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This is your destination for feeling empowered in building your business.
These are the real, raw stories of entrepreneurs and business owners who have built their businesses through the messy middle of $1-20 Million, hosted by serial entrepreneur Matt Tait.
Matt knows what it’s like to scale past the first million, and on this show he’ll be bringing on other serial entrepreneurs and business owners who have been there, done that (or, are currently in it) to share what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what’s next.
Dave Olsen [00:00:00]:
You want people only handling what only they can handle and everything else you delegate down. So our controllers only handle what controller stuff can do, and they push everything they can to our managers, and managers only do that piece of what only they can do, and they delegate the rest to our Philippines team. There's lots of benefits to doing that, but one is it just gives everybody the chance to step up and grow.
Matt Tait [00:00:19]:
Hi, I'm Matt Tait, Founder of Decimal and host of After the First Million podcast. And like you, I've taken the leap not just to start a business, but to scale and grow it. I've hustled from zero to that first million, and now I'm building for the next 50. I know firsthand what the messy middle looks like, and we need more than just numbers. We need strategy, we need community and we need real conversations about what growth takes. In our line of work, scaling beyond a million means going beyond the spreadsheet. This is where you learn how to grow.
Matt Tait [00:00:55]:
This is After the First Million. All right, welcome to this week's episode of After the First Million. I'm your host, Matt Tait, and I am extremely excited about Dave Olsen, today's guest. I'm excited for a couple of reasons. Number one, Dave has grown an amazing company. Not a firm that does bookkeeping, accounting operations. He's also expanded into being the CEO of multiple other companies we'll talk about throughout the podcast. But he's also just all around a great guy.
Matt Tait [00:01:27]:
And so I'm excited for today's conversation about how to scale your firm, scale your company past that first million. So with that, Dave, welcome.
Dave Olsen [00:01:36]:
Yeah, thank you. Appreciate that generous introduction and yeah, it's good to be chatting with you.
Matt Tait [00:01:41]:
One of the things that I'd love to just kind of start with is you and I both have not your standard background for people running these types of companies, and yet yours is a very good example of kind of stepping out of the doer role and into the kind of CEO business owner role. If you wouldn't mind, give us a little more background on your story.
Dave Olsen [00:02:03]:
I did get a master's in accounting and a CPA, but I really don't identify as an accountant. And there's a few reasons for that. Not that I have anything to do with accounting. I love the industry and I started out in information systems and did programming on kind of as a job during college and really loved that world. And those worlds intersected when I went into IT audit with the Big Four after graduating. And it was actually through that I got my master's in Accounting and rotated into financial audit. So I kind of got to straddle both those worlds in IT and financial accounting. And what I also didn't understand early on is there can be a big difference between accounting and finance.
Dave Olsen [00:02:41]:
I always kind of saw that as the same thing. And when I left Big Four to become CFO of some startup companies, you know, I was doing everything. I was doing the accounting, the finance, and I just kind of saw it all as one. And what I didn't realize is that they can be different skill sets, especially in a, you know, bigger environment where. Where the responsibilities are more segregated. So I actually identify more as a finance person than I do as an accounting person. I love the. The CFO work, the financial modeling, the, the cash flow projections. And I was less concerned about the compliance, the right way to account for certain transactions. And I think what Julie lends itself. Well, the small business, where the technicalities aren't really as important. I mean, you've got to be compliant for taxes, you've got to be accurate. But, you know, how to, you know, account for these complex accounting roles isn't nearly as important as it is for a, you know, bigger audited company. So, yeah, the intersection of the technology, the accounting, the finance is really kind of where I found my passion early on. And that combined with small business.
Dave Olsen [00:03:36]:
I grew up in a small business household. My dad owned a small and still owns a small construction company and a small farm as well. And my kind of family history is all kind of small entrepreneurial. And so I really have a soft spot in my heart for. For the small business owner. And even though I started in the Big Four, in the kind of the bigger environment, I learned pretty quickly that I, my heart's in the, in the small business.
Matt Tait [00:03:58]:
It's funny you kind of mentioned that. My dad, he's retired now, but was a builder and construction guy my whole career, had his own company. And that's what kind of got me down the road after a couple of companies interested in this space as well, was just kind of seeing the interplay of the differences between what they need and what they usually get.
Dave Olsen [00:04:16]:
So did you grow up on the construction crew with working with him?
Matt Tait [00:04:19]:
Oh, good lord. I've been throwing bricks into dumpsters since I was about 6 years old.
Dave Olsen [00:04:23]:
So I've been up on roofs and shovel and stucco and all those kind of things for about the same amount of time, so.
Matt Tait [00:04:30]:
You know, my wife still jokes that she says I'm the best sweeper she's ever met. And when we first started Dating. I told her, I was like, her apartment got dirty. I was like, I'll sweep. I'm really good at it. And she looks, she's like, you really are. And I'm like, look, when you have to sweep drywall, dust through an entire house, you learn exactly how to do it. Because if you do it wrong, you'll sweep about 85 times and still make no progress.
Dave Olsen [00:04:53]:
Yep, been there, been there, done that. So that's a big part of my motivation to where I'm at now. My dad never had to say, say anything about doing well in school. He just put me to work, and.
Matt Tait [00:05:03]:
It was the example of why you want to not do that. Once you left Big Four, you were CFO for some smaller companies and then you, you also were a fractional CFO for quite a while and then eventually you transitioned into running a company and what is now Nimbl. Talk about that kind of transition and how you made that and how you thought about it.
Dave Olsen [00:05:28]:
I'd like to take credit for the master plan, but there really wasn't one. It had just like a lot of careers and businesses, it really evolved. And in a lot of ways I was lucky with timing. Not strategic necessarily. There's about a 10 year period where I was a CFO and a fractional CFO really became fractional pretty early on because I discovered with a couple of jobs that a CFO of startups really not likely a full time job. I went into one company from Big Four. It was full time for a few months as I got things cleaned up and it was a fast growing startup. Once I had things streamlined, it was either become the office manager and the sales rep and everything else as a full time job or look for something else.
Dave Olsen [00:06:04]:
So I jumped off to another startup, did this similar thing, got it cleaned up, took a few months, and then this time I again didn't know the industry. I didn't know what was going on outside of the my world. But I thought, well, if my CFO job's not a full time job, what if I have two halftime CFO jobs? And so I did. I took on, I had a friend who needed some help and didn't need someone full time and I was kind of outgrowing my role in my other company. So I talked to that CEO and said, hey, what if I just do half and half and had a little light bulb go off. Because I thought, well, if I'm going half and half and they're saving money, I can charge a little bit more than half my salary for each one and make a little more money. That sounded great to me. And then I added a third one and a fourth one and realized part of that was a venture capital fund.
Dave Olsen [00:06:44]:
And then I took on some of their portfolio companies and realized that at first I saw it as multiple jobs and I started to see this is actually kind of a, kind of a business. And then early in the, this is kind of late 2000s, early 2010s because I was a CFO of multiple startups, I'm starting to see myself as a fractional CFO with my own business. I wasn't looking to scale necessarily, but I had a lot of work to do and I realized that there's a lot of high level work that was valuable to the client, but because it was a small company, I was doing everything. I was doing the bookkeeping and the paying the bills and all that. So I don't really want to build a business. I don't want to commit to like full time employees. But what if I just use some part time people offshore to just help get some of the work done? So in 2012 I found a CPA firm in India on upwork and just part time, they helped me out. 2015, discovered the Philippines and started building a small team there.
Dave Olsen [00:07:32]:
And then once I had a kind of a taste of what it looked like to work with a team, I realized, well, I'm actually basically outsourcing the whole accounting department and the finance department. This is kind of a good business. And again, my head was down. I didn't know what was going on in the industry. I thought I was just making it up as I went. So between 2015, 2018, 2017, I kind of proved out the model, kind of dialed it in with my small offshore team. And then 2018 is when I started Nimbl and wasn't called Nimbl at the time, but I started the entity, it became the entity that became Nimbl and started scaling up, hired a U.S. team or began hiring U.S. employees in 2018 and then scaled it up from there.
Matt Tait [00:08:08]:
What's interesting is I think if you look at all the industry trends, you were about two years ahead of when everybody else started or in the fractional CFO world, even 10 years ahead of kind of the big boom in terms of the industry really solidifying itself.
Dave Olsen [00:08:25]:
Yeah, I really didn't understand what I had. Again, I implemented zero in 2010. I actually lived in Canada in 2010 and, and Xero became available before the U.S. so I implemented Xero, used that for a few years and then QuickBooks Online became usable. In 2015, Zen Payroll became gusto. On Bill.com, all those things kind of emerged in that, in that timeframe. And I just, I kind of got lucky that I was in the right place at the right time. It wasn't until 2017 that I went to Accountex with my first accounting conference.
Dave Olsen [00:08:51]:
And that was the first time I had any idea that anybody else was doing what I was doing. And that really opened my eyes and that was part of what catalyzed, you know, actually building a business out of it. Because I realized, yeah, not just this, so we got to do my own thing. It's, there's an opportunity here.
Matt Tait [00:09:05]:
I appreciate the humility, but getting lucky, is it happening once when it happens over and over again? I think it's more preparation, setting it up for when the right trend hits at the right time. You're going to take advantage of it.
Dave Olsen [00:09:17]:
Yeah, I do like the term surface area of luck. The, I guess the more action you're in, the more surface area you enable for luck. So I guess I, I can take a little bit of credit for that.
Matt Tait [00:09:27]:
Well, I think it's really cool too that as you've kind of grown your business, you've gotten over hurdles and you talk about it as it was easy and I'm guessing it wasn't as easy as that very quick storyline sounded. And you've seen this in the industry. A lot of people really struggle with that first flex point of you start your business and really what you've started is job for yourself. You're doing all the work, you're doing the sales, you're HR for yourself. You're everything that I find to be the hardest hurdle for most people is to get over that hump to running a business. Talk about how you really navigated that versus getting stuck like a lot of people.
Dave Olsen [00:10:08]:
It is a quick timeline to run down those many years, but it was really 10 years of figuring it out. Ten years going from that full time job is probably two years before I started fractionally, you know, eight years of realizing that I had some kind of business. And really part of what held me back was going to part time offshore people. It's just like I didn't have the vision or the confidence to, you know, commit to a full time us person and kind of put their livelihood my in my hands. So yeah, it took me a long time, many years and especially it was 2015 when I really started building an offshore team and to 2017 I started to see, see a path for it. A lot of factors that went into it. One was I met an executive coach who became an accounting client in 2017. It's just part of who he is and what he does.
Dave Olsen [00:10:54]:
He started asking me about my business and my goals. And it was mid-2017, and I'd really been wrestling with the idea that I think I've got something here. But, like, what does it look like to. To scale it, to take that risk, Take, like I said, people's lives in my hands or livelihoods. But I also looked at my lifestyle, too. My kids were 14, 12, and 10. I think at that time frame, I had pretty good schedule, making good money. And it's funny how, you know, on paper, it was perfect.
Dave Olsen [00:11:22]:
Like, didn't have to work a ton making good money, but I just didn't quite feel fulfilled. I just felt called to do something more. If I thought doing more meant taking more risk, it meant giving up lifestyle. I mean, working, like, crazy hours. And so I met with this executive coach. He started asking me about it, and I told him that dilemma. Like, I feel called to build something bigger, but I don't want to give up my lifestyle. And he asked me the question that really hit me hard, in simple words, but just.
Dave Olsen [00:11:49]:
I was ready to hear it, I guess. And he said, why can't you have both? We talked more, and he helped me kind of see the path to doing that just in that one conversation. And then we. We're still working together now, and he's really helped me think a lot bigger than. Than I was at the time. We talked about the surface area block and being in action and watching, but it's really taken a really big network of people like him. Like the early team that came on, my offshore team that we've built since then, the landscape and the technology and the software, all these things kind of came together to make it possible. So that's really what kind of having a coach, having somebody on the outside encouraging me is what gave me that first little boost to see something more than just my own solo company.
Matt Tait [00:12:30]:
You know, I think you hit on something that. That's so important that few people really intentionally think through, and that's investing in yourself. You know, that coach is an investment in yourself to take some time and say, hey, I'm gonna. I'm gonna pay somebody. I'm gonna invest in. In that. And yet, getting out of our own echo chamber. Every company is an echo chamber when it's just us, that echo chamber is just between the four walls of our head. And. And it's Very small and can sometimes be a little scary. When your company grows, it's your company and having a coach, having a peer group, having a community of people helps you to see other perspectives and expand yourself in ways that you never would when you just kind of stay within your own kind of company or your own headspace. And I think that's so important for people to kind of internalize.
Dave Olsen [00:13:17]:
That was a big jump for me and just big jump in mindset. I'm just being pretty conservative financial guy I had always thought, done a lot to learn, read a ton of books, listened to podcasts. I was podcasting before anybody knew about podcasting or listening to podcasts. I'd never really spent any money than more than just like buying a book. And when I met this executive coach, the first step, the first, what I felt like is a huge step is he, he has a leadership course that he puts on and it's, you know, several thousand to attend. Yeah. And just way more than I'd ever even contemplated spending on working on myself. But I justified it because a few months of his fee would, you know, cover the course.
Dave Olsen [00:13:54]:
I thought, well, if nothing else, at least, you know, it's a trade. Having, having the client, but going to that, making that investment. It really just, it blew my mind. And it really kicked off the journey of, you know, paying a lot of money for mastermind groups, peer groups, one on one coaching, all that and it's, you know, paid off big time.
Matt Tait [00:14:10]:
I don't know if you found this, but sometimes with peer groups or coaches and, and I've got a coach in a couple of peer groups, not all of them work, but investing to keep finding until you find the one that does or the two that do whatever you need to is so important. And I feel like so many people, they try one, it doesn't work and then they say, well, this will never work.
Dave Olsen [00:14:33]:
It takes some searching to find one that works. And they work for different seasons too. You can be in one that works great for a while and then if it's not serving you anymore, there's no reason to keep going. You keep searching. And there's been many of these types of groups, some kind of more organic peer groups, more structured, but things like the accounting salon. I joined the that and I remember it was 2018 or 2019 and that was a, a big thing. Early on, to start learning from others who are doing similar things and just meeting people like you and other, other fellow company owners has been, you know, super helpful.
Matt Tait [00:15:01]:
As you talked about your journey, one of the other things that. Well, I guess two things that you hit on that I think are so important, and particularly as people think about growing their own firm, their own practice, their own company, you hit on technology and outsourcing or offshoring. And I want to kind of unpack both of those, starting with the first, the team in India and then the team in the Philippines. Because you and I both absolutely love having teams in the Philippines. And I'm guessing in your company, it's the same as mine, where we treat them as equals. They're exactly the same as the team in the US and we train them the same, we work with them the same, and we expect our teams to act like they are the same. And yet I don't see that play out all the time or even often with a lot of other companies in the space. And talk about how important it's been for your company to grow and continue to grow, and also how you've really treated the training and culture and how that's been a benefit.
Dave Olsen [00:16:03]:
It's a huge thing. It was still not perfect, but it wasn't always great either. Like, when I first started, I had a lot to learn about how do I, you know, how do I work with different cultures and different time zones and all those things? So I probably spent, you know, a few years in that early times. It was working, working well enough for me to keep going, but I wasn't as effective as I could have been in actually building a relationship and spend a lot of time with them. It was more, you know, we assigned tasks and we had kind of documentation for tasks, and I. I look back and I see the cost of that. I could have, you know, had much more fulfillment and much more performance in the team if I had been more. More intentional about that.
Dave Olsen [00:16:35]:
So really, once we started scaling in 2018, that became a, you know, big intention is to really integrate the teams. As I hired a US Team and to build a Philippines team at the same time is to really, like you said, not treat them any different. Whether they're sitting in Florida across the country for me, or whether they're sitting across the world, it really doesn't matter. They're a human being. They have their hopes and dreams and their goals and their personal challenges and everything that goes on. Like, we're all. We're all really the same, and to treat everybody in that way. And a lot of the things I learned about that process, we've iterated a lot in, you know, how do we structure it? Do we have a leadership structure? Where we have say people in the US directly supervising someone in the Philippines.
Dave Olsen [00:17:15]:
And what we've landed on right now is kind of a dual structure where it is important to have people on the ground. We have two offices in the Philippines and a few remote people, but mostly in the offices. And so to have people in the offices who understand the culture, who are, you know, know, part of the culture and can be right there to mentor and, and train and that is a, is a huge benefit. But then to also have the mentorship and the training and the relationship with our US Team as well. So it took a while to kind of dial in that, that dual structure, but it's, it's working really well. And yeah, just integrating them and, and help helping everybody just feel part of the team. There's one thing, the part of the Filipino culture is they really love being and generalizing, of course. But my experience with our team is they just love being part of something bigger.
Dave Olsen [00:17:59]:
They want like to see the vision of where the company's going. They have a lot of respect for the U.S. and North America and just love to be, love to be part of that and to the more we can integrate them into that and have them either join or view our all hands meetings and those kind of things really builds a lot of excitement in the kind of the energy in the culture.
Matt Tait [00:18:17]:
Well, one thing you talked about that I think is underdeveloped in a lot of companies and firms is you talked about documentation. And I think that in general I see other accounting firms and companies in the space where documentation, clear documentation of a client, what the client needs, what standard processes are, it's almost that people expect it to be absorbed through osmosis rather than carefully documented and iterated on too talk about how that documentation has proven to be. I'm guessing one of the secret sauces to scaling both in the US as well as together with the Philippines.
Dave Olsen [00:18:54]:
It's always been really important to me to document what I do. Even if it was just, just me, if I document what I do, I don't have to figure it out again or remember what I did the next time. So it just, it was, for me it was all about efficiency. And so because I had that in place for myself when I started integrating offshore team members, then it was just simply a matter of, you know, making sure it was clear and understandable to someone else and plugging them into that. So it really didn't take a whole lot of training. It was just here's the documentation. Follow these steps and we'll Kind of train on the job as you have questions. That's been key that we build that foundation and it's been key all along to have that clear step-by-step.
Dave Olsen [00:19:28]:
And that's really ingrained. We're definitely not perfect at it, especially as we scale. It takes some work to stay on top of it and have everybody be consistent in how they, how they operate. But it is something we attempt to instill in our culture is just document everything. And again it's not perfect, but the idea is that somebody in short notice has to is not available for whatever reason, somebody else can step in and take over a client.
Matt Tait [00:19:50]:
And the weakest all of us are is when there's a transition of a point of contact, we lose an employee, somebody even gets promoted. Like that's the weakest you are in your client relationship because of the relationship transfer, the knowledge transfer and the better documentation you have, the easier that is. It's still the weakest you'll ever be but I find it to be so important.
Dave Olsen [00:20:10]:
Yeah, that's one thing we instill in our team or attempt to is to build yourself out of a job. And it can be seen as kind of a scarcity fear thing where if I'm not needed anymore then I could be let go. But it's no, it's the only way you can progress. Like we can't promote you unless we have a way to fill your position you're doing now. So if you can build yourself out of a job, have good documentation, then that's what enables a progression.
Matt Tait [00:20:32]:
It takes the burden away. Right now you and I are recording this during busy season for tax time. I'm wearing my ramp hat that says keep calm and tax on which is irony because I can't do taxes nor do I feel the busy season. But when you have good documentation, when you create a team that can share that knowledge through documentation, you also share the burdens and you take the power away from a lot of busy season because you don't have that one person has to do one thing but you can have a team accomplishing a group of tasks much easier too.
Dave Olsen [00:21:05]:
Yeah, it's also that delegation funnel. You want people only handling what only they can handle and everything else you delegate down. So you know our controllers are only handle what controller stuff can do and then they push everything they can to our managers and managers only do that piece of what only they can do and they delegate the rest to our Philippines team. I mean there's lots of benefits to doing that but one is it just gives Everybody the chance to step up and grow.
Matt Tait [00:21:25]:
You mentioned how important it is and not just for your Philippines team, but both teams to see the vision of where you're going as a company. I always talk about vision as one of three legs to a stool. It's vision, values and mission. And I'm guessing you guys have the same. So share with us your mission and values too.
Dave Olsen [00:21:46]:
We look at it in terms of our core virtues, actually. And it's a term coined by Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz. You can look at its equivalent. But it really hit me when he talked about in one of his books that virtues are really we embody. It's not just something we value, but something we really embody. So we call them core virtues. At Nimbl, we have six of those. Integrity being our first one.
Dave Olsen [00:22:06]:
Six of those that really embody who we strive to be. And then we have our purpose, our mission, our vision is how we separate it out. And our purpose is really to provide freedom, freedom for our clients and also freedom for our team. And we intentionally leave it at that, to leave that freedom open to interpretation because we want to discover what does freedom mean to a given client. We're not going to dictate what freedom means to you. We're going to discover what kind of freedom do you want and how can we help provide that. And same thing for our team. Every one of our team members is going to be different.
Dave Olsen [00:22:35]:
That could mean freedom from a full time work schedule. They just want to work part time, they want to take care of their families and they perform really well in the part time. That's what freedom looks like some means. Freedom to really work hard and progress as fast as they can in their career. So we look to discover with our clients and our team, what does freedom look like for you and how can Nimbl deal around that? That's our purpose, you know, our mission, the wording in front of me, but essentially to enable that, that freedom for our clients and team, specifically in the, for the back office services. So accounting, staffing, it, all those services we provide and then our vision is to really set the standard for that. To really do it differently, not be the same old CPA firm, but really to set the standard of a new way of working that really disrupts the, the accounting and the back office industry.
Matt Tait [00:23:21]:
All right, you just dropped the term I was waiting for when this was going to happen in our conversation, but you just used the pejorative term that neither you or I like. You called yourself a firm.
Dave Olsen [00:23:32]:
Oh, did I, did I mess up there?
Matt Tait [00:23:33]:
You did. You called yourself a firm. Why is it so important? And I'll, I'll hop on my soapbox after you hop on yours that you and I don't run firms, we run companies.
Dave Olsen [00:23:44]:
Yep. Sometimes we do serve the accounting industry with our staffing and our IT businesses. So we refer to our clients as firms, but we are definitely a company. Yeah. And that it really comes from partly coming from outside the industry. I not don't have the traditional background in CPA firms, but yeah, I intentionally built Nimbl as a company with a corporate structure. Not necessarily a corporate legal structure, but a corporate organizational structure. I had no interest in a partnership model.
Dave Olsen [00:24:12]:
You know, I act as the CEO, my co-founder is the president, and then we have our VPs and directors and that kind of corporate organization. And so we definitely identify as a company, not as a firm.
Matt Tait [00:24:25]:
My first career was as a lawyer. So I saw the same kind of structure play out in law firms that I did accounting firms. And I had companies that sold into law firms and accounting firms. And I just noticed that as you build a firm, you have decision making distributed. You could have a firm leadership make a decision that says, hey, we're going to do this. Then you had to go sell each individual partner and then you had to sell the people that work for them. In a corporate structure, we can move and we can pivot and we can adopt new technologies because leadership says itself and you have to engender trust going both ways. But it provides a corporate structure where I actually think you can pay people more, you can give greater benefits, you can adapt to changing technology or changing market conditions much, much faster when you have that kind of corporate structure, which we have the exact same thing. We have a CEO, we have a board on top, but we have a CEO, we have a coo, we've got our vice presidents, our managers and team leads. I find that corporate structure allows for that.
Dave Olsen [00:25:31]:
Yeah, and I think it also allows for specialization as well. Often in the partnership structure, the partners are the top level leaders of any function and they're, they may hire specialists, a marketing specialist or whatever, but really they're ultimately responsible for a function. And with our corporate structure, like our sales leader is from outside the industry, our marketing leaders from the outside the industry, they own that, that function. We don't have partners owning the sales and marketing and the HR and all that.
Matt Tait [00:25:58]:
I like to get people focused on core competencies. And if your core competency is to run a very specific industry vertical for us it could be family offices. I want you to run that, but I want another person with a core competency to sell into that. I want you to work together, but I want that core competency to break out. You look and you get an understanding of, hey, your core competency is client relationships and final quality. And it's your delegation funnel played out too, where it's great. The person under you, their core competency is, is learning how to do the work, is learning how to maybe do the technology. Consulting is all of these layers behind you build that pyramid structure of work that allows for you to build a good, I think, good culture, a good ability for people to move and improve, but then you also build a good economic structure that allows you to effectively scale and grow.
Matt Tait [00:26:52]:
So one of the other things, and I'm going to circle back to the second thing of technology here in a little bit, but before we do that, there's always been something that has kind of struck me about you that I think is so important for other people to hear about. You take a sales first approach. You've grown your business by selling. And I think when I see so many people start their own firm or run their own firm, two of the things that they really struggle at, one we addressed, which is how do I go from being the kind of I started a job for myself to now I'm running a company. But the second thing is, and we see this with service providers, accountants, I think are really big in having this problem, is thinking about sales as something that's scary and hard to do. And you have a very introverted personality. You're not a very outgoing, loud person, and yet you've been very successful in selling and taking that sales first mentality and approach. How did you adapt and develop into that at the beginning and as you decided to grow Nimbl?
Dave Olsen [00:28:02]:
Yeah, it's been a very interesting evolution, I think back 20 years or so. One reason I didn't want to continue in the Big Four or any kind of CPA firm track is my perception was that to become a partner, you had to be good at selling. And I thought, I never want to sell. Not a good salesperson, so I'm not going to stay in.
Matt Tait [00:28:19]:
Yeah. How'd that work out?
Dave Olsen [00:28:21]:
Yeah, I mean, that was just one of. One of the many factors, so. And that was part of the. The slow path that I had, I guess too is I still didn't see myself as a salesperson. It was take on one big client every few months and it was always by word of mouth. I wasn't outselling. I wasn't marketing. It was just got a referral and I'll take it on.
Dave Olsen [00:28:37]:
So it's a very slow. And I mentioned that venture capital fund and the portfolio companies. It wasn't selling. It was just do a good job for one company and they'd refer someone else. So it was really a word of mouth thing for the first quite a few years. But then once I started branching outside of that, I had kind of like a core family of companies, similar investors. Once I started branching outside of that, again, it came from referrals. But every time I got a referral, I didn't even think of myself as a sales conversation.
Dave Olsen [00:29:02]:
I'd contact the referral, I'd set up a meeting, I'd go talk to about what I do. I'd, you know, figure out a price and exactly the scope and, and then they, they'd agree and we'd go forward. And I did that a few times before I realized that was actually selling. So the transition again wasn't intentionally strategic. It was just realizing that sales is really just being confident about what you do, but passionate about what you do and being able to be competent in first of all explaining it and then also being able to deliver on it. And so when I had that realization, it really opened my eyes to, yeah, I can sell. I don't need to be a flashy, charismatic, stereotypical salesperson. I can just be confident and talk clearly about what I do.
Dave Olsen [00:29:39]:
So all the revenue I had as a solo operator and then our first about a million and a half in building Nimbl was pretty much 100% me selling that and then early on. So again, intentionally building on corporate structure, intending to scale and also recognizing from working with other companies, seeing what that messy middle of growing looks like. I know you talk about that a lot where you. That million mark tends to be kind of the, the tipping point of that messiness of when you're big enough, you need help, but not necessarily able to afford much. So I was intentional about going as fast as I could from that 1 million to the point where I could forward a leadership team and start hiring specialists to handle different functions. So one of the first specialists we did hire was a sales director. And that was December 2020, I think. So almost three years in, we hired full time sales rep or sales director.
Dave Olsen [00:30:27]:
And so we've had a separate sales and marketing team since then. And that's been a huge part of, of selling and a huge part of scaling. And part of that is, is recognizing too that you Know, conservative approach when I was solo and going slow is, you know, I can figure it out and then I'll be confident about selling. But I realized the best way to figure it out is to start selling and get people in. And yeah, we're going to make mistakes. We have some churn. We've lost some great clients because of not having perfect systems. The only way we can dial it in is to keep having people come in the door and learn from iterating on that.
Matt Tait [00:31:01]:
When we talk sales a lot. And I did the same thing. I sold the first million or two and then we hired out a sales team and I've iterated on that too. But one of the things I like to train into sales staff and really talk about is you never actually sell it. The consultative journey of what we do starts in the sales process. It's just an extension of what you've always wanted to do. You are just working towards that relationship and if you view it as the entire time you are there to listen and advise it makes selling seem less intimidating. I think sometimes it also takes away like business owners are sold to all the time and so they know the difference immediately.
Matt Tait [00:31:46]:
Like the smell test on somebody that is actively selling them crap is very easy versus the other person that comes in authentically just listening and advising. And that I find to be a much, a much clearer and a much better sales process.
Dave Olsen [00:32:02]:
Yeah, especially the nature of our work. We're not selling a one time thing. We're not just engaging in any transaction. This is the beginning of hopefully the many multi year relationship. Yes, it's a very, you know, different kind of process and part of our journey also has been how do we take a non accounting salesperson, how do we have them talk competently and confidently in, in the beginnings of that journey in a way that gives a client enough confidence that we know what we're doing but doesn't require an accountant to be be having that discussion. And it's not to say that we've nailed it, but I think we've done a pretty good job of productizing what we do and so that they don't have to have the deep years of knowledge to interpret what the client's saying and translate that to what we can do. We just have a product library and here's what we can, here's what we can offer, here's a starting point and it's complex. We can bring in one of our controllers or somebody more technical to get in some of the details but we can still have a non technical person building that relationship and running the process well.
Matt Tait [00:32:57]:
And I don't know about you, but we found that it's easier to teach people how to sell than it is price. Pricing is much harder to do because you can adequately productize pricing for certain levels of clients. Sometimes you have to have controls kind of around that, and.
Dave Olsen [00:33:11]:
Yeah, part of that, that process for us has been creating workability between our sales team and our delivery team. Because when you're doing that, when you're finger in the wind like you're going to mess up sometimes, sometimes you're going to nail it. You're going to have a great margin the client's still happy with because they're, they're loving the value. And sometimes we're just going to flop and the service team is going to be like, yeah, we're losing money on this and the client's not willing to pay more. We look at it in terms of a portfolio. Like if we keep a scalable sales process, we don't stress too much about getting it perfect in the beginning. One out of ten gets messed up. Well, that's better than losing out on opportunities because we're going too slow.
Dave Olsen [00:33:50]:
And so just create the understanding both ways that nobody's going to be fired or penalized because we didn't get this one right. We'll just keep iterating and getting better at that process.
Matt Tait [00:33:59]:
So I noticed today you posted about failure and we've kind of been talking about this a lot. And it's something that I feel very strongly about is building a culture that accepts failure. To me, it's. Failure is a building block to success. I'll talk pretty frequently. We have all hands coming up this Friday. Part of it, I'm going to talk about my recent failures. I find that if I normalize how much I screw up and been married for almost 15 years, my wife will tell you it's frequently that it makes it okay when my teen does.
Matt Tait [00:34:28]:
And it sounds like you have a very similar kind of mindset and culture.
Dave Olsen [00:34:31]:
I think I wrote in my post that if I look back at truly how I would define failure, like a catastrophic big issue, like I can't think of anything that really happened. I'd made mistakes and gone the wrong direction and gone a lot slower, whatever. But they've all been, like you said, building blocks on, on the future. So I don't, I don't see anything as failure. I see it just as a building block. And it's not to say that, you know, every person is going to work out Too. Like we're not going to fire someone for making a mistake or improving. But sometimes somebody's not a fit and that's not a failure either.
Dave Olsen [00:35:03]:
It's the sooner you can find that misalignment and, you know, find better alignment somewhere else. That's not a failure. That's just moving their career, moving our business forward. So there's just a lot of different angles and a lot of ways to look at. It's easy to judge our decisions based on what we know today, but if we look at our decision process at the time, like, it's not like we're trying to make a mistake. We did the best we could based on the information we had.
Matt Tait [00:35:25]:
I always view it as lessons. Some of the lessons are cheap, some are very expensive to learn. And I remember all of them. Think about the expensive ones maybe a little bit more frequently.
Dave Olsen [00:35:35]:
A little more painful sometimes, but.
Matt Tait [00:35:37]:
Yeah, I also like to joke about them too. Those are fine. Are the best ones for a dinner conversation with friends is, gosh, you wouldn't believe how much money I just lost doing this.
Dave Olsen [00:35:46]:
They make the best stories.
Matt Tait [00:35:48]:
And we live in a very boring business that doesn't have a lot of great stories. So those have a tendency to be the only things that I can pull out in a room of friends who aren't accountants.
Dave Olsen [00:35:57]:
Only way to keep them entertained.
Matt Tait [00:36:00]:
Right. One of the things that I think has been really cool about how you've built Nimbl and it's been a big recent push for you guys. Recent. In the last four or five years, you've diversified out as you've looked at growth of Nimbl. It isn't just the verticalized kind of bookkeeping, controllership, advisory. You've also expanded horizontally. Talk about how you've kind of looked at expanding your footprint, building your brand and business outside of just the pure accounting side.
Dave Olsen [00:36:30]:
Yeah, we want to be the full back office for small businesses and small, you know, 1 to 10 million is our, our target market. And business owners don't really. They don't want to be thinking a lot about the back office. They don't want to have multiple vendors, service providers. And so we just want to be that one contact. That one leader of the back office will handle it for you. And it really lends itself well because we need those back office services too with Nimbl. And so if we can build it really well internally and then take what we learned internally and we're on the, you know, 6 million revenue right now.
Dave Olsen [00:37:00]:
So we're in that same journey that our client-base is in, so we can really relate with them on Here's a service that works for us and we can translate that to what they need. So natural one was as we built our offshore team and this was really started in 2017, I believe was our first kind of outside client. We built the infrastructure for our offshore team in the Philippines. Other firms, other companies were looking at what we're doing and say just for a few people, I don't want to build this whole infrastructure myself. Can you just hire someone for me from your office and let them sit there? And so I saw that kind of as a favorite of friends, Catching Clouds. Scott and Patty Scharf were one of our first clients. They just wanted a few people and we helped them out by, by placing some people with them in our office. And then kind of like the slow growth of my CFO practice, I gradually realized this is a business so it really lasts probably two or three years.
Dave Olsen [00:37:47]:
We really doubled down on growing that business beyond just kind of the scene as a side thing three or four years ago as we were really beginning to expand and our security is becoming more important as we get more remote team members. And it wasn't working to have them use their own laptops and not have some of the basic security things. So we looked outside for an outsourced provider, but we just couldn't find one that was cost effective and also gave us everything we wanted. There's those out there who would say monitor a device, but they wouldn't provide access, support or there's just a lot of things that we'd still have to have some kind of internal IT capability anyway. So we thought we might as well just build it. So we built a team and then incredible leader Nathan and decided about six months ago to spin that out to offer that to other accounting companies as our first kind of demographic that really started taking off. And we've got some really good traction with that business. So we provide the service we wish we had had three or four years ago at a reasonable cost as far as the device management and security monitoring, phishing training, access controls, all those kinds of things.
Matt Tait [00:38:50]:
So what's next? PEO, HR. banking? What's the next step?
Dave Olsen [00:38:55]:
I think the, the big thing we're missing right now as far as the, the standard back office is the HR compliance piece of it. We do payroll, but not the, not the HR. One thing we've, we've built internally really well is, you know, HR compliance for, you know, remote multi state company, which isn't, isn't trivial We've also been very intentional about our people experience as well, and not just the HR compliance, but also create an experience for our team that attracts and retains the best people. So I think that's probably our least. One of our next opportunities is to, you know, offer that externally in some way. We haven't figured out exactly when or how we'll do that.
Matt Tait [00:39:29]:
So one of the hottest topics that we've not talked a ton about is technology and like AI in the space and we talked about IT and infrastructure. But how do you guys look at. And you've been ahead of the curve for the history of Nimbl in terms of technology adoption. And the cloud was a massive technology leap forward. And I would argue that AI is going to be an even bigger one whatever timeline it hits. And I think we're at the very beginning stages. But how do you guys kind of look at implementing artificial intelligence and implementing it to your offerings, to your team, to your workflows? What's your theory on it?
Dave Olsen [00:40:12]:
Yeah, I feel similarly to you about the change that's coming. I think it is as big or bigger than the cloud. What I don't know yet is what's that going to look like, who are the winners going to be and how long it's going to take? I would say up until probably one or two months ago, it felt kind of nebulous to me. In the accounting, specific applications, there's a lot of hype, marketing about what's coming, people developing offerings. You know, we were both at Intuit Connect. I had several meetings with people developing companies, developing products, but nothing that really like grabbed me. Like, you know, this is something that's really going to be a game changer, maybe eventually, but it's not there yet. And so I've been more in the waiting mode.
Dave Olsen [00:40:50]:
Just in the last month or two, I've seen something's shifting and I think we need to be closer to it. So what we've done just as a first step is to roll out chat GPT teams through to most of our team, at least to our leadership team and our next level of leadership with no specific agenda other than every day, everything you do think of how can I use AI for this? And then all of our team meetings have a standing agenda item for AI, an AI discussion, like, what did you learn last week from AI? Are other things that we learned that would be worth rolling out to the whole team or are we just kind of playing with it for now? That's where I've seen the biggest, I guess opportunity Just right now is just experimenting with it, starting with myself like even before in the last month or two. I've been using it for months and really since it came out, just everything I could think of and the more, the more disciplined I get about not doing almost anything without at least thinking about can I run this through AI in some way? Just the efficiencies and the insights and just you know, are mind blowing. So, so that's I guess our first step is getting our kind of feet wet, getting our those muscles exercised of using it and seeing if anything really bubbles up as something that is worth the overhead of rolling out to a big team. What I'm not seeing, still not seeing, is compelling accounting application. Whether it be an automation categorization layer on top of QuickBooks or Xero or just a whole new ledger. I know they're out there. There's things like puzzle and Campfire and several like digits has a layer on coming out and I think their own ledger too.
Dave Olsen [00:42:20]:
There's a lot of things coming. Had a conversation this past week with someone who's looking to build and they appear pretty credible Building an actual staff accountant agent. I'm intrigued and I want to stay close to it. But again I'm not seeing anything that I'm going to drop everything or pay a lot to roll out to the whole team, yeah.
Matt Tait [00:42:39]:
We're a couple of steps ahead, but we had a different circumstance that gave us that opportunity. But I kind of view it the same way for us. Having the Spark acquisition that brought in a bunch of kind of smaller below our ICP level. Cash basis counts gave us the opportunity to go test and we chose Puzzle. We looked at a few of them and we moved a little over 200 clients over there. And I will say I'm very pleased with it thus far. It's a very narrow ICP that is probably nowhere near your icp. And as the product grows I would look at it but I'm kind of with you on the accounting specific application so far.
Matt Tait [00:43:15]:
But then I'm also testing like my new favorite is Granola. It is a note taking app and it listens to our conversations and then it will create a synopsis and I can put in a note that says hey, this is really important this topic. And then it integrates into my notion notes so it helps me to kind of store things and I can ask questions in my whole notes database. And our team is testing a bunch. We're building a few agents right now which will be interesting, but I'm getting the sense from the looking at the skies that the winds are about to change and it's pretty close. It'll just be interesting. I'm interested in the theory behind a lot of these companies too. Some of them are the we want to work with accountants and make accountants the hero along with AI.
Matt Tait [00:43:58]:
Others are we're going to replace accountants. And so I'm interested to see kind of which one of those narratives, as well as technologies, plays out better.
Dave Olsen [00:44:07]:
Yeah, I think a big unknown in AI in general, and including accounting specifically, is what does the interface look like? Is it AI on the traditional graphical interface, or is it a whole different way of, kind of a whole different paradigm of how we interact and that's part of the discovery that's going to happen over the next few months or years?
Matt Tait [00:44:23]:
Well, you made a statement earlier in the podcast that I think will always ring true. Businesses don't really like or care about this area of their business, and we have to start and end with knowing that that will probably never change. It's amazing how to me how many businesses are what I would call just bank account businesses. They think about their business in terms of what's in their bank account, what they know is going to leave, what they know is coming in. And it's not just like 1 to 2 million. It can be a 30, 40 million company that's kind of running in their owner's head like a bank account business. And that mentality is important to keep in mind.
Dave Olsen [00:44:58]:
Yeah, the mentality of I just need my books done so I can get my tax return done. They're not necessarily using that day to day on month to month on making decisions 100%.
Matt Tait [00:45:07]:
So Dave, as we wrap this up, I'm interested to me, a lot of how we've built our companies is very similar. And we're entering a phase where I just posted today that I feel like starting your own firm has become simultaneously easier and harder in today's world. What advice would you give for people that are kind of looking to start their own firm today? And navigating the thought process of how am I going to build myself out of a job into running a company or actually doing sales, or how do I build this into the lifestyle that I want? What advice would you give to people in the current environment?
Dave Olsen [00:45:48]:
Doing it is super easy and never been easier. Like you can go out on your own and you can set it up and you can start handling clients tomorrow, but actually attracting clients, actually having the credibility and getting people's attention and actually building that enough Scale to first of all replace your job and then be able to build from there is. It's becoming more challenging. Part of that's just for that reason it's so easy to start. Everybody's starting and everybody's catching on to, yes, this can be a great lifestyle business, you can make a lot of money with it. But just becoming more and more noise in the industry. I think that combined with offshoring and with technology again, is kind of a double edged sword as well. Like it, you know, enables so much scale and margin and that kind of thing, but at the same time it creates a lot of noise and commoditization and, and that, so.
Dave Olsen [00:46:34]:
I think just being aware of all those dynamics, not thinking that you can just, you know, hang out your shingle and all of a sudden replace your double your salary and then grow from there, it can be a challenge. I'd say first is to ease into it. If you don't have kind of a built in pipeline and then I think this is kind of cliche, but I think it's accurate, especially when you're smaller and starting to have a really clear niche. That's probably somewhere that I made the mistake of is I wanted to help everyone and I didn't. I wasn't really skilled, even though I, you know, I learned to sell in the conversation. I wasn't skilled at, you know, marketing and going after a certain niche and getting lead flow. And so I just kind of took whatever came in. But if I was to do it over again, I would really double down more on a specific niche and just really get to know that industry, get to know people, get to know conferences and really focus on a certain expertise rather than going too broad.
Matt Tait [00:47:22]:
Dave, I really appreciate you joining us today and taking the time to talk. Thank you.
Dave Olsen [00:47:27]:
Great to talk to you.
Matt Tait [00:47:28]:
That's After the First Million.
Matt Tait [00:47:33]:
All right, for today's takeaways from Dave Olsen's interview. And After the First Million, I am excited. As you all know, I firmly believe that growth After the First Million is about more than just revenue. It's about building something that can last. Dave's story is quite frankly a masterclass in moving from being a solopreneur a of having a job to being a real CEO. And here are some of my takeaways from my conversation with Dave. I mean, first and foremost, talk about just an amazing human being. Dave is a great person to emulate not only as a CEO in the space of accounting, but also just somebody that has balanced life with work.
Matt Tait [00:48:14]:
So first, when I Think about Dave's takeaways. I think about how scale doesn't happen by accident, but it also doesn't always have to follow a master plan. You know, Dave, when he talked, he really didn't have a detailed roadmap for when he left the Big Four and was starting to see his own problems. But first as a CFO, then as a fractional CFO, and eventually as a founder of Nimbl, he really took and saw opportunities as they presented themselves. But it was that openness to opportunity that was the big difference. And what also made a difference beyond just seeing that opportunity was taking action. So many people failed to see the opportunity and then so many others failed to take action, but also seeing the opportunity, taking action and then building the structure to support growth. For Dave, that meant offshoring, it meant documentation, it meant systems, it meant technology, and then eventually it meant a leadership team he could trust.
Matt Tait [00:49:10]:
So just remember, scale doesn't happen by accident, but it also doesn't always follow a master plan. Second, building a company is very, very different than running a firm. Dave talks about how intentional he was in not calling Nimbl a firm, which is something I firmly believe in and we do it decimal. He built a company with a CEO, now a president, vice president and specialists. That corporate structure gave him a better ability to scale, promote, delegate, grow his team. His approach was treat offshoring as a people first investment. Build documentation like your business depends on it and let your team grow by giving them the tools and freedom to succeed, trust them to grow. That corporate structure versus building into the old school traditional firm is one of the keys, I think, as Dave would tell you, to their growth at Nimbl.
Matt Tait [00:50:06]:
Finally, and this is really cool to hear from him, sales is not about personality, it's about confidence in what you do. When you meet Dave, he doesn't fit the stereotype of a sales guy or a sales bro, but he sold the first million and a half of revenue himself. His mindset is being confident in how you can help taking that consultative approach. And that approach that Dave has has really affected how he's built Nimbl sales processes. And it's about authentic conversations, clarity around services, and a focus on truly solving real problems. So number one, scale doesn't happen by accident, but it doesn't always follow a master plan. Number two, building a company is very different than running a firm. Three, and finally, sales is not about personality, but it's about confidence in what you do, whether it's offshoring, AI sales or building a culture.
Matt Tait [00:51:01]:
I really think that Dave's story is a great reminder that growth comes when you start running your business like a business, and that means having a vision, building systems and investing in people. This episode was just jam packed with really practical day to day lessons and I hope you'll listen for more. Thank you.
Matt Tait [00:51:22]:
Thanks so much for listening. After the First Million is presented by Decimal. To listen to more episodes and find tips to help make running a business easier, visit decimal.com/afm. Want to join the conversation? Reach out to me on LinkedIn and let's explore the messy middle.