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Matthew May is the VP of Sales & Marketing at Acuity, a virtual accounting solution for entrepreneurs. In this episode, Matthew and Stuart discuss how important it is to have a partner and mutual support in both rewarding and challenging times. They also talk about how Acuity has transformed throughout the years and the main challenges of a company's growth. Tune in for this inspirational discussion that dives deep into the challenges of partnership and leadership.
Join Stuart McLeod as he interviews the world's top accounting leaders to understand their story, how they operate, their goals, mission, and top advice to help you run your accounting firm.
Stuart McLeod 00:00:06.188 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 Matthew May, founder and VP of sales and marketing at Acuity, a virtual accounting solution for entrepreneurs. One of Matthew's strengths is navigating tax and accounting rules and translating them from accounting language to entrepreneur language. He's a volunteer in the Georgia technology community and part of the board of the Atlanta Technology Angels. It's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, Matthew May.
Matthew May 00:00:46.105 Hey, Stuart. How are you today?
Stuart McLeod 00:00:47.283 Good. Thanks, Matthew. Nice to see you.
Matthew May 00:00:48.770 Nothing. We're doing our first million-dollar month this month. So we're really--
Stuart McLeod 00:00:52.854 There you go. There you go.
Matthew May 00:00:53.708 That doesn't suck.
Stuart McLeod 00:00:56.603 That doesn't suck. In terms of recurring-- how do you class your revenue? Recurring revenue?
Matthew May 00:01:03.105 No, that was just a gross revenue, the overall revenue.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:05.517 Gross. Yeah.
Matthew May 00:01:06.167 But so it's relatively recurring though, so it's good.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:10.879 Until you fire them, right?
Matthew May 00:01:14.273 Yeah, so it's great, so.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:16.639 And Kenji said you got about 130-odd staff now.
Matthew May 00:01:20.969 It's 150 right now.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:22.210 There you go. We're playing who-can-hire-more-people.
Matthew May 00:01:28.075 We were pacing at five a month last year, I think is what we did. One a week.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:32.651 Yeah. And so you're still pretty steady on that?
Matthew May 00:01:36.889 Pretty steady. So between turnover and growth.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:41.684 Yeah, yeah. And he said all remote, more or less.
Matthew May 00:01:46.745 Yeah. Oh yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:48.168 Yeah. And how have you been? How's the family? How's Atlanta?
Matthew May 00:01:53.197 Been good. I got one in college now, so that's been the biggest adjustment this year.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:59.172 That's why you need your million-dollar month to pay the school fees, right?
Matthew May 00:02:05.346 [inaudible].
Stuart McLeod 00:02:08.004 And are they studying accounting in college? Have you managed to influence the uptake of accountants in university?
Matthew May 00:02:15.563 I can safely say this one will not study accounting in college.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:20.716 They're not quite built that way?
Matthew May 00:02:22.250 No, he's not built that way. My daughter might be, but yeah. He won't be studying accounting, I don't think, so.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:31.503 And Maryland, did I read that correctly? College of Maryland.
Matthew May 00:02:35.814 Yeah. University of Maryland, College Park, right outside of Washington, DC.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:39.486 Wow. Right in the thick of it.
Matthew May 00:02:42.147 Yep. Well, big city to big city, so.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:44.653 Yeah, yeah. And how long have you been in Atlanta?
Matthew May 00:02:48.015 We're about 13 years in Atlanta now.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:50.059 And the Acuity took you there, or that was just sort of--
Matthew May 00:02:54.036 No. I followed a woman. My wife's job - Laura - she ended up here. I was with Ernst & Young when we moved here. So I've only done-- Acuity, I'm on year 9, just over half of Acuity's life, I believe. So I think Kenji is on year 18.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:09.414 Right. Okay, okay. And what have you learned over those 9 years, Matthew? Give me the wisdom of your 9 years with Kenji and Acuity.
Matthew May 00:03:18.740 What have I learned about Kenji or myself?
Stuart McLeod 00:03:22.518 All of the above. All of the above, please.
Matthew May 00:03:25.413 I'm glad I did this with a business partner. That is a huge takeaway. My dad was a small business owner, but he never had a partner and he had two failed partnerships. So I actually thought that he would discourage me having a partner. And he said, "No, no, no. You need somebody to have for the highs and the lows." So that was the biggest probably single takeaway that I have from the last 9 years, is it's really helpful in both the good times and the bad to have a partner so you can share those times with them, so. And the good is as important as the bad, is the irony. The loneliest place in the world is to be a single business owner and have something incredibly successful happen, and you really can't talk to about anything. You can't really have a-- there's no celebration, there's no culmination of that. It's an interesting, weird thing that people don't realize, I think.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:17.168 Yeah, yeah. Did you play a team? Well, we'll come back to what you learned about yourself and Kenji and probably Acuity, or keep going on that line of question. But did you play team sports at college?
Matthew May 00:04:30.703 Not at college. I was a runt. So when I started college, I was 125 pounds soaking wet. So I looked much different physically. So I was a late bloomer, as they say in the States.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:42.650 As they say, yeah.
Matthew May 00:04:44.484 Yeah, so I didn't play college sports, but I was always a team sports fan. I played every sport that I could play. Soccer, basketball, baseball, anything where a 125-pound person that was 6 foot tall couldn't get snapped in half. Like football, that would be a-- I was out at football, so.
Stuart McLeod 00:05:02.158 Yeah, I can relate. I spent what you would say my senior year in high school doing exams in the ER at the local hospital, having come off second best in a pack, we say, with a [inaudible] that broke four ribs, ruptured my spleen, and punctured both lungs. That wasn't the most fun I've ever had, let me tell you that.
Matthew May 00:05:27.886 You don't advise that for other people? Like, "Hey, let's have this fun experience?"
Stuart McLeod 00:05:33.728 But the point of that question was - and I reflect on this a little bit like you do too - is business is not like team sports. You don't get to sort of go out every week and win or lose and kind of build on that experience. It's a constant. It's a forever marathon. And I find myself personally that I work best in waves. I work best in, say, seasons or quarters or whatever you want to do. And I find if I don't have a goal to sort of work towards, that is not too far out, I get a bit disillusioned. I get perhaps frustrated. And you don't get to enjoy that periodic success if you don't build your business in those waves. So there you go, there's my reflection of team sports versus business.
Matthew May 00:06:22.696 Yeah. Oh yeah, we can't handle anything farther out than quarterly. So we took forever. We've been struggling with a BHAG forever. And what's the BHAG here? What's the BHAG here? And for those listeners, a big hairy audacious goal, if you're not familiar with that term. But yeah, we finally found one. So that kind of resonates. So it's the first time we've had kind of a longer-term goal, which is really cool, so.
Stuart McLeod 00:06:46.732 What have you learned? So you learned about yourself, that a partner in business is a really valuable asset. What have you learned about Kenji? Tell me, because now we'll have to post this, but-- oh, I know we just posted the Kenji podcast. So you're going to go after that. What have you learned about Kenji in that time? And don't worry, he won't listen.
Matthew May 00:07:06.647 It's all right. I know. He knows I talk a lot of smack about him. I mean, the biggest thing, people, if you don't know Kenji, he has a huge fear of missing out. He has FOMO like nobody has ever had. I've never experienced anybody with that much FOMO in his life. So that works both ways with him. It makes him the life of the party. It makes everybody love Kenji. He always does all the things, but then he becomes accommodating, and then he wants everybody to have fun and be pleasant and stuff like that. So your weakness is just your strengths that you overdo them. That's my theory. So if you overdo that, his strength, which is everybody loves him and hanging out with them, then you get to be too soft and stuff like that, so. But the nice thing about partnerships is, he can be imperfect, I can be imperfect. And as long as we mesh and surround ourselves with people that fill in those gaps, which is what we've done with Lisa and Patty and Scott and the rest of the team, it's like they fill in a bunch of gaps. And if you're really self reflective you can-- the more self reflective you are, the better you can fill those gaps and enjoy it. It doesn't allow you to dismiss those things. That's a big mistake I see people make. You kind of still have to be aware of them and lean into some of the things and be intentional or uncomfortable a little bit for your natural stuff, or your natural proclivities, you'll say. But it's still important to fill those gaps and not kind of absolve yourselves of those things also. So it's kind of two extremes, right? You can fill the gap and say, "I'm not responsible anymore."
Stuart McLeod 00:08:33.550 Yeah. "I can continue to just be an asshole because this person is super nice." Is that what you mean?
Matthew May 00:08:42.620 Yeah. Well, that's one of the examples. Like when you have bad cops and good cops, you go, "I can still be the asshole." And that doesn't work that way. You got to fill it out and then find a way to be intentional to support that person. And also make sure that your weakness doesn't shine through and overcome that kind of plug that you put in place.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:01.621 Yeah. No, yeah. No, that's why Ian is a super nice guy at Karbon, right? Because I'm the asshole and he's just lovely.
Matthew May 00:09:11.019 Yeah. I was always the nice guy until I became partner with Kenji, and then I became the asshole all of a sudden. And it's like, I don't know how that works. I became bad cop. It's the worst thing ever. I was the nice partner at Cherry Bekaert. I was the nice guy. It was like, "Oh, everybody likes Matthew. Go do the recruiting and talk to everything and the fun stuff. You have a problem, talk to Matthew." Now it's like, "Oo-oo, Matthew." I'm the same exact guy.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:34.704 The bad guy. I can honestly say I've never had that problem. No. Nobody's ever said that about me. But I think you'd make a good recruiter on the stand there at the booth at EY's desk, and answer the questions of the grads.
Matthew May 00:09:56.345 Man, I tell you, I was all over Baylor recruiting and UT recruiting and A&M recruiting in the Texas markets. They would send me out there. I was the closer. I would get them to say yes, come work here. I would snow them over with my salesmanship, so it's like--
Stuart McLeod 00:10:13.322 That's fantastic.
Matthew May 00:10:14.388 Yeah. It's pretty funny.
Stuart McLeod 00:10:16.378 They were the days, right? And so okay. And so what have you learned about the business, Acuity, in those 9 years?
Matthew May 00:10:24.690 Growth is expensive. I mean, we took this thing from a million bucks run rate to over-- we'll be kind of somewhere around 11 this year. And the years that we grew the most were the hardest from a cash flow perspective. If you're not going to take investors, right, it's just really hard to bootstrap growth. That's really a huge thing. As a leader, the other thing, you got to develop skills that are changing all the time. The skills you need to be a leader at 10 people - when I started, it was 10 people - is way different than at 50, there's a big cliff. And at 150, it's just a totally different game. Not game, but it's a skillset needed to--
Stuart McLeod 00:11:07.012 It's a different role. It's a different role, right? You might be the same person filling that role, but it's a different skillset, a different set of objectives, a different set of requirements, a different relationship set. All of that, right?
Matthew May 00:11:20.398 Yeah. And change management is just an unbelievably important skill to learn as you scale. Communication is 90% of every problem you have. What else can I tell you?
Stuart McLeod 00:11:34.145 Yeah, no. Keep going.
Matthew May 00:11:34.674 That's the basic stuff.
Stuart McLeod 00:11:35.827 I'm taking notes. I'm taking notes, Matthew.
Matthew May 00:11:37.788 Right. I mean, you could probably say that in the technology business, I bet 90% of your problems are also technology-related. I mean, communication-related. It's all communication at the end of the day. So we're not on the same page.
Stuart McLeod 00:11:53.223 And by saying not on the same page, alignment is the most difficult thing that I find to achieve in a high-growth organization. And there are many mechanisms in order to be able to achieve that. All of them are just fucking hell.
Matthew May 00:12:08.492 Yeah, they're really hard. Yeah. I mean, I tell people-- when they say, "How did you lose - however many people - in the Great Resignation? How do you lose that?" I was like, "Well, you have to start with the realization that as my company is growing at this speed, and people's abilities are growing at 150 different speeds, and the likelihood of that becoming dis-aligned with 150 people, and I'm only growing at one pace--"
Stuart McLeod 00:12:34.073 Is 100%.
Matthew May 00:12:35.833 It's 100%. It's absolutely 100%.
Stuart McLeod 00:12:37.960 [crosstalk] dis-aligned is 100%. Fucking frustrating, isn't it?
Matthew May 00:12:42.602 I mean, I tell people, like, "Do you get upset with that?" It's like, I ask people when they say they're thinking about leaving, I ask them one question that they have to answer me, and it's like, "Is this better for your family?" That is the answer, is if they answer that question that this is better for their family, I stop. "I understand we're growing at different paces. I want you to be here. But if that's better for your family-- did you make Acuity better?" I asked everybody one thing, "You just make Acuity better when you leave than when you started, and we'll make the commitment to try to make you better when you leave than when you started," right? And then we all make the commitment to make our clients better when they leave than when they started. So that's as simple as it gets. That's my core. I try to always go back to that, those three things. If we're doing those three things all the time, we're doing something right.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:30.522 Yeah, yeah. No, that's great. So there's a couple of things I want to pick up there, right? You said growth is expensive. So you're in the middle of - I don't know - probably the-- well, you're at the forefront of the transformation of the accounting industry. So recurring revenue to treating customers and clients more like partners. The thing that I'm sure goes without saying-- I'm sure your time billing versus your fixed fee is a very low ratio. But, or and, it's-- gosh. In the technology industry, in our software business, it is relatively easy to raise capital to fund that growth. Have you seen a change of availability of capital in professional services in your model? Do you think you've managed to educate enough investors, or have you tried to educate investors, around that the models are actually similar, barring the cost of goods, compared to a technology, a software business? Do you think that that is a thing or not a thing?
Matthew May 00:14:39.789 We have tried to help educate people, and we've seen people like Pilot who we compare ourselves to or Bench raise these monies. And we were like, "If we go head-to-head--" I was like on G2 crowd the other day, and it's like Pilot, Bench, Acuity, like those were like the three comparisons that were.
Stuart McLeod 00:14:55.121 Yeah. Cool. Well done. Well done.
Matthew May 00:14:57.291 I was like those two companies, we haven't seen the same success of the market moving towards their valuations. So there's a couple of schools of thought on that. I was like, I think part of it the traditional investors in the space are anchored at the current valuations, right? But we are seeing much more private equity come into this space. So with some of the top firms now having liquidity events and carving out audit practices and tax and everything else comes through the private equity firm, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:15:30.192 Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew May 00:15:30.505 So we're seeing lots more opportunities, but I haven't seen any kind of real valuation changes in this space that are led or landmark-driven. And I've seen some of the companies that tried to follow Bench and Pilot. Like I think Ceteris is going through a leadership change now, and I'm watching them because they had a similar valuation, I think. I'm not sure what that value was, but I assume because it was Venture, it was more closer to Bench and Pilot than the private equity valuations. So we're trying to watch some of those and see what happens. But you're still seeing primarily just private equity firms buying out firms. I'm seeing people not get off that one times revenue mark.
Stuart McLeod 00:16:13.378 Yeah. [crosstalk].
Matthew May 00:16:13.430 But cash flow is different. But we'll see--
Stuart McLeod 00:16:15.753 Yeah. Cash flow is different. Margins are different. That's the biggest difference, right? The margin is never going to be 83, 84, 85 percent. That's the hardest thing.
Matthew May 00:16:27.396 No. It's not. I mean, if you can get to a 40% margin business, I think if you're counting everything, I think-- it's funny how people count stuff differently.
Stuart McLeod 00:16:36.186 Yeah. Yeah. Your accountants count stuff differently.
Matthew May 00:16:37.607 "I'm a 40% margin business, if you don't count my time and I do 90% of the work." Yeah, great. So we've been trying to get clean margins really now. Really in the last three years, trying to really clean up the margins, really understand the people doing the work, making sure their cost is fully loaded into the margins. And it's interesting. So the different service levels that we see. So we do the CFO advisory all the way down to the bookkeeping. Then we added tax a couple of years ago, and then we have a controller practice. So four practices. The margins are real different on all four for us. So it's really interesting to see. I see some of the market kind of where you can do some no-code stuff in bookkeeping and you can do some cool stuff to really get the margins up in bookkeeping. So I see why Pilot and Bench have that. But I also see them adding other services. I see them adding tax. I see Pilot have a CFO services. So they've got the same margin problems as us. So it will be fascinating to see what they do on their next rounds. And obviously venture capital raise, as I tell my clients, because we work with a lot of-- that's just setting the preference stack.
Stuart McLeod 00:17:45.502 That's true.
Matthew May 00:17:45.994 So at the end of the day, that's just a press release. If you don't take money off the table, that's just a press release and a point in time. So don't count your chickens before they hatch there.
Stuart McLeod 00:17:56.752 Or as we say in our family, "Don't count you cows." You don't want to find yourself on the bottom of the preference stack of liquidity either.
Matthew May 00:18:07.781 No, no. That was our, I mean, hesitation when Pilot and Bench were doing their things, is we think those pref stocks are pretty damn high. And if the private equity, who is typically the people that buy those VCs out, isn't coming in - their valuations aren't coming up - I don't know how they're getting out. And so it's a tough sell.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:25.371 Yeah. All that [crosstalk]. All that hard work for [inaudible] for nothing.
Matthew May 00:18:30.314 Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:32.222 Yeah. [crosstalk]--
Matthew May 00:18:32.212 Yeah. It's just interesting.
Stuart McLeod 00:18:34.689 One other thing I wanted to come back quick to, the Great Resignation. Yes. Well, isn't that a thing, right? Matthew comment.
Matthew May 00:18:44.549 Wow. I mean, so the biggest thing with the Great Resignation that I'm seeing is a more troubling trend from a personal perspective, I just have this struggle with, where we're seeing an inordinate amount of people quitting on like a day notice, two days notice, less than a week notice. Just as a trend in a professional service industry that's usually not done. That's just an odd-- for perspective when I came to Acuity, I had a 90-day notice that I gave. So I'm like that's my perspective, right? Like two weeks is totally sufficient for a transition for a sustainable company. But less than that-- it's just an interesting trend. That's the most troubling trend. I think you can't--
Stuart McLeod 00:19:26.714 [crosstalk]-- do you feel a bit disrespected perhaps in that scenario?
Matthew May 00:19:31.271 I feel old in that scenario. I'm way old-school. I feel like I'm becoming that older generation. But the people that are quitting are my generation. They're not the younger generation. I'm kind of average age at Acuity or even on the young end at 47.
Stuart McLeod 00:19:50.910 23?
Matthew May 00:19:53.822 So our average age is--
Stuart McLeod 00:19:54.563 [crosstalk]. You look much younger than 47, Matthew. For a podcast audience, that's easy to say.
Matthew May 00:20:02.037 I bet if we did our average age, it's about 50 at Acuity. So we haven't had the Gen Z, Gen Y influx yet, so we're mostly Gen X and older here. We're starting to see some Gen Y's, but no Gen Zs for sure. So we're interested in seeing what happens there. But I think really interesting with the Great Resignation is a lot of people are just re-evaluating what's important to them. And when that happens, I think you got to double down on your value prop. And for us at Acuity it's flexibility. We provide flexible lives with people that want to have families and do that. And when you're competing against somebody that can pay more, that's not our value prop, right? Our clients are the smallest of the S's in the SMBs, right? They're never going to pay Ernst-&-Young rates here, so we can't pay Ernst-&-Young wages. So we've built our company based on flexibility. So it's really hard not to stray from that, I would say, during the Great Resignation and to be tempted to match every offer or do whatever. And I think we've done a really good job doubling down, and we've had some tough, tough losses on people that we really, really wish were still here. But again, it was better for their families, and I can't argue with that, right? I don't understand the sustainability models that those other companies they went to had. I hope they're great. I hope that if there's a downturn, those people aren't the first one on the block, which is my concern for them. Especially the Goldman report coming out that says in the next two years, they're saying there's a 35% chance of a recession. I know everybody's been saying that, but Goldman coming out with that a couple of weeks ago is like-- I've been worried about it. I haven't seen anybody put something out that stark about it, but it's interesting.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:47.673 Yeah. And there's, on the back of that, there's the VC space, sort of that-- those articles that start coming out every three or four years that say VCs are encouraging conserving cash and it all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Speaking of Goldman, what I really loved about, not that article, but the chairman or CEO or-- I can't remember his title. But he came out and said, "We are a five-day-a-week, in-the-office company. And we're going to double-down on that. We are a five day-- our value prop. our compelling reason that our clients pay exorbitant fucking fees is because we are a great company and a great company built by human interaction and a great company that has a hiring model that is 3,000 graduates out of business school every year, 30% of which stay, 70% of which go off into the universe and do great things." And I think it's not only-- and then from the follow on, I was, "Well, we're all going to quit. We're all going to quit." And he's like, "Well, go on. Fuck off, then. Go and work for a company that allows you that flexibility." He's never said something that he's not. And that's what I really loved about. Would I want to work there? No. Would you encourage my-- well, would you encourage your college graduate to work there? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.
Matthew May 00:23:14.140 I probably would. I just know that just because I see how beneficial that is for the new early bloomers to have that mentorship live.
Stuart McLeod 00:23:22.875 Yeah. Completely.
Matthew May 00:23:25.509 I think that's what I'm talking about. I think that's the right thing to do. Accept the risk, own it, accept the risk and go, right? That's what we're doing.
Stuart McLeod 00:23:35.458 Yeah. And if it's not for you, don't apply. Don't be there. That's fine, right? But don't pretend-- so the worst ones are, I reckon, is when you pretend you're something you're not when you bait and switch, right? We're one-or-two-day-a-week-in-the-office type of company, and then those that are turning up three or four or five, are granted the promotions are granted favors, are granted the pathway in that organization against the ones and twos. Then, "Hang on a minute, you said six months ago you are a one-and-two-day-a-week organization." I think that's the bullshit that I think is disingenuous and will lead to greater cultural problems not only for yourself, but also the industry that you represent, if it becomes a thing.
Matthew May 00:24:23.863 Yeah. I think the next three to five years is going to be just fascinating because we'll have time to-- COVID's going to be behind us - knock on wood - from a tragedy perspective, from a crisis perspective. We're out of crisis mode, right? So now we got to live with the new world. So we'll do that. There's a potential-- if there's a recession. We've got all these things coming over the next three to five years that will sort itself out. It's really going to be fascinating.
Stuart McLeod 00:24:50.577 Inflation is driving interest rates already, right?
Matthew May 00:24:53.367 Inflation. We're going to have to deal with it. The interest rates are-- like everything, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:24:58.633 Yeah. Completely. No, and to your point, so Acuity, "We're flexible," is Goldman's, "We're fucking not."
Matthew May 00:25:07.220 Right.
Stuart McLeod 00:25:07.220 And it's great. Just say what you are and you do you and be proud of it and own it.
Matthew May 00:25:14.249 Yeah. I wouldn't [brand?] it that way for him. I would [brand?] it that, "We're investing in our people and we need our people here."
Stuart McLeod 00:25:20.249 [crosstalk]. I'm paraphrasing.
Matthew May 00:25:21.610 But he could spin it.
Stuart McLeod 00:25:25.142 I'm not on Goldman's marketing team so they don't have to worry about it. And I'm pretty sure he doesn't listen to the podcast. I could be wrong, though. We're gaining at least a person a day, [inaudible].
Matthew May 00:25:38.881 Awesome.a
Stuart McLeod 00:25:41.115 I mean a week. My mum listens twice. Now tell me, what's on your five-year plan for Acuity, and how do you see the accounting industry in terms of-- perhaps let's just start with technology playing out.
Matthew May 00:25:56.677 Well, I think I mean obviously joining up with Patty and Scott and the Catching Clouds team is a huge bet for us on kind of the no-code movement and process and standardization to be able to prepare ourselves for robot process automation. No-codes Zapier is unbelievably powerful when you pair it with Air table in a system like Salesforce, like we have. We're seeing the things that we can do are just phenomenal. So we're really trying to prepare for that and we're really making our decisions based on those things to be able to have, "What does a good job in accounting look like in five years," and not getting left behind with the technology? So I think that's been a huge thing for us. And I think not enough firms are taking enough risk to be prepared for ten years from now. It might not be five years from now, but 2030, like I'm telling you, it's going to be really interesting. Technology just moves so fast. I mean, what is it, Moore's Law? That over the five years, everything doubles. I mean, we got two doubles coming up before 2030 about.
Stuart McLeod 00:27:14.272 [crosstalk]. Yeah, yeah.
Matthew May 00:27:16.326 I mean, you got to be ready. You got to be ready. Things are getting smarter. We've got to continue to build great jobs for people if you're going to be in a services business, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:27:27.404 And how did the Catching-- tell us about the Catching Clouds acquisition. What was the thought process? How did that come together?
Matthew May 00:27:34.403 Well, I mean, we had one acquisition we did before that. And Catching Clouds really is more of a merger, I would call it. I don't want to split hairs, but the way that came about was, I mean, to Kenji's credit, he had built a six-year relationship with the [Sharfs?], Patty and Scott. There are some people we had kept our eyes on, in the e-commerce space in particular, that we try to model after in that space. I think from their perspective, there were some from talking to them that they were interested in having a deeper bench from a support perspective. And we had built that. We had kind of been through that. They were at the 25-person inflection point where you still didn't have a management team to support you. And we had kind of pushed through that at 50. And they saw that when they met our management team and the leadership team that they would have some support and be able to try to do what they were doing at scale and in some select industries. We're still not in all the industries, but like tech, e-com, marketing services, and crypto. All kind of like those are all really progressive entrepreneurs and business owners typically. So when we were doing our BHAG and we were meeting at our executive retreat and there's five of us on the exec team we were like, "We finally settled on the BHAG. We were like, 'We love working with entrepreneurs.'" It was like, "How do we get to where we're working with at least 5,000 entrepreneurs by 2030?" And so that became our BHAG, which was the coolest thing. Revenue goals didn't sound very fun. None of us get real jazzed about that. For as big of accountants as four of us are, that just doesn't jazz us up at all. Growth for the sake of growth doesn't do it. But when we start helping people, that just gets really exciting. So we finally had a BHAG that mattered. But--
Stuart McLeod 00:29:19.754 So what was-- restate your BHAG for us?
Matthew May 00:29:22.657 Our BHAG is, "By 2030, we will have helped 5,000 entrepreneurs in their businesses." So we've got some plans and fun stuff in store for some of our employees for this year's Acuity Con. We get everybody together because we're a virtual team once a year at Acuity Con. And so we're going to celebrate kind of the milestone at each Acuity Con every year and then kind of de-mark where we are. We'll figure that out. We'll probably stop it. We'll probably pick a point a couple of months before maybe June 30th or something where we pick whatever our entrepreneur count was there. And then we'll kind of share that with everybody and do some celebrations around that every year.
Stuart McLeod 00:29:58.723 Yeah. [crosstalk]. Yeah. So continue on the merger. How did it sort of-- Kenji had established this relationship and then just [shared?] a whole lot of values together, right. Like similar businesses, similar mindset.
Matthew May 00:30:13.934 Yes. They've known each other for about six years. I think they met, I think when I think Scott and Kenji crossed over at X Pack on the Zero Advisory Council. And then I think they crossed or like he was coming off-- Scott was coming off when Kinji was coming off or on or something like that. And then Patty and Kenjie were in accounting [so long?] together for years. So they had this long relationship where there was this trust established. So when Patty and Scott kind of hit this inflection point where they really wanted to have more of a team, more of a bench from the management perspective - they had a great team on the execution side - they brought it up in June. We put a deal together by August. I mean, it was great.
Stuart McLeod 00:30:53.261 That's [crosstalk].
Matthew May 00:30:55.694 So yeah. We probably could have done it by July except they kind of like-- we moved a little too quick for them and they were like, "Wait, wait, wait. We got to fill your [other?] options. We got to wait."
Stuart McLeod 00:31:04.915 Yeah. That's more like it.
Matthew May 00:31:07.878 So we spooked them. I was like, 'If you want to do this fast, I'll tell you how to do it fast." And we told them and then nobody else moved that fast. So then they were like, "Oh, I've got to figure out what we're worth and stuff like that." But at the end of the day, it came down to trust for that being successful. We also learned a lot from our first acquisition. When we talk about alignment, Stuart, we had built a very protective kind of agreement that was really dis-aligned with our counter-party. And I feel like-- and we ended up ultimately unwinding it and coming up with a more fair deal later. So we learned a lot from that. So it's really interesting as a business, when you're negotiating a business contract, it's easy for me to slip into negotiation mode and try to get the best deal for us. Man, alignment on the merger was a huge-ass deal. It was about getting to a fair deal and not the best deal for us at that time because we were going for-- in a merger, you're going for a 'we' afterwards. And it was an important-- I would not have had-- we would not have had the same experience if we had not made some mistakes in the acquisition before in trying to kind of build the best deal possible, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:32:25.074 Yeah. And how has that gone since then? So from reading between the lines, I think you learn from that first experience and then the second [one's gotten even better?].
Matthew May 00:32:37.060 Yeah. I mean, we learned from both acquisitions that acquisition growth in this space is more expensive than our organic growth. It's really interesting. Like we can acquire customers somewhere between a third and half the cost that we can acquire customers even at the current valuations. We had talked about valuations in this space being relatively low compared to software. Well, part of the reason is that I can acquire customers for a third to half the cost for that, organically. So unless you can get a fully functional team that will convert over to your processes immediately, acquisitions stop looking very attractive, I think, from valuation perspective, what will be interesting to see if some of us can actually get to a critical mass size on the client advisory services side. Because, I mean, even us for a software company, we're going to hit 11 this year; 11 in revenue. And I mean, that doesn't get people real excited in the software business. You got to be 100 million revenue, 40 million revenue. There's just not a lot of [cash?] firms that are out there hitting those numbers right now, at any kind of growth rate, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:33:45.929 No.
Matthew May 00:33:48.929 So that's part of the valuation thing. Valuation is part margins, part revenue, but it's a lot growth rate, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:33:57.916 Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew May 00:33:59.312 How fast can you scale? So until somebody starts fixing that, it'll be interesting. And I think that's something some of the VC-backed companies are struggling right now with a little bit of scale and growth.
Stuart McLeod 00:34:08.407 I bet. I bet. I mean, just the complexity of onboarding is [inaudible] an acquisition is so much more difficult in professional services than it is in software. I'm there's just no fucking getting around, right?
Matthew May 00:34:20.874 It's not.
Stuart McLeod 00:34:22.746 Well, that's a good lead into, Acuity is one of the very, very, very, very few software-- uh, software businesses. Accounting businesses, accounting firms, that actually even knows how to spell sales, let alone has a BD team and a marketing and a go-to-market engine, if you want to call it that. Tell me about how that came about and your learnings over the years about go-to-market.
Matthew May 00:34:50.038 Well, I mean, it's our client's fault, right? We serve the SaaS tech clients. I'm the tech CPA on Twitter. I always serve SaaS clients. So the only sales things I knew, really I knew that their sales department is better than- we knew how to do it in a professional services model. And I actually ended up being an okay salesperson in the professional service model and kind of the traditional relationship sales model. But one of the problems I had at Cherry Bekaert, where I was an audit partner, is I had some success and some sales. A lot of that was due to the MP there at the time that really kind of helped me figure out what was going on and trained me. And I think I got a lot-- he teed a bunch of stuff up for me, too. He put a lot of guard rails around me and made me successful. But what was crazy there is the way the public accounting business works is you build your own book of business and then you're full.
Stuart McLeod 00:35:45.239 Yeah. Yeah, right. Okay.
Matthew May 00:35:47.599 You don't be like, okay, let's go-- like a line partner does not go and like--
Stuart McLeod 00:35:50.254 Let's find another million dollars.
Matthew May 00:35:53.516 Yeah. My book was 2 point whatever-- 2.2 million or something.
Stuart McLeod 00:35:55.910 Weird. Weird.
Matthew May 00:35:58.710 My second year is partner, and you're like, "Whoa, where do I put it?"
Stuart McLeod 00:36:02.818 [I can't do it anymore?]. Yeah.
Matthew May 00:36:03.959 It's not scalable at all, right? Well, even if I had another partner to do it with, we don't have another senior manager because we had to hire that person ten years ago and train them for ten years, right? You can't bring it in. So that's kind of one of the weird dynamics. I realized that I was like, okay, relationship sales is not what I want to do. A, it's not building enterprise value. And it's limited by me, right? So the [crosstalk]--
Stuart McLeod 00:36:32.005 Yeah. So imagine go to business school, though, business school, Harvard business school, your first day there, and you get up and say, "I know all about this stuff. I've got this model that doesn't grow, that it depends on me that if I quit, it disappears entirely, that the margins are shit, that the people that are executing the work take ten years to train, and it's high-risk and high cost of insurance. What do you think people, should be all going to do that?"
Matthew May 00:37:05.876 Yeah. That's why they carved the audit practice out of the private equity deal. Just notice that.
Stuart McLeod 00:37:15.272 No coincidence. Yeah.
Matthew May 00:37:15.272 If you're an auditor, listen to this, I'm sorry. I'm recovered nine years.
Stuart McLeod 00:37:18.906 We've just given you PTSD.
Matthew May 00:37:22.311 Yeah, well, I mean, when we started building our sales team because we had been based in Atlanta, we didn't let the sales team sell to Atlanta companies.
Stuart McLeod 00:37:34.300 [crosstalk] the risk, yeah.
Matthew May 00:37:36.529 We gave you every other market. We're like, "We want to know if transactional sales can work in this business," if people [crosstalk]--
Stuart McLeod 00:37:42.706 So not for the risk but because you're not doing Rolledex [selling?].
Matthew May 00:37:46.759 Yeah. I mean, we don't want people like, "Oh, yeah, I know, Matthew. I'll sign up." "Oh, I know, Kenzie. I'll sign up."
Stuart McLeod 00:37:51.709 Yeah. Exactly.
Matthew May 00:37:53.160 We were like, no, go anywhere else. Nobody knows us anywhere else. Go see if that model works. If that works, that's a sustainable sales model. And then it was two years after we built that model, we were like, "Okay, you can sell Atlanta now." It was pretty funny, but we have like a typical SaaS sales model. We have BDRs that set appointments for account executives. None of those people are accountants. That is their job, to do sales. And then we have a marketing team that fills the funnel. And if those funnels-- we have a drip marketing campaigns. If those convert, they convert on the website to appointments, then we run the process on the sales side. So it's against most people's being to not be involved in the sales process in this industry for some reason. It's like, "Oh, they can't scope it right," or, "It's too complicated," or, "I want to know my clients. I want them to be able to pick up the phone and call me." And I'm like, "I don't want them to call me."
Stuart McLeod 00:38:53.561 Yeah. But by the same token, it's sort of like you don't want to really have to sell a lot of tickets. Or maybe you do that. In our experience-- well, I'll rephrase. In our experience, [inaudible]. In our experience, most of our customers come to us and say, "Look, we don't want our customers logging a ticket for help with their payroll. They want one throat to choke.
Matthew May 00:39:18.334 Yeah, but it doesn't have to be my throat, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:39:21.160 No. That's right. Absolutely. As nice as yours is, it can be anybody else's but mine.
Matthew May 00:39:27.075 I don't mind stepping in if somebody's trying to choke one of my people and say, "No, you can't do that." I frequently-- Kenji and I both get to do that. Lisa does a ton of that right now. So stepping in between in those uncomfortable situations. But we don't have that traditional model to where there's a partner and there's a manager and there's a staff, and then you got to go up the chain and there's escalation. We have much flatter system.
Stuart McLeod 00:39:52.523 Yeah. What's in-- I don't want you to give away all your secrets. But by the same token, I mean virtually no firm think in this paradigm. What's been some of the most successful techniques, or/and what is your ideal client?
Matthew May 00:40:14.410 Well, I think I figured out one qualifying question for our ICPs. Do you use Slack?
Stuart McLeod 00:40:21.377 Right. There you go. So if they're on Slack, you're likely to close.
Matthew May 00:40:25.289 So if they use Slack, well, we're likely to want to work with them. We can close a lot of stuff. We have about four ICPs right now that we're having success with. We have a $1-million e-commerce company. We have a sub-$1 million SaaS startup with less than 10 employees that haven't hired their first accountant yet. We have a marketing services firm between 20 and 30 people. And then we have a business that either fits in one of those categories or a similar category that's trying to use cryptocurrency in their business, but that's still kind of in the south of 20 people. So 10 to 20 employees trying to use cryptocurrency in their business and they want to do it correctly, the right way, as compliant as they can. So those are our four current verticals right now that we call those verticals.
Stuart McLeod 00:41:16.484 Nice. Nice.
Matthew May 00:41:18.442 So if you have an ICP, you have a vertical. So that's who we serve right now.
Stuart McLeod 00:41:22.229 Yeah. And that'd be easy to target using [Sales Now?], you can go out, you can do some cold calling. What's your BDR process look like?
Matthew May 00:41:31.706 So our three BDRs, all they do is they take each of those profiles and they mine them with the different tools we have. We've used [Sales Now?] before we use LinkedIn, we use all different kind of sources, industry. Any of those industries have different sources. And then we're testing a tool right now called Apollo that helps with that as well. So we've kicked around lots of tools. We started with [Sales Loff?], who was also a customer of ours because they started in the next-door building. And actually the CEO of [Sales Loff?] is who sat on a whiteboard with Kenji - and this is eight years ago - helping us sketch out what we do with our BDR and SDR team and our A team.
Stuart McLeod 00:42:08.302 There you go. Nice.
Matthew May 00:42:10.654 So those people, they each identify ten of those prospects every day. We don't buy lists. They identify ten prospects. And then we run what they call-- I think we're running right now a five by eight. So in eight business days, we have five touches, usually three emails and two phone calls. And then from there we convert them to a drip campaign and we try to convert them. The drip campaign is like a twelve-email series that mixes up marketing kind of helpful touch and then a sales touch. Every third one I think is about a sales touch.
Stuart McLeod 00:42:40.733 Depending on your LTV and your CAC, I'm going to give you a secret Matthew May.
Matthew May 00:42:46.517 Okay. y
Stuart McLeod 00:42:47.270 You ready? This will change your life.
Matthew May 00:42:49.259 Okay.
Stuart McLeod 00:42:50.117 Two words. Direct mail.
Matthew May 00:42:52.613 Direct mail.
Stuart McLeod 00:42:53.904 Yeah. Because you know why? No [prick?] sends anything anymore in this world. And the way to-- and email selling is dead and the way to sort of break through all the noise in the world is to send them a package. And what we do is use [Zen Craft?], which is a plug-in that works with Salesforce and the UPS and FedEx, USPS and all of that. And so when that package-- so what you do is you send a package. What we do is send socks and say we want to be the sole of your practice. A dad joke there for you. And once that's received, it triggers-- we use outreach. And if you want to-- I know the guys aren't thrilled with outreach. So if you want to use-- if you want to get the sales off guy hassle a change, then I'm sure they'd be thrilled to hear from them. And then the sequence commences, right? And so that warm up, that direct mail warmup, costs about 50 bucks, I guess, by the time you write a little letter in there. And the other thing we do is use Handwrytten. Have you seen Handwrytten? It's H-A-N-D-W-R-Y-T-T-E-N. And it's a robot with your handwriting, right? So it looks like a-- it's a handwritten letter and yeah. So that creates-- that is the trigger for the sequence to commence. There you go. Change your life.
Matthew May 00:44:16.589 Okay. We might have to model that one and test it. We test lots of stuff.
Stuart McLeod 00:44:20.954 Good. [crosstalk].
Matthew May 00:44:21.662 My favorite tip that I haven't tried yet is the Giraffe guys actually do a video and they have a whiteboard, and they put the person's name on the whiteboard and they do a one-minute video saying, "Hey, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. this is what--" and do their value prop. Most of it's canned, but the whiteboard where they put the thumbnail on. And it says, "Play me, please." It would be like, "Stuart, please play me."
Stuart McLeod 00:44:45.932 Yeah. Massive. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. It works well. We use VDR for that. I think combining-- I think email selling is dead, but--
Matthew May 00:44:57.015 Email selling isn't dead, actually, I don't think.
Stuart McLeod 00:45:00.658 Okay. Debate. All right.
Matthew May 00:45:02.767 I mean, it's one of the main ways we push people to our website. Nobody responds to email, I agree to you. But it's one of the number one conversion ways to get to our website, is somebody clicks in an email and is like, "What is that?"
Stuart McLeod 00:45:16.925 Yeah. Okay, we can agree on that. What I'm saying is like generating an appointment out of email-only sequence is very, very difficult. How's that?
Matthew May 00:45:29.937 It is.
Stuart McLeod 00:45:30.131 Can we agree on that?
Matthew May 00:45:31.236 Yes. I can tell you. Our stat is we convert-- I think the stat is 0.3%. So we have a 0.3% conversion rate. So we have to put somebody through that process, 1,000 people through that process to get one client.
Stuart McLeod 00:45:49.356 To get three [crosstalk].
Matthew May 00:45:50.637 To get three clients.
Stuart McLeod 00:45:51.911 Yeah. And so we don't have that many in our TAM. So we had to find ways-- we'd be done in three days, right? So we had to find ways to be much more selective. So we at Karbon fish with spears not nets, right? And so there's a bit of a difference there. And so we're always juggling upon the spectrum of quality versus quantity. And what we've found is we have to be right up the quantity end in order-- we just don't have the TAM in order to be at the quality end because we'll blow through them so quickly. And to get 0.3 of a percent response, it's just-- the maths don't work. And so your maths are going to be a bit different because-- I mean, I could call most of the accounts in Australia. I've just come back, so I still-- thank you, United Airlines for the gastro, I really appreciate it. And so does my family. We could nearly call every accountant that is or every firm that is say more than ten people in the US, like in a year. Like, it's ridiculous how L-shaped our market is right. And I wouldn't suggest anybody coming to it. But go with your life if you want to. You're silly as I am. But you've got a bigger TAM and you can slide up and down that scale a bit easier than us.
Matthew May 00:47:14.496 Yeah. Going back to what lessons have I learned at Acuity? One of the big ones is, we have grown faster every time we've tried to shrink our TAM.
Stuart McLeod 00:47:26.724 Yeah. Exactly.
Matthew May 00:47:26.724 So every time we've tried-- everybody's like, "Oh, you only have four ideal client profiles." We grew our fastest when we had one.
Stuart McLeod 00:47:36.817 Yeah, exactly.
Matthew May 00:47:38.435 When we just have the tech person, we grew the fastest.
Stuart McLeod 00:47:39.888 Yeah. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. Focus. [inaudible] there's a disturbance in the force at Karbon, it's because we lose focus. It's because we tried to do something-- we get out of doing our knitting. Stick to your knitting, right? So I don't know, try-- and in those four ICPs you could easily break them down further, right? Like, you could break them down by geo; this type of marketing agency, not that type. It's a fascinating-- it's really enjoyable way-- well, I find it really enjoyable, the way the experiments-- the way things come together. The data of it all I reckon is really fun.
Matthew May 00:48:19.256 Oh, yeah. I mean, I've literally thought about putting on, before you can book an appointment with Tyler who's our main account executive - and that's if you go to 'Talk to Tyler' on our website - to putting a qualifying question is, "Do you use Slack in your business," before you do that?
Stuart McLeod 00:48:33.032 Yeah. Go for it.
Matthew May 00:48:34.004 And if you say, "Yes," you get to the calendar.
Stuart McLeod 00:48:36.345 You get straight through. [crosstalk].
Matthew May 00:48:37.098 And if you say, "No," you say, "Sorry, we're probably not the firm for you."
Stuart McLeod 00:48:42.389 Perfect. Do it. Keep cutting-- I don't know what your top of your funnel numbers are, but it's worthwhile just keeping on. There's always that balance of letting enough people through. And that's the beauty of getting your top of your funnel going, right? So we're acquiring-- so you got three SDRs and 150 people. We're hiring 22 at the moment. And because we've found in our experiments that we've got a process that is-- so out of that process that I described to you when we did our experiments, we had 100% hit rate in the firms that we targeted. All right 100%. Be it at of a different 0.3% or 100%. But it's a time-consuming, relatively expensive, but not compared to our LTV, right? So I just love the process of it, the data of it, the outcome and versus the inputs. I find it really enjoyable.
Matthew May 00:49:39.794 Yeah, definitely. It's awesome.
Stuart McLeod 00:49:42.135 Oh, my God. That hour went quick. What's next for you? You got a travel schedule this year. How are you seeing 2022 play out?
Matthew May 00:49:53.088 For the first time ever-- or the first time I feel like in years, I have an actual travel schedule. In May. We got Accounting Web coming up in San Diego. I have one of the business groups I'm in-- I'm in a small group of other diverse business owners and not accounting owners, so we can get this thing [inaudible]. So we're going to South Carolina doing a wedding in New York. Then I come back and do an [X pack?] in Denver and then go back to New York. And then I think we're going to potentially go to AICPA Engage, then that kind of book that. So I got five weeks of travel coming up. That's really going to be fun. Just got back from St. Lucia for my wife's birthday. And also I was supposed to check on our office there, but I didn't. And they got mad at me. They're like, "You came all the way to St. Lucia and you didn't come to the office."
Stuart McLeod 00:50:38.839 There you go.
Matthew May 00:50:40.939 And I was like, "Sorry, I was on vacation. It was my wife's birthday."
Stuart McLeod 00:50:45.046 Good for you.
Matthew May 00:50:45.046 So I will go back there this year to check on the office. But that's kind of the fun travel coming up, so hopefully that's exciting.
Stuart McLeod 00:50:52.237 Yeah. Well, we've got, as you know, we've got our own conference, and then we'll be down at Engage, so I hope to catch you then. Hey, Matthew, this has been an absolute pleasure. I always enjoy catching up with you. And look, congratulations--
Matthew May 00:51:06.301 We didn't even talk blockchain and crypto this time.
Stuart McLeod 00:51:09.566 We can come back. We can come back and talk blockchain and crypto. We can do that anytime.
Matthew May 00:51:13.061 No, I'm fine. My wife tells me I talk about it too much, so that's good.
Stuart McLeod 00:51:17.623 I do need to plug your podcast, so that's what I need to do.
Matthew May 00:51:21.070 Oh, okay, sure.
Stuart McLeod 00:51:21.491 Because I've listened to it a couple of times. My invite must have got lost in the mail somewhere. I'm joking. Thinking While Drinking, Matthew May and [crosstalk]--
Matthew May 00:51:34.087 Drink While You Think.
Stuart McLeod 00:51:35.527 There you go. Drink While You Think.
Matthew May 00:51:36.087 Drink While You Think.
Stuart McLeod 00:51:37.718 There you go. I've already had three drinks. No, not true. Gastro will do that for you. Think While You Drink with Matthew May and Kenji [inaudible].
Matthew May 00:51:49.526 You almost got it that time. You almost got it. Drink While You Think. Drink While You Think.
Stuart McLeod 00:51:54.061 Drink While You Think with [inaudible]-- fucking hell. Drink While You think with Matthew May and Kenji Kuromoto. Did I say that right?
Matthew May 00:52:07.527 You did it great, man.
Stuart McLeod 00:52:08.869 Okay, there we go. Think While You Drink with Matthew May [crosstalk]--
Matthew May 00:52:11.964 No, you messed it up second that time. Drink While You Think.
Stuart McLeod 00:52:15.741 Drink While You Think with Matthew May and Kenji Kuromoto. There you go. Podcast.
Matthew May 00:52:19.606 I can do it [crosstalk].
Stuart McLeod 00:52:20.778 Check out. [crosstalk].
Matthew May 00:52:22.550 Check out Drink While You Think with Matthew May and Kenji Kuromoto. It's on YouTube and all the podcast links.
Stuart McLeod 00:52:29.230 All the places where you get only decent podcasts and some shit ones, too, but the decent ones, especially. Matthew, this has been an absolute pleasure. Always love catching up [crosstalk].
Matthew May 00:52:37.256 Thanks for having me, man.
Stuart McLeod 00:52:38.528 Hope to be able to do it in person as soon as possible, as soon as the travel schedules align. And absolutely do another one and we can talk all the blockchain, cypto [inaudible].
Matthew May 00:52:50.726 Sounds good. Thanks, [inaudible].
Stuart McLeod 00:52:58.043 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 a thousand 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 like this session and we'll be able to keep bringing you more guests for you to learn from and get inspired by. Thanks for joining joining and see you on the next episode of The Accounting Leaders podcast.