Growing with Upwork & Firm Growth Forum Recap with Tailor Hartman

Before I jump into this episode, I want to give a big thank you to this episode's sponsor, Canopy. Canopy is a best-in-class practice management software to help your firm run smoother. If you want to get the most out of your talent at your accounting firm, you need to make sure that they have access to the right tools to be able to properly leverage their time and spend more time doing what they are best at, and less time in the weeds trying to manage firm operations, trying to get organized folders, and trying to figure out where all the documentation is. So if you want to run a smoother operation, check out getcanopy.com. They're going to be linked in the podcast description. And unclunk your firm with Canopy. Hello and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency Podcast. I'm joined today by Taylor Hartman, the founder of Celerity Accounting, a CAS and fractional CFO firm focused on helping support 5 to $50 million a year SMBs. Welcome to the pod, Taylor. Thank you. Happy to be here. Yeah. Yeah. My pleasure. I've been seeing you on Twitter forever and finally got to kind of put two and two together when I met you at Firm Growth Forum. So it was great to meet you in person. And what I'm thinking of doing kind of with this episode is we can dive a little bit into your journey, what you're up to with Celerity. I have some personal questions too about, you know, teaching and some of that journey. And then maybe we can do a little bit of a recap of the conference because you were both a speaker and I mean, de facto an attendee. So you'll have some good perspectives there. Yeah, let's get into it. Yeah. Yeah. So Celerity, you basically, you had spent some time, you're working at, you know, a top 25 firm, very large firm, went to industry for a very brief stint and then ended up launching your own kind of practice. Do you think your time in industry helped prepare you for that at all? Or do you think that instead it maybe just pushed you to look for something new? So I was in industry before I went to BDO as well. So I'll consider that time too. I think I learned how to do accounting in general in industry before I moved on to BDO. And then BDO is where I really learned how to work with clients and how to work with lots of clients at once and, you know, time management and everything like that. But then yeah, that little six month period I spent back in private really motivated me to start my own business because I just found the day to day to be so monotonous working for one company. It was post COVID and I had to go back into the office full time, which was hard for me with a new puppy at home. And I just, I started trying to make a little side money to pay off my student loans on Upwork. So I would get these little cleanup jobs on Upwork and I would complete their books. I would clean up their books. They would be super happy. And then they kept asking me to stick around. So I'd have like recurring revenue to do the monthly accounting for their books. So I got like three to four clients like that and it added up to like six or seven thousand dollars a month. Within a month and a half, I got that many clients and I was like, whoa, this is actually, I could like replace my income pretty quick if I keep doing this. So I tried to go remote with the industry job and they said no. So I quit on the spot that day and went full time with Solarity. I think it was March 1st, 2022. So Upwork is where you got your initial clients. I wouldn't have necessarily expected there to be like a pool of great clients there. Like I feel like often I would associate that with people kind of looking for inexpensive work, but maybe I am wrong on that front. Are you still working with a lot of those kind of initial Upwork clients? All of them. We've had zero churn. Oh my God. They're my biggest clients from Upwork still. And I'm actually pretty good friends with them. And they're $7,000 a month. So over $80,000 a year on Upwork. Yeah. You got to find the diamond in the rough for sure. And it took, I would spend like, before I quit that job, I would spend like my lunch hour. I would grab food, like fast food or something, subway, don't judge me. I would go sit at this park in the parking lot and like sit on my phone and apply to jobs on Upwork. And I would just find the ones that, you know, made the most sense or would pay the most. And I would just apply on my phone over and over and over again and before work too. And then eventually they would work and I get them on. Once you got them on a call, I feel like the close rate was pretty good, but I spent a lot of time applying and I went through a lot of crazy people, people who didn't want to pay me, a lot of interviews that went nowhere. And, you know, eventually you find like one or two a month that are really good. Wow. That's incredible. Was there anything that you would recommend for someone who is listening to this pod and actively signing up for Upwork to try and repeat the process? Like, were there any kind of like key learnings that helped you get success on there? I would say apply frequently and check it. Friday mornings, especially, were really good times to apply. I would take a few easy jobs in the beginning at whatever price and try and get really good reviews. That was the way where I kind of boosted my profile, where people actually would talk to me and they would take me seriously. Like obviously I have a decent resume. If you worked in public accounting a couple of years, you might be like a CPA or something. You have a lot of reasons to trust you, but it's like eBay, right? You don't want to buy from someone that doesn't have any reviews on eBay. The same with Upwork. You don't want to work with anyone that doesn't have any reviews. So getting those first couple of reviews is really helpful. And then applying to jobs that they've posted in the last hour. The faster you apply, the higher the chance they'll interview you because entrepreneurs are like business owners for the most part and their attention spans are pretty small. And they want to interview like three people, they want to just be done with it. They want to have an accountant. So applying really quickly after the job is posted has helped me a lot. But then you can also filter by stuff too. So like I work with NetSuite, so I filter by NetSuite if I go on there. And I just apply to those types of jobs. Interesting. Okay. So your initial client base was pretty much entirely off of Upwork, it sounds like. And then where are you getting clients from today? So today it's mostly referrals. So going to conferences, like we're going to talk about, and meeting other accountants. I get a lot of accountant to accountant referrals because of the NetSuite niche. And then I would say 90% of it's referrals from other accountants right now. The other 10% is probably referrals locally for people I know and from clients. Okay. That's cool to hear that off of an initial client base, you're able to grow and scale a business to a point where now like you're hiring a senior accountant for Solarity. So I mean, if you're looking for to kind of join a small growing tech forward practice, go check that out. But yeah, to a point where you're now kind of hiring a full time senior accountant, you have a few bookkeepers working for you full time as well, I believe, right? Yep. Three full time staff accountant, bookkeeper type people right now. And when you launched this, like, did you think that this was going to actually be like a for real scalable business and you were going to be, you know, actually hiring full time folks? Or was it just kind of like, you know, side money, like you said? It was side money. It was like survival mode. In fact, I think it took a year and a half until I actually was like, okay, I can do this. And this might actually be like a viable business model. I had a lot of imposter syndrome for that first six months, especially I was super stressed. But I also was like really good at the month end close and like controller level work. So I was doing, I was closing the books for these clients and, you know, making roughly like $10,000 a month in the first couple of months. And I was working like 15 hours a week at the most. It'd be like the first, you know, week and a half of the month would be super busy. But then after that, I would have nothing to do. So I was like, this feels weird after being in public accounting and working, trying to be as utilized as possible, going down to like 15 hours a week, making $100,000 a year, $100,000 plus a year. It was crazy. So yeah, it was definitely like, what am I doing for the first six to 12 months? And I was like, I'm just happy to replace my income. And yeah, but in the back of my mind, I was like, what if? So I think after a year and a half, I was like, okay, I hired my first bookkeeper. And I was like, okay, we're going to try and actually scale this. And that's when things really started to take off. That's cool. Huh? Yeah. That's like a dynamic I try to get people to understand about the accounting industry is that there's very much a general kind of aura of, you know, like there's plenty of work to go around. There isn't this kind of limited, there we go, abundance mindset. That's what I'm going for. Where like firms are referring business away to kind of smaller practices all the time. Many of them without expecting any kind of a referral fee or anything like that. Because again, a lot of accountants are just kind of naturally like helpful people, like we like to be of service to people when we can. And so making that intro sometimes is the best way to help out. And then on the flip side, if you're an accountant and you spend a lot of time meeting other you can get great lead generation from that. Or even if you have any kind of like a social media platform or things like that, you end up being very top of mind for people to send work over to. I actually wrote an article for it of, you know, there's always money in the banana stand where it's based off of my own experience of like, hey, like anytime I've been in a situation where I'm like, hey, I need to like scrounge up a little, like a little extra or something. I launched a crypto tax practice, helping out folks in that space after I left Deloitte just for a little bit of side income. I wanted to buy a rental property and very quickly that started to pull me into a point where like people were like, dude, this could just be your full-time job. And I personally, like I didn't want to put all my eggs in that specific basket, but it did become kind of like you said, like very quickly it was like $10,000 in a month worth of work. There was a lot of market pull, whereas like every other business experience, this included has felt like a lot of market push, like you have to do a lot of selling, whereas in accounting it can feel a little bit different on that front. So I encourage people to kind of like give it a try even, because I've heard stories of, you know, $10 million firms that started that way and you don't necessarily know where the journey is going to take you. Right. And it just feels like luck the whole time, but it's really not. A lot of people, there's millions of businesses in the US that need help and they all, a huge portion of those businesses have really bad accounting. So I think it's an easy sell if you're good at the work. Interesting. And then what's kind of going through your mind as you're making your first hire, I guess maybe the first bookkeeper hire and now the first maybe senior accountant hire who's going to be, or not, you know, not necessarily first hire, but like hiring a senior accountant who's going to be helping you out maybe more on like the operational front as well. Like, what does that feel like? Because that's obviously a huge step for a business, right? Yeah. So my goal with this position is really to pull myself out of the client work more so I can focus more on sales and I can focus more on like speaking at conferences and, you know, building the brand a little bit more rather than doing the client work and being like fixing all the problems and answering questions, you know, like a lot of people who do the senior accountant controller level work are doing in firms. So that's kind of my mindset with that. And then the way I'm thinking about long-term right now, I would say is I'm trying to build like pod one right now. So I'm trying, I like the pod structure a lot and I like teamwork a lot. And I think in accounting where you work with different clients and not everyone works on the same clients, it's hard to give someone that team mindset. So I am trying to build pods where people can kind of back each other up. If somebody wants to go on vacation, they can fill in for the other person. And we work with bigger clients. So they're mid-market, they're, you know, $30 million a year in revenue clients. So they need lots of data entry and they need lots of communication. So we need somebody to fill in and back people up when they go on vacations or they need to take time off, you know, for maternity leave or something like that. So I feel like I'm excited by building out pod one and like really making that the base of the company and then moving, you know, out from there. That's a cool, it's a cool way to think about it. And I think that is really important to have like some level of redundancy, right? And that's obviously not possible like at the very beginning, but being able to, like you said, have people cover for that and still deliver, you know, a perfect client experience or as close to perfect as possible, seamless, where they don't necessarily feel like that one person leaving has actually impacted their specific experience with your business. So I think that's a good way to think about it for sure. And then in terms of tech adoption, has there been anything that you've adopted beyond, you know, the typical kind of QBO that has like really been transformational for your practice? Because you're obviously, that's something you speak about a lot and that's what you spoke about at the conferences is how being tech forward can be very helpful for one's firm. Yeah, I mean, for me, I like the basics a lot. So existing tech, I don't, I do like to play around with new AI tech, but I feel like it's not there yet. So I like to play with existing tools a lot and use API connections to kind of make little tasks a little bit faster. And apps like Finoptimal, Accruer are really nice and I love stuff like that where it's so boring, it's accruals, but it's like, it makes it so easy and it makes it really easy to train people on too. And then I also get really excited by non-accounting apps. Like we use Missive for communication. It's an email app that you can combine all your different email addresses. Since we're working with bigger clients, we usually have an email address per client and we can build teams around in there, around a group of clients. And then we can also use email to kind of facilitate task management. And you can use rules in there, which I think is super cool to kind of uphold really good communication with clients and to cover you. Like if you miss something and nobody responds to it after three days, it can ping you back and be like, Hey, did you miss this email? Can you respond to it or close it out? And it kind of treats every email like almost like customer service. And that's kind of the way that we want to run our firm is like, we really want to make sure we crush it on communication because so many accounting firms are terrible at that. So a lot of the tech that I like to play with is communication based. Okay, that's cool. And are you able to teach a lot of that? Like if we kind of transition here into your role right now, teaching, you're teaching a accounting technology course, or have taught it anyways, are you able to get into like the specifics with teaching that like showing people here specific programs that I use and here's how they work? Because I think in my education anyways, that's been like a huge missing point where they'll talk about the concept of tech implementation, but they're not actually able to get into the weeds or like show you anything actionable or usable. And when I first worked as an industry accountant, like, you know, my controller role, like that was the part I struggled with the most. Like the actual accounting was super easy, but understanding like, oh, how do you automate a workflow or how do you, you know, set things up properly so that you're going to be like set for success. Like that's that was like the hardest part for me. So yeah, are you finding that you're able to kind of like teach that with that level of granularity? The course that I teach is actually only really QuickBooks based. So it's QuickBooks online, but I do try to sprinkle that in there as much as possible because philosophically I'm like, okay, tech gets better every year and the accounting kind of stays the same and like we're not going to need the technical stuff as much as we're going to need somebody that's really good with technology and like adapting to new tech. So I feel like for me, the technology is almost the most important part of being an accountant for future accountants. So yeah, I try and talk about that as much as possible, but yeah, mostly QuickBooks online in that course. Okay. But that is cool that at least you're in QuickBooks showing people how to do it. It's not all just like T-accounts and stuff like that. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's all, it's all the automations. It's the banking screen. It's yeah. No T-accounts. That's cool. And are a lot of those students like there to become entrepreneurs based off of conversation you've had or are a lot of them kind of looking to work at, you know, the solarities and places like that to do bookkeeping work? Yeah. They're most of them are trying to do bookkeeping work somewhere for sure. Okay. And probably more private businesses because that's a community college. So they're trying to be very technical, get a job, a solid job where they can work the rest of their career. That's nice. That's cool. Now kind of changing gears to the conference a little bit. You spoke on a panel there, like we said about kind of technology. What was your, like, what were you looking for when you decided to like apply to be a panelist, to be a speaker at that conference? Like was there anything specific that you're hoping to get out of it? Get out of the conference itself? Yeah. Or out of the experience of speaking there? Like, you know, do you have like a message that you're super passionate about sharing or does typically a lot of deal flow come from that for accountants who are actually speaking at conferences or like, what is, what does that usually look like for you? Yeah. So this is actually the first conference I've gotten to speak at. And I've applied a couple of times unsuccessfully. And I guess what I wanted to speak about, which actually they denied me on this one too, to be full transparency. They denied me and then put me on the panel and asked me to go on this panel because the topics were similar. And I love to talk about technology because I think my whole philosophy when I started my business was, I'm going to take over the books for these larger businesses and I'm going to automate 80% of it using existing tech, using something like Zapier, whatever seems to be imports if I have to. And I'm going to do the work for like three people with one person and make it super efficient. So with that in mind, I kind of on Twitter and LinkedIn have become more outspoken about technology in general. So I think that's really what drove me to do that. And then this conference specifically, I had never been to before and it's very focused on like growing your firm. So I think that that's all things that really excite me. So that's kind of what drove me to apply. Okay, cool. And have you made like very meaningful connections as a result of speaking there so far? Yeah, no. I mean, as an attendee and a speaker, I think conferences really changed my whole trajectory. I was a scared little... Like in the first year, I went to Intuit Connect and I was like terrified and stayed in my room as much as possible. And now it's like, now I'm speaking at conferences, which is crazy to me. But those connections at conferences have changed everything for me. I come back so inspired every single time I go to one. And this one specifically, there's a lot of firms in the bigger, not focused small firm, not focused like top 25 firm, but like that middle range. And there was a lot of focus on technology and PE, which I thought was really on par for like what everyone's talking about right now. Yeah. So it's very topical. I really, really liked kind of like the who was in attendance here, like, yeah, that kind of middle range of firms where... And there are some pretty huge firms there too, you know, like CLA was there, Aprio was there. A lot of Aprio people were there, which was actually really cool. I got along with a lot of them. Yeah. But, but yeah, there was a lot of that kind of middle range, which I think, you know, if you're trying to learn how to operate a practice, like anyone who's like one or two steps ahead of you is a lot more useful to you than someone who's like 500 steps ahead of you. Right. Like, I think Solarity probably has a lot more to learn from a, from a 50 person practice than you do from Deloitte. Like, you know, it's, it's just not going to be super like, oh, here's how you land a billion dollar government contract. Like that's not going to be super applicable for other people. So I actually really, really liked that. I personally, out of my own interest, like I've been super fascinated by PE's involvement in M&A in the markets and things like that. So I, I found like, I kind of got exactly what I wanted to get out of this conference. Were there some kind of like highlights and lowlights for you in terms of your experience as an attendee? I think the highlight is the same as always. And it's the networking events after, hanging out, you know, at a dinner that a vendor pays for or provides, you know, or like the, the karaoke night. That's, that's the thing that I always take away, like the relationships that you build and then take home and then, you know, keep in touch with these people. That's always the most, that's the best part about the conferences for me. No negative takeaways or anything like that this time. I feel like it was a really well-run conference and actually stayed after because it was such a good location in San Diego. I stayed at that same resort until Sunday, even though the conference ended, I think, Wednesday night. Wait, I didn't see you there because I ran a, I ran a winery tour with Aaron Dabur that you definitely could have been invited to. I don't know. Sorry about that. My wife came, so, uh, we were like exploring San Diego, so I probably would have told you no. Yeah. Beautiful venues like that. Like make it really, really nice. Yeah. It was incredible. Um, yeah, I found, I found like the, the speaker lineup was excellent. Um, and yeah, just encourage people to kind of get out there and, and try, you know, try one conference, see how you like it. I always push people more towards the kind of like smaller medium conferences as well. Like I find you can build a lot more relationships that way you're going to speak to the same people multiple times. And even at that, like even, I don't know what this would have been like 250, 300 attendees or something like that. Even at that, it does feel like information overload in your brain of like, Oh, like who, who said what, like what was, what was this topic that I was talking about with this person or like people you need to follow up with. So I find that's plenty big to kind of get everything you need while still being small enough that you can kind of like foster real relationships with people. So I'm always like really encouraging people to get out there. Um, do you find you get a lot of takeaways that are going to be like directly applicable to your firm or even just like ideologies on how to run it? Yeah. And I, I think what's interesting is you talked to the same people over and over during the conference and you might be like, Oh yeah, they're really good at tech. I might ask them about this problem that just popped up this week with tech that I have. And or you ask them about something you have been dealing with for the last couple of months at your firm in person while you're there and they can give you feedback of how they deal with it at their firm, which I think is so useful. Um, yeah, that's mainly the big takeaway for me. I don't get a, I mean the sessions are great, but they're not like, so you can't apply them right away. Usually it's like, Oh, in six months down, I might like use this next time I hire somebody. But then like when I'm actually talking to somebody and having a conversation, they're like, what are you dealing with lately? And I can tell them about it and get live feedback from people that have, you know, 50 person firms or a hundred person firms and might be two steps ahead of me. Like you said, yeah, that's, that's my favorite part. Yeah. Yeah. I would kind of share that sentiment of like, yeah, the favorite events were all like over drinks or dinner or like even lunch, you know, people are still trying to wake up, but like you get sat with four other people at your table and you know, all four of them are like super impressive people that you have a ton to learn from, which is, which is really, really, really valuable. I did find for, from my perspective for like AI, I did think there was a lot of talk of AI without actual, like any practical application of it, which I think some of those levels can be a little, you know, some of that can be a little bit high level for people looking to learn from AI right now. Like I would recommend maybe more just, you know, doing a crash course, trying to work on it. I know like Automation Town does like very kind of specific things are on that front. So that might be more, more of a direct learning for AI. I found that to be a little bit high level, but yeah, very much like you said, it was kind of just like meeting the people when you're just kind of hanging around chatting with folks. That's where kind of the most value came from. So yeah, get out there folks. You know, if you're a senior accountant looking to work for kind of a small, innovative remote first practice, get in touch with Taylor. I'll make sure I link all your, all your information here in the, in the pod description, but yeah, get out there. Go to a conference. I think you're, you might get something out of it. of it that is not at all what you expected to get out of it. But one way or another, I do think you're going to get a ton of value out of it. So yeah, thanks for joining me on the pod, Taylor. I appreciate it. Yeah, no problem. This was great. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.