Building Better Firms with Brandon Hall

Hello, and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. I'm joined today by Brandon Hall, CEO of Hall CPA and co-host of the Tax Smart Real Estate Investor podcast. Welcome to the pod, Brandon. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Dom. I appreciate it. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, thank you. It's been a long time coming. We've done some work together in the past, and you've really kind of helped me along with this business and inspired me to push a little bit further this year, so thank you for that. Yeah. I think you have an awesome product, and anybody listening should be hitting you up and thinking about whether or not your product makes sense for them. Thanks for the very, very early plug. I appreciate it. 100%. Yeah. We actually use Dom's product, so it's amazing. Trust me. Yeah. That's what the podcast is about. But still, I feel like people should know. Yeah, yeah. Good early plug, though. I really appreciate it. Yeah. I mean, so to start off, I wanted to talk about a lot of the other guests I've had on here recently. I think I told you this before, but they hold you in extremely high regards, like particularly the way that you're running your firm. We've had some discussions in the past about you wanting to find that middle ground where you can be kind of the employer of choice, as well as compensate employees generously while remaining profitable, right? So ultimately, what that's going to boil down to means that you need significantly more efficiency in how you run your firm versus some of the other traditional firms who either leave their staff dry or not so profitable. So what's been the secret sauce for you to run your business so well? Oh, man. How long do we have? 45 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, look, I run my business a little bit differently than the traditional model. We don't track time. I look at everything as a revenue production output that's effectively like our core metrics that we're really measuring at the firm. And we know what each person on the team can produce and how that should change each year with pricing increases and things like that. And my goal was just to always build a platform to attract really smart people. So one is, once you attract the smart people, how do you know that they're doing a great job? How do you know when people are not doing a great job? Because high performers don't want to work with people that are not doing a great job. So we've got to have a method to identify those people and then also move them off the platform. But then also, how do you run a platform where your core leadership team is not in the day-to-day weeds of providing client service? I think of everything in terms of a, I think Alex Formosy actually framed this pretty well, but I've always thought in terms of leverage. And he talks about the leverage pyramid where you've got low leverage activities and high leverage activities. Well, in an accounting firm, the lowest leverage activity that you have is providing one-on-one client service. Yeah. And that's a weird thing to say, because that's what we all pride ourselves on. We pride ourselves on providing the best client service. But the reality is that you can only scale your hourly rate so much before the market tells you, no, I'm not going to pay that rate. So how do you gain more leverage? Well, you manage the people that are providing the client service. Now you can do that at scale, right? How do you gain leverage from there? Well, you start bringing in business. How do you gain leverage from there? Well, you start developing technology, right? So I always think in terms of the leverage pyramid. And when you think about it like that, it's obvious that your leadership team, your partners, the people that have equity in the company, for the most part, should not be doing lower leverage activities. So my whole thing, and I don't run my firm as profitably as a firm where all the partners are doing client work, because our partners are not doing client work. So we don't have 100% margin projects as a result. But we have figured out a way to build a platform that scales 40% to 50% per year, attracts really great talent. It's amazing. The team that we're building now, I never, never dreamed of having these people. I'm actually scared to talk taxes now with my team, because they're just like, they're on a different level, man. I thought I was a tax nerd, and these guys that I'm hiring and women that I'm hiring are just incredible. But anyway, we're building this great platform. We're attracting great people. We're paying them well. And we're still able to claw a margin that I think is acceptable for somebody that's growing 40% to 50% per year. Awesome. Yeah. So you mentioned managing a high performance team and all that without the use of timesheets. I know you've tweeted recently a little bit about kind of introducing net promoter score. So NPS surveys with your customers. Is that kind of the tool of choice? Because timekeeping goes beyond just the means of building your work. And I've been talking to some firms who do time tracking and timekeeping, despite that not being the metric by which they build their customers just to evaluate performance. So has net promoter score kind of been like the better way for you to do this and track kind of performance of your team? Yeah. I guess anytime that I have the timesheet time tracking conversation, I just always ask what's the point, right? And everybody will tell you, oh, well, we just we use it as a data point. Well, why? Yeah. Well, just it's just a good thing to use. Okay. But why? Oh, it's we're trying to allocate costs. There you go. You're trying to allocate costs. Just admit that that's what you're trying to do with your time tracking. The problem is that that entire thing is just flawed. It doesn't even make sense. Like, okay, you have $100,000 salary, right? And that resource is going to work 2,000 hours a year, so $50 an hour. Let's say January through November, they're on track, perfectly on track. So no overtime and no undertime, just 40 hours a week. Perfect. In December, they work an extra 100 hours on top of what they were scheduled to do. So now we've got a 100K divided by 2,100 hours. And I don't know what the math is, but 48 hours or something an hour, right? Yeah. So 100K divided by 21 hours. $48 an hour is the cost. But now you have a dilemma because this issue came in December. So do you retroactively apply a $48 an hour cost to all projects, even if those projects have already been completed? Or do you have 100% margin on the extra 100 hours that you worked in December? Either way, it's like a pointless argument. I don't even know why we're doing it. So for me, I was just like, okay, the data doesn't make sense to me. I don't know why you would use the data or how you would use the time tracking data. So instead, I'm going to find a different way to do this. And when you go the opposite way, you actually start realizing, oh, it's just like every other business that doesn't track time. So you're just looking at regular KPI. So NPS is certainly one of them, right? We want to know how our customers are feeling on an ongoing basis. And if you can build NPS data year over year over year, then you can hold your team accountable to it. So we can bonus on it. And that's what we do now. So if we've improved our NPS the way that we want to, then you get a bonus. But we primarily track production via revenue. So revenue produced per resource, per team, per service line. And it's just simplified that entire conversation for us. We know when projects are taking too long or underpriced because we give our team production bonuses and they let us know. And we also have weekly one-on-ones with our team where we're looking at data on a consistent basis. Are projects moving? If they're not moving, why are they not moving? So we're creating all these feedback loops that people, I think, just rely on timesheets to do. But we just don't track time. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like once you reach scale, I'm going to be interested in understanding how kind of scalable, I mean, you've already reached scale, I mean, for other firms, but I'm kind of curious in how that scales, right? Because one of the big benefits of just timesheets is you get all this kind of more or less quantitative data that you can kind of use in establishing that, right? So how are you assessing how much time is going into each project and how much cost to allocate then? I don't allocate costs. So I don't track profitability per project. And I don't, it's too, it's too in the weeds. Okay. So I try to focus on efficiency, but also effectiveness. And I don't want to be way too in the weeds that hurts both of those things. So what we do is we just look at the macro, the macro level, right? So every year at the beginning of the year, I project out what each team is supposed to do, what each service line is supposed to do in terms of revenue and expenses. So I'm going to work on it until I get the margin that I want. And then we're going to go back to the table and ask, do we need to do price increases? Do we need to restaff our team or restructure our team to make this happen? So it's not a, yeah, we just, I just, I've never really thought about using time in that. I don't know how that would help me because we have, we have multi years now of production revenue production data in revenue terms. So I know what every single person on my team and their role can produce at any, in any given year. And so that becomes their expectation. And it's, it's nice when you can give an employee, you need to review $500,000 worth of tax returns this year. That's a lot clearer than I need you to bill 1800 hours. Yeah. Um, you know, so, so we, we just simplify it for everybody in the process. Yeah. And I think tying things directly to revenue, I've had a lot of other discussions with people who either have production pay or things like that, where people are really kind of mindful of the revenue they're generating rather than just the hours they're billing. And I think, I think that really empowers people a lot more too, to actually kind of step forward and be like, Hey, Brandon, like we are undercharging this person because they're the person who's actually like on this project. Right. And, and so if it's just, you dump a bunch of billable hours and some partner up the line is writing them off and it's not your problem because you're hitting your billable hour target, you're not going to be reporting those things as much. Right. So I think, I think that's awesome for incentive alignment for sure. Yeah. I mean, we get into realization, utilization, allizations and, um, it's just, there's just a lot of accounting games that we like to play as accountants. And I just prefer, like, like what I like to know is what is true because you can, you can record eight hours. It doesn't mean that you actually worked or billed eight hours. You could have worked nine, you could have eaten one yourself. You could have worked seven and just billed eight. I mean, these things happen, right? And so, and people will say, well, at scale over time, you get tons of good data and I'm, but I'm like, yeah, but you still have the issue of, is it even true? Um, so I, I just, I just choose to focus on very, what is true? What can you not fake? You can't fake revenue and you can't fake when you put that project into the next stage. Yeah. It either happened or it didn't. Right. Um, so that, that's what I've choose to focus on and that's what I chose to build, build my entire business and model around. Interesting. It's nice to hear you when you talk about, is there a margin? Correct. The first thing you talk about is pricing. Cause you know, there's some, some recent surveys that came out, uh, I was listening to Blake Oliver's podcast where he's like, oh, so many accounting firms, basically like the data shows that they're just not doing pricing increases and it's just like, oh, we just need to squeeze a little bit more out of our people. Right. And it is, it is important for people to understand that like pricing is a key component. Right. And you need to be pricing your work appropriately. So it's nice that that was the first thing you went to. Yeah. Yeah. It's always the first thing that you go to. Right. And I think especially over the past couple of years, if you haven't been increasing your prices, what are you doing? Like inflation has been raging. Yeah. Your clients are expecting a price increase. Um, so if you're not increasing your, you are, it's costing you yourself. Right. So most, most account, I have found that accountants, you know, myself included, I'm an accountant are choose, prefer to be conflict averse, right? We don't want conflict. If I got to call the client, tell them that the fees increased cause we misscoped it. I just, I was not going to do that. We'll just eat it. Right. Yeah. I don't want to send the client this bad email, so I'll just wait. I'll kick it down to, I'll wait two weeks and cause that'll make it better. Um, but the same thing happens with pricing increases. I don't want to, I don't want to tell the client that I'm going to have to increase their prices. So I'll just work extra. That's the solution. And that's not a solution. And you got to think about all of your people in your firm to like, you're a model. If you are in leadership, even as a manager, right? People are looking up to you to decide how they should act and work and what they should be expecting as well. And so if you are not able to emulate a good business decisions and behavior, um, then other people in your firm are going to, I mean, they're going to lose, lose trust, right? They might, they might still work there, but they might not aspire to leadership anymore. And so then you've got scale issues. Interesting. Um, while we're on the topic of margin too, you actually, you publish something in your newsletter, um, about how basically busy seasons are a direct result of firms trying to squeeze out too high of a margin on their tax work. Um, and that they're overworking their staff. Is that really that simple of like a, of like a fix, like is, is just accepting lower margin kind of like the key. And has that been like a huge driver for your business as well in like retaining staff? I think, I think it is. I think that is the simple fix. I think that we like to point at a lot of things. Like we like to spend time focusing on, uh, well, we have to automate more, right? Our workflow is not optimized. We don't have the right, uh, work papers. Oh, Sally over there isn't doing a good job. That's why we're having a bad tax season. No. The reason that you're having a bad tax season is because you're trying to squeeze 40% out of your projects versus 20. Yeah. Right. So if I have a million dollar tax practice, the difference between 40 and 20 is $200,000 that buys me two more pretty solid staff, right? What do two more really solid staff do for a million dollar revenue, uh, tax compliance business? I mean, that, that's the night and day difference that you're looking for. So it's just people, it's, it's, it's us thinking that we have to make our money on tax compliance work. And that's not how we think at our firm. We want the tax compliance work because it's, it, it scales well, uh, it stacks, it compounds over time and it gives you a very large book of clients over time that you can sell advisory service to accounting services to, and other flywheel business businesses too, right? Like we work with a bunch of real estate investors. We could open up a cost segregation company, we could open up an insurance company so you can do all of these things that, that the tax service kind of, that's like the foundational point, but I don't need that service to clear 40%. I would rather it clear 20 and all my clients be happy and all my employees be happy. Um, and if I can get that, then I'm happy. So that's how we think. But you know, when I, when I talked to other firm owners, sometimes that's like a hard topic for them to understand and, uh, and it is hard because if you're, if you're used to making, as a firm owner, a few hundred thousand dollars and somebody is coming in here and saying, you need to cut your, your take home pay by 200 K to really solve your problem, that's, that's a hard thing. That's a hard conversation. And somebody tried to have that conversation with me way early on too. And I ignored it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's very forward looking. Like that, that was actually going to be my followup question was like, are you getting your margin now from like advisory services and other stuff? And so it sounds like that is kind of the playbook because when I was working at a big four firm, like there was definitely a lot of that where it's like most of the time, sometimes it was just mispriced work, but sometimes whenever I was asking why the heck are we charging this person what we're charging them, it's like, oh yeah, well we're also doing like a restructuring of like their entire family trust business. Like, you know, we're, we're doing all of this other work. And then, so yeah, they asked, can you do my return for this small amount? We did it. Right. So like if we say no and like, are you going to throw away the $40,000 project because you want it to squeeze out an extra thousand dollars on this person's like personal tax return? Like that's, yeah. So it's, it's cool that you're thinking much bigger picture. And I think that thinking probably is helping enable some of the scale that you're achieving and pursuing. Right. So yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. Well it keeps people here. You know, our retention is amazing in terms of staff retention. So when you can keep people here year over year, over year, and you give them the same projects year over year, over year, they get better and better and better, faster and faster. They know the clients like the back of their hands. So yeah, I mean that, that's the goal longterm, right? But what you were just talking about is I think, I think like marketers or whatever refer to it as a loss leader. So yeah, we're going to lose money on the tax, but we're going to get all this other stuff. I, I think that there, that more of those, more of those decisions should be made in accounting firms. The problem is, is that you don't have alignment to the, uh, to the under, to the actual P&L. You have alignment to everybody's individual timesheet. So if you're going to wait, wait a second, if you're going to write down the tax work, that's going to negatively impact my performance. No thanks. Whereas if I'm going to write down the tax work, I can just, I can just adjust the revenue down and call it a day. And I guess you could do that on timesheets too, but that's just not how it works in, in those types of firms. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not even got to be a loss leader, right? It's just a thinner margin leader. So, you know, shout out to like the Costco hotdog and the rotisserie and you know, they get you in the store and there's still maybe making a couple bucks, but like everyone talks about it. Everyone remembers it and you're there, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's smart. It's always thinking about it. Nice. So I read a newsletter also wanting to kind of continue scaling Hall CPA, maybe a throwaway number or maybe something you're really driving towards, I'm not sure, to a hundred million dollars in revenue. I think it was in relation to, you know, would I sell to PE ever? And I actually, right after reading that, had a conversation with a partner at a big four firm who in their past, they'd actually considered going out on their own, doing their own kind of work. And his major concern at the time with doing that was that once you kind of pursue and reach that level of scale, you end up with these crown jewel clients that eventually kind of outgrow your firm and then move on to that big four firm that you just left to try and kind of build your own book of business. So how are you addressing that? Or is your mindset just that this is going to happen as you kind of try to scale larger and get those larger clients? And that's just what it is. Yeah. I think that there's some strategy to it that I'm probably not yet aware of in terms of what types of clients should we really be taking on as we continue to scale? And do we not take on clients that are too large that eventually will move on? So I'm sure that exists. I have not personally yet experienced it. My mindset is the top 100 firms have $50 million plus in revenue. If they're running $100 million firms, so can I. There's nothing that prevents me from doing that. I'm not really worried about losing crown jewel clients and things like that. And I guess part of my I'm not worried about it is not only is... So I've done a lot of work on our sales pipeline, a lot of work on our marketing to just make sure that that thing is just humming along at all times. So we have this month, sorry, last month, January, we had 527 web forms filled out. That's our biggest month ever. Normally we get about 400 a month. And of those 527 web forms, we're going to have 250 calls, we're going to close 50, 60 new deals. And so that's as long as I can continue marketing and as long as the sales continue coming in, I'm not worried about losing clients as we scale because I know that I'll be able to backfill them. The other thing that's interesting too is that we are niched. And this is funny because I was just on a realize session. So shout out Jason Stats. But I was hosting it and somebody on the session asked me, they're like, well, are you 100% real estate? And I was like, yeah, we're 100% real estate. And then somebody else asked, well, if a real estate investor brings like an S corporation that's in a restaurant or service or something, do you do that as well? And I was like, yeah, I do. And I guess I'm not 100% real estate. So anyway, but because we target real estate investors, and because we're so true to making sure that we're servicing real estate investors, just like the clear marketing in terms of who we service, I would just redeploy that and any additional niche that we jump into to help us scale to 100 million. And I think it just gives you, when you can create a brand moat, you're going to have protection, especially at scale. Because then everybody's going to know your name and they're going to know what you're capable of and that you provide good service. So more people will come to you, I think, than will ultimately leave you. But that's certainly a risk. I just, in my mind, it's probably just maybe overblown. I think that if you're running a $100 million firm and if you can't replace a Crown Jewel client, then that's probably a problem. You have so much leverage and scale at that point that you should be able to continue growing. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's also a little bit of a case of, and everyone does this, but worrying about what they call the champagne problems is like, oh, worrying about, oh, if I grow so much and then this bad thing happens, and it's like, well, put yourself in a position to have those problems. The business coach that I've been working with on this and who really encouraged this podcast too, I was like, oh, I don't want to do such broad outreach because what if I have to record too many podcast sessions in a week? And he's like, man, listen to you. That's what you want. And so I did the broad outreach and it actually did happen where there was one week where I was like, there's starting to be a lot of recording, but that's the exact problem you want to have. Right. And I was like, I'm not stopping myself from doing this in a real way because I was worried about that. And so I think there's a lot of that kind of psychology that goes into it where maybe you just need to be like, we'll worry about that problem when we get there because once we're there, it'll be, things will be fine. I think what you're describing is a learned skill. I used to struggle with this a lot, especially when I was in like the 10 to 20 people range. That's the hardest time that I've ever had running this firm. I went through some pretty serious downs. It was bad. But I just really struggled to learn how to put all the pieces together and primarily learn how to manage people effectively and lead people and promote the right people. But what I learned to do is basically, and this was inspired by my coach, I learned to whenever I'm facing something like this, like where there's a fear or where there's some problem and I don't know what to do or I'm scared I'm going to make the wrong decision. So basically fear. Yeah. I'll get a sheet of paper and I'll write down what's the worst that can happen and I'll just throw down everything. The worst that can happen, right? Oh, I'm going to lose my business. I'm going to lose my house. My spouse is going to divorce me. My kids are going to hate me. You know, pop up a pop. You just go all the way down the list, get a lot of paper and then you look at it, you take a deep breath, right? Then you look at it and then you go, is that really realistic? How much of that is actually going to be true? And the reality is that like, it's not realistic. We over, I'm going to say overestimate, but that's not the right word. But we basically just, we go way too far in the worst thing possible and we just camp out there. We get this like very negative, we get in this very negative space and we stay there for too long. We'll start to believe it and that'll become a reality. But if you just, if you just do this like brainstorming exercise, what's the worst that can happen? And you're going to look at that sheet and you're like, this is just, I mean this could, it could be bad, but it's not going to be that bad. So what could it be then? What could, what's a more realistic version of it? Write that down and then create a plan for it, right? So okay, we're a hundred million dollars. What happens if we lose a crown jewel client? Let's create a plan for it. And it happens because things probably will happen. So it happens. But now we just have a plan to execute. We're not emotional about it. That's awesome. I love that. Just kind of getting out of your own way as well. So you mentioned kind of like the building like a strong sales and marketing pipeline and all that being like a really big key. Do you know how much of that might be like driven? by Brandon Hall, like your own thing, versus how much might be driven by kind of like replicable systems in your firm, because you're obviously like quite a large figure on, you know, especially like Twitter, and we can talk about your most recent series, I think it's absolutely brilliant, you know, LinkedIn as well, but some of it does seem replicable. Like I have a few of the other people from your firm on Instagram, or sorry, not on LinkedIn, and they're like creating great content, right? And I, so some of this is replicable, but I think some of it as well as your personal brand, do you have any idea of like what that split is? Oh, it's all replicable. Yeah, I'm not special by any means, I just, I'm relentless, that's the difference. Yeah, okay. I just don't quit. So look, when I started my firm, the way that I acquired, the way that I started this entire marketing system was simply posting on an online forum called BiggerPockets. I would post answers to people's tax questions. So people would go onto that forum, they would ask a tax question, and then I would post. And I was working at Ernst & Young at the time, and I set up all of my alerts to ensure that I would get an immediate email when somebody asked like different keywords, like tax or whatever, real estate professional status, section 469, all that type of stuff. I made sure that I would get an email, and I'd immediately click on that email, and I'd immediately type out an answer to that question. So I was always trying to be first to reply. I did that, gosh, I did that for probably six months before really anybody reached out and asked if I was taking on clients. It was a very, but I did it, it was interesting, because I wasn't even really thinking about it from like a lead gen perspective at the time, it was more of just like, this is fun for me, I like learning taxes, and I like answering people's tax questions. And then people started asking if I would take on clients, and I started realizing, oh, there's something here, and I could actually be an entrepreneur, and that is way more in alignment with what I wanna do than working at EY. So that was the start of it all. It was simply just providing value to people that had tax questions. But I did it like, I was like three, four posts a day. It was a lot of time spent on that website answering those questions. And then from there, it scaled, right? So once I realized, oh, this is something I could actually do, I kept up with those questions for probably another year and a half, but simultaneously reached out to bigger pockets and was like, hey, can I be a guest on your blog? I wanna write some blog articles. And they're like, yeah. And my thought process was, I shouldn't go spin up a website because I'm gonna be writing into the void. Nobody knows I exist. It's kind of like the whole Twitter thing, too. It's like, I could go spin up my whole, oh, follow me, Brandon D. Hall, CPA, right? Build firms, but nobody knows that that website exists, so where is everybody hanging out? They're all hanging out on Twitter, so I'm gonna go right there. But it was the same process early on, too. So I'm gonna go write for the BiggerPockets blog, and then people can just contact me directly, and we can set up a call. And then that turned into being on their podcast a few times, and then that, once I had this following, then I went and I set up my own website. So I didn't have a, I had a one-page website for the longest time. Then I went and I actually invested time into really building my site out, putting resources on there. I launched my podcast, launched my blog, did white papers and things like that to really scale that out. So anybody can do that, but that process took three years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool, though, at the beginning, that it wasn't even necessarily the intention. And to the point of everyone can do that, I kind of ended up having similar opportunity early on in the crypto space, and I decided I'm not hanging my hat on that, and don't wanna become a full-time tax preparer in the crypto space. But when I was at Deloitte, I was, I think I was the only analyst in Canada working on that blockchain tax team at the time. And so after I left, I was just answering questions, second nature, and then got a lead, and then whatever. So now I'm actually transferring that business off to someone else. I found someone who wants to take it over. But I generated a low five-figure tax business just kind of off of, yeah, I was on the toilet, probably answering someone's question about whatever. And then I got added to kind of the upper-end discord of the larger communities, and then people were like, oh, this is the guy, this is the guy. Yeah, yeah, that's how it happened. Yeah, and it was really a decision. I was like, I don't wanna be crypto tax guy necessarily, and at the same time, Big Four Transparency was picking up, and I was like, I care more about this. But it is cool to see that it was a similar instinct of just, you're just messing around, answering some questions, and then you just kind of follow that stream, and here you are today. So that's awesome. And I think it's important to, just for anybody listening, to understand that the sales pipeline is your most important asset in the entire firm. And I know that that's hard to, it's kind of hard to explain because it's easy to get clients today because of the supply shortage of accountants. But the reality is is that if I know for a fact that I'm gonna have 400 web forums every month, then I also know for a fact that I'm gonna have 220 sales calls. And I also know for a fact that I'm gonna close 50 new deals, which means that I need a team that can service 50 deals today, but also a tax team that can service the 50 deals that I closed this month, their future tax work six months from now. So it just, when you can start at the sales, when you can have a very reliable sales pipeline, everything downstream becomes very easy to manage. Not very easy, I should say, but easier to manage downstream. So fulfillment, recruiting, hiring, right? Like you'll see me on LinkedIn. When you see me on LinkedIn going hard, it's because we're really trying to build the funnel for talent, right? Right now I'm relaxing on LinkedIn and I've shifted my focus to Twitter because we've staffed our entire team this year. We're good. So you can kind of shift where you spend time based on the needs of the firm, obviously, but having that strong sales pipeline enables everything downstream to be easier. That's awesome. So what like drove you to launch your own firm? Like what was the thing where you're like, I need to be doing this? So obviously you mentioned like, you're getting some kind of leads from just answering questions, but like, what was the thing of like, I am an entrepreneur, I need to be doing this? Yeah, honestly, ignorance, ego, and I don't know, probably just those two things. I graduated college 2013. I joined PWC. I was in their federal consulting practice. So we were consulting on like towers and valuations and things like that, like real estate valuations. And I decided pretty early on, I was like, man, I cannot do this for the rest of my career. There's just no way I, you know, the typical like young, fresh out of college, oh my gosh, now I have to work for a living. There's no way that this is gonna, there's no way this is real life. That was my feeling. So I immediately started trying to figure out how to not do that. I read a lot of different entrepreneurship books and ultimately found real estate as the way out. I started buying real estate, and then I realized how much capital you need and how long it would take me to accumulate that capital working for PWC and EY. And that just didn't align with my, wanna get out of this as fast as possible. So then it was, how else do I do it? And right around the same time was all this whole like, oh, people are asking me if I'll take them on as a client. And then that was the big like light bulb aha moment that I had, oh wait, I can turn this into a business and we'll see how far this goes. But it's kind of weird. I mean, my goal was never, originally, originally it was never to actually run even something as big as I am today. My goal, this was 2015. I sat down and I wrote a 10 year vision. And my 10 year vision was to have a firm grossing a million bucks. So last year we did eight, five. So it's like, I never, originally did not think that I was gonna be doing this. I just wanted to run a firm that enabled me to make some money, live on the beach, sit on the, drink cocktails on the beach all day long, just hang out, travel around, service my clients as long as I had a wifi connection. But something changed. And to be honest, I'm not really sure what changed, but something changed early on that made me realize I can take this a lot further, and maybe I can do it in a way that inspires other people to run not a traditional accounting firm. And there's risk there, right? Like there's, I don't know. Sometimes I question if my margin's good enough because I hear other people saying that they're at 35, 40, 45. Then you ask all the partners what they're working and it all makes sense. But, you know, there's risk in trying to do it a different way, but I just figured, eh, why not? Life's short, might as well. Yeah. Well, that's interesting to hear you say like, yeah, you look at what the partners are working to achieve those margins, right? Like I think, you know, there's a ton of contributors to the talent pipeline issue, but I think the, at the end of the day, a lot of it is like the carrot that they were dangling, which is, hey, you can be a partner and make half a million, million dollars a year, whatever that might be. Actually, like, isn't that enticing to a lot of people because they've seen these partners and like, you know, like, okay, cool. Like I might be sitting on a ton of money and then die of a heart attack or like just not have time to enjoy it, right? And I'm sure there are some partners at traditional firms, even big firms who make it work, but like it's not like the glamorous lifestyle, right? So it's really nice to see that you're kind of just finding a way to make it work for you. And yeah, does that maybe come at the cost of super high margins? Sure, but like, if you're really happy and you're going to want to keep doing this for 20 years, then you're going to outperform, right, ultimately, so. Yeah, and don't get me wrong, we absolutely have sprints where all the partners in my firm are grinding for some time. But the key difference is that my expectation is that my partners do not work on client work. And I think that that is the difference because when you know that you can sell into the partner workload, then they're going to be bogged down with the client work and managing a team and managing a P&L and business development and marketing and branding and recruiting and hiring, it's just too much. It's too much to do on top of the client work. And again, the one-on-one client work is the lowest leverage that anybody has. And it doesn't make it not important, don't get me wrong. Like we have to service clients effectively, but the reality is that I can only ever bill as much as the client's going to let me bill one-on-one versus managing a team of 20 people is very different. I want you to do that full-time if you can do that effectively. I don't want you to spend any time one-on-one. I'd rather you coach a manager who's managing five people into being the most effective manager in the entire world. And then that manager is going to make the five people that they've managed the most effective people in the entire world. That's the goal, right? So for us, the expectation is, hey, partners are not doing client work. And as a result, our margin's 10% lower than what you would expect an accounting firm to be because our partners are not doing 100% free margin work. Our pay is not on the payroll, but we're also not generating revenue, like one-on-one client revenue. Yeah. Nice, that's awesome. So on the topic of things that you do a little bit differently, you've started writing annual letters. Yeah. And I read through it. It's actually, it's really interesting. I would recommend people go check it out. Is that a practice you'd strongly recommend? And if so, how has that helped your business or even just your mindset about your business? Yes, so I have always been a writer myself. I've always written reflections just in a notebook that I have. I've got stacks and stacks of notebooks. Actually, I've started to digitize it recently because, I don't know, I've got this weird fantasy that my kids are gonna wanna read it one day where they're probably gonna be like, no thanks, dad. That's ridiculous. All your notes about influencers you wanna take down and giving bad tax advice. They're like, oh yeah, great. Exactly, they're gonna be like, dad was such a weirdo. Anyway, yeah, so I've got this habit that I write, I'll journal, and I'll typically reflect quarterly or annually and or annually. What we started doing at the firm a couple years ago was writing, we took from Jeff Bezos, his six-page memo idea. His whole thing is you come to a meeting with a six-page memo, everybody stops for the first 30 minutes and just reads the memo and then we discuss it. So I took that idea and I was like, hey, all the leaders, myself included, I want us all writing a six-page memo on how the last 12 months went. So what were the lessons learned? Where can we improve? What are the goals for next year? So we've been doing that and then this year, I decided I'm not gonna make them do that. A couple of them still did it, but I was like, I'm not gonna make them do that. But I still wanna do it, but I wanna make it public. So I went and I downloaded all the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters as well as the Amazon shareholder letters and started reading through those just to think through how do you structure this to make it interesting and just something that would be nice for me to reflect on year over year. So that was kind of the idea. It was just trying something new. It had a pretty good response. People were sending me emails and stuff. It was cool. I didn't expect that. Yeah, no, it's cool. And it gives a good overview of where the focus is. And I think you saying that you had your other partners involved in that is, again, a testament of them not being super bogged down by client work, right? I think you want people at your firm to be able to think about these things strategically. I would bet that most places, if someone says write me a six-page letter, there's gonna be some pushback because they're just drowned in client work, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the important thing is just that we're always trying new things and trying to figure out how do these new things help with our communication and our strategy and our tactics. But the memos, the memos were great. And we still use the memos today in terms of presenting new ideas. So I recently rolled out a new business bonus at the firm. Actually, when is this coming out? Because this is rolling out tomorrow. Probably late February. I won't get you to the punch for sure, yeah. Yeah, so I recently rolled out a new business bonus. But what I did to present it to the partner group was I wrote a three-page memo on it talking about here's why I think it's important, here's what other firms do, here's what we're gonna do for our folks. So it's a really, when you can get into a narrative format, it's a really good way to just like, and especially if you limit yourself, right? If you write 50 pages, well, that doesn't really do anything for you. So you're trying to limit yourself and you're trying to make it a narrative and you're trying to make it very clear. You like get rid of subjective language. It really forces you to think about issues like really thoroughly. Because the worst thing in any firm is you get somebody that's just like peppering you with new ideas all day long. And it's like, geez, all I need is one really amazing idea once a year that you've thought through, have a solution for and can go and implement. And that's really what I think leaders are looking for. So forcing yourself to kind of put it all on the paper and really think through it is a really good exercise. Nice. New business bonus, is that like to reward people who are doing business development and like driving their own pipeline in? Yeah, so we've had quite a few members of our firm now start posting on LinkedIn daily, some are now posting on Twitter. We've had one posting on TikTok. We actually have a Slack channel called Content Interaction. So anytime somebody posts, everybody else in the channel, and you gotta be like somebody that posts regularly to be in the channel. So it is a little private group that we've got, but everybody knows about it in the firm. And anybody in my firm is welcome to post and I'll come back to that point. But the Content Interaction channel, yeah, so anytime somebody posts, you post a link to your post, everybody clicks on it, likes it, comments on it, and it boosts the post, right? So we've been helping each other out. We've actually started getting a lot of business. So I've got like three people in the firm that pretty regularly get people DMing them saying, hey, can you help me with taxes? So I never had this problem before because primarily just like all of our content generated all the leads, but I want them to keep doing that business development. So yeah, so we just rolled out a new business bonus for everybody. That would have made a huge difference for me as like an analyst. Like I was, that was part of like kind of when I left, I was like, listen, there's gonna be like six years until any of what I like doing is actually recognized as part of my job. And like, as an analyst, I was hosting product hunt at the Deloitte offices. Like I was having businesses come over, do stuff like that. And, you know, was I closing tremendous amounts of deals? Like, no, not really, but like I was really developing that stuff. So even the promise of future reward of that, but my evaluations were strictly based on count of billable hours, not even revenue. So again, focusing on like the higher value stuff didn't help me, like any of this didn't help me. Yeah, so you just go, all right, we'll come out. For me, I'm sitting here like, okay, if I don't give a new business bonus, then eventually they're gonna go, this is high value and I can just go do, I can either do this somewhere else or I can do it myself. And so my goal is, hey, I'm gonna give you a new business bonus because really I want you to stay here for a long period of time. And I want you to do this with me over time. And if you are able to consistently bring that business in, then we know, it's all about consistency though, right? So I think like sometimes what I see, and even in our firm is people get excited, they start and then they stop when they quit, right? Cause they don't see any traction. But we've got a couple of people that have stuck with it no matter what. And that's really the attitude that you have to have because when you stick with it, no matter what, then you do build a brand and that brand can consistently generate leads. And when you can consistently bring in business, then you can build a team around that. I can't build a team around somebody going to a conference one time and landing some big deal. I can't build a team around that, right? But I can build a team around somebody that is consistently bringing in five new clients a month. And if I can build a team around you, then I can elevate you up and out of all of the lower leverage stuff so that you can focus on bringing in 10 clients a month and then 15 clients a month and then 20 clients a month. And then all of a sudden, you're making $500,000 and your partner at the firm. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. It's like a little taste and like ramp towards partner, which can probably like start benefiting you at any level, right? Cause again, like some of these younger people like might really have a knack for TikTok and like, I don't know, you know, I think you're probably a little bit older than I am and I'm already like, oh God, like if I had to do TikTok content, I'll probably try to get this up on there. But like, that's daunting to me. Like I'm not into it. And like, that's where stuff can really blow up right now, right? And so yeah, that's awesome that that gets rewarded. Well, it's interesting. So I wanted to circle back to the comment that I made about, you know, anybody in my firm can do the LinkedIn content, the Twitter, whatever. And I'll actually like, I'll help them. So anytime that I see somebody take an interest in it and I got to see like post a few times and kind of stick with it. But if I can see that you've actually got a real interest and that you're just trying, you're really trying to make it work, I'll sit down with you and I'll coach you on, I'll tell you everything that I figured out and try to help build you up. My theory is that if you don't do that, one day, that kind of like what you just described, actually one day that person's going to go, man, I don't see a path to do the stuff that I really want to do. So I'm just going to, I'm out. I'll talk to you later. My approach is I'm going to try to give you that path. Like I want to try to retain me from EY. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want, because if they had tried to do this with me, I genuinely don't know that I would have left if they would have really said, hey, we've got a path for all these things that you want to do. Here it is, go. I don't know that I would have left, right? I would have been totally fine just helping them and scaling up that way. So that's not my goal. It's like, I want to retain that person and I want to help them become the best that they can be and do the stuff that they want to do at my firm. And we're figuring it out. We don't have it all figured out right now, but I don't have the approach of, I got asked this one time. They're like, well, if they're posting on LinkedIn all day, aren't you scared that they're going to get poached? Yeah. And I was like, no, I'm not. And I mean, if they're posting on LinkedIn all day, does it make them a target for something like that? Yeah, heck yeah it does. I would reach out to people that are posting and say, do you want to come work for me? But if they're able to do that here and they haven't had that experience anywhere else, the chances of them saying, okay, I'm out are just so small. And they're probably going to give me a heads up because I'm trying to help them build their career. And when they give me that heads up, it's just feedback and I can implement that feedback and save them. So no, I'm not scared that I'm going to, that my folks are going to get poached. That's awesome. I love that. It seems like you guys have a really good culture, which is kind of a point I wanted to ask about. Cause my understanding is you're kind of remote first, but you do have an office space in Raleigh, right? We don't have an office space. No office space. Okay, cool. So entirely remote then. What are some of the things you've done that have promoted that culture? Like obviously you talked about like Slack and I think having some of those initiatives where people build each other up is huge, but there's obviously more. And like people that I see posting so much, like sure, you're doing that to chase monetary reward, but like you're also not doing that if you don't like where you are, right? Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, you know, I would describe our culture as just a high performance, get bleep done culture. It isn't monetized yet, you can swear. Yeah. Yeah, we think that we can conquer the world together and we believe that we need high performing team members to do that. Working at my firm is not easy. We have high expectations and the people that don't fit that, it's very clear and obvious very early. But what I have always worked to do, well, not always, sorry. I have learned to do because I used to not know how to do this, but now what I work to do is to make sure that we always have absolute rock stars in every single role. And that is very hard to do, but I just remember what it was like to work on teams with not great people and how frustrating that is and just all the energy that you spend like gossiping about it and just being annoyed about it. So my goal is just to make sure that we have a really great team at all times and that they're hitting the goals that they're supposed to hit and that they're delivering on the promises that they've made. So we just have a very different, that's the crux of it, but it really boils down into like every single message that we send. I believe clarity is kindness, right? And you might say, okay, yeah, I'll get this done. I'll get this done next week. Well, if you say that to me, I'm gonna say what day and time specifically, right? But that's the difference. It's just we try to get extremely clear in every aspect of the firm. And through that clarity, everybody knows what success looks like. And when you know what success looks like, you know what to do and you know how to build. That's the crux of it. It's just being very, very, very clear and then sticking to that as often as you possibly can and then soliciting feedback on a consistent basis, being very open to it and putting your ego aside and letting people tell you that you're not doing a good job and you need to do better. People tell me that. Not me telling them that, people telling me that. Yeah, upward feedback I think is so important. Like across the board, having the ability to do that, even if it's not implemented, like just being like, oh, I got that off my chest. Like it's been said, I can let it go, right? So nice, nice, nice, nice. Well, I'm happy for you. I'm happy that everything is kind of looking very rosy at the firm and I really appreciate you coming on. Where should people check you out? Like what's your kind of main channel that you're focusing on? I'd plug the newsletter as well, actually. People might love that. Thanks, yeah. You can check me out at Twitter, on Twitter or X, whatever. It's at bhallcpa. Or you can find me on LinkedIn if you just, I don't know what the. Thing is but just Google Brandon Hall CPA on LinkedIn and you'll find me Yeah, and then both of those landing pages have a link to my newsletter I actually don't know what my newsletter link is off the top of my head. So, okay. Okay. Yeah, I write a weekly newsletter every Saturday morning Just kind of on firm tips and things that I'm doing and I'll write about what's working well and what's not working Well, so I try to be relatively transparent. Mm-hmm And then I post on Twitter a whole bunch and and then LinkedIn as well sometimes so cool. Awesome Well, thank you so much for coming on Brandon. Thanks for having me on Dom. I appreciate it was fun