A New Era of Accounting Entrepreneurship with Matt Tait

Hello and welcome back to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. I'm very excited to be joined today by Matt Tate, the CEO of Decimal and host of the After the First Million podcast. Welcome to the pod, Matt. Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. We were introduced through some connections that I made at the Private Equity Summit pretty quickly into the conversation. I think it was Ernesto said, hey, I got someone you really got to talk to. I think you guys are going to have a lot of similar ideas on the industry and whatnot. And, you know, after a couple of minutes into the discussion, I figured, you know, we should we should get this on the record and recorded. So maybe to kick us off, do you want to talk to us about what Decimal is and also kind of where you're headed with the business? Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. And I don't know, I feel like some trouble is going to come out of this and you know, why not? But so, you know, for us, we started Decimal in January of 2020. And we did it to create what we thought was a different cast and bookkeeping firm. Simultaneously, we were building a operating system and playbook for how to build and run an accounting firm in a bookkeeping shop. And it's been great. I mean, in five and a half, almost six years, we've helped over a thousand businesses and grown to a little over 100 employees. But about a year ago, we made the decision, we kind of looked at the accounting and bookkeeping market and said, you know, there are 85-90,000 firms and people are very entrepreneurial. They love starting their own firms, but the problem is they fail at about a 60% rate within three years. So there's something really hard about doing it too. How do we help? And that's where our technology infrastructure, our processes, we started to look and said, you know what, we could just help people start firms. So that's what we did. When you allude to what are the next steps for us, we are now franchising Decimal. We are helping give people all of the benefits of a multi-million dollar company and the infrastructure that that entails, but then give them also the ability to have the trust and credibility of the small local firm. And that's franchising. We launched our first group of franchisees publicly a week ago. They really launched a couple of months ago. We've got our second group starting in January and we're looking to start 15 to 20 next year. Our goal eventually is to create a community of thousands of Decimal firms that refer work to each other, that help each other, that create the community of uplifting people that are just working together to help small to mid-sized business clients. Yeah. Like the model around where a franchisee will automatically be into something that resembles a firm alliance as well, right? And that's kind of a market I've been tapping into a lot, but like these firm alliances support a lot of accounting firms with a lot of the infrastructure and same idea behind the platform model, right? So there's, there is some proof of concept there that like, this is something that is worthwhile and there's something there to justify, you know, the franchise fees and kind of cost structure that they'll bear as well. Well, and I think you're also looking at, Hey, we're entering a new wave of how accounting is accomplished and doing it in a way that's, that's both ready today and ready for tomorrow's AI age and outsourcing and kind of the next phase of technology. That I think is really important because we are dealing with these things and the industry that we work in is not typically known for changing fast. And so how do we make that easily more approachable? Yeah. I love that. Before we dig deeper into that, like how'd you even end up in accounting? Cause you know, I was digging through your LinkedIn profile. Like you've, you've had like an attorney at law practice and you're not a CPA either. Like what's that journey like? No, gosh, no. I'm not even given access to my own QuickBooks file. So that would be a bad idea. I'm, I always joke, I'm a recovering attorney. I'm also a multiple time entrepreneur. Decimal is my like really third company. What happened was I got asked about seven years ago to join a midsize accounting firm as kind of an entrepreneur in residence, help them start new businesses, help them kind of really achieve more than the box of what their firm was. And at the same time, having run my own companies, I'd had a really big problem with the kind of bookkeeping and tax. I'd hired before, I'd outsourced to the best firms in the country before, and I really thought it was all pretty terrible. And so for me, I saw this big, and I brought my co-founder Jacob in and we saw this really big opportunity to help small businesses pay their bills, get paid and track it all. And to kind of do it from more of an entrepreneurial lens than an accounting lens. And it turns out that that type of mentality has really resonated with business owners because a lot of times they run into, and we see this in our industry, we talk accounting to people that just want not to be talked to about accounting. And so how do you approach them with, here's how your business can run better, you can understand it better, and hopefully you can succeed better. That's kind of how we got into it. We started the business out of the firm. COVID obviously hit so that was fun six weeks after we started a company. But we bought the business from the firm and then it's really grown and taken on a life of its own and given us the opportunity to acquire. We bought a company from KPMG, bought another one from a tech company that was struggling last year. And that gave us the opportunity to kind of see what the acquisition game was like. And do we want to roll up? Do we want to do this? And ultimately, we love entrepreneurs. And so we are now in the business of enabling entrepreneurs in accounting to be successful. So what specifically were you seeking to do differently? When you mentioned the experiences that you had from the client perspective were pretty bad. What are one or two of the kind of key points of where you think the market was lacking? So number one, you still were seeing a lot of billable hours. And to me, for repeatable monthly work, you should be able to have a completely fixed fee. The market is pretty much there now. There are very few hourly billers, I think, left in the space. So that's been able to take on a life of its own. But at the time, six years ago, you were still dealing with the vast majority of hourly rates. So predictable fee structure was one really big one. The other one was leaning into the technology and tools and being opinionated. Now, what I often find, and I think it's still a struggle in accounting, is a client will come in and say, here's what I'm doing. Here's what I'm doing it with. Will you do it for me? And accountants have a tendency to say, okay. And we said, no. And we said, hey, here is the better way to do it. If you use Ramp instead of Expensify, it's going to save you time in terms of expense reports, in terms of the reporting, in terms of... And by the way, your client or your employees are going to like it a lot more. You're going to like it. You're going to have better controls. It's going to save you time. Everybody's going to be happier. And by the way, Ramp's free. So it's cheaper. It's going to save you money. So having that opinionation of process and tech stack, but not just the tools, how you use them and how we will use them with you, that kind of advising really, really resonates with people because they just don't want to focus on this area of their business. So cost structure, technology, those were, I think, two of the really main ones that really resonated with people. And then just not talking accounting with them and talking business. You want to get your financials. The other thing that we did that I think is still to this day a substantial difference is we are in their books every single day. Every time a transaction hits the bank feed or the credit card feed, it gets classified. Every time a bill hits Ramp or bill.com, it gets processed. And so we're not batching things for the end of the month or the end of the week or the end of the quarter for some firms. It was, hey, you truly want to see what's happening. You're not necessarily looking at the reports. You just want to see that somebody's coming into work every day like you are. I think the learning to push back on the tech stack is something that we're finally starting to come around to. I agree. I covered that kind of at length in an episode with Erica Goody, who, you know, she runs the 15-hour firm. And I was like, yeah, how's this possible? And she's like, yeah, tech stack standardization was a huge piece of it where you really had to turn otherwise good clients away if they weren't willing to move over to your tech stack. And I think that that is a worthwhile procedure because every time you onboard something new, you know, the last company I worked at, we had transactions and that's just the nature of that business. But we had transactions happening on like seven or eight different marketplaces and different kind of revenue recognition things. And it was a disaster. It was like, just really, really hard to deal with. And when you have that many, like, you know, one will go down or they'll change the format of the reports and everything kind of is askew. And it was really hard to keep up with all of those. Whereas like if you have one, maybe two things that you're keeping up with, that makes it all a lot easier. So, yeah, if you're not doing that as a firm operator, you should definitely get on it. Oh, yeah. And then, so you also mentioned kind of offline when we were speaking, what drove wanting to move towards that sort of franchising model was that you were realizing margins that were a lot higher than most firms, right? A lot of brick and mortar might be kind of 20, maybe 25%. A lot of cloud practices kind of in the 30, 35% maybe margins. What were you seeing in terms of margins and what do you think are a few of the higher impact drivers of those increased margins? So those are good questions. And I'm going to, based on having looked at over 100 firms to acquire in the cloud and non-cloud space, I'd actually probably pull about 10% off of both of those numbers you threw out when totally honestly done. The numbers that you necessarily see in a sim when you're acquiring a firm aren't the ones you really realize when you do the full diligence on the firm and see what was taken out. So what we traditionally and typically found was that about the 20 to 30% is about where most firms margins are. And the problem is, is that that makes it really hard for you to make good money and to build a lifestyle that isn't like, I'm working 80 hours a week and 105 grand a year. That is a terrible... If it's what you want, that's great. But that also can be really, really stressful. For us, by building an infrastructure around the technology that we use, the technology that we've built, and the processes that we've put in place, we've been able to achieve well over 50. And at times, depending on the client base, much higher than that. And when you break it down by service line, like BillPay is a great, great service line for us. One of our highest profit margins is on BillPay. And the reason is, is because partially, we have created a structure and a system that makes documentation very easy because good data in allows good data to be used, updated, and then good data out. Most firms I find don't actually document well, or it's in somebody's head or it's in one place and it's not structured amongst a firm. And so creating that type of an infrastructure along with a team structure where other people are able to do stuff together. And then finally, we have broken apart the one person, one client workflow. So we actually have a team of people. It's a queue that does all transactions. And another queue that does all BillPay processing. And soon another queue that does all tax form, or filling out all tax forms. And we've got a payroll queue that's about to be stood up. What that means is that you get to take that work away from your highest value employees. And our US team members, our accounting managers are only doing client relationship and making sure the quality of work that gets to them is, and gets to the client is perfect for what it needs to be. And so you're breaking that work up and saying, hey, we're going to put the work at the price point that it needs to be. Technology is a foundation, get it to do as much as possible. We have a great team, multiple teams in the Philippines that do the next level of work. And then our US team is relationship based. They are not doing accounting work. And we hire for that specific skill set. What that also means is as we start to look at the push towards advising, like right now, I think we're at this other transition point in accounting where we're getting more focused towards helping our clients or businesses succeed versus just stand. And so much of bookkeeping is about how do I keep you operating today and it's not looking forward. To do that, we have to create capacity. And so we've created capacity of US people so that they can focus on the relationships and advising businesses on how to succeed going forward. Yeah, I like that a lot. It's interesting hearing you point out bill pay as like the super high profit margin area within Decimal because we don't really talk about these things very much. It's the bookkeeping, it's advisory work, fractional CFO work, things like that, or tax. But you're not the first person to point that out. I've had people talk about payroll firms in the past as well being like, oh man, you don't know this or hear about this, but payroll is like an incredible business as well. You just have to have a very well-oiled machine to do it, right? Because the consequences of getting that wrong are massive. So panic across a firm or a company if you get that wrong. Well, and I hear people, I was talking to somebody the other day and they were like, yeah, we will never do bill pay. And I was like, why not? And he goes, well, why would we? And I was like, well, you have ramp or bill.com. So it's fully remote. You can do it. They are sending you everything. You're entering it into a system, making sure it's ready, and then you're queuing it up. So all they have to do is click approve. Why wouldn't you do that? That is an administrative process. And very rarely, if ever, are you dealing with a, this needs to be paid today. So realistically, you're dealing with a net 30, net 60, something around there. Like, why wouldn't you do that? And then they say like, oh, well, I don't want my accounting manager. I don't want my controller to do that work. And I said, absolutely not. It's perfect work for somebody in the Philippines. Or ramp's got a nice AI agent that's doing almost all of that too. Like, why wouldn't you do it? I'll let somebody pay me for work something else is doing. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's super high impact as well. I've worked somewhere where the bill pay was not on track when I came in and that can cause some pretty big issues and some pretty big headaches. And then having that outsourced from the company perspective as well is really nice because there's continuation. So where everything fell apart when I had come into this like very small operation was, you know, it wasn't handed off properly from the prior controller. And so it was just like a whole mess. And we had key vendors who hadn't been paid. And it was like, it was a really scary time actually, genuinely. And I, I remember working on Christmas Eve and day to fix it. Like that's the kind of level of thing it is. Right. So, um, changing gears here a little bit. So we're talking about like a franchise model we've had, uh, Chase Berkey from Dark Horse on before talking about what they're doing as well. And I've had tons of conversations with people as part of the recruiting process or just via what I do with Big Four Transparency who are like, ah, you know, I'm thinking about maybe starting a firm, but like, I have all these questions, I have all these insecurities or, um, you know, it just feels like I'm jumping out with no safety net. So what's unique about the decimal franchise model, you know, short sales pitch on that. Like if I'm considering, like, I don't know, like if I want another senior manager job, but I'm not the person to go out fully on my own. Like what's the, what's the model here? Well, so first those questions were part of what really led us to finally saying, all right, we're going to do franchising was I've always, I love helping entrepreneurs. And so I've talked to dozens of people that were that senior manager and I just, Hey, do you want advice on how to start a firm? I'd still do that even with franchising. Like, here's some of the things I do. Here's how I'd start. Here's how I think about it. Um, I just, we, and I love fundamentally helping businesses. I really, really think it's cool to see how many kind of alternative models you're starting to see in the accounting space. And I think what Dark Horse is doing is a great example of that. The difference is, is when you have a franchise, you own a business that is your business. You have equity in that business. And someday you can sell that business for the multiples that other people are selling and hopefully better, um, businesses. And so you're able to, uh, do that. A lot of the playbook side they have, we have technology infrastructure. Theirs is more of a, you're part of a firm, but it's a distributed firm. I think that is a great model for those people that don't want the full, I'm starting my own company. I'm starting my own firm. Now, if you want to start your own firm and be a business owner, then Decimal in a franchise is a better choice. Uh, if you want to kind of be a part of a firm, um, then I think Dark Horse is a better choice. For both though, what I think is really great about what they've done and something that we're doing as well is creating the community aspect. You know, at Decimal, our first group of franchisees is already referring business to each other because they have different skill sets. So you're creating, uh, kind of that community aspect, uh, or as you mentioned, the alliance. Um, I think what BDO is kind of the best known alliance, but you're starting to see new, better versions of that pop up, uh, in Aprio and other firms today. Um, and I think what they're doing is really great because people want a community where they can pool knowledge and information and then also feel less lonely and isolated. And so to me, part of this is creating a community. And for me, we just drew kind of more attraction towards the idea of a community of entrepreneurs and, and that's more of what Decimal is versus kind of being more a part of a firm. Interesting. And where you mentioned owning it and being able to sell it, like if I started a Decimal franchise and I, you know, I scale it up, things go great to $7 million in revenue and Ascend comes knocking, let's say like, can I sell it externally to Ascend or you have to sell it kind of as a Decimal franchise to someone who wants to own a Decimal franchise? So right now you have to sell it as a Decimal franchise. Yeah. But you know, with, with anything I'm, we're capitalists and so there's a number on what that looks like. Yeah. But realistically, the highest best value is going to be selling it as a Decimal franchise. And we also already have franchisees that are looking at acquiring firms and stuff like that. So I think that's probably going to be more built into the model. Yeah. But part of it is, Hey, if somebody wants to sell, whether they are just ready to be done or they've gotten that 7 million, we're going to help them sell. We want to help them sell. I think that that is a big, awesome thing and we want to encourage it as much as possible. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, as the influence of the kind of mothership grows, right, for early franchisees, probably most specifically as well, so does the value of it. If it becomes a super well-known kind of brand name within firms and you know, within operations and people have a good understanding of what it is you offer and the value of that, then that can be a creative to a sale, I guess, for sure. Yeah, I would agree. So how does having the podcast after the first million, how does that influence your business? Was that built as something to serve a company Decimal or has it sort of taken a life of its own? Because I've found that to be the case a little bit with me where I thought this was going to be like, Oh, this is going to be a sales pipeline for big for transparency. And that hasn't totally been the case, but I've reaped just a ton of other rewards from it. And I'm curious for other people's experience with that. Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I was talking to one of the groups that I work with yesterday and they joke that I'm the reluctant influencer because, you know, about two years ago, year and a half ago, my team approached me and they said, look, we think it'd be really good if you started a podcast and if you started posting on LinkedIn. And I pushed back. It's not my personality. But I finally agreed. And I have found, you know, the first season of After the First Million was with entrepreneurs that I knew who had grown businesses like really, really big. And I wanted to talk with them and learn from them how they'd gotten past the startup phase and into scale up. Because that's a really big difference when you get after that first million and you start to have to do all the things that you didn't like to do, like starting up, like where you are now, where I've been, like you're in this like first million of revenue. It's scrappy. You're kind of doing everything. And then all of a sudden you look like, all right, how do I get to four or five? And you have to start putting processes and I'm allergic to processes. And it's an identity crisis for an entrepreneur. And then as we looked at season two, we were like, all right, now let's focus on accounting. How do we help accounting businesses and accounting firms really think like, how do we become that scale? How do we work ourselves out of the business? Doesn't mean you have to not be in the business. But if you want to kind of create a lifestyle for yourselves and a good brand that you can sell, you have to not be there at some point. And so you need to figure out how do I do that scale up? How do I go through that identity crisis in accounting? And I learned more doing the podcast than I do in any other place. Just the tidbits, the notes. I was talking to somebody that I had on the podcast about a year ago and I was like, dude, I still remember when you said X, Y, and Z and I applied it and it's worked great and I love it. Thank you. And so those are the things that probably like you, like you just, you kind of get these tidbits and you're like, this is great. This is awesome. Yeah. No, I feel super ready. If I ever wanted to start a firm one day, like it really feels like a, it feels like you're doing a, you know, advanced MBA in whatever the topic is. And then at the same time- We'll get you to buy a franchise down the road. There we go. Maybe, maybe. But no, it's, it's like a really cool thing where you, yeah, you have all this knowledge and, you know, having started a firm or even for that matter, like you said, like making that transition, I call it like going from a founder to a CEO, right? Right. Like sometimes people ask, what's your position in big for transparency? And I, I still just go with founder. And they're like, oh, so you're the CEO of the business. And I'm like, ah, it feels like a weird framing. Cause I'm not really like, that's not really what I'm doing. Right. So, so decimal big mission, sort of supporting entrepreneurial accounting professionals. Um, what do you think the future of entrepreneurship in accounting looks like? Because I've had some conversations, uh, it was some relatively, uh, you know, the sky is falling reactive types in accounting. We're like, oh, PE coming in is, is going to completely squash entrepreneurship in accounting. And, and like, you know, it's going to be the end of, end of times. And I was saying kind of, I think it's the opposite personally. I think everything's sort of cyclical, the pendulum swings in one direction and then it'll swing back in the other. And everything is met with a reaction. And I think a reaction to a consolidation of a ton of firms is kind of clearing out the brush and there will be a lot of room for entrepreneurship, but I'm curious for your opinion and the reason for that. All right. So I'll keep this to the most part. a private equities effect on entrepreneurship, but taking a step back, I think this is the single best time to get into accounting in the history of accounting, like hard stop. I think that with where technology is going, where kind of globalization of the workforce is going, what small businesses and mid-sized businesses are needing, I think it's an extremely, extremely exciting time to be in accounting, period. I also think, like you said, what private equity is doing is it's clearing out the brush in these old firm, old business models and saying, look, if the economics don't work, we're going to clear it out. Is it all going to be good? No. But change is never perfect. It's messy. And I think at the end, that mess will be a really, really good thing. But when it comes to entrepreneurship, in every industry period that private equity enters into, it barbells the industry. It quite literally starts more entrepreneurship because the consolidation isn't for everybody. And so it automatically pushes people out. But what it does is it kills the middle. Those middle firms that are in that, call it five to almost 100 million in revenue, those firms are going to disappear. And they're going to constantly be disappearing. And what happens- Through consolidation? Through consolidation, yeah. And then you're going to see more and more people starting their own firm and building to that five, $10 million. But what's changed is you now have an exit path. Prior to private equity, you actually didn't have a real exit path in accounting. You were just kind of stuck in some retirement function that you could get paid when you retired. Now you can actually receive value for selling your assets because private equity is placing a value on that. And even firms that are doing their own consolidating, I've got a buddy that runs tax for a really large midsize firm. They're buying a ton and they're paying cash. They're not doing the old, we'll pay you in deferred compensation somewhere down the road, which to me is like total bullshit. I want to get paid cash now. So you're actually creating the economic system for entrepreneurship. To be fair, I think the barrier to entry to starting a firm is much lower than it ever has been because of cloud technology, because of integrated automated technologies and soon to be AI. I think the hard thing is it takes a lot of investment and time to build an infrastructure for scale. And that I think is where people are struggling. And that's why having a fully baked operating system from a dark horse, from a decimal, from a multi-million dollar company can be that firm in a box that is the safety net. A lot of those people you've talked to are looking for because you don't get caught in the how to on everything. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you talk to me about IT infrastructure, my eyes are going to roll in the back of my head. There's all these things that are like, I want to sign up for what would essentially almost be like running a pod within a larger firm. I want to sign up for that and run my own business, but not have all the headache. And that's where I've been fascinated with platform private equity groups, like the Ascend and things like that, or even platform accounting group, where they have all these resources. And so this is a way to do that, but just maintaining that equity ownership to a higher degree. Yeah. It's having the ownership and the singularity to have your own business and to be a business owner rather than part of a business. And for a lot of people being part of a business is ideal for them. And I think that's awesome. For some of us, and you're in this crowd, having your own business is your ideal. And those are the ones that we're looking for. And I think that you're starting to see more and more. Last question for you here before we wrap up. What are some of the biggest sort of aha breakthrough moments that you've had on the podcast talking to accountants specifically? What are the big breaking points where they've had to change who they are, change their frame on what running an accounting firm means and what was the way out for them? The nicest human being in accounting is Dave Runs Nimble. He's down in Salt Lake City. Nicest human being you'll ever meet. And he'll tell you, and he's published this on LinkedIn and done podcasts on it. He was like the CFO and he was caught doing a lot of the work and at some point he realized I need to scale. I need to make this into a scalable growing business, which means I need to be able to get myself out of it. And now they're a huge size. He's done amazingly well. And I think that that idea of pulling himself out of the business and making himself into a true CEO, that's the scale point. That's the hard identity crisis I mentioned earlier. And something that he's done and then Dan Gertrudes at Growth Labs has done too is the Amazon effect of, I see some of these cost centers for me that I could turn into profit centers. So I'm going to create sidecar businesses. For Dan, that's some custom software dev around platforms people are using. Streams. Yeah. Yeah. The other revenue streams. For Dave, it's outsourcing and helping people hire in the Philippines or it's IT support. I think that's also where you see the creativity of the CEO role really playing into people. And I think that's where growth comes from. But once again, you have to create capacity. And if you are totally busy doing work for clients, trying to sell new clients, you're not going to have the capacity to improve your business. So you've got to create that capacity. And sometimes that means applying additional economic risk. Sometimes that means hiring somebody. But it means some sort of risk you're going to have to apply to get over that plateau. Every business, and you've seen this in your company, you go through multiple plateau moments. And at some point during each plateau, you look yourself in the mirror and sometimes you say, you know what? I'm cool being here for right now. Other times you say, you know what? I'm willing to risk getting to the next plateau. That's another thing I've really learned in podcasting with all types of entrepreneurs is there are some of us that just view jumping out of the plane as really freaking fun. And other people that just kind of say, you know what? This is my plateau. I talked to a guy, one of my first guests, grew a consulting business out of an accounting firm that is now a half billion dollar or more accounting or consulting business. They got to 300 million and he said, you know what? This is my plateau. I'm going to retire. I'm done. And like, that's a pretty cool freaking plateau. He was like employee five. Everybody reaches their plateau at some point and that's cool. But I think seeing how people deal with that and analyze each plateau is really important. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in a little bit of a jumping out of the plane phase with breaking through the prior sort of revenue threshold we were sort of stuck at. And so I can very much relate to that where it's like, okay, you know what? We're going to pull the trigger on this thing. I've been thinking about it. I thought it was maybe a shiny object at first. Wasn't sure, but like now it's time to do it. And did I see you just got like 10,000 followers on LinkedIn? So now you're really famous. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of things back to back. I got my first keynote at PE Summit, got that. And then the Accounting Today top 100 all sort of at the same time, which was cool. Congrats. Thank you. Yeah. And that's long tail stuff. That doesn't feel like a jumping out of the plane. That's earned. That's 21, 22 months of posting four times a week on LinkedIn, creating content and stuff. That's like a very long tail. But even that, right? Like early on, I was just kind of like, oh man, like I'm getting all these rooms and people don't know what Big Four Transparency is. It's like, yeah, you got to, you got to publish, you got to do a podcast, you got to contribute to journals. You got to do all these things. Yeah. It took about nine months before that started to pay off, I would say. And so yeah, I definitely got to stick with those things. Yeah. But yeah. I think that's awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Matt. I appreciate it and I'll be keeping a close eye on Decimal and everything you're doing. Just launching that first franchise is super exciting and I look forward to seeing what you guys are up to in the future. Well, thanks for having me on. I've enjoyed the conversation. Take care. Bye. Bye.