Holistic Wealth Management: Crafting Client Success with Craig Hausz

In episode six of the Big Four Transparency podcast, I'm joined by Craig House, co-founder and CEO of CMH Advisors. What makes Craig's experience unique is that in addition to being a CPA, he is also a certified financial planner, which allows his firm to offer both tax and accounting services, as well as wealth management. In this episode, we discuss the synergies in offering both services to clients, giving a more 360 coverage of clients' financial well-being while maximizing profitability. We discuss the difference in pricing models in financial advisory versus accounting services and how accounting professionals can do a better job in valuing the services they offer. We also cover topics like the 150-hour rule, variable compensation based on billing, and the early days of launching CMH Advisors. This episode is also sponsored by Pluvo by Rain Technologies. Pluvo is a one-stop shop for business owners and decision makers to plan, strategize, and project their finances with unparalleled efficiency. Pluvo integrates directly with QBO, offering you a smoother process and includes a suite of FP&A tools supporting forecasting, scenario planning, and financial reporting. Reduce the amount of time you are spending on manual tasks and focus on strategic decision making instead. Pluvo is a great addition to your firm if you are looking to step up your game in virtual CFO services with clients or if you are looking to better manage your finances internally. Check them out in the episode's show notes and enjoy the episode. Hello everyone and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. I am joined today by Craig House, who is the founder and CEO of CMH Advisors, a high-growth accounting firm and financial advisory firm as well that grew from $2.1 million to $3.9 million in 2023 and ended the year at 19 employees. Welcome to the podcast, Craig. Hi, thank you. Happy to be here. Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate you joining me. So right away, kind of looking at your profile when I was setting all this up, I noticed that it is not just Craig House CPA, it is Craig CPA and CFP. I'm really curious while I have you here to know about the benefits of having both designations and kind of the advantages of having CMH in both the tax accounting and the wealth advisory spaces rather than the kind of more classic just bookkeeping and tax that we normally see. Correct, correct. Yeah. So, you know, and honestly, it's actually not just Craig House CPA, the CMH is Craig and Michelle House. So it's our individuals. We started our firm 10 years ago in 2014, both of us, former Arthur Anderson CPAs. And over the last almost 30 years now, we figured that it was really good to help serve clients in the fashion that we wanted to, which was a holistic tax and financial advisory service offering. Obviously, for regulatory purposes, there's a separate entity, CMH Wealth Management. Nothing on this can be construed as advice, I guess. There's probably some restrictions there, but let's just talk about the CPA side. But from a CFP perspective, though, it does give me some insight into conversations I can have and advice on the tax side of how our clients, what they need to incorporate into their daily lives so that they're not only just maximizing taxes, but it makes sense for what they want to do with these assets that they've developed for themselves, their children, grandchildren, and future heirs or charity. The CFP designation gives me some insight into how they deal with retirement planning, insurance, investments, and all that. That training and background, coupled with the CPA side as being a tax advisor, I believe gives us an advantage there, which is actually somewhat relevant. This morning, we met with an accounting client who has some tax issues, but also needs to think through what does this mean for them long term. Instead of just saying, I have no idea, sorry, go talk to an attorney or somebody else, we can have that whole conversation, and then we can help drive a resolution for them to an attorney that can help on the estate side and just talk through how they can structure this to make sure planning-wise their kids are taken care of and everything. Yeah, I mean, it's such a natural fit, right, where you can become that person's trusted advisor and rather than needing to kind of let multiple people in and really count on them where, you know, while being sound advice from both sides, there can be differing opinions, right? Maybe their CPA is very, you know, aggressive, whereas maybe the planner is not. And that can be probably really confusing for people. So really just getting it all from one source, like, I think you can you can offer people a very, very cohesive kind of strategy around their entire financial lives, which is right, which is fantastic, right? It makes a lot of sense. And it kind of made me wonder why this is not more common. I agree. Yeah. It's kind of funny. You know, if you follow a lot of the tax people on Twitter, you'll you'll see a little bit of a headbutting back and forth between financial advisors and tax professionals. You know, one saying, hey, this is the easier way to do it. Another saying, you know, all the tax stuff is easy. I can just do that. I actually quoted on this the other day that I think adding a wealth management practice to a tax practice is harder because of the regulations you have to deal with adding wealth management, whereas if you're a financial advisor, I mean, reality, I could go hire a tax professional and, you know, they could start preparing tax returns. You don't have to file you don't even have to be a CPA firm to file tax returns. You know, H&R Block, right? You can go down the street and have somebody prepare your return. So it is. But I but I agree. I don't know why more firms wouldn't do this, A, if they're already in a role where they're a trusted advisor. Well, that's just natural, like to just start adding that and become the quarterback for the relationship. And B, I mean, really, one of our core values is continuous learning. And I think that helps strengthen our CPAs and our tax professionals to have other to know that there's other things out there. So when they're advising a client, you don't tell them, hey, go set up this entity and let's structure it this way. And then you find out, well, if they would have structured it a different way, they could have actually achieved some more of their financial goals as well as tax minimization. And too many tax professionals, I think, do focus on saving as much in taxes and don't think through or may not just be qualified. I don't know how you'd want it if they don't have both sides. It's tougher to to consult on that. And it's just an ambition for the client. Yeah, absolutely. And I think some of that tension, like you mentioned, between the professions, like one of the arguments I've seen online recently, too, is like, oh, yeah, like as a tax professional, you really have to justify all your fees because the client sees it. And as a as a wealth manager or a financial planner, like it's a little bit easier to kind of justify higher fees because it's just representative of a portion of managed assets. Right, right. And it kind of gets rolled into the whole billing and people kind of have this impression that, well, maybe that's easier. Well, then like more people should go do it then if that's truly the case. Right. So it's it's that's where I'm so happy to have input from someone like you who is actually genuinely doing both. So you can have that very objective conversation about it where, you know, someone who's only on one side can just be like, oh, they have it so much easier. I need to do all the hard work. Right. So I think that's really interesting to get your perspective. So, you know, to settle that debate online, even like I'd be I'd be curious to have you kind of weigh in on that. Like, do you think it is easier to kind of bill and justify kind of more value based fees in the in the wealth management side versus the tax side? Or do you think that it's like a pretty balanced ecosystem? No, it's it's definitely I mean, you know, financial advisors for the amount of time they spend and this isn't a dig on them, it's just, you know, credit to their industry spend way less time for their dollar earned than a CPA or a tax professional. I shouldn't say CPA, right, because you can be a yeah, yeah, you actually can be uncredentialed and still prepare taxes. But yes, in part of it goes back to that human nature of anchoring to a fee and what is reasonable. And really the CPA, the tax industry for, you know, decades have underpriced themselves or just done a ton of work and don't charge for it. They're kind of known for it. And I think it's a little bit more the nature that they tend to be cautious and stable in their own personality. So they don't want to upset the apple cart with a client by saying, boy, I think I'm going to charge you, you know, a thousand dollars for something that somebody on the street may say, well, I can't believe that I'd only pay a hundred dollars for that. And so historically, the CPA that I keep saying CPA, I know I'm going to offend all the EA's out here. I'm not trying to, but the tax industry as a whole has really downgraded their value to the public. And it shows, I mean, we still we still get calls from people saying, oh, this is really easy. You should be able to just put these numbers on a form and do it. You know, hardly ever. I mean, you know, now I guess you're seeing this a little bit in the younger generation on the wealth management side of, well, it's really easy. You just go buy an S&P fund and, you know, index and chill or whatever they say. So whereas the financial advisory industry has historically been, hey, it's one percent of assets that are managed and, you know, five million dollar client, you're paying fifty thousand dollars. You may spend 10 to 12 hours a year on that. You know, a tax professional would never bill fifty thousand dollars for, you know, that. Now, the value difference. And this is where I think when you get to a value perspective, and I think this will change in the industry, in the financial advisory industry is you would typically say, hey, that person that was going to outperform whatever benchmark by more than their fee, the one percent. So it's kind of easy. Like, hey, if I was if I outperformed by two percent, then a one percent fee was it was really good on the CPA side. You know, we're not allowed to bill based on the refund we've given. Yeah. And so, you know, I can't just go on and say, hey, if I can get you fifty grand, you can pay me, you know, 10 percent of that. That's illegal. You know, so there really isn't that that same denominator there. But, yeah, I mean, you've got an entire generation, I'd say probably at least 50 years old and above that still are pretty OK with, you know, just paying an asset under management fee. And honestly, there's nothing wrong with that. The CMH Wealth Management firm does that, too. You know, it's just stair step down quite a bit so that, you know, most clients aren't paying. You shouldn't pay nowhere near what you'd pay at like a larger Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley type place that they'll charge one percent on five to ten million dollars of asset. Yeah, I think that you're going to see that flip and change. You're going to see a lot more options for people and they're going to understand that they have those options. And so that'll change over time as well to where, you know, clients will pay more of just a planning fee and then maybe they have a small asset management fee depending on what they're invested in. But that's changing quickly. OK, so you think that potentially. It may kind of scale down on the financial advisory side, do you see any way for the tax side to kind of and even bookkeeping, right, to kind of step up in terms of like the value that is perceived? Because I agree with you. I really think it is a bit of like a self-imposed issue that is really hard to pin down. Like what has happened that has led to this, where the perceived value is is probably less than it should be. Right. Right. And, you know, yeah, there's been really good structure in some of the financial management systems like that, where it is understood that it's just going to be that 1 percent in many of the cases or, you know, real estate where it's a percentage of the purchase of the house and stuff like that. Like, do you see any way where that could kind of be fixed for the tax profession or bookkeeping profession or it it sort of is what it is? Like, I think there's an issue around communication of value here as well. It completely. Yeah. You know, it's funny in a way. I think a lot of people would say a lot of professionals would say, you know, the QuickBooks online, TurboTax Live, all these types of offerings are going to diminish the value and take it away. And then they're actually showing up and charging more than you would pay to go to a tax professional, which is crazy. Right. It's like, why would a tax professional charge less than somebody that would go to TurboTax Live for the same return? So I think I think they're getting helped out actually by that. The the problem with the value, though, is is if you're doing something that is somewhat commoditized, which would be just taking numbers and putting them on forms or taking things in bank reconciliations and just kind of reconciling everything without any type of color advisory work, something that goes along with it, I think that's going to be hard to create more value there. Right. Yeah. Because eventually the AI will catch up to the point where it will know how to do a bank reconciliation. It will know how to do how to pretty much code everything possible. So and I can already take my data through. We use SurePrep, right. I could take data and SurePrep and it could create an entire tax return. And then, you know, and at this point, we still know there's still errors in it. So we you know, you'd have to review it. We actually don't use that for prep. But you could do that now. Yeah, you could really do that in the future, you know, five years from now. So advisors are going to have to and I say advisors, I think tax advisors, you need to you need to have that mentality. Or at some point, a lot of it will start to catch up to where kind of go, OK, thanks. But what does this do to help me run my business better? What does this do so that I'm sleeping better at night knowing, hey, all the planning we've done is is taken care of. I don't have any loose ends out there that could become a disaster for me. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So I had, you know, key takeaway for accounting professionals is like step beyond the basic assumption that, yeah, you'll keep me tax compliant, but try to sell that additional work, right, of a potentially this structure. I'm in Canada, so I'm not as fluent about this. So absolutely not advice, but like multiplication of QSBS, right. If you're starting a business like that might save you tax on ten million dollars. In Canada, we have an equivalent that's one million dollars. And I've done a ton of planning around that when I used to kind of work in tax, where again, like the value prop is like, hey, if you think your business is going to work, this is going to save you millions of dollars in a few years. So, yeah, like we can start talking more serious fees. Right. And I think I think I agree with your point of like, yeah, I think a lot of the lower value work in the profession is actually in trouble, I guess. But that doesn't need to be viewed as a negative. It can actually just be viewed as like stepping up the ladder of the value add and the value proposition that we're bringing to clients. Right. So there's there's really two sides of that coin where, yeah, sure, it's a threat. And I think it is important for there to be some kind of entry work for for new entrance into the industry to kind of, you know, test themselves on. But like at the end of the day, it creates the opportunity. Yeah, you can focus more on higher value work, which can raise the value of the overall profession, whatever that might be. Right. CPA, EA, but just in general, like as a as a tax or just accounting professional. So. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, I can give you a map around your house or I can give you a map in the desert. Which one are you going to value more? That's you know, if you're lost in the desert versus your house, you're you're in a much different situation. Yeah. And I think I think tax professionals and accountants and they need to understand that, that that's that's really why clients are hiring them. You know, one thing that doesn't get talked about a lot, but in, you know, I say the old days, right, 20, 30 years ago, beyond banks and everything, they would require an accountant that was credentialed to prepare a financial statement that they would then use to for to lend and, you know, and offer services to the clients. And so it was a requirement where now, I mean, a lot of banks, you know, they'll just I mean, you could go print your QuickBooks, P&L and whether it's right or not and give it to them. And a lot of banks are like, OK, you know, they're not requiring even compilations, right? We've seen those have fallen off a lot. We still do with some compilations, but banks don't require them nearly as much as they did. So the profession does need to adjust to that and go, hey, I'm technically not really required. Somebody could go to QuickBooks online and go to TurboTax live and they could do their own thing and probably file it and probably be OK most of the time. But, you know, we've seen clients try to do their own payroll and then, oops, they missed a payroll deposit. And, you know, it becomes, you know, quickly. And and then also they or they get to a point where they're going to go, you know, possibly sell their business or they get far enough along and they're like, oh, wow. OK, well, I wish I had been planning for this long all along. And that's where that's where accountants need to really look at that as a as an industry to provide that value is to say, what do you want to do with this? What are your goals? Too many just don't they don't take the time because they're too busy. You know, the other thing that's going to be interesting, that's an odd value add to the profession will be, you know, so many are retiring. And there's just not going to be options, right? Yeah. Five. If you're in a small firm, you know, there's a couple of firms on Twitter that are in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and they talk about how the low cost of living, you know, in reality, there's only like what, three, four or five firms maybe of their type that can actually do work there. And, you know, if they're all if the one down the street is going to charge two hundred and you're charging three hundred at some point, somebody may go, well, I'll just get it for two hundred. So they want somebody they want to look and see that there's some other options. If all of a sudden it becomes one person, you become you you're kind of the only one that sets the price. So hopefully we as a profession start to value ourselves more and you're starting to see that you're starting to see that a lot more in the industry where people are starting to recognize like, hey, this this working 50, 60 hour thing is, you know, is not good for me. Yeah. I don't like feeling burned out and tired and stressed out and not being able to spend time with my family. And that's changing a lot in this younger generation. Yeah. Yeah. Wanting to have more of a work life balance than just saying, hey, I'm just I'm OK working a lot of hours. They're not. You can't do that anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's two sides to like the profession having to value itself more, where one of the ones is genuinely the mission of Big Four Transparency is like enable the people working in the profession to understand, like, here's what I could be getting compensated and kind of standing up for themselves and advocating for themselves. But then to be able to afford to compensate people properly on the other side of that, right, like businesses need to then be valuing their work properly because you can't have one without the other. If your employees are advocating for themselves, but the business isn't and keeps the really low billings, well, it's going to be hard to pay people properly if you're not running your business properly. Right. So I think that's part of the kind of whole pipeline and talent issue that the industry is having. And sure, there's this debate about the hundred and fifty hours and hundred and twenty hours. But like I think at its essence, it's really just like businesses need to advocate for the value that they bring and by businesses, mostly firms, and then people need to advocate for the value that they bring. So that doesn't just stay in profit, like in profits for the firm. Like, you know, the whole industry can kind of step up from where it is right now. So, yeah, you know, I hope I hope with more information out there and whatnot that that can be the case and that can be where we end up. Yeah, I think I think somebody real quick, I think somebody sitting in that chair that's saying, boy, I really do want to get paid more and I don't want to deal with these long hours. And, you know, they need to know that there are a lot of firms out there that do have it structured better and that that isn't that isn't just how every firm operates. We spent a lot of time when we brought over our tax director who was at Deloitte and then Baker Tilly to go, you know, because Baker Tilly promised like, oh, we're different. We're work life balance is going to be way better for you. And got over there, went, no, it's pretty much the same thing. We just work on smaller clients. And so it was really like, how are you guys how do you do it? How do you how are you going to be different? And a lot of it is you got to learn to say no. And you've got to be able to to respect your own boundaries first as a firm that then allows that everybody around you. It's better for the clients, too. I tell people this all the time. It's better for your client if you're engaged and not burned out. And so it's this I mean, this may sound silly, but right. Hey, it's better if I charge you higher fees because now I can go spend more time with you. It's like, OK, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And that time is not going to be like resistant. Right. Where they've asked you one too many questions. You're like, I'm already underwater on this client. Like, right. Just just get it done. Whereas, again, if you're charging them properly, you might be like, yeah, sure. Let's dig into this and you might uncover some opportunities. So there's yeah, there's absolutely that trade off. Right. You mentioned there being a better option of like not everyone needs to work those hours and the lifestyle people generally assume from public accounting doesn't need to be the case. So we've had some discussion about your firms not really having much of a busy season. Sure. Which to me is really most highly an indicator of like a well-run business. Right. And I'm sure there's kind of some key points in there, like some key systems that have helped you operate the firm better. I'd be curious to kind of hear about some of those for you. Like what are some of the highest leveraged things that you think have made a difference in protecting your staff's time and making sure that they don't need to have this crazy busy season? Yeah, I mean, a key is, I say this all the time, ideal clients and having a mix of work that isn't high seasonality. Right. So if all we did was file a bunch of tax returns and for a bunch of people that wanted stuff done by April 15th, you're going to compress. There's just zero way to get around it unless you just say, hey, our prices are going to be twice as much as everybody else so that we don't have to do as many to make the same amount of money. The problem then you run into that commodity thing. I mean, if you're just cranking out tax returns, you're not, you know, they're going to be like, well, why would I pay a thousand when I can go pay five hundred just and they're going to do just as well and they have the same credentials. So we really focused on our mix of clients to be more accounting focused. So we're working with them throughout the year. There's not a, hey, let's get to the end of the year and look and see what your books did. Oh, man, your books are a mess. Let's clean them up now in March and then file a tax return. So we've focused on a higher mix of revenue from payroll and accounting versus tax only. I actually don't know the percentages off the top of my head. I could. But, you know, if you look at our at our percentages, I mean, our accounting this year, we had almost a million dollars of the three point nine were monthly recurring accounting only. So more than half of our revenue was from monthly clients. And I say I'm adding in the tax fees and stuff that they're paying throughout the year and then their tax filings and then only, you know, just less than half of it was. And that doesn't include payroll, too. So that's so now we're probably 60, 60 percent recurring work versus 40 percent seasonal. So that's helped us eliminate this a lot. We we do file a lot of extensions for clients. We want our tax clients to be taxed and planning. So like any new client coming in, we're not just going to do a tax return and see you later. It's, you know, they're going to be in our planning mix. So we're going to spend time with them throughout the year beforehand. Now, we I mean, literally we take on clients all year round. I don't have this like we turned off the spigot, but we have somebody, you know, right now our marketing person I know is having a phone call with a new prospect. They do need a tax return. and they've got a somewhat complicated situation. So we'll help get it extended, file it here in the summer, and then get them in and start doing some of the planning to avoid future situations as they may have. But that helps a lot, right? So now you have a client that was, you know, you're not the only time you touch them isn't just in March. Yeah, that helps. Yeah, yeah, we we have I mean, our busy season, we call I mean, it's it's hard because it's just a nomenclature in the in the industry. But, you know, from here until April 15. We'll work, you know, I don't know, 45 hours, 50 hours, maybe reasonable. Yeah, reasonable. Um, but you know, and I had somebody that I think last week came in on Saturday, because they had a bunch of year end 1099 processing, they wanted to get done. But, you know, there's not this huge requirement. But at the same time, if, you know, if it takes, if it takes them three hours to do something or five, our pay structure rewards them for doing it faster and efficiently and accurately the first time. Which Yeah, so there's some incentive there, right? Like, yeah, there's a lot of talk about some, you know, some people are starting to talk about, you know, should the AICPA be advocating for accountants to be more eligible for overtime? And is that an issue? And, um, you know, personally, if I was leaving busy season, like when I was working, sometimes I'd be doing 80 90 hour weeks, like, if I'm making twice as much money, like, yeah, it's a little bit more palatable. But like, I would get, you know, I was an analyst at the time. And so the bonuses aren't that exciting, honestly. And so you're just like, what am I doing all this for, like for a comp duper home and, you know, warm up delivered to the office, like, right, the value just doesn't add up, right. So, yeah, let's talk about that a little bit, the the variable compensation structure at your firm, you're the second person I talked to, where that's a thing where I had actually never really heard of that prior. So I think maybe more kind of local firms are potentially kind of dipping into that. And I think it's a fantastic way to do it where it aligns incentives a little bit more than having accountants who need overtime pay, right, where some of the arguments against that is like, then you're incentivizing, like low productivity. So yeah, like, let's talk about that structure a little bit for variable pay. Right. So we're, we're members of PASBA, it's the Professional Association of Small Business Accountants. I'm actually on the board as well, but we joined it in 2019. And I had met a CPA that talked about this. And I, and I was like, that sounds really unique. And once again, my role in the firm is much more strategy and growth, my title's visionary. So, you know, I've, I've really taken to account that I need to help lead this firm not try to get in and just do a bunch of client work. And so I started listening to this, and they were talking about, so I we joined PASBA, we started meeting with other firm owners. And I mean, these are these are firms that have been doing this for decades. And they grew up in a model because I think comprehensive accounting back in the 80s or something like that. And yeah, they get it to where all of their accountants are on a production model. So they get paid a percentage of what they bill. And so it's in their best interest to obviously do it efficiently and accurately, without having to spend a lot of time on it. But for me, I'm like this, this is exactly what they should get. It's like, hey, if they have to work two hours extra on Saturday, to take on more work, they get paid for it. Right. So that's not, you know, I mean, we have this, you know, I've seen this mentality with several of our team members. You know, if we have somebody that leaves, they want to pick up the work, because they know they'll get they'll get rewarded for it. You know, until you hit obviously a point where you're like, okay, I'm at full capacity, I don't want to take on anymore. And then the way that then you benefit, say you're our full capacity, as you raise fees each year with cost of living, everything like that, that's where you generate your raises as a as a team member. And it also though, and you know, what the irony is, is the bigger firms are actually better geared towards paying in this model than the smaller firms are, because I don't have all of the analysis and details and everything to do it. So we've had to build out quite a bit of our reporting to be able to manage it that way. Whereas if somebody has a time system, you can go down the time system, look at their realization and say you're getting paid x amount of realization. And, you know, yeah, and you'll see the higher performance. That's the thing. They're really missing an opportunity there, because those high performers are already sitting at these big four firms or top 100 firms. And they really should be I mean, could you imagine it? Yeah, if you're working 7080 hours, and you're like, yeah, but I just made, you know, 180k as a staff person, because I worked this many hours. I mean, yeah, no problem won't have a pipeline problem for very long. But yeah, I mean, we miss the other industries, right? Like, yeah, investment banking is like a terrible lifestyle. I've I know some people who've been in that and I'm like, wow, that seems terrible, but they're getting paid for it. And and guess what, like people are just fighting to get into that industry. Yep. Where, you know, I don't know that the culture is very good. I the lifestyle is certainly just the worst of the worst. But like, hey, the compensations there. And there's no reason why there couldn't be some middle ground where for accounting, like the compensations there, it's a better lifestyle than that. And maybe you're not making as much. But like, now, like, sometimes it's like, I've heard colleagues say that, like in busy season, they're like, hey, if I'm working 8090 hours a week, like why didn't I go into banking? Where I'd be making triple, right? Like, or double or whatever, right? Like, it's, it's actually kind of crazy to think about. So I think that variable compensation model, like, does, like, it answers a ton of these problems, right? So, yeah. And these PASMA firms do well. I mean, this is not like, you know, I mean, I, I think I said this the other day, I go, I bet I make more money per hour than a Deloitte partner does. Yeah, an experience, right? I mean, it's not like they're, it's not like they're making money hand over fist for the amount of time that they're working and putting into. So yeah, it just, it to me doesn't make sense that they wouldn't go that route, especially if they're struggling for staff. Because every time I get a resume, it's always, man, I'm just, I'm burned out. I'm just, I just can't keep doing this. And partly, maybe it is partially that, but if you had them on that incentive pay, you wouldn't care if staff A worked 45 hours a week and staff B worked 65 hours a week, because you knew you wouldn't be paying staff A the same amount that you're paying staff B. Yeah, but what they're doing is they are paying them the same. And then just making them just keep competing against each other until they both just call say uncle and quit. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's a lot of trade offs to on even like, some of the value of the work you pursue, right? Where, again, at the large firm for us, there was like annual billing targets, but it completely ignored whether that actually ended up being paid by the customer, whether that was being like, whether your billing was being collected at a higher rate. So we use discount rates where I was working. And, and when crypto kind of boom, four years ago, or whatever that might be, I was like the only analyst at the firm who was part of that work. So my work was actually getting billed out at like quite a premium. But then at the end of the year, they're just like, Oh, how many billable hours did you do? And I was like, Hey, like, but I was billing out at 120% instead of 70. But that doesn't really count. Right? So yeah. I think that's a fantastic model. Yeah. And we pay it based on the revenue. Right? So I want to clarify that it's Yeah, I don't care how many hours you spend. I don't even look at timesheets. Right? Yeah. Like you can put down that you spend eight hours on this, but the client's only paying $1,000. So, you know, that's, you know, unless you can go back to the client and have them pay more. And, and really, you know, we would we obviously make them track, track from the standpoint of scope creep, right? We want them to go a timeout. You know, they've typically had three bank accounts, but they just went and bought a whole new, like, you know, but they bought like three rental properties and put them inside their business. And now we've, you know, whatever, I'm just making stuff up. But, you know, we want them to go time out, this needs to be billed more, because now it is, I'm spending more time on it. But yeah, it is, it doesn't have anything to do, I don't want, I would rather have somebody that bills 200 hours, and is 100%, you know, basically, is efficient versus somebody that builds 300 hours, and spins their wheels a lot, or is just padding their stats. And so the revenue number doesn't lie that that's what comes in. And so it does. So then it does incentivize them to say, boy, I can really, I've automated this, to be able to do this faster. And we have one of our seniors is doing that right now automating ACS, so that it'll automatically import into all the tax returns, it should save an hour or two on every tax return. You know, it's the, you know, and I mean, think about it, when you go to TurboTax live, nobody's sitting back there cranking out billable hours. I mean, maybe they are, I don't know. But it's, yeah, you know, and I think that we as an industry need to start thinking that way more. It'll solve your pipeline problem a lot. And then real quick on the 150 hours, that was just accountants not not thinking through this legitimately, they, they thought, hey, if we put this in place, it'll make it a scarcity model. So people pay more for the CPA profession. And then a bunch of people retired and others didn't want to come in. And, and then, frankly, the world basically said, you know, we don't really need you to be a CPA. You know, some do obviously need for audit and tax or audit and reviews and things like that. Or, but yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm with you on that. Like, I'm against the 150. But I say, I think that's a convenient scapegoat. I don't think like, do you have trouble hiring? Doesn't sound like it? No, I mean, no, we don't. Because yeah, it's just a different model. People are, are looking for the grass to be greener. But I mean, I don't, I mean, I can see why someone sitting in an accounting industry would be like, wait, I got to go get an extra class. And why am I doing this? And, you know, I mean, I would take I would take 120 hour graduate student with two years of experience at a good firm over 150 hour person with one year experience all day long. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. Um, okay, so changing gears a little bit. I'm curious to know about like the early days of starting your firm, right? So I mean, first of all, you started with your spouse, which is very interesting and a unique experience I want to dig into. But in general, like, I feel like a lot of the people I've spoken with have kind of gone about this solo, like they've kind of launched this themselves. Um, do you think that, like, the overall experience, you think like solo has kind of more benefits? Or would you recommend having done that? Like, do you think starting it with another person? And for you, you have to be careful because it happens to be your spouse. But I'm just saying, in general, like, do you think that having multiple people on board gives you like a significant advantage in starting this firm? Definitely, you know, I subscribe to the EOS model entrepreneurial operating system where you have a visionary and an integrator. A lot of business owners have great ideas or entrepreneurs, right? They have great ideas. This is their big picture. This is how I get done. And then they just fall on their face trying to implement it. And then you have people that are really good at implementing, but they really don't want to take a lot of risks. And they don't really want to be crazy and go out there and do all these things. So they just sit in a job and don't do it. And I mean, Michelle and I are that right? We're the exact opposite. She would much rather make sure all the details are done. Everything's lined out. You know, our trip to Germany this summer, she's got a map, she's got green and red dots on it, it is all mapped out, days are planned, everything. I'm like, yeah, we're going to Germany, I think it's at the end of May till around the middle of June. Yeah. And I know we're going to be in southern Germany, between Munich and we're flying into Frankfurt. And you know, I know the dates. But I'm like, I don't know all the towns we're going to I don't have anything. And she wouldn't want me planning most of that. Yeah, some people are good at it, right? It's same thing with our firm. You know, I'm like, Oh, here's what we can do. Here's how we should offer this. You know, I'm like, Oh, how are we going to do this? And then that's where she fills in those details. So I do think I think, I think if you're starting on your own, you've got to recognize quickly that you've got to offset your weakness with either administrative staff, other team members. And that's the way we did it, right? It was the two of us for about three months. We were in a one, you know, we're actually in a file room in another like firm's office. And we hired we hired first, we hired an admin, and she helped out through busy season and everything. And then we hired a tax manager, who's now been with us since, you know, early 2015. And it really has helped us as we built this to find those people to offset our we call them red light activities. So that's an activity you're not good at, and you don't like doing I mean, it's if you get a list of things for the day, and you're like that one, I am going to do last. Yeah, there are other people that will do that. So I do think starting a firm with somebody that compliments you as a, I mean, is a huge benefit. But for the writing solo, you just need to understand there's things you're going to be good at, and things you're not. And I would say as quickly as possible, figure out ways to do it. A lot of tech professionals will do that. And then hire like a virtual assistant, or they'll hire in person, you know, they'll hire somebody to take off that work, because they're probably really good at doing the work. And was that the case for you? Like early on? Were you kind of each doing the actual like execution of the client work? And then for how long was that the case before you started kind of getting help? You mentioned an admin and then a preparer, I think, right? Right. So three months in, yeah. So for the first three months, you know, it was, let's figure out what we got, what, you know, let's get this going. And then once we had enough revenue, yeah, we had, we brought in an admin, so could, you know, do all the basic stuff, you know, make sure tax returns got uploaded, make sure, you know, accounting got sent to the clients, answer the phones, doing stuff like that. And then we hired a tax manager who could do accounting and tax to take off some of the excess work that we, you know, so we could focus on things that we wanted to do. You know, for me, once again, for me, it was never going to be I want to do 150 tax returns a month type of deal. It was, you know, I really want to grow something that can serve clients and advise them, but I can't be advising them all day long and then go crank out tax returns at night. Yeah. And so I knew quickly, I need somebody else to help us there. And I do think I mean, it's like any team. You know, I can't be I can't be playing quarterback and receiver. Right. And at some point, I could chuck the ball on the field and run and try to catch it, but I'm not going to. Yeah. And so I do. Yeah, I think I think having those skill sets around you are helpful. If that's your goal. Some people just want to, you know, hey, I'm gonna get 100 clients, and I'll do them for a few months. And I'll take a couple months off. Yeah, it depends. I guess. Yeah, not everyone wants to scale something large. I definitely like ask a lot of those questions, because I kind of like see myself in there. Whereas, if I were ever to kind of start a firm, like, I would want to be out of the preparation, like ASAP. Right. And I'm sure a lot of the kind of listeners, there's going to be a mix, like some people actually quite enjoy the accounting and tax work for me, like, I've always been like a working on the business person. That's where I get my energy. And obviously, being like, kind of lower level in a lot of places, you have to work in the business. But like, what I've always been passionate about is working on the business, right? So right. It sounds like maybe like, it was pretty quick for you, then. So like, maybe like a year or so, like, within within that timeframe, you were kind of out of the preparer seat, at least? Well, out of the main, main person. But yeah, I mean, I think it took, I'd say until we got about five, six people, that was kind of end of 2016. We had six people. Okay. That was really when it was like, okay, now I've got multiple people, we had a staff person, we had two managers, an admin, and then Michelle and I, that's when, you know, I got out of a lot of the preparation side of it. But, you know, I mean, even still, I mean, I still review a couple returns a year for some of our bigger clients are ones that I just kind of know this stuff a little bit, I can do it. But yeah, the goal for the firm is really to keep me out of as much of the preparation side as possible. I mean, honestly, once again, it's better for the client, it's better for the client for me to talk to them about what they care about, more than me to do their tax return, and to have somebody else do it, that's going to be very detail oriented, and check every box. Okay, awesome. Um, so I mean, thank you so much for kind of contributing so much to the conversation. I think it's like really, really interesting hearing about your experience and like what makes it unique is involving more than just kind of what the typical accounting firm would write. Thank you. So I mean, before we leave, I have kind of two, two final questions. The first one being, what advice would you have for someone young in the accounting profession looking to make the most out of it, like looking to make this profession work for them? Yeah, learn to be a problem solver. Right? If you can figure out if you can identify problems, or at least identify goals, and help clients or your team solve them, you're going to be way more valuable than somebody that just gets stuff done and doesn't understand the big picture. That would be I mean, if I was if I was sitting back and saying, Hey, you know, second year, Craig and Arthur Anderson, you know, this is what you need to start doing, that would be it. And, you know, and then I think, also, you have to understand that, in order to learn, there has to be a you have to work hard to get to a to a level, whether it's anything right, fitness, eating, health, relationships, everything. And the same thing goes, you're not just going to show up on day one, and they're going to write you a bunch of big checks. You know, and, and then just, and you get to sale, and it's easy. Being an advisor is not easy, because you have to understand, you know, psychology and the details, and you have to really understand and be able to do that in order to solve clients problems, right. So I think, I think understanding that there's more to it than just learning the technical side will be a very valuable. Okay, awesome. And then the last question is, if you have anything to plug to our listeners, potentially open roles, you're looking to recruit for, I know, we talked a lot about what makes your firm unique. So that might kind of resonate with a lot of people. To me, the variable compensation is huge. And just kind of your general management philosophy, I think it's fantastic. So if there's anything you'd like to plug to people who are going to be listening, I mean, you know, right now, we're not doing anything for the next couple months, probably to rock the boat. But I tell when recruiters call, I tell them all the time, we're always looking for a players. And that doesn't mean a type personalities that are going to be heavily driven and stuff, but a player team members that recognize their role and want to be at a firm where they can help advise others have a happy to do it attitude, and our problem solvers. So yeah, I mean, we're always we're always open to talking, you know, actually, one of the people we hired this year, came from a, you know, Twitter lead, and, you know, reached out and was really proactive about it and realized after a couple months of talking, like, hey, maybe this would work for you to come be part of our firm. We're definitely I'm definitely a big teammate type of mentality. So someone who wants to be part of a team would be ideal. You know, and I think, you know, I, I'd probably say my next hire may be more of a sales role, actually, further get it to where I want a firm that self multiplying, at this point, not just self managing. So helping the team develop and grow without me being involved would be great. Okay, right on. And where can people get in touch with you? What's the best? What's the best place? Our website is www cpa tax team.com. That's my Twitter handle, too, is at CPA tax team. Yeah, probably find us there. And, you know, I mean, we're in Dallas, but we have clients, we have clients all over the country. And we actually have employees that are remote, hybrid and in the office. So we kind of try to be best of both worlds there. Cool. Perfect. Well, thank you very much, Craig. Thank you for joining the podcast. And I look forward to hearing how you know how the next year goes for you after tremendous growth like that. Thanks. Yeah, this year may not be quite the same as last year. But if it is a even better. Thanks, Dominic. I appreciate it.