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Joe Cox is the Founder and Managing Partner of Ecommerce Accountants LLP—the leading accountancy in the UK for e-commerce businesses. In this episode, Joe shares his story of being an e-commerce seller who spotted an opportunity to serve like-minded entrepreneurs in the accounting domain (eventually creating Ecommerce Accountants). Joe and Stuart discuss the trajectory of Ecommerce Accountants, their tech stack, the nuances of working in this niche, the impact of COVID and Brexit on e-commerce, and Joe’s passion for traveling.
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 00:00:05.239 Hi, I'm Stuart McLeod, CEO and co-founder 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 Joe Cox, the founder and managing partner of Ecommerce Accountants, the leading accountancy in the UK free commerce businesses. Before starting his firm, Joe was an ecommerce seller himself. In 2012, he, along with some friends, began selling on Amazon to escape his day job, as, of all things, an accountant. In 2016, he was looking to outsource the accounting function when he realized that no accountants in the UK specialized in ecommerce. Well, that was it. He went full circle and founded Ecommerce Accountants. It's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast Joe Cox. Welcome, Joe.
Joe Cox 00:00:58.340 Thanks for having me. It's good to know that all the money that we spend with Karbon, that you spend actually on the product rather than buying nice headphones and things for the directors.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:09.467 No. No, there's plenty of money going on the product. That's for sure. How are you? It's nice to see you. How was your trip to Reno, Lake Tahoe?
Joe Cox 00:01:19.563 Yeah, it's really fun, actually. I think looking forward to next year already. It was good. Nice to meet yourself and all of the team.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:26.421 Yes. And did you find some like-minded accountants around the world to sort of compare notes and get some ideas?
Joe Cox 00:01:36.420 Yeah, completely. I think that is the one thing I'd say the biggest benefit of going there was. It wasn't to necessarily get [crosstalk].
Stuart McLeod 00:01:45.517 [inaudible].
Joe Cox 00:01:47.157 Exactly. To get upsold. Yeah, which you did a very good job of.
Stuart McLeod 00:01:54.570 That's good. That's good. I'm doing my job then.
Joe Cox 00:01:57.922 Yeah, it was really good. I mean, to see the other firm that's from the UK that was there, they were five or six years ahead of us in terms of how long they've been going, and their team is three times the size. So it's pretty inspirational to meet them and see what they're doing and then, yeah, just so many other people that were either similar size or significantly bigger. And to see what they're doing and how they're using Karbon, it was really inspirational, to be honest.
Stuart McLeod 00:02:24.175 Yes. Gary and [inaudible], they've done an amazing job, right? And their growth is solid. What, Joe, has your growth being at the moment? Where are you finding some success in the types of clients or marketing channels that you're using?
Joe Cox 00:02:39.869 Growth for us, to be honest, at the moment, is kind of tapered off and relatively flat. A large part of that is self driven, though. We don't spend any money on advertising at all, so we've got kind of zero ad spend. And we keep changing our pricing and increasing it. And it's effectively because we want to make sure that we're being not only profitable, but making sure that we're working with the right kind of clients. So we're almost not deliberately, but we kind of got a bit of a one in, one out policy at the moment, and that's been going for about six to nine months. And the logic is that if we work with fewer clients, then we can do a better job with them. But as long as we're kind of charging the same or more, then it's better than taking on more work and getting stressed. Yeah, it's working quite nicely, to be honest. We're spending a lot of money in software and new technology like the-- I don't know actually what you guys are calling it, but the business intelligence thing, like the extra or the connective--
Stuart McLeod 00:03:38.647 The KPI, the practice intelligence. Yeah.
Joe Cox 00:03:40.944 Yeah, the practice intelligence. I know Stefan's working. I'm in some of the threads where he's going back and forth with Sada. Yeah. So we've not fully implemented it yet, but I know Stefan's getting there with it.
Stuart McLeod 00:03:52.468 Good. Good.
Joe Cox 00:03:53.279 And in terms of channels, I mean, for us, Google. I think because our name, Ecommerce Accountants, we rank quite well for accountants for ecommerce or UK accountants for ecommerce. So for all of those sort of keywords and long tail keywords, we're usually one or two in where we are, so we get quite a lot of organic traffic coming through. But since we changed our pricing - and we're quite public and open about our pricing; we're transparent - I think that's put a lot of people-- it's put them off us, basically. Not to say that--
Stuart McLeod 00:04:25.389 Keeps your demand lower.
Joe Cox 00:04:26.450 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So for now, it's nice to get a bit of breathing room. We're still working with a lot of probably more interesting businesses now than we had before. A lot of people before were just like anyone that was starting an online business and getting started. And then what you would find is after six to nine months, they might fail or it wouldn't work out. So it was a bit kind of you get on top of a set of books or something and then the client closes down or leaves, and you're just like, "Oh, what was that for?" Whereas now we're getting quite complex problems. People that they [inaudible] accountant hasn't been able to figure out how to deal with the data on various sales channels and things, and then we were able to do it. It's like way more fulfilling because then once you've kind of got them set up and working-- because they're not cost sensitive because they see the value in the work that we're doing, yeah, it's good.
Stuart McLeod 00:05:11.561 And let's go back to the start a bit. But you got a fascinating story how you came into Ecommerce Accountants. How did it all come about?
Joe Cox 00:05:19.152 I suppose before the accountancy practice was set up, I was basically working as an accountant somewhere, and my friend basically approach me with the idea of starting an online business. He'd done a course online that he spent about 5 grand on, which we were just out of uni and that was obviously tons of money at the time. And he basically was like, "I paid for this course online. Do you want to do it? If so, if we start another business and you put the money in for it, then you'd have to pay for the course." I was like, okay, that seems fair then, because he was really, really into it and really wanted to do it, and I believed in it, basically. And essentially that went really well to the point that where I was working as an accountant, I was earning way more money with this kind of side hustle, but I never wanted to-- I made sure that I focused and still finished my qualifications and things because I always knew that I'd have that to fall back on, and when I finish those we then spent a few years working on the online thing full time. And then we just couldn't find an accountancy in the UK that I could just couldn't just give the books to. And I had a bookkeeper that's working for me. And we had a team in the UK. We actually had an office with a lot of products that we were making and selling.
Joe Cox 00:06:35.205 And yeah, I'd kind of quit accounting because I didn't really enjoy it. Started this online thing, which I really enjoyed, but then ended up basically being an internal finance function. And I was like, I really don't want to do this. I really want to just pay someone to deal with it. But I really resented it. Any of the accountants in the UK I'd speak to just didn't understand our business or our business model. So I carried on doing it, and I just saw that the domain, the Ecommerce Accountants, was available. I was like, it's just crazy that nobody's got that. So I just bought it, not with the intention of starting an accountancy, to sit on it and just if ever I needed it. And then a few years later, I was off traveling, and my friends were doing other things, my business partners. And we had other friends that were-- our office dog at the moment got sad because his owner's just gone out, and he started crying. [inaudible] in the background. But yeah, basically, when I came back from this traveling trip, I kind of needed something, a new project to get started with. And I was like, I've got a small portfolio of clients because I have a friend that start an online business and things. I was like, I've got the domain. Why not? Let's just see.
Stuart McLeod 00:07:45.187 Let's go and do it.
Joe Cox 00:07:46.288 Yeah. And then kind of six years later, now we got a team of 25 people. Past couple of years we've kind of doubled in size in both revenue and team size each year. And then now we're kind of dealing with all these sort of problems, I suppose, that come from running a service-based business, whereas before I had different problems which were like physical products basically with there's slightly different set of problems.
Stuart McLeod 00:08:09.583 What's more fun?
Joe Cox 00:08:11.219 Good question. I ask myself that sometimes. I think in some ways this is way more fulfilling. When you're working with people, when you have good outcomes and especially trainees and things like that, when you're able to train someone well, help them develop, I kind of find that unsurprisingly satisfying. Whereas selling products online is very much just like money, money, money because all you're doing is making stuff, selling it, and then you just dealing with one star reviews or five star reviews. So it wasn't as enjoyable at the end of it, whereas this, when you do a really good job and help a client, although you still get paid and you might get paid more if you done a really good job, you also have that satisfaction of oh, this person has paid me for my knowledge and my service and all my team, what they've done. Much more satisfying.
Stuart McLeod 00:09:04.526 And are there some clients or a client that comes to mind where you've sort of watched them grow and been on the journey throughout?
Joe Cox 00:09:12.463 Oh yeah. There's quite a few, actually, and there's a few in particular that-- well, one specifically who started-- basically who's been with me from the very beginning, and it was kind of like his business has grown now. And they're in the same building as us as well, and that's a complete coincidence. We've got our office here in London, and he started off. He came into my old office when I was renting this little dank basement, and he was just like a one man band. And at the time he was an Amazon seller, and he also then become an employee at Amazon. And basically, we've kind of carried on working together. And he quit Amazon, sold his first business, started another business, and now he started a consultancy to help people that sell on Amazon. And just a couple years ago we moved into this building on the Friday; on the Monday they moved in. And they've got 15, 16 people in their team, and we actually have quite a lot of crossover in terms of clients. I mean, sometimes we don't even realize until we're doing someone's VAT return and we see his company's name has been invoiced, and we're like, oh, nice, because client confidentiality. You can't really talk about it too much. So yeah, quite a few like that.
Stuart McLeod 00:10:23.766 Obviously, there's been a big tailwind from COVID in ecommerce and everything. Have you sort of seen that drop off a little bit since the world sort of trying to restore a little bit to normal? And Brexit, you guys have got as well.
Joe Cox 00:10:38.259 Yeah. When the pandemic happened, it was actually insane on our side because I think most of the world was kind of doom and gloom, but for us, the way we work with our clients, we usually get secondary user access to a lot of their accounts. And things like Amazon and Shopify, they're quite visual, so you can see graphs of sales and things like that. And in that sort of-- at the very beginning, it was like no one knew what was happening, that the world was going to end. And then in May, June, people's sales were-- you could just see on these charts that's spiking higher than they are in Christmas and Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Those days are insane, and this was higher. And it was just weird to kind of-- you could just visually see through these different accounts what everyone in the world was suddenly doing, that they're all buying this stuff online. And then for us, we were just swamped with work because we had all the furlough sort of things to deal with and bounce back loans in the UK and all the sort of government stuff that comes out. But also there were just so many people starting online businesses, and we were just waylaid with stuff.
Joe Cox 00:11:43.556 But then you fast forward another year, all of the Brexit changes were kind of implemented, and there are a few tax changes there, which basically made it more difficult for-- there was a certain loophole that got tightened where to do VAT where they lost large part of their margin so loads of drop shipping businesses, which is when they kind of-- they sell the goods. They have a shop online. Someone clicks buy, but they actually place the order from China and send it directly to the consumer in their country of origin. So all these drop shippers, their business model just kind of collapsed because one of the advantages was that they didn't have to pay VAT, so they all closed. And then there's kind of been quite a correction, basically, in how people spend their money and shop online. And there's been definitely a drop down in terms of new businesses. And the kind of sales, when you look at them now, some of them are flat, but mostly 25%, I'd say, down on what they were last year. But probably over all the trajectory is gone well.
Stuart McLeod 00:12:45.562 There's a big lift and then it sort of dropped off a little bit. Yeah. And since Brexit and sort of interest rates are going up, what's the mood in London over summer at the moment?
Joe Cox 00:12:57.622 I don't really know if that's affecting-- maybe I'm just not going out and talking to too many people about that. I'd say there's more-- everyone seems a bit positive. There's the women's EUROs we've just won. Everyone's quite happy about that. I think the fact that our government have just been like, coronavirus doesn't exist anymore, it's been kind of nice because we're all just walking around blissfully enjoying ourselves.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:23.218 You guys have got an interesting model. You've got the office there in London, but you've got quite a remote workforce as well, don't you?
Joe Cox 00:13:32.665 Yeah. I mean, Stefan, who you met, is in Canada, my business partner. Originally, he actually lives around the corner from the office. He's kind of going over there on a sabbatical just before COVID and so should be coming back. We never know when. And there's a few people dotted around. But I mean, primarily we've got a core team that are here in London, but being set up, obviously using Karbon - and we were using it way before the pandemic - we were already able to work remotely. And I kind of originally set the business up with the intention that I could work remotely because I enjoyed traveling and things like that. But then as the business has grown, I've found that I'm unable to do that because I've got so many other things to focus on. Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:14:17.546 Wait a bit. Are you traveling again this year? What are the plans?
Joe Cox 00:14:21.086 No plans. I've just been away to the south of France, and I've got a stag do in [inaudible]. No actual travel.
Stuart McLeod 00:14:33.275 Glad you're preparing for that.
Joe Cox 00:14:37.047 I've never actually been before, so I don't know what it's going to be like. But yeah, the guys I'm going with, I think, love it. So be different.
Stuart McLeod 00:14:45.533 There you go. And so in terms of your workforce and the types of clients, you sort of trying to push up the value chain, aren't you, and charge more, get bigger clients, that kind of thing?
Joe Cox 00:14:59.756 Yeah, exactly. I mean, the main thing we're trying to do at the moment is move, I suppose, from doing compliance work into advisory kind of value add work. And when you go to all of the different conferences, that seems to be the hammer that everyone's hitting you over the head with, but I feel like it's easier said than done and especially to do it properly. I don't know. Maybe I'm like a perfectionist and worry about making sure it's really good, but I wouldn't want to-- there's quite a lot of moving pieces that we're trying to get in place first to make that work. Ecommerce businesses have-- primarily, they've got inventory, which is the main thing on their balance sheet and affects their profit and loss. So for us, unless the client has that sorted, it's very difficult to then offer any value add services because you need to make sure that sorted, and then to try and get a standard system where they all do it slightly differently and use all different channels, that is something we've not been able to solve yet. And that's kind of been because a lot of the team have got so much of a work on their plates, which is, again, partly why we're increasing our pricing so that we can work with fewer clients and then get some headspace to do work on that work.
Stuart McLeod 00:16:14.645 So when you go and do those types of service, have you got some virtual CFOs that you roll out, or what's the plan for the advisory aspect?
Joe Cox 00:16:27.011 The plan at the moment is-- another thing we've struggled with is probably our structure, the organizational structure. So we're currently trying to fix some of that. We've got a couple of managers and just trying to-- one of them their last day is tomorrow, actually. So we're kind of looking for a placement for that. And you kind of can't-- yeah. That's basically taken priority over trying to get a plan for everything else because it just get too swamped otherwise.
Stuart McLeod 00:16:55.882 Yeah. No, I get it. Okay. So what about other countries? It's primarily just UK clients at the moment. Stefan is in Canada. Is there international plans or that's all too hard?
Joe Cox 00:17:09.651 Yeah, and probably at the moment eventually, not probably, but I think making sure-- I don't really feel like we fully conquered and mastered the UK. So it would be a bit silly to switch focus and try and do anything anywhere else because there's still a lot of work for us to do here. I think once we've mastered the advisory stuff here and got a big enough team, whether that's 100 or 250 people, then I think we can start looking at Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada, those sort of places. Not to say never, but yeah, just learning on the different taxes. I mean, probably Australia and New Zealand would be easier for us conceptually to get because GST is quite similar to VAT, whereas I think sales tax and dealing with that in the US seems to just-- I feel like US accountants don't really get it. How could we go there and kind of deal with that if they don't? What do you think? Do you think we should think about that, or do you think--?
Stuart McLeod 00:18:13.212 What do I think? I think that no, don't do it. [laughter]
Joe Cox 00:18:21.346 How would our Karbon look? Would there be a way to have this set up to have multiple branches?
Stuart McLeod 00:18:26.574 Yeah. We can create a couple of new tenants and you could split them out, or you could join them together, whatever you like. That's the beauty of the reporting.
Joe Cox 00:18:35.292 What do you mean by tenant?
Stuart McLeod 00:18:36.354 When you're in Karbon, we call that a tenant. And so some of our customers with multiple offices, franchises, and stuff have different tenants per-- one tenant per office. And then you could join them together in reporting. So each tenant would have different customers and different staff. The staff can be in both tenants if you want.
Joe Cox 00:18:59.691 Oh, cool. Is that in the top left where you'd be able to change your [inaudible]? Okay.
Stuart McLeod 00:19:06.071 Yeah, it's exactly what happens.
Joe Cox 00:19:07.881 That's cool.
Stuart McLeod 00:19:08.734 We love you guys as customers, but tell me more about the tech stack that you've got going on at the moment. You're a pretty technically forward, technologically progressive person and firm. How does the tech stack stack up? There you go.
Joe Cox 00:19:24.070 Well, first and foremost, Karbon, we got that for our practice management. Then we use for bookkeeping Xero. But would you consider that as part of the tech stack?
Stuart McLeod 00:19:32.882 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Cox 00:19:34.404 [crosstalk]. Xero for accounting, and again-- sorry, for bookkeeping. And we're very process orientated. So if a client comes in and says, oh, I want to do QuickBooks, then we would say okay, unfortunately we don't work with that. And it's not because one's better than the other. It's just because that's the one we use. So Xero. There's an integration called Link My Books that pulls through data from Amazon and Shopify and things like that. So we use that for a lot of our kind of connecting our platforms to Xero. Slack for internal messaging, which I know you're not a big fan of.
Stuart McLeod 00:20:08.024 Oh, we use it too, but I don't know. I could never find anything. I think that it's a necessary evil of some sort. I haven't found a great alternative, put it that way.
Joe Cox 00:20:21.161 Yeah. I mean, in some ways it's better than email. Depends on, I suppose, what it is you're talking about. Right? Quick messages, it's really useful. Longer messages, probably email or notes or something like that on Karbon. We use something called 1Password for our passwords management, which I think something is really important for accounting firms to make sure you have something to share logins and things like that.
Stuart McLeod 00:20:46.421 Keeping that organized is important.
Joe Cox 00:20:48.753 Yeah, massively. I mean, there's lots of small ones. I suppose Salesforce is our CRM, but then we're open to changing that. I think Stefan started using that to begin with because it's fairly flexible and lets you connect to a lot of things. I think most accountants seem to use HubSpot, right?
Stuart McLeod 00:21:08.440 Yeah. Yeah, HubSpot and Pipedrive is a bit-- yeah, we don't see a lot of Salesforce. At the big end you see bit of Dynamics and things as well.
Joe Cox 00:21:19.663 When is Karbon going to sort out and let people send bulk email?
Stuart McLeod 00:21:23.189 Yeah. I mean, we need a more direct connection to MailChimp. That's for sure. I think email templates are probably before bulk email. I reckon your marketing stuff you do in your marketing platform. We just need to provide a better way to get context in and out. That's all.
Joe Cox 00:21:40.192 That would be cool. For templates actually we use another app called [Text Plays?] which is a plugin to Chrome, and you kind of type slash like you can create loads of kind of mail merge things. Really, really cool. So we use that until obviously you guys introduce similar.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:58.618 There you go. Yeah, we started doing some AI stuff in-- you probably don't even notice it yet, but in terms of timesheets suggestions and contact suggestions and a few things. So there is some interesting-- I mean, there's so many interesting things-- there's so many interesting aspects and technologies that are available now not only in enterprise, but the Azure platforms and the AWS platforms are making available pretty fancy technology to anybody. It's just about applying it in pragmatic ways and getting the [inaudible], getting the time just to be able to do it right. What about reporting? I mean, you guys must have an enormous amount of reporting requirements for your clients with inventory and balance sheet and perhaps a bit of cost accounting or something in there.
Joe Cox 00:22:50.556 Do you mean like what sort of reports do we use or get? Because that's something, I suppose, as part of this move to advisory that I'm trying to instill in the firm is that I think there's a lot we could be doing, but at the moment we kind of use all the basic stuff that comes out of Xero. I mean, Xero is pretty good for its reports that we need, and then everything really that gets a bit more technical comes down to a spreadsheet and a bit of elbow grease sometimes. Like I said, we've not got one approach for the inventory stuff, so it kind of has ended up being a case by case basis on how we approach it for each client.
Joe Cox 00:23:29.519 We went to Xerocon three weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago, and that was one of the things that we were looking for there, was one inventory solution that we're going to recommend to our clients. And I think we found it, but we've just not spent the time to be able to start implementing it because for now, we can get reports that look as good as anything, but if they don't show the inventory and the cost of good sold, it's not very useful. But yeah, I mean, one thing I'd like to be able to do or spend some time doing is to try and-- now we've got like 250, 300 ecommerce clients, is kind of collate the reports to be able to effectively benchmark and show, like I said, in that-- it would have been really cool at the start of the pandemic to be like, oh, everyone's sales have gone up. Look at the data to show that, or to at least be able to sit down and have that discussion with the client to say well, everyone else has gone up. Yours has gone down. What are you doing differently? I think that would be quite cool.
Stuart McLeod 00:24:30.961 Do you have a consolidated chart of accounts that you use across all your clients?
Joe Cox 00:24:36.107 We do, but again, it's basically the Xero default one because when you take clients on from someone else, they're probably the default one. And then we've got a few extra ones that are just based off of those numbers but with different letters and things like that for the different platforms.
Stuart McLeod 00:24:54.503 Yeah. So if you had that, you could sort of get all your reporting, match out the clients. Do you consolidate your Xeros in a warehouse or something like that to be able to report on it yet? No. That'd be kind of [crosstalk].
Joe Cox 00:25:07.805 Not yet. No.
Stuart McLeod 00:25:08.683 There's quite a few. That's easy.
Joe Cox 00:25:09.899 Where do I even start with that, though? Yeah. Can you let me [crosstalk]?
Stuart McLeod 00:25:15.734 No. No. No, you can't afford that. [crosstalk].
Joe Cox 00:25:17.319 But you can come and do it. I don't mind. You can come and do it and go to Harrods again.
Stuart McLeod 00:25:21.708 Yes. That pudding will forever be famous in our house. No. No. So the way that we put KPI together, what happens in the background is there's a couple of sort of technologies that we use. Snowflake is this underlying warehouse, and there's quite a few ways that you can get your general ledgers into Snowflake and per clients. And then you would require a consolidated general ledger-- sorry, a consolidated chart of accounts would help with the reporting. But what's the one that we--
Joe Cox 00:25:57.442 With the warehouse that we're building with you guys, would we basically have a separate warehouse for this sort of project? Is it best practice to basically have-- you know like on a spreadsheet you have separate tabs. Right? I've got no experience with these things. I've just left it with Stefan.
Stuart McLeod 00:26:15.999 You wouldn't put it in there, but you could use the same sort of technology. I found it. So if we go to chat. So we're starting to think about using this Merge.dev. And what that does is enables you to integrate any accounting system with another. Right? So you'd be able to take the-- if you have a look at the Xero, for instance, or the QBO, what it does is it'll take any of your accounts, purchase orders, contacts, any of those from each of your clients and put them in the warehouse. And then you would use something like a Tableau or any kind of presentation layer for reporting to be able to extract them out and compare and contrast. That'd be pretty cool. You could then do benchmarking across your clients. You could look for trends. You could look for margins. You could pretty much be able to provide value back into your clients based on how they're doing compared to others. Right?
Joe Cox 00:27:25.158 Yeah, exactly. Like I said, if you sat down and had a conversation with a client and said, look, your sales have actually dropped compared to everyone else's. What have you changed? What's going differently? It might not be nice to hear. Kind of prompts you to think about it, doesn't it? You don't just think--
Stuart McLeod 00:27:42.438 Yeah. I mean, the reporting across types of products, right? This category is-- your margin is 40%, and their margin is 32%. You've got eight points advantage. You got to try and drive home that or whatever it might be. Right?
Joe Cox 00:27:58.423 Yeah. Or it might just be that that person sells barbecues and the other person sells umbrellas.
Stuart McLeod 00:28:03.813 Barbeque is a bit of match.
Joe Cox 00:28:05.161 That's why there's a difference.
Stuart McLeod 00:28:07.869 Is everything still out of China? Have you seen sort of a bit of a move away from Chinese produced products or not?
Joe Cox 00:28:19.810 Honestly, it seems that most of them still are, but then I probably don't get as involved in the weeds, I suppose, as I used to. So if I'm reviewing work, I don't dig too much into where their suppliers necessarily are as much as I used to. When you're more involved in the bookkeeping and the accounts, you end up seeing it much more. I mean, a few of the ones that are the most successful at the moment, their suppliers are in the UK, but they're supplement sellers and things. So that's selling all sorts of health supplements. And I guess if you're selling stuff that people are going to consume, probably makes more sense to get it from a bit of a more trustworthy or more quality controlled source. So yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:29:07.756 I get it. I get it. What else comes to mind? What have you got going on personally that's interesting at the moment, Joe?
Joe Cox 00:29:17.410 What have I got going on personally that's interesting? I mean, interesting to me is the fact that my house has got asbestos, and I've got builders in there over the past few weeks messing things up. And it all been--
Stuart McLeod 00:29:28.535 That sounds expensive.
Joe Cox 00:29:28.844 --going on for way longer than it should have. Yeah, a little bit. And when stuff runs over and then they're like, oh, it cost you more. Yeah. And they left. And as we were unpacking our house, we found in one wardrobe dust and plaster all over our stuff. So we were like, "Shit, is this asbestos?" So we've been having to sleep in our front [inaudible] sofa for the last week.
Stuart McLeod 00:29:49.258 How's your back?
Joe Cox 00:29:51.066 No wonder I look so fresh. Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:29:54.403 Well, I hope you get that sort.
Joe Cox 00:29:57.295 Yeah. But I don't know if listeners will find that interesting.
Stuart McLeod 00:29:58.571 When was the house built? Because there's a lot of old shit in London.
Joe Cox 00:30:03.406 Yeah. 50 years ago now. And the lady before us was there the whole time.
Stuart McLeod 00:30:08.261 The whole time, yeah. Okay. Right. So just driven to church on Sundays. Right? One owner. There you go.
Joe Cox 00:30:15.896 And there's a church right next door to it, so [inaudible] out.
Stuart McLeod 00:30:18.761 I mean, I love London. We're up in Cheltenham, which was fascinating. And some of the old-- everything is old. Right? Australia, here in the US, particularly in Nevada, people built houses in 2006, and they're knocking them down to build something new. It's a massive cultural disparity between the two. That's for sure.
Joe Cox 00:30:50.212 Yeah. Well, I mean, probably the church next door to my house is probably older than America. It's a couple of hundred years old. My team are slowly leaving as we're doing this. They had the pleasure of getting to listen to one side of the interview.
Stuart McLeod 00:31:02.746 Oh, there you go. The other side wasn't that interesting anyway. Joe, look, I love catching up with you guys. And your support for Karbon is amazing, and we appreciate you so much. If there's anything that we can do to ever help, we'd love to, and whenever we're in town, would be great to catch up.
Joe Cox 00:31:27.555 No, definitely. Have you got any plans to be back in London?
Stuart McLeod 00:31:29.115 Not at the moment. You never know what happens before the end of the year.
Joe Cox 00:31:31.992 And the next Karbon event, any discounts for the people that are flying more than a couple thousand miles?
Stuart McLeod 00:31:36.971 Yeah. Yeah. We'll get you sorted, Joe. Don't worry about it. We'll get you looked after. We appreciate the huge effort.
Joe Cox 00:31:44.892 Thanks, Stuart. Appreciate that.
Stuart McLeod 00:31:46.161 We'll get you on stage next time.
Joe Cox 00:31:47.619 Yeah, I'll be up for that. I don't mind. Talk about how transformative all the BI stuff is as long as we get it finished.
Stuart McLeod 00:31:55.377 No, you'd be all right. You guys would get it. No worries. Sounds good. Joe, it's been an absolute pleasure as always.
Joe Cox 00:32:05.959 Amazing. Thanks so much, Stuart.
Stuart McLeod 00:32:13.278 Thanks for listening to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting, fun, you'll find lots more to help you run a successful accounting firm at Karbon Magazine. There are more than 1,000 free resources there, including guides, articles, templates, webinars, and more. Just head to karbonhq.com/resources. I'd also love it if you could leave us a five-star review wherever you listen to this podcast. Let us know you like this session. We'll be able to keep bringing you more guests for you to learn from and get inspired by. Thanks for joining, and see you on the next episode of the Accounting Leaders Podcast.