Ep: 85 Top experts answer: "Are business owners any closer to receiving proactive advice from accountants?"
The Accounting Answers Podcast, hosted by Rob Brown, asks critical questions of the experts, leaders and influencers who shape the decision-making of accountants, CPAs and finance professionals. Today we ask:
Are business owners any closer to receiving proactive advice from accountants?
You'll hear insightful and passionate answers from these 5 experts and influencers:
Arun Mehra | CEO of Samera Global, helping accountants build a global firm
Ashley Leeds | 15 minute guy teaching LinkedIn in 15 Minutes a Day
Becky Glover | Award winning Finance Director, board member and business leader
Ben Richmond | Chartered accountant and U.S. country manager at Xero
Blake Oliver | Founder of Earmark, where accountants earn CPE for podcasts
Tune into more on this daily show for short, sharp episodes that keep you informed of what's happening in the accounting world and the whole ecosystem of consultants, organizations, vendors and advisors who serve them.
To participate in our international virtual speed networking events for the accounting community, book your place at the next gathering. Great for building your personal brand and making valuable industry connections in return for a small donation to charity: https://accountinginfluencers.com/events
◣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◢
Thanks to our sponsors:
CPA Trendlines. Actionable intelligence for the professional tax, accounting and finance community. Facts and figures, insights and implications, news, trends, tips and research serving more than 500,000 tax, accounting and finance professionals from around the world. go to https://cpatrendlines.com to sign up for free email updates.
Dan McMahon and Integrated Growth Advisors. IGA are the CPA firm experts in Growth, Building Infrastructure, and Exchanging ownership. This management advisory firm focuses on empowering CPAs to grow their revenues and increase their profitability and firm value. IGA’s methodology delivers on services built upon "IGA GBX" which represents the firm’s value creation model of "firm Growth, Building infrastructure, and eXchanging ownership. https://www.integratedgrowthadvisors.com
If you'd like to sponsor the show and elevate your brand with our audience, reach out to show host Rob Brown on LinkedIn and his team will reach out to fix up a chat to explore.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/therobbrown
You can also check out other Accounting Influencers Shows on YouTube:
https://bit.ly/AI-youtube
How do you stay informed about what's happening in the accounting world? Not so much the news and the day today but the trends, the patterns, the drivers of change. What if you had an advisory board of experts help you gauge what the world is thinking about vital trends and patterns in the accounting world, about what's working and what isn't. You could put some prompts into chat GPT and get an idea, but what if you could go to the real people themselves who are on the front line working with and in accounting firms. I'm talking about real people, real opinions, real insights. I'm Rob Brown and for this brand new accounting answers podcast I've interviewed 111 people in the know from tons of different countries, roles, viewpoints, all to keep you ahead of what the world is thinking in accounting finance and tech. And I've asked them all the same five questions about change, talent, people, tech and the future of accounting. That's over 500 brilliant passionate and articulate perceptions, insights, viewpoints from professionals with a say in this game. And in this show, coming at every working day for the next few weeks, you're going to hear every single answer. Each episode will focus on one of the five questions and give you answers from five of our experts. So that's deep dive into today's episode. We've been focusing all this week on the question, our business owners any closer to receiving proactive advice from accountants. While the consensus seems to be yes, the actual news is mixed. And what's even more interesting is the reasons for the answers are experts and influencers are given for the slow pace of change with cast or client advisory services or business coaching or consultancy or compliance plus or whatever you choose to call it. Let's check out more of their answers. Sharing the thoughts now is our own mirror CEO of Samira Global, dedicated to helping accountants build and scale their firms on a global scale with strategic advice and insights into international markets. No, the reason, the reason I say that is it's a couple of things. Two, two main reasons. I think accountants have to train their clients better to provide the information to them. If the client provide the information of format in a way which is streamlined, then yes, accountants can then add value. Then accountants can give proactive advice. Okay. But quite often enough, especially amongst the small or to medium sized organizations that you deal with, they're just trying to keep their head above the parapet. So they're not dealing with the accountant or preparing the information to the accountant isn't their priority. They're just trying to get much in common and do it. So I think the smaller organizations you struggle with, the larger medium to larger organizations, they can get that added value. But again, I think there are too many generalists out there in terms of accounting. I've been doing this for 20 years and pretty much our whole health care sector is dentists, doctors, that type of thing. So we've seen everything. If I was asked to advise on a SaaS business, I wouldn't have an idea where to start to be honest with you. And I wouldn't be doing a duty to a good deed for the client. So I think it's really important for the accountants to really have a specialism and then they can offer that proactive advice. So it goes both ways. The client has to be helpful in terms of providing information to enable the accountant to provide advice. Also, the accountant needs to really specialize and be able to provide the necessary skill, the knowledge that they have. Next, we welcome Ashley Leeds, known as the 15-minute guide teaching professionals how to leverage LinkedIn effectively in just 15 minutes a day to grow their network and business opportunities. Absolutely. With AI taking over some of the drudgery jobs, the stuff that is taking all the time, it's going to give our accountants and bookkeepers the chance to spend a little bit of time. In fact, my bookkeeper sends me a little video every month showing me what I'm doing in my zero. So I'm getting that. I haven't asked for it. She's doing that extra little thing just to add a little bit more value. And as our accountants and bookkeepers get more confident, they're going to be doing an awful lot more of this. And there's a lot more people out there helping accountants and bookkeepers to do that. And the software, the AI, and all the other tools that we've got as our disposal is going to help that and make that happen even more. Next, we hear the perspective of Becky Glover, and a woodwind and finance director, board member and business leader renowned for her strategic financial leadership and commitment to driving business success. Now, obviously, we're biased as accountants. I will say that firstly, but yes, I do think business owners are getting better and better value from their accountants, whether that be accountants in practice, or whether that be an accountant within an actual business and in industry. And I think that's because the technology is allowing them to do that. So myself, for example, I'm now not spending a lot of time on boring mundane tasks. I'm spending more time on giving my business owners amazing information, which might look beautiful so that they can quickly scan it and go, yes, that's the information I need. That's the trend I was looking for. I'm now able to make better decisions to grow this business or make it a more robust business. And we've seen a lot of that with Covid, with Brexit, you know, everyone knows the troubles that we've had in the last few years. And I think that pushed accountants forward in getting better value. And business owners are going to be able to see more and more of that to come. Next, please welcome Ben Richmond, a chartered accountant and US country manager at zero, where he leads initiatives to empower small businesses and accountants with innovative cloud-based accounting software. Yeah, so the answer is yes. But again, it's so far from where it should be. So I work with so many practices, I work with practices right across the world, and there are practices that have totally transformed what we have. You know, we talk a lot about CAD services or client advisory services. Some of the practices that I've been working with at zero for nearly for over a decade, you know, CADs is like very 2010. They've become full managed service shots to the small businesses they support. And they've completely changed how they interact with clients, the type of advice they give them, they where they go to for education technology, because where does a small business go for that? They where they go to for advice around the processes and controls they should have, how they run that, they where they go to for advice and business planning, and that really good advisory work around then how do we then track how that business is. And they're right alongside their small business clients along the way. That's where we should that's where we should be today with the technology that we have. But it is still scary. And I think we saw in the pandemic, you know, as firms had to go remote quickly, the amount of firms that still weren't set up to operate remotely was horrific. And so their clients, you know, trying to manage how to get through a tax season was the biggest thing they were worried as their clients came running to them going, I don't know if I've got enough cash flow over the next 90 days. You know, how do I get access to these government loans that are out? Can you help me with my records? And they were not set up to support those clients. So the exciting thing is we have seen a bigger chunk of the profession take that step and seeing some amazing things out. But at the mass market level, it's still far too slow. Those firms made, you know, made huge success during the pandemic because they were able to, they were first anyways, they could operate like that. And we're able to get right alongside their small businesses. And I think it was a massive wake up call to the firms that have been talking about doing this. You know, always we know we need to do it busy this year. It's another busy tax season that's getting through that we've got to get on and start doing it. You know, the technology at these table stakes, you've got to think about how you engage with your clients, making it easy for them to engage with you, showing up where they are. They want to know much more about their business. And I think the last thing is really, you know, I think quite funny, we researched a lot of small businesses going, we're going for this help. And most of them said, Oh, I have a customer who's a friend. I have a customer who's a CPA, often asked some questions, I have a friend. And we said, well, who should you go? So who do you think should be giving you this advice? And I suppose my accountant or bookkeeper should be giving me that advice. And then when we ran the same question on the accounting and bookkeeping community, they were like, well, it should be us, but do they want it for us? And I experienced this firsthand with my advisor and I was like, I felt like I was having to beg for advisory, like, the clock, you know, we shouldn't be scared to sell these services. And we can definitely see there's a disconnect between the clients think it should be us that provided. But we're a bit nervous around what they actually want for us. And how do we sell those services? And the first step is get connected with them using digital technology, you're connected with them, which means you can see when they're struggling, or we can see when there's opportunity, and you can be reaching out regularly with a more regular engagement. That's the stuff that you don't have to be a used car salesperson. But there's a massive disconnect. And we've got it. We've got to show small businesses that doing it on their own. It's not smart and doing it together with us. It's much smarter. So yes, they're closer. We need to go much faster and it's still too big again. Diving into the conversation now is Blake Oliver, founder of EMR, where accountants and CP for listening to podcast, blending education with entertainment to support the accounting professions, continuous learning. I feel like that's a loaded question because it depends on what business owner you're talking about, what accountant you're talking about. There are plenty of accountants who do deliver proactive advice. And there's also plenty who don't. So I would say we're going to get closer with tech. Tech is going to help us give more proactive advice because we're going to spend less time assembling historical financials. If we know what we're doing, we've set up the systems properly. And so we'll have data that is up to date on a daily basis. That's the dream for me as a business owner. I'm both an accountant and I'm a business owner. And so what I do with my own accounting is I do it on a daily basis every morning. So I know exactly where I stand from a cash flow perspective, exactly where I am in terms of assets and liabilities. And I've set up my accounts payable, accounts receivable, such that I don't have to worry about cash flow the way that people did in the past. A lot of businesses though, they aren't set up that way. They're still operating with this lag of weeks or sometimes even months before they really know where they stand. So I think they are closer because tech is going to help us get there. But you've always been able to do this. If you're a good accountant, you've always been able to give proactive advice. So I just hope that more business owners will get closer. So there you have five great answers to the question. Are business owners any closer to receiving proactive advice from accountants? Every work in day of the week, Monday through Friday, we give you the insights of five top influencers in the accounting world on this critical area for proactive advice from accountants. That's 25 valuable perspectives, viewpoints and best thinking every week. And with each fresh week comes a fresh question with more thoughts from the best accounting influencers and leaders we can find. Thanks for listening to the Accounting Answers podcast and sharing this brand you show with your friends. If you want to join the conversation, you can plug into our community of influencers at accountinginfluencers.com and check out our virtual speed networking events. These happen every few months for the North American region and the UK Europe region. Great opportunities to raise your profile, build valuable connections and share your thoughts with influential peers. Until next time, this is your host Rob Brown saying stay informed, stay relevant and stay connected.
