on QuickBooks Online or Xero. We partner with Gusto to do payroll. We use Bill.com. All of the cloud-based kind of bookkeeping back-end solutions. And we're moving towards kind of a consulting around that where as we're entering what feels like a pullback and potentially-- I hate to use the R word, but potential recession.
Stuart McLeod 00:22:30.883 Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Bryant 00:22:31.702 We're trying to empower our clients to learn how to use this software so they're not as reliant on us. And so we're doing training sessions and trying to kind of build out learning opportunities for them to provide some guidance and help them kind of do some things on their own so they're not as reliant on us. Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent. But our other software-- we're heavy on using Teams. We do video chats. We have channels there. We're in constant communication. Our audit team is kind of probably the leaders in using technology there. We're in full cloud-based audit files. We subscribe to cloud-based guidance. Our tax is in the same boat as well. We use CCH products. We're in Axcess. We use a great solution called XCM, which helps us manage deadlines and things like that.
Stuart McLeod 00:23:21.212 Yep. No, excellent. Well, what else comes to mind in terms of where you guys are up to?
Kyle Bryant 00:23:27.051 What I've told you is kind of the main place we are. I can't say enough-- I know I've said it probably about three or four times, but we're really focused on kind of the next generation and helping with the transition plans. I've helped a handful of families kind of sort that out. It's a very personal thing, and it's very rewarding when you get to the end of it and you've helped create or play a role in a solution for the next generation to take over or to help someone get ready to sell their business and provide value on that side.
Stuart McLeod 00:23:56.959 Yeah, no, I understand. I mean, when we talk to accountants, the prevailing view, right, is your capacity and your interest and your motivation to help your customers, help your clients run better businesses and improve their lives. Does that resonate?
Kyle Bryant 00:24:17.268 Absolutely. We're trying to be on the forefront of that. That's our goal always, is to-- we call it business beyond numbers. We want to help clients understand kind of their business and what numbers play a part in that. We always say that accounting is the language of business. So we want to help them understand what their numbers are telling them and how that translates into their day-to-day operations.
Stuart McLeod 00:24:39.948 Yeah. No, that makes sense. Kyle, it's been an absolute pleasure. And you guys are on the forefront of technology and progressing the business industry in Chattanooga and the Southeast. And congratulations on all your success so far. I think it's fantastic what you guys are doing.
Kyle Bryant 00:24:57.215 Well, thank you. Very much appreciate it.
Stuart McLeod 00:24:59.115 We really appreciate you being on the Accounting Leaders Podcast.
Kyle Bryant 00:25:02.024 Thanks for having me. [music]
Stuart McLeod 00:25:09.413 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 KarbonHQ.com/resources. I'd also love it if you could leave us a five-star review wherever you listened to this podcast. Let us know you liked this session. 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. [music]