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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: 00:00:00.882 [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 Stefan van Duyvendijk - I hope I got that right - the accounting operations evangelist at FloQast. Before FloQast, Stefan was a US controller at Skullcandy, the headphones company, a senior associate at KPMG, and a corporate controller for Kodiak Cakes where he led a 10-member for an entertainment through a pre-IPO initiative. He is an experienced controller, has consistently nurtured finance professionals and improved accounting processes throughout his career. It's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, Stefan van Duyvendijk. Well, do the obligatory post COVID introduction. Where do I find you today?
Stefan: 00:01:01.240 I'm located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Yeah. What about you?
Stuart: 00:01:06.055 Incline Village, North Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
Stefan: 00:01:09.108 Oh, very nice.
Stuart: 00:01:10.306 We're recording the day after voting. Did you go and vote yesterday?
Stefan: 00:01:14.116 I did. Yeah. I actually had to drop off my ballot because I was traveling the last two days. So dropped it off. I live in a state where generally it doesn't matter how you vote anyway. There's a lot of the majority that you're like, "Well, there you go, I guess." But [crosstalk].
Stuart: 00:01:30.813 Oh, yes. I know. Everybody's encouraged to participate in the process. They would arrest me and put me in jail and deport me if I voted. So I'm very careful not to vote.
Stefan: 00:01:40.465 [laughter] Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah.
Stuart: 00:01:43.507 Only one of our family is a native. He can vote in a few years or about 16 years.
Stefan: 00:01:49.110 There you go. There you go. Yeah. He'll represent the clan.
Stuart: 00:01:52.367 That's right. He can only vote once though, otherwise he gets in the same boat. But in Salt Lake City, you're not too far from the ski fields of Utah, about an hour and a half.
Stefan: 00:02:03.117 I mean, the closest resort would probably take me, from where I live near downtown Salt Lake, probably 25 minutes to get to work in Park City, Utah. I had two different locations up there, Skullcandy Inc., which is a CPG headphone company. And we were one bus stop away from the closest resort. And then we worked at Kodiak Cakes, where it was maybe a 10-minute drive to the closest ski resort. So I would go here and have lunch or maybe go into work late that day and work a little bit later so I could catch some powder tracks in the morning. So it was pretty nice.
Stuart: 00:02:41.732 What's your resort of choice at Park City? Park City itself, there's a couple around there.
Stefan: 00:02:46.749 There's four on the Wasatch Front, which is in Salt Lake, and there's, I guess, three in Park City. But I usually ski canyons just due to convenience and knowledge of the terrain. It's not a lot of local ski, and it's a relatively large resort. So if you know it well enough, there's powder in the trees days after a storm. You can just be like, "It's a bluebird day and I'm up to my chest in powder. So I don't really know what could get better than this."
Stuart: 00:03:16.121 No. There's not much better in life, I reckon. Our local resort is a little bit like that. Some of our best days, powder days, are just you can ski all day, at least a day, maybe more if you're lucky, where it's still untracked in the trees. And it's so much fun. And the Epic and the Ikon resorts get skied out by about 10:00 to 9:00. Some idiots are hiking up at 6:00 AM.
Stefan: 00:03:44.715 Well, it's pretty funny because even if there's a few tracks and it's generally pretty good and there's a few areas that the diehards hit once or twice and they put a few tracks in there and they're like, "It's no good anymore." And you're like, "There's plenty here still if you're just willing to enjoy it." I maybe had a foot where I went through someone else's track, I'll take that deal. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:04:07.616 Yes, that's right. So especially if you've got a chairlift at the bottom, it's better than-- we do some hiking where you earn your turns and stick the skins on and uphill you go. And of course, the reward is your own line, of course. But you get fit doing that. It's hard work sometimes pushing uphill. Well, Stefan, we should talk about work. Tell me about FloQast and how you came to the company and your journey.
Stefan: 00:04:37.369 Sure. So FloQast is a workflow automation platform. Humble beginnings. Two of the three founders are accountants themselves. One of them worked in public accounting, got out of that, was working at a company where he was helping with the close, and it was just such a painful process. He was at Cornerstone and doing revenue recognition, all this stuff. The CEO, Mike, he worked at Cornerstone OnDemand, and he was helping them with the revenue recognition, helping with their close. And like most of us have experienced going through that process, it is painful. Right? There's a lot of communication breakdown. There's a lot of perception breakdown. There's a lot of misalignment. And it's just always this hero's journey to get through the close. And so--
Stuart: 00:05:22.644 Without any of the heroics, the thanks.
Stefan: 00:05:24.766 Right. Exactly. I didn't go into accounting to be a hero. Yeah.
Stuart: 00:05:28.789 Yeah. No parade at the end of it each month.
Stefan: 00:05:32.887 Yeah. I was like, no, actually that was the furthest thing I was trying to be when I chose accounting as a career. That was kind of the humble beginnings of FloQast, is just a fed up accountant saying, "Hey, we can do this differently." And so they built a workflow automation platform out of it. And it's gone through some iterations. And back in, I believe, late 2019, I was at Kodiak Cakes. I was a corporate controller. They were growing rapidly as an organization. And the accounting manager there and the CFO, they were like, "Hey, have you heard of this accounting workflow automation tool?" And I was like, "No. I've heard of competitors," but I hadn't heard of that specific one. And I really didn't like any of the competitors, so I wasn't really all that interested.
Stuart: 00:06:12.080 We don't have to skirt the issue. Did you try BlackLine at your old company?
Stefan: 00:06:17.197 I hadn't. I had seen companies when I was [inaudible] that were using BlackLine or using very similar tools, and they weren't successful. They weren't actually adopted. People were bypassing the systems. It made, honestly, the audit more difficult because the controls they told you were in place weren't actually effective. So now you're trying to make up these mitigating controls so that you have a control environment you can test. So I really wasn't all that interested. And then they showed me a demo of FloQast and I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I've envisioned." I had actually tried to build something similar at Skullcandy, but I'm not an engineer. Right? And the people they had on set--
Stuart: 00:07:00.387 What did you try and build it out of?
Stefan: 00:07:02.613 We were trying to build the most simplistic model of something similar. And I don't even know what their engineers were --using. I just kind of sketched something out, and they were like, "Well, if we have--"
Stuart: 00:07:10.915 Right. Okay. Pulled out the pen and paper and said, "Hey, build this."
Stefan: 00:07:14.083 Yeah. That's exactly what I did. I was like, "Well, this is kind of how I'd make it look," and I mocked it up actually in excel. And it looked very similar if Mike or Chris or Collin, the founder, showed you that first version of what they had. What I had kind of asked to be built was the very first version of FloQast back in 2013.
Stuart: 00:07:33.588 And there you go, a meeting of the minds.
Stefan: 00:07:35.899 Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I wish I had their vision and their drive back in 2013. When they showed me the demo, I was like, "Man, this is a super robust version of what I've dreamed of." And so we signed the contract, got it up and running super quick. And it was super influential to the team. I was kind of blown away on how much it could change how the team ran, give us our insights. Some of it wasn't even information I wanted to hear because it let me know that I was the one that was slowing things down, which is like--
Stuart: 00:08:06.721 You're the bottleneck.
Stefan: 00:08:08.060 I'm here like, "Oh, I'm the one who's slowing us down? I thought it was-- oh, shoot." So it was definitely an eye-opening experience. But it was a really great tool for myself and the rest of the team, and we really liked working with the company. They just had nice people working there that cared about how you were doing and cared about how the product was working for you and not just that you had signed a contract. So we had Kodiak Cake, I've been there for almost three years. We had just wrapped up a private transaction selling to L Catterton, which is part of the larger Catterton fund, a pretty massive PE group back east. And so I was kind of looking for my next steps in my career. And so far, I've been pretty fortunate at working at companies I really enjoyed. When I left KPMG after public accounting, I got to work at Skullcandy. I love their headphones. I love music. I love their culture. I love where they're located in Park City. I mean, we would ski all the time. I had a coworker, speaking of skiing, that hit 100 days on the mountain in one year.
Stuart: 00:09:07.643 There you go. That's the work life.
Stefan: 00:09:09.761 Yeah. And that guy, when they scan you on your 100th turn on the Epic Pass in Vail, it actually plays the Rocky theme song. No one knew. Right? There's legend of that that will happen. And I have a video of my coworker, Tyler. And I'm going up and he's like, "Let's see if it works." And it plays it. And even the person that's working the chair or the lifty is just like, "Oh my God, this actually happens." It's like this [inaudible]--
Stuart: 00:09:35.871 [laughter] How cool is that? 100 days, that's a good effort that winter.
Stefan: 00:09:40.055 Yeah. I mean, man, that guy went every day of the week. Always kind of worked at places I liked in companies I liked. Same thing with Kodiak Cakes, love the product, love location, the culture, and everything. So when I was leaving Kodiak Cakes, I was like, well, I want to work with a company that I really enjoy their product, I'm familiar with it. So I let FloQast know that I was looking and hoping they had something in the accounting finance space. And they say, "Have you considered marketing?" And I said, "Not in a million years. I'm an accountant." And then they came back to me like, "But you really should consider this evangelist role." And I was like, "I don't even know what that means, so I'm going to give you a hard pass." And eventually they said, "Well, just gave us 15 minutes on a phone call, and let us know what you think." And so that's kind of how they got their hooks in me and convinced me to go. So that's what brought me into FloQast. And at the time, I was looking to maybe get a VP of finance, maybe a CFO role at a smaller company.
Stefan: 00:10:35.129 But one thing I had felt in my career is that while I was still perfecting the craft in a lot of ways, it was really fine-tuning of the machine. Right? You're not learning really great insights. You've mastered a lot of it. You're maybe not a pure master in every sense of the term, but you have a great sense of knowledge broadly. And I just felt like I was losing my competitive edge on learning. I felt like that ability to learn new things was kind of disappearing. So when FloQast offered me an opportunity to look at the way I do my work completely differently, new mindset, new skill set, it really interested me. And so I said, "Well, it doesn't hurt me to take a break and try something new." And I've always had a passion to bring knowledge, I'm like, "Hey, we can change the way we do our work, and we should challenge the notion of how we do our work." And I'm not saying that I have the magic way of doing things. I think the magic way of doing things is being willing to learn and change and challenge. And that's what we want to do. And that's what FloQast wants to bring to the market is they're saying, "Well, we want to disseminate that knowledge, challenge the status quo, and say, 'We need to do things differently. This is a way we think you can do things differently,' but also learn ourselves and change ourselves at FloQast and our platform." If someone else comes out with a better idea and says, "This is how we're using the product and we think it's a great way," then we're all ears. There's no ego there.
Stuart: 00:11:58.009 Yep. I imagine you sort of went into it thinking, well, you can always go back to a VP of finance role if it doesn't work out. Even in this climate, there's still plenty of those roles out there.
Stefan: 00:12:09.113 That's right. Once you've kind of gone through the gauntlet a couple of times, you've proven yourself, your resume stands on its own. And so really what I'm doing now is just trying new skill sets. And I really do think when you look at successful CFOs, the skill they have isn't necessarily financial prowess. Right? They're not coming out this, "Oh, I'm just this prodigy when it comes to finance." They're obviously very talented and smart in that space, but they're able to communicate effectively and efficiently. And that's something that accountants don't get a lot of opportunity to try and do and see. And I said, "Well, who communicates more than an evangelist?" Not many. So this is a great way to kind of [inaudible] that skill set.
Stuart: 00:12:49.072 Well, you're one step away from sales now. There you go. They'll stick a quota on you before you know it.
Stefan: 00:12:53.820 That was my one stipulation. I was like, "I'm not in sales, don't have quotas, got nothing to do with that."
Stuart: 00:12:59.797 Yeah. That's a different world. But yeah, I mean, our accountant, Frank, is amazing communicator. And I don't think he ever got a-- he was never sort of a CPA. He came into it from different angles. And he's just been a revelation to our business. And I'm thankful every day for Frank and his efforts. And he's building a team out now. And there's probably a few people at Facebook he might be able to hire today. But there're 13,000 people looking for jobs. That's all right. That's the season that we're in at the moment.
Stefan: 00:13:33.406 Yep. It's a cycle that goes through it.
Stuart: 00:13:36.044 In a lot of businesses, but I think maybe in finance because-- maybe it's because finance people haven't been able to-- some perhaps, majority perhaps finance people haven't sort of had a reputation of being great communicators, and they haven't been able to portray or convey the story of the numbers. They're great at the numbers, but it's really only half the battle or perhaps even less. Understanding and drawing meaning from the numbers is the most important thing as a business owner, I believe, anyway.
Stefan: 00:14:12.757 Yeah. If it's not actionable, then what are you doing with it? One of the things we talk about in some of our thought leadership is we really talk about operationalizing accounting. And if you look at a pure definition of operation or operationalize, it's just to measure and track the abstract, right, which is simple. You could apply that in any situation in life. You could say, "Well, I'm going to measure and track how fast I can run a mile, how much I can bench, my cholesterol."
Stuart: 00:14:42.210 How many days you can ski.
Stefan: 00:14:43.697 Yeah. How many days I can ski. But measuring and tracking doesn't really do anything for you unless you have the intention to change it. So we kind of like to change that definition a little bit and say, "If you're going to operationalize, you're going to measure and track something with the intention to change or improve it." Accounting in the past is maybe they measure, maybe they track, but they haven't ever done anything with the intention of changing it. And that's where, as FloQast, we really want people to focus is stop getting caught up just in, well, I've achieved my goal because I measured the number that I run.
Stuart: 00:15:17.659 Closed in 10 days, not 30.
Stefan: 00:15:19.035 Yeah. I closed in 10 days. We made this much money, or whatever it is. It's like, "Well, what's that mean? And what are we going to do with it? Where do we want to go with it?" And that's where I really think, as I was alluding earlier, the successful CFO knows how to take that and craft the story, right, and say, "This is what occurred. This is what has happened," but then also write the narrative for tomorrow and say, "And this is where we think it's going to take us tomorrow." And that's what really drives people and drives the action in their organization.
Stuart: 00:15:50.845 You must work with a lot of customers and clients as an evangelist. What are some of your favorites? If I say perhaps a client that's inspired you or that they've gone on a fantastic journey, who comes to mind? You don't have to name names, by the way. But what types?
Stefan: 00:16:05.183 There's a few journeys. It's always great to just flat out see when someone implements the tool and they're like, "Yeah. I reduced the days to close the books by X days," whether that's 1 day because there're only already 5 and they got down to 4, which is impressive feat, or whether they went from 45 to 10 overnight. They're like, "It used to take us a month and a half to close the books," which is just insane that people were going through that kind of pain. But what I really like seeing, there's a customer internally that's up in Alaska actually. And what I love about her story the most is that it talks to the emotional side of things and the personal cost of accounting. And she has a quote, and I'll butcher it even though I've read it probably 40 times this month. But she essentially talks about how there's all this burn at work. You work these late hours. You miss bedtime. You miss meals. You miss moments. And people don't talk about the fact that people can cry at their desk about this. The stress is so strong to get work done that people are burned to the point that they're crying at their desk.
Stefan: 00:17:06.160 And she talks about how implementing FloQast-- not the fact that she necessarily all of a sudden noticed, "Oh, I'm no longer crying at my desk." She said that my husband noticed things were better in life. He said, "You're better. What's changed?" And that it could actually affect-- a tool that she was using at work could affect her personal life that strongly that all that stuff disappeared, and all of a sudden, she was like, "I didn't have this excessive burden on my personal life anymore." And to me, that's really important, is that I think a lot of times we forget that there's a personal and emotional cost to doing work in the same old way, the status quo, and not challenging it and saying, "We don't need to live this lifestyle as accountants where we work super late hours, are underappreciated just trying to get to this hero's journey every month." And instead saying, "No. Actually, we can do this better. We can be strategic assets to the organization." And I'm not sitting there super frustrated at my desk every day. And if it's not you crying at your desk, right, it might be an employee. You just don't know it. And I never want to look back at my job as a manager and say, "Oh, yeah, I had an employee crying at their desk constantly, super burdened by this, and I did nothing." Right? That's just a terrible place.
Stuart: 00:18:20.670 [laughter] Yeah. Well, in a whole lot of ways. Right?
Stefan: 00:18:22.949 Yeah.
Stuart: 00:18:23.573 What's the ideal customer profile? Let's talk about the types of customers that you service.
Stefan: 00:18:29.284 There's a wide net to cast there. Internally, I think other people disagree, but I think once you kind of have a team of at least five, six on your accounting team working on the close, well, definitely, it's time to look at your workflow automation tool. There's enough communication going on there, there's enough task being done there that it helps to have that workflow automation tool to help ease lines of communication, improve perception, and get the work done in a healthier way. But I think pretty much there's not a cap on the size of the organization that it can work for, whether you're a large, decentralized, multinational organization. When I look at Skullcandy, when I first started there, we had a lot of accountants in different countries because there's a lot of sales works in different companies, whether that's a GmbH over in Europe or maybe you have an entity in China doing manufacturing. Right? And getting all those accounts on the same page in different time zones with different statutory requirements is really difficult, and it'd have been very helpful to have something like a FloQast there to anything in between. It's a pretty wide net to cast, but I think once you break that threshold of five, six individuals on your team, it's time to use it. And then I think maybe only the most robust complex organizations that already really have a really set process internally, they don't really deviate. So it's like you get some of your large manufacturers that are like, "This is how we close every month. We've been doing it this way for 20 years." Maybe they're not going to see the same use, but I would actually challenge they could probably flip that narrative on its head and see a lot of use out of it.
Stuart: 00:20:06.158 Yeah. They've probably got other issues if they've been doing the same thing for-- but to get five or six people on your accounting team, you're probably 20, 30 million and above of revenue, something like that, depending on the complexity organization.
Stefan: 00:20:21.480 Yeah. I'd say depending on the industry, it could be anywhere from 25 to 50 million in that space. And that's about time to start looking at a tool to come in and help you. Or in some organizations, you're still pre-revenue. Right? But if you're significant enough in your operations that you need that tool, so you think about different healthcare, pharmaceutical, stuff like that.
Stuart: 00:20:41.944 Yeah. There's obviously smaller revenue, higher complexity types of industries. That makes sense. What's on the agenda for '23? Are you guys growing strongly and looking to expand countries? What's the strategic plan look like?
Stefan: 00:20:58.701 Yeah. Strategically, we're all the above. Right? We've seen tremendous growth in our business. It's been really great. And it's really fun to be in an organization that grows in that way. That's one thing that was exciting about Kodiak Cakes. That's one thing that's really exciting about FloQast is just when you see the new logos coming in or everything, names you recognize. But yeah, we're definitely expanding our presence globally. We opened up a UK office a couple of years ago, and that's done really well. Expanded into the [DOC?] region, stuff like that. Looking down into probably-- if I had to guess, Australia and New Zealand are probably high on our list.
Stuart: 00:21:36.056 Don't go there. Those people are weird, I reckon.
Stefan: 00:21:40.048 [laughter] There's a reason [inaudible].
Stuart: 00:21:42.465 Don't tell mom.
Stefan: 00:21:45.860 Yeah. But I think expanding our presence in some of those really easy to reach because just the language. Right? It's like, well--
Stuart: 00:21:53.697 Yeah. Just change the Z to S's, you'll be right. Turn the dates around. Don't forget to change the dates.
Stefan: 00:21:59.117 That's right. That's right. And so it just makes it really easy to kind of expand-- to launch and expand in those regions. But we've seen some good access in the global market. We really want to bring our product out there. This is my personal opinion and kind of what I've seen is, in a lot of cases, the US is very forward-thinking when it comes to financial reporting and financial processes. And so it's really fun to kind of bring some of the stuff to the broader or different countries and everything because you can really impact the way they look at their financials, period. Right? It can be even more impactful to them. And then I think as far as product goes, we have-- I don't want to let the cat out of the bag on too much, but we definitely are launching some really neat product in late Q1 on the platform that will really impact the way people do their compliance side of the house. That, I think, really rounds out the platform quite nicely.
Stuart: 00:22:53.739 The competitive landscape is not too dynamic, I would say. I mean, ours isn't neither. It sort of doesn't change rapidly because not everybody wakes up in the morning and goes to Y Combinator and wants to start close workflow software or practice management, for that matter. But BlackLine is probably the most well-known in your space. And a phenomenal story of the founder, Therese, and one of the very first women to found a company and take all the way to IPO. There's probably good and bad things about-- and we find the same thing. It's like you got to keep innovating to stay ahead. But also, adoption in the market can be frustrating sometimes as well. The accountants, and by nature, they're the most progressive all the time. Right? So what do you think it is that drives the founders to better, to grow, to innovate, and those kinds of things?
Stefan: 00:23:51.314 Within FloQast, I think what really drives us is our founders are accountants. Right? Two of the three founders are accountants. They've lived this lifestyle. They know the pain intimately. And a lot of times-- and if any listeners are interested in a little bit of light casual reading, we've done some surveys recently with different CFOs and everything. But we found that a lot of technology in the fintech space is not really purpose-built behind the user. Right? It's purpose-built around function. And it's just trying to achieve an objective, and it is a engineer solving the problem in the way that they see the problem existing and being told to them, but not really natively understanding the end user. And what we see is that that creates unforeseen friction in use and adoption and functionality, where it's like, well, the functionality is there because I built it into the platform and the program, but then when the user gets it, they're like, "Well, it doesn't really work the way I work," and so that functionality doesn't really exist. There's kind of this horizon of form or usability that needs to happen. And we see that friction actually causing people to not be able to close their books as quickly, reopen their books more often, having work interfere with their personal life more often driving what we call burnout. And we did a whole study on that. We applied a methodology they use for surgeons to identify if surgeons are too burnt out and shouldn't be doing surgery currently. Right? Obviously a very important thing is if my surgeon--
Stuart: 00:25:23.654 Obviously.
Stefan: 00:25:25.399 Maybe don't cut my chest open.
Stuart: 00:25:26.837 Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're about to have a breakdown. Well, very stressful role. Right? Yeah. I understand the-- it's not quite an analogy, is it? It's the similarities between the constant pressure to perform, yeah.
Stefan: 00:25:43.109 We kind of use this methodology, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and we applied it to accountants. And we found out that accountants, as a whole in the industry, are significantly burnt out. Right? It's driving poor reporting. Right? And it's like, if you have poor reporting, you have poor decision making, period. That's just how that works. If you have data, you can't make a good decision off of it. And we kind of got into the drivers of that, and we found out that technology is one of the big drivers of that, and adoption of the technology and how it's used. So what really drives innovation at FloQast is that we really focus around the user. We want to work as the user thinks, as the user works, and what they want, not necessarily how we want to solve their problem, if that makes sense. And a lot of times technology says, "Well, we can solve your problem this way, and so you just need to change the way you do things. And we say, "No. If that's the way you want to do it, then technology needs to embrace the way you want to do it and we'll fill in that gap." And I think that's what really sets us apart as a product, and that's what's really important about our founders is that two of the three of them are accountants, know that pain intimately, and really stay true to that north star. And the other founder who's the engineer and the brains behind making the product really sticks to that truth as well and says, "Well, this is how we want to solve that problem, is focusing on how the user wants it solved, not how we want to solve it for them." I think that's where our competitors really fail is they're saying, "Well, no, we're simply just going to solve the problem as we want to solve the problem."
Stuart: 00:27:10.686 Well, as we come up to time here, Stefan, tell me what's next for you. Are you planning a big ski season? What's on the agenda over the next couple of quarters?
Stefan: 00:27:20.592 I think for us, it's really trying to expand our thought leadership, and that's a lot of what we're going to do with FloQast, which is a lot of fun. I got to say, I didn't realize how much fun it would be to say, "I know we want to communicate with people. Right? What is the story we want to tell?" So I think internally, FloQast is really saying, "Looking at 2023, how do we want to communicate to people that there is a greener pasture, there is a better way to do things?" Also making sure that we're still listening to people to make sure that we're solving it the way they want to and that we're open to new ideas ourselves. On a personal, yeah, I'm looking for a great [inaudible] in the head of me. So we are dumping at Salt Lake. We have a resort opening up here. I think potentially Solitude locally might be opening up as soon as [inaudible], which means that-- and that's a fairly low elevation resort compared to Brighton or Alta or Snowbird. So that means those guys should be right behind us. So I'm salivating at the idea that, yeah, I can get up there soon. I got to get some new sticks though. I need some new skis to ride on. So I'm now neck-deep in research. I'm like, "Oh, what are we riding this year?"
Stuart: 00:28:26.627 There's so many brands out there these days. I saw Bode Miller just started his own brand of all-mountain skis, ironically. It is ironic, yes. So--
Stefan: 00:28:37.870 Yeah. What's its name? I'ma look it up.
Stuart: 00:28:40.134 Oh, I can't remember, but just Google Bode Miller skis. You probably have-- so there are a couple of local guys that build planks. We've got Praxis that try and support them. It's snowing out the window as I speak. Don't tell my colleagues, but I might go and sneak out, put some skins on and go and sneak out the [Savo?], and. But our local is opening on Friday, so I'm going to be up there [crosstalk].
Stefan: 00:29:05.434 Mount Rosa?
Stuart: 00:29:06.471 Yeah.
Stefan: 00:29:07.446 Nice. I need to get out there and try it out. Right now I'm kind of in that place of how many ski trips can I fit in this season and where are they going to be. I think Steamboat might be first. But I need to get out there and get the sea legs back on me, so to speak.
Stuart: 00:29:21.863 Well, there's plenty of companies up and down the western seaboard that you can come and visit and put in some days.
Stefan: 00:29:29.656 Yeah. Definitely will. But yeah, that's what's on the horizon for me. It sounds like it's the same for you. It's just getting those turns in.
Stuart: 00:29:35.526 Yeah, yeah. No. I'm pretty stoked. I mean, I hope-- last year, we got some snow early and then we got a big load at Christmas, and that was about it for the year. So I'm hoping that it's a little bit more consistent. But humans have managed to fuck up the climate considerably, and so we're at the mercy of our own stupidity. So there you go.
Stefan: 00:29:57.018 Yeah. I don't know if you know, but the Great Salt Lake may not be a lake soon. That's how low it is.
Stuart: 00:30:03.151 Yeah. That's a significant issue. I was reading about that. That's a massive issue for the area.
Stefan: 00:30:08.271 They say that there's a lot of arsenic dust at the bottom of it and if it dries up, that that's just going to blow into the local climate. And it's like, okay, well, Tahoe's looking nice. So you might get a new neighbor out of me.
Stuart: 00:30:20.207 [laughter] That's right. Utah, you've got the [biggest?] payroll tax, don't you? So come to Nevada and help support the local economy and skip out the payroll tax. It's quite a nice bonus.
Stefan: 00:30:33.144 Yeah. That Mount Rosa is looking pretty good. I have a coworker that's over there as well. So I'm hearing good things. I might need a visit one of these days.
Stuart: 00:30:42.448 The skis are up at the local ski shop, getting their yearly tune and-- well, getting their first tune of the year and out we go. But Stefan, thank you so much for your time today. [music] It's been wonderful to catch up and talk a tiny bit of work and more skiing. And I appreciate that more than anything.
Stefan: 00:31:01.011 Well, if you end up in Salt Lake, let me know. We can get some turns in.
Stuart: 00:31:03.650 Sounds great. You have a great day. Cheers.
Stefan: 00:31:05.829 All right. Pleasure, Stuart.
Stuart: 00:31:13.070 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 listen 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.