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Join Stuart McLeod as he interviews the world's top accounting leaders to understand their story, how they operate, their goals, mission, and top advice to help you run your accounting firm.
Stuart: 00:00:06.290 [music] Hi, I'm Stuart McLeod, CEO and cofounder of Karbon. Welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, the show where I go behind the scenes with the world's top accounting leaders. Today I'm joined by Meghan Blair, owner and founder of Fogged In Bookkeeping. Meghan is an ambitious entrepreneur with expansive business experience in cattle stations in Australia. She launched Fogged In Bookkeeping as a single mother and grew it by 800% in the last five years. She's passionate about technology, automation, and elevating bookkeeping as a career choice and an industry. It is my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast Meghan Blair.
Stuart: 00:00:51.733 Meghan Blair, welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast. Thank you for joining us today.
Meghan: 00:00:56.127 Thank you for having me.
Stuart: 00:00:57.244 Now, Fogged In Bookkeeping. Let's start there. It must be in San Francisco, right?
Meghan: 00:01:03.432 No, it's in the East Coast in Massachusetts in an island called Nantucket. They refer to Nantucket as the Gray Lady, super foggy place on the East Coast, but people in San Francisco and Massachusetts are the only one that get my joke. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:01:18.146 When we first arrived in the United States, we lived in San Francisco, and not long after we moved to Sausalito. And those who have not lived in sort of the shores of the San Francisco Bay probably are not aware of the bridge foghorn that goes off every 18 seconds [laughter] and take some getting used to, I would say. The first few nights, we were like, "Fuck, what is this? How are we ever going to get some sleep with this thing going on?"
Meghan: 00:01:57.321 We can hear one from our house, and we can also hear the ferry horn that goes off when it leaves the harbor. So I feel you.
Stuart: 00:02:06.233 Once you're there for a while, it's kind of reassuring. It's soothing, right, but it does take some time. We're living in Melbourne. We're near the train depot, and you know when it was 4:36 because those big old things would roll out of the depot down the road. And that took some getting used to as well. But living up here where we are now, there are no such noises apart from the snow-clearing machinery when it snows overnight.
Meghan: 00:02:40.425 Where was home before California?
Stuart: 00:02:43.514 Melbourne. Melbourne, Australia. We grew up there, both my wife and I, and two of our three kids were born in Melbourne.
Meghan: 00:02:52.440 I lived in Darwin for a while. Actually, that's aggrandizing. I lived in Katherine.
Stuart: 00:02:59.943 Oh, wow. Okay. All right. So Melbourne to Katherine is probably further apart than Nantucket to Tahoe, for a start. It's a fucking long way. And what took you to that part of, well, Australia, for a start, and that part of the world?
Meghan: 00:03:17.596 I was an exchange student in high school. And they put everybody on the plane. They dropped most people off in Sydney. A few people went to Melbourne. Few people went to Brisbane. And then they're like, "But you, Meghan, you're flying to Darwin. And then a family's going to pick you up and drive you to Katherine, and you're going to live on a cattle station." I learned to ride horses, deliver cows, inoculate animals. I've been in a rodeo. It's an experience there.
Stuart: 00:03:44.075 Well, Darwin to Katherine, that's still like a day, isn't it? That's still a long way.
Meghan: 00:03:48.886 It's like four or five hours, I think. Yeah.
Stuart: 00:03:51.327 Yeah, yeah, it would be, and not much bitumen. Let me congratulate on your pronunciation of Brisbane, not Brisbane. So you've got that bit down. Well done. And living on a cattle station in Katherine. Okay. So probably a small one, like 20,000 square kilometers or something.
Meghan: 00:04:11.678 Real tiny. Yeah, the stations I spent time on were actually outside of Katherine, closer to Alice Springs on the way to Uluru. Yeah, they were out there: road trains, kangaroos, dingoes, the whole nine.
Stuart: 00:04:26.527 There you go. That would've been pretty formative experience for a late-high-school student living out in the middle of fucking nowhere. [laughter]
Meghan: 00:04:35.683 I was 16 years old. I don't think I even had an American driver's license yet. The aboriginal population in Katherine's pretty big, so that was something I had never experienced as an American kid stepping into just the remoteness of it, right? Who lives someplace where you go to the grocery store once a month and you buy your beer by the pallet?
Stuart: 00:04:57.063 Well, that's just for the week. [laughter]
Meghan: 00:05:00.853 Yeah, it gave me a very different appreciation of agricultural food systems - I moved there as a vegetarian; I did not come home a vegetarian - and culture. Very different culture from America.
Stuart: 00:05:15.557 Oh, yeah. Well, very different culture even in Australia, right? That's about as raw and as hardworking as it gets. What was the biggest lesson, you think?
Meghan: 00:05:24.766 Oh, lessons. I don't know. I learned I didn't want to be a vet. I moved there thinking I wanted to be a vet.
Stuart: 00:05:29.558 Okay, that's good.
Meghan: 00:05:30.762 It was a flying vet. She was delivering a baby calf. She had her arm up inside the animal, and that cow rolled over and spiral fractured her arm. And in the moment, I was like, "Yeah, no, not for me. A lifetime of accounting is in my future." [laughter]
Stuart: 00:05:49.028 Yes, it's a bit different vetting out there. It's not the domestic cat, in and out every day.
Meghan: 00:05:55.285 I think what I really learned, in all seriousness, is an appreciation for culture and that cultures aren't better or worse. They're just different. And if you go into those kinds of things without judgment, just to observe and understand, goes a long way.
Stuart: 00:06:08.989 Yeah. Look, the appreciation of the-- I'm sure the vastness must've just-- there must've been a moment where it just strikes you as there is nothing, absolutely nothing out there.
Meghan: 00:06:21.708 For days. And to move there-- I'd lived and worked on farms before - my family owned a small produce farm in America - but the scale of it. You could ride for days and still be on the same property. Yeah, the need for self-reliance in those communities. The kids in the households I lived in did School of the Air, so COVID-style homeschooling long before [laughter] that was a thing.
Stuart: 00:06:49.491 Before any Google Classroom existed.
Meghan: 00:06:53.923 Yeah. And it's wildly big.
Stuart: 00:06:57.175 Yeah. Wow. Okay. And, I mean, obviously, I grew up very domesticated, but School of the Air is literally that. It's UHF radio. And the kids are thousands of kilometers apart, and the teacher is in perhaps Alice Springs or Darwin or something like that.
Meghan: 00:07:16.110 And I think, when I lived there, it was right on the verge of-- I'm old. Email was just starting to be a thing, right? So if you had a computer, it was dial-up internet. So that just, there, wasn't really a thing yet. If households had a computer, it was because the family was doing National Weather Service reporting of some kind. No email, no computer, no Twitter, nada.
Stuart: 00:07:44.708 No. No. Well, that might be the same-- we might be at full circle soon. [laughter] Have you been back to Australia since?
Meghan: 00:07:53.689 I've not been back to Australia since. That is a very long flight. The younger me knew that life post high school would get busy and that was my shot to sort of really do something fun and amazing like that. And that proved to be right. Between kids and businesses, living someplace for couple of months, that's harder now. Although I think we're maybe on the other turn of that, right? COVID, remote work more acceptable, more people sort of living places longer term, not just popping in and out on vacation but really settling into places and being a part of those communities.
Stuart: 00:08:31.218 There you go. Maybe there's a cattle station in Katherine in your future you could-- [laughter]
Meghan: 00:08:38.523 I would go back in a heartbeat.
Stuart: 00:08:41.783 How many kids have you got? How old are they?
Meghan: 00:08:43.801 Two. My kids are 20 and 15.
Stuart: 00:08:46.438 Right. Okay. Well, there you go. There's a 15-year-old now that-- he or she is about to go to a cattle station.
Meghan: 00:08:55.179 If anybody was going to be a good sport about it, he would. He's 15 years old. He loves animals, loves farms. If anybody's going to do it, he would. My older one, I don't know. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:09:08.388 I think that's amazing. So where you are on the East Coast, what kind of community and clients do you encounter through Fogged In Bookkeeping?
Meghan: 00:09:20.664 Yeah. So we serve clients nationally. We're an all-remote firm. Our team's been remote for 10 years. COVID was not the start of something new for us. But the clients we encounter here are generally tied to Nantucket in some way. So Nantucket's this amazingly funny little ecosystem onto itself. So we're physically separated from the mainland by 30 miles of water. You get some geographical exclusivity, and then you get some economic exclusivity because Nantucket has a reputation for the one-percenters, the CEO hangout, playground of the wealthy, similar to the Hamptons and some other places in the US, right? But Nantucket, interestingly, also has this amazingly diverse population. My son, as a white male, is in the minority in his high school. So they are a majority-minority high school. 40% of the students in our public high school would qualify for free lunch programs and things. So Nantucket is not this exclusive playground of the rich people perceive it to be, and that trickles down into the business community. So you get this ecosystem here for Fogged In of really cool startups that get funded by our visitors, and this wealthy population creates opportunity. But you get a lot of these small-town businesses, whether they'd be restaurants, hotels, landscaping companies, what have you. So we get this nice balance. My initial mentors were CEOs of publicly traded companies like Exxon and Sotheby's, right? And some of my first clients were HVAC companies, electricians, and landscapers. So yeah. So here on this little outpost on the East Coast, you get this real coming together of some wild influences.
Stuart: 00:11:10.771 And what are the tourist seasons? Is it a summer playground?
Meghan: 00:11:15.574 It is a summer playground. It gets real quiet here in the winter. So you see a population flux from-- the published population's probably 15,000 tops in the winter to like 85,000 peak summer. That happens real fast, and it's the who's who from around the world. And so the economics that that creates for small businesses is interesting. Winter cash flow gets really important. Seasonal business management, financials get really important really quick. So it's been a very interesting place to do the work we do. We have very sophisticated investor agreements, advisory boards.
Stuart: 00:11:58.491 Well, Meghan, that's quite interesting because we live in a not dissimilar town. I was just looking at our population. I think we're pretty similar. Nantucket - so it says Wikipedia, the source of all things truth, right? - is 11,000. We're nearly 9,000, and yeah, July 4, I wouldn't be surprised if we grow to about 80,000. But we also have a winter economy, our skiing, as well. There's seven resorts sort of within an hour or so of where we are, which kind of helps. So I relate to the type of thing that you're describing. So here - and I'll ask you if you've experienced the same thing, particularly after COVID - labor in the businesses that keep the locals fed and groomed and watered has been a significant challenge here. Is that the same for you?
Meghan: 00:12:57.569 It has. So before COVID, there were cracks in the dam around housing, wage practices, labor supply, all different things that, I think, affect America in general. But when you're in isolated community where people can't commute from the next town over, that gets magnified. COVID blew that up. Food security becomes so crucial. The housing market collapses. Getting labor becomes incredibly difficult, especially in service-based industries where we saw the highest attrition, so food service. Getting people to work back of house, incredibly difficult. And PPP, ERC, whatever, that stuff goes a ways, but you need bodies. And that got incredibly difficult. And you've got to adapt. We're watching businesses across the world try to adapt to the great attrition, or whatever you want to call that, but here, it just got wildly lopsided. So I would spend the first part of the week processing payroll for employees that come through our payroll company. And I'm looking at what people are making, and for a long time, I've been like, "How does anybody live on that, especially someplace here where the cost of living is so high?"
Stuart: 00:14:17.439 Yeah, so high. Yeah.
Meghan: 00:14:17.769 So we're on par with a New York City or a San Francisco, right? And then I volunteer in the food pantry on Thursdays, and you're seeing a lot of those same people come in through the door because the cost of living and the wage just don't line up. And that's not a criticism of any individual business. It's just the reality of these high-net-worth, superexpensive communities where housing is a struggle. And so instead of maybe 30% of someone's wages going to their housing, they're putting 70, 80 percent of their wages into their housing. And I think it's an interesting opportunity for the accounting community to get involved in those conversations and start working with our clients to sort of figure that out. Ian had a really great webinar yesterday with Karbon--
Stuart: 00:15:06.283 That's not like him. [laughter]
Meghan: 00:15:10.728 --around carbon credit, sustainability metrics, and building those into our accounting processes and starting to be a part-- building that into our advisory practices. And that's something we actually started about a year ago with our clients, not the carbon part in particular but more human capital metrics and social responsibility and community sustainability metrics. And I think that's going to be really important for accounting practices. A little bit of what I'm focused on is trying to create some playbooks for that and how do you participate in the solution rather than being frustrated, tired, and disillusioned by the problem.
Stuart: 00:15:48.689 Yeah. Oh, God, it's so easy to be the latter at the moment, isn't it?
Meghan: 00:15:53.615 Yeah, but I don't know, I think the accounting community-- we keep talking about moving into advisory as accountants, right? We have the ear of the clients. We're talking to them about their money. Why not be a part of the conversation around-- you don't have to wait around for minimum wage law to change to change how you compensate people.
Stuart: 00:16:15.545 Yeah. I'm sure it's so present where you are. It's such a microcosm of what's happening everywhere, but it's probably amplified by your geographical isolation and your seasonality, right? The income source during winter needs to be replaced-- finish the sentence. The three months of summer are basically the economic windfall for the year, and you got to manage that. You've got to plan for that. You've got to try and extrapolate the best you can during those months. It's so frustrating for restaurants that-- like I see around here. I went and had dinner with a-- had a beer with a mate last night, and they serve six people because we're in shoulder season on a Tuesday, right? Thank you for being open, for a start, but it must be so frustrating. You get to, in your case, say, the Friday before July 4 or something, and you've got a three-hour wait line at a nice restaurant. And they physically can't get the revenue through the door and through the economies as fast as they'd like. And this issue only gets worse and worse. So anyway, there you go. I don't know how to fix that bit.
Meghan: 00:17:35.722 Yeah, you've got essentially 16 to 20 weeks of core season. If you're managing your financials like so many businesses do by waiting for the tax return prep, if you've had a bad season and you don't know until January, you're done, right? So live-time financials are critical. We're looking at labor costs and food costs with the restaurant every week, right? And yeah, your biggest constraint is: what can that kitchen pump out? And that's a human problem, not a [inaudible] problem.
Stuart: 00:18:09.472 And it's probably discouraging for service entrepreneurs or hospitality entrepreneurs, right, perhaps those that grew up in places like yours and then come home and be part of the area again. It's like, "Oh, am I really going to have to sort of go through this every year?" It can be discouraging. Can be difficult.
Meghan: 00:18:29.804 I think it weeds out people that aren't truly committed to a real love, right, of food and hospitality. I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing, right? So the people that you are left with don't fool around. They really love what they do. They love the people they work with. They love the food and beverage industry. The restaurant business around here creates almost a sense of second family. So when someone gets sick or someone passes away, there's this coming together of that community in a way that I don't think you see in a lot of other industries and other places. So there's upside to it. And then you've got folks in this community that are really working hard on the food security problem as a community. And that is going to involve your agriculture, right? It's going to involve your food, beverage industry, and it's going to involve the general public and the food insecure. And it's going to involve the nonprofits, so traditional food pantries, food distribution organizations.
Meghan: 00:19:31.879 And so COVID brought that stuff to the forefront, and now you've got sort of this critical mass of issues that's actually motivating people for change and for problem-solving. So there's an organization here called Process First, and they're working hard to create data integrations off the back end of point-of-sale systems, like, "How much ingredient are you using when you're using it? What's profitable for you?" and how to do that in a light touch way so you're not going into a spreadsheet. And they're pairing up also with community service organizations and the farmers to create this data web that is just like nothing I had ever seen before. And that came out of COVID problems. And so they're able to share data in secure and private ways that allow them to have conversations with farmers and say, "Listen, the restaurant community needs 10,000 pounds of onions, and here's when they need it," so that we're not all growing the same thing at the same time, right, and we're creating that knowledge sharing. But also then, when there's excess food, how do you get that back into the community without asking the farmer to just give it all away?
Stuart: 00:20:38.124 That's fascinating. That's a local idea, is it?
Meghan: 00:20:42.121 It is. It's a company out of Boston. One of the founders came here during COVID, family ties to the island, got really involved in the problem and is staying here and solving the problem. But they're using Nantucket as a testing ground. It's easy to control and-- easier to control and measure what's here because you can--
Stuart: 00:21:03.577 What's there only goes in and out on the ferry.
Meghan: 00:21:05.145 Yeah, there's not even a bridge, right? So they're looking to take it as a model and bring it other places because other places have the same problem. And that's been an awesome project to work on because app developers don't always understand accountant brain or business owner brain: what will the chef actually do, how often will people actually count inventory, that kind of thing.
Stuart: 00:21:28.625 Amazing. And what took you to Nantucket, then? Is that your upbringing?
Meghan: 00:21:35.727 My grandparents had a summer home here. I moved here like February, my senior year of high school. My mom said, "You're going to make--"
Stuart: 00:21:43.413 After Katherine.
Meghan: 00:21:44.666 Yeah. "You're going to make some better money waitressing there than you will at home. Go earn some money for college." And I came and I did leave and go to college. And I didn't like it very much, and I came back here. I learned very quickly that waitressing was not for me.
Stuart: 00:22:01.441 Was there a particular incident?
Meghan: 00:22:03.442 Yeah. I got fired when I told - he was a senator at the time; he later became secretary of state - John Kerry that it didn't matter who he was. The table was occupied and he couldn't have it. And--
Stuart: 00:22:15.390 That's good advice.
Meghan: 00:22:15.881 --I learned some lessons in that about customer service but also about my inability to work front of house.
Stuart: 00:22:22.293 I think you were right. There's worse senators than him, though. And so your waitressing career was limited.
Meghan: 00:22:32.640 Was cut short pretty quickly. The GM had me come nanny for his kids instead.
Stuart: 00:22:37.849 Well, there you go. There's--
Meghan: 00:22:39.060 Yeah. I don't know, Nantucket's a hard place to leave. It's a unique community.
Stuart: 00:22:45.163 Great place to raise kids, by the sounds of it.
Meghan: 00:22:47.506 It's a hard place to raise kids. So it's isolated. It's small in its geography and what your kids get to experience, so you have to make a real concerted effort to get them out into a bigger world. My daughter was probably 17, and we were in San Francisco. And we let the kids pick the restaurant. And we looked at the kids. We were like, "Okay, how do we get there?" And she's like, "I don't know." She hadn't been anyplace where she was in the driver's seat enough that she needed to figure out how to get from point A to point B because her whole life she either knew where she was going or she was sitting in the back seat of a car. So at 17 she had to figure out how to use Google Maps.
Stuart: 00:23:29.578 Better late than never. [laughter]
Meghan: 00:23:33.177 So yeah. So for raising kids, there's this wild diversity. I think there's something like 12 languages spoken in our kids' high school. In this amazingly beautiful, natural place, there's the opportunity for fishing and being outdoors and beaches, and that kind of thing, but it's tough in that it can't be everything to everybody. You just don't have the resources available to you like you would in a bigger metropolitan area. It's isolated.
Stuart: 00:24:00.153 Yeah. And so let's talk about Fogged In a little bit. Being remote, I assume not everybody is on the island.
Meghan: 00:24:07.606 Yeah. So founded this business about 21 years ago. We were an in-person firm. Started just me. Add an employee. Add an employee. Rent an office. Grow. And about 10 years ago, we had our first employee. "My husband's retiring," she says to me, "We want to be in Florida. We own a home there." I'm like, "Great. He can retire all he wants. You're gold. I'm not letting you leave." She's still with us, by the way.
Stuart: 00:24:35.589 Oh, how nice. Is her husband still retired?
Meghan: 00:24:39.552 Yep. And we had built a rapport in the office. So when she went remote, I got to make some mistakes, I'm sure, and figure out how to manage a remote firm. And then as the years went on, it just made more and more sense. It was cost-effective. I had a selection from a bigger pool because, being 30 miles out at sea, I was forced to be resourceful about my staff. And then in turn, once you're remote, why not have remote customers? So the constraint forced innovation that, I think, put us ahead of the curve on sort of the remote bit of accounting.
Stuart: 00:25:21.634 So is there anybody else on the island or just you?
Meghan: 00:25:25.154 Just me now. I'm a solo show here. We sent our last local employee home March 2020 and never looked back. We have local customers that will sometimes pop by the office, but yeah, just me here now. We have staff in mostly Oregon, mainland Massachusetts, and Florida now.
Stuart: 00:25:45.577 And obviously, you have some local clients. What's sort of the growth profile? You're happy with sort of how you're traveling?
Meghan: 00:25:53.690 Yeah. So years ago we got involved with a family office out of the Bay Area. So he had been CEO of a very large name-recognizable tech firm that had interest here on the island. We got involved with one of those interests and sort of started dipping our toe in this multi-family office idea. And so our growth and our client profile since then has really come from those sorts of relationships. So we will work with a high-net-worth individual or a serial entrepreneur investor who has finger in multiple things. Maybe they own a tech company and they've got a couple of real estate investments or that kind of thing. And then those folks turn around and they may put some seed money or A round money into a small business or a startup, but a tether of that money is often, "We want our K-1s on time, so we would really like you to work with Meghan and the Fogged In team on the financial piece. That way we know our investment's in good hands and you're not going to get derailed by something silly, like, you never enrolled for workman's comp or some silly reason businesses get themselves in trouble early." So there's this pumpkin-patching effect, right, or sort of rollover effect of these folks tend to start more businesses, so we get new business that way. But when you get involved in new investor groups, they tend to see what we're doing and say, "Oh, I want that for myself. I want a personal balance sheet. I want my investments being tracked. I'd like my family bills paid, but I also have this business that needs some accounting." And so that's the client profile we've fallen into. A lot of the folks we work with have some sort of a tie to the island. Maybe they have a home here, a business here. They spend a lot of time here. They've invested in businesses here.
Stuart: 00:27:45.089 And so it's probably not a typical profile for a bookkeeping firm. You're dealing with some sophisticated clients and some sophisticated mechanisms by which they're investing, and their relationships are obviously very important to them. So congrats on all the success that you've experienced over your years of business. What's next for you and the organization, do you think, Meghan?
Meghan: 00:28:10.080 We're being acquired.
Stuart: 00:28:11.360 Oh, wow. Okay.
Meghan: 00:28:13.846 Yeah. So COVID was hard. It was hard for me not from a firm management standpoint but from what was going on in the world, for me. I was crawling into bed at 2 o'clock in the afternoon with my laptop. And I thought I needed to leave accounting. What I realized since then is I was burnt out. I didn't need to leave accounting. I love accounting. I love what we do for businesses and the people behind them. What I needed to do was change how I was interacting. So we made some of those changes in the sustainability work that we're doing and sort of helping businesses think about that. I felt like, "Oh, I'm doing something proactive, moving the ball forward, but I want to focus on that," and managing firm insurance policies and toner cartridges wasn't necessarily how I want to be spending my time in.
Stuart: 00:29:04.011 Wasn't part of your purpose.
Meghan: 00:29:06.983 Wasn't part of my purpose. And small firms are vulnerable. If your team is six and two people leave at the same time or have a medical emergency at the same time, which became very real reality during COVID, you're vulnerable. And we felt like the best thing we could do for our team and our clients was to be part of something bigger because it was more stable. And it gave us the opportunity and the resources to really focus on some of the stuff that was going to move the needle forward from a social responsibility and sustainability perspective, just from basic accounting for our clients. And so we are being acquired by a firm called GrowthLabs out of Providence, Rhode Island. I am enamored with their team and their owner group, and I'm very excited about the move.
Stuart: 00:29:59.658 Two Karbon firms.
Meghan: 00:30:01.470 Two Karbon firms. And that was a big piece of why it worked.
Stuart: 00:30:05.266 Oh, really?
Meghan: 00:30:06.083 Yeah. So it's going to allow us to more easily merge systems. My team's already used to that workflow and that technology. I actually reached out to Ian this morning, like, "Let me tell my story to more people because it's so important." Karbon really saved us during COVID because we did have some folks-- someone on our team had their mother passing away. Other people had severe COVID. People hospitalized and that kind of thing. So Karbon was what kept us afloat. For about a month at one point, in a way, it was the daily triage of going into Karbon and saying, "How are we getting through this week?" And I don't know how we would've done it without that kind of clarity that Karbon created, not to overplug the product. But yeah, it's been a big part of our acquisition. So that's what's next: more stability, more resources for our customer and our team. I'm really excited about where we're going.
Stuart: 00:31:04.833 That's very exciting. And does that mean a little bit of a rest for you, perhaps, in 2023?
Meghan: 00:31:13.128 Probably not. I just don't think I'm built that way. I think it's a rest in that some of the periphery that comes with firm ownership, that I'm sure your listeners are familiar with, goes away. The exhausting level of client contracts, or two tools aren't talking to each other properly and that ends up being your problem. That goes away. I think I'm energized, but I'm going to probably work harder than ever. Transitions aren't easy, one. Two, we want to make sure all of our customers are happy and our team is happy in that transition, which I think takes a lot of effort. And then I'm taking a role in customer success. And it's a new position in GrowthLabs, and I think building that out is probably going to be just as much work as anything I've ever done.
Stuart: 00:32:06.034 Yeah. Yeah. No, given the longevity of the firm and your commitment to your customers, I'm sure that there's a burning desire to make sure that the transition goes smoothly and that everybody is content on the other side.
Meghan: 00:32:24.313 We have team and customers that have been with us for more than a decade. I have a customer that's been with me at least 15 years, and I was present at the birth of her daughter. These are not just strangers on some customer list. So yeah, I am really trying to do what I think is in everybody's best interest. It was not a grab-some-cash-and-get-out situation at all.
Stuart: 00:32:50.298 Yep. Yep. No, I get it. Well, congratulations on all the success of the firm. And the next chapter is very exciting.
Meghan: 00:32:58.666 It is. It is.
Stuart: 00:33:00.130 And thank you for being a wonderful Karbon customer. And I'm sure that that will continue at the GrowthLabs. You're in very safe hands with the GrowthLabs team. They're a fantastic group. And I'm sure that you should take a little bit of a rest as you successfully complete the next phase.
Meghan: 00:33:19.449 We have a planned trip to Quebec City between Christmas and New Year's. It's my little break, like, "I'm ending this one thing and starting this new thing."
Stuart: 00:33:28.102 There you go. That'd be great. Well, Meghan Blair, thank you for joining the Accounting Leaders Podcast, and congratulations on all the success of Fogged In Bookkeeping.
Meghan: 00:33:38.168 Thank you for having me, and thank you for putting together such a great product in Karbon. It's really made a difference for us.
Stuart: 00:33:42.996 Oh, our pleasure. [music]
Stuart: 00:33:50.688 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 in Karbon Magazine. There are more than 1,000 free resources there, including guides, articles, templates, webinars, and more. Just head to karbonhq.com/resources. I'd also love it if you could leave us a five-star review wherever you listen to this podcast. Let us know you liked this session. We'll be able to keep bringing you more guests for you to learn from and get inspired by. Thanks for joining and see you on the next episode of the Accounting Leaders Podcast.