Mastering Networking and Unlocking Opportunities with Chayton Farlee

Before we jump into the content, there is no sponsor on this video, but I wanted to call out a little bit of what I'm doing right now with Big Four Transparency just for your knowledge. So obviously every single submission on Big Four Transparency matters a ton because someone in your exact position, either maybe in your city, in your role, or considering doing what you are doing right now is absolutely wondering what compensation might look like for them as well as what the path ahead might look like. And so to kind of help people get through busy season, I wanted to give back for people who are submitting their data on the website. And so we are offering a pizza party, a $100 pizza party giveaway every single week between now and the end of April. You can also redeem that for cash equivalent value if you would prefer. So yeah, go and check that out, BigFourTransparency.com slash pizza party. Thank you. Hello, and welcome to the Big Four Transparency podcast. I'm joined today by Chetan Farley, an associate at Actuate, a cloud accounting firm and a student almost done his studies at University of the Pacific. Welcome to the pod, Chetan. Dom, this has been a long time coming, man. I'm excited. Big time. Yeah, no, we had this kind of like little group chat for bridging the gap, you know, with a couple of the other guys, with Mike, with Scotty, and I just, you were on that list, you know, I had to have you on. For the listeners who might not be familiar with Chetan already, or maybe you are, but what makes Chetan special as a student, and one of the reasons I really want to have you on is you have this like boundless enthusiasm for the accounting industry. And it's really, really refreshing. It's really impressive. And I think it's going to take you very far. And you've been very vocal about your experience, which is a little bit unique. So maybe just to kick us off, like, where does all of this enthusiasm for accounting come from? Yeah, I think it comes from the opportunities that are available, right? You look at accounting as a whole, and everybody thinks it's boring, and it's not fun, that you're going to go get locked away and do tax returns all spring long. And granted, maybe some of those things are true, but look at the future of accounting. So I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I've always listened to entrepreneurial podcasts. I served a two-year mission for my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And I loved talking to everybody about that. And I think I go about everything in that manner of just being excited about it and being as involved in it as I can. I don't want to do things 80%. I want to do them 200%. So that's kind of my excitement there. And then to go back to the entrepreneurial side of things, I went into accounting because I wanted to be an entrepreneur at first. It wasn't because I wanted to go in and become an accountant. I wanted to learn everything I needed to know about business, and then I was going to go out and do my own thing. I talked to a lot of mentors, some CFOs, some project managers, some people I knew through church and family friends who were successful in business, and they had all said to go do accounting. So I went in at first because of that, and then come to find out what's the best low-cost, high-margin business out there, an accounting firm. And they're just starting to embrace technology. 75% of accountants are at retirement age, and hardly any students are coming into the profession. That's the most ripe business ready to just be used up and go build your own firm. So I saw it as a massive opportunity, and from there, that's just kind of what got me started. And then I started encountering podcasts. I found Blake and David's The Accounting Podcast and was eating that up all the time. Started finding all these other shows, The Unique CPA. I think Summit Virtual CFO has a podcast for students, The Young Accounting Success Show. And I found all this stuff, and I'm like, why is nobody else listening to this? I go to class, and I tell my classmates about it, and they're like, you're crazy, dude. You go and think about accounting outside of the classroom? Like, hell yeah, I do. And I think that that's an important distinction, is there is a lot of doom and gloom. And we'll talk about what some of your classmates are saying, but I just presented a week and a half ago at a student conference, and I was talking about a lot of the opportunities in the space, and obviously presenting salary data, and here's what you can expect to make. And people were really surprised by some of the recommendations on what you can do, and a lot of people's ears kind of perked up when I was talking about the differences between audit, tax, and CAS. And I was like, yeah, audit translates super well to industry jobs. Tax and CAS might be really good opportunities for future entrepreneurship. And then I talked about my own experience, where after I left Deloitte, I rolled up a low five-figure crypto tax side hustle in no time at all. And I kind of made the choice, I was like, I don't really want to necessarily go all in on that space, but just how many people start coming to you when you open your doors. And at a larger scale, that could have been an entire firm, or that could have been kind of my full-time job or whatever that is. And a lot of people's ears really perked up at like, oh, there's opportunities other than the typical talked about public accounting being a cog in the machine of a huge firm, which again, is fine for some people, but it's not for everyone. And people really weren't aware of that. So for you kind of pursuing that side of things, the more entrepreneurial side and all of that, there's a lot of things that I think you're doing differently that you're doing really well, but let's maybe kind of like dig into them. So first of all, what in your mind got you into all of these podcasts? Because I think understanding the industry you work in is super valuable, but I never actually really picked that up until I was maybe four or five years into my career, right? So I'm like a researchaholic, and for a while it was like, I'd get excited about one thing, research it, research it, research it, and oh, on to the next thing. But with accounting, it was just like, okay, I'm in the classroom, I'm learning, I'm going through the textbook, listening to the professor. What can I do more to get ahead and learn more? Because in my mind, I mean, school is four years long here in the United States. That's like a slow drag that you go along, right? And just preparing for and taking an exam doesn't prepare you to be a professional. You're learning the material. Granted, to become a CPA someday, you're going to need to know those things. But in the actual standpoint of career development, it's a very slow-moving progress. And I wanted to do something to shoot me up there faster, right? So I started applying for internships everywhere. And I tried talking to people, and this was before I found cloud accounting. I was just trying to talk to people from EY, Deloitte, maybe the firm down the street who still has stacks of paper the size of the leaning tower of Pisa on their desk. And nobody was really talking to me. I remember going to lunch twice with two firm owners here down the street in my hometown who own a local really small firm. And they had no idea how to talk to me as a student interested in being a CPA. They were your stereotypical accountants, not very good at talking to people, they just do their thing, all that stuff. And hang on, I'm going to pause you right there. You say, oh, yeah, I just go talk to these firm owners, or I just go talk to these CFOs. So if I'm a student listening to this, and I'm like, okay, cool, sure, great. What does that actually look like? How are you making that happen for yourself? So it all starts on LinkedIn. And I actually just posted about this the other day. I listed my framework for how to network the right way. You got to start by optimizing your profile. That's number one. Number two is you got to start posting. Who cares about the engagement? Who cares about who's commenting, liking it? You just need to get content out there. So when people click on your profile, they see you actually know what you're talking about or you're enthusiastic about it. There's hardly any accounting students or students in general who are posting on LinkedIn. You're like in the top 2% just if you start posting, doesn't matter if people are liking it or not. Then you need to start engaging in other people's content. So writing comments in the comment section on posts of people that you want to connect with, that you want to learn from. But writing valuable stuff, right? Not just commenting on a post and being like, oh, this is cool. Good idea. No. You got to get a conversation going. You need to verify or re-explain something you found valuable in their post, add an insight of your own, and then ask a question to either further the conversation with other people or the author of the post. And then if you do this consistently with targeted people, so target the people you want to talk to, comment on their posts for three, four, five weeks, and then you send them a DM. Dude, they already know your name. They've seen your little name pop up on their posts for the past five weeks. So they're not going to deny your connection request or deny a message from you because they've seen your name. So then this is the part that students mess up. They come into these conversations and they're like, okay, I want to talk to this guy or girl, and I'm going to ask for a job right away. Or I'm going to ask if they have internships available. You are going to turn them off right away. So if I was going to reach out to you, Dom, I would go back to your LinkedIn profile, look at your history, right, see, oh, he was at Big Four, and then he moved into finance. Now he's at Big Four Transparency. I kind of am thinking about going to the Big Four, and finance really interests me too. I'm going to see if I can learn about how he made that transition. So a good question would go something like this, hey, Dom, really appreciate the content you're putting out. I really enjoy your podcast. In fact, I really enjoyed this specific episode. I saw that a few years back, you transitioned from being at a Big Four firm to more of a finance FP&A role. Could you talk about that more and why you made that transition? If you get a question like that, you want to talk about your career and what you've done. But if you just get some blanket message, hey, Dom, I see you work at Big Four Transparency. Do you know if they're going to be offering any internships anytime soon? Dude, I'm not even going to respond to that. So the more specific your question is, the better. And then after this, this is the other mistake students make. They don't follow up. So you have the conversation with the person, probably around 15 minutes. You make sure by the end of that call that they give you something actionable that you can go out and do to better your career. You go do that thing, and then you follow up with them on how it helped you, and they're going to want to keep helping you and keep networking with you and keep having conversations with you. But you have to be specific, it has to be actionable, and you have to follow up. And you need to show them that you have the drive to learn and grow. And then eventually, it gets so good, they just start talking about you to their co-workers. They start mentioning you to people they know. They go talk to the HR department the next time an internship line opens up because they think of you first. But if you never do these steps in the beginning, there's no way to even get your foot in the door at that point. But students automatically just instantly go to, oh, I'm going to ask for a job or an internship when, if you do it the right way, it's just going to come naturally. And this extends far beyond just being a student. This is your whole life where the kind of next opportunity will often come from this type of thing, where the last place I worked, when there were layoffs, people were kind of freaking out a little bit. And they're like, oh my god, what will I do if I'm included? And I always kind of felt like I was like, honestly, I'm good. Because I often at all times had two or three conversations going of someone being like, oh, you should come here, do this. And I think that just continues to compound on itself and becomes so valuable the longer you do it. The longer you do it, first of all, the easier it becomes. And this is a thread that I've heard from some podcasts I really like. Sam Parr talks about this of like, oh, if you can hire someone who's Mormon into a sales role, they're relentless and they're so good. Because you do this two-year mission with a 0.0001% win rate, what we could call, and people have this kind of continuation. But you can foster that in other ways, right? Like door-to-door sales. I did credit card sales. You got really used to the no and really rude no's too. Or an easier way is, yeah, you just force yourself to do that beginning of that little bit of outreach. And it's funny because it feels uncool, it feels embarrassing until it works. And then it's like, oh my god, thank goodness I've been doing this. And so yeah, I really applaud you for doing it at the degree that you're doing it, at the stage you're at, I think is absolutely incredible. I tell students this all the time. Why are you waiting? A portion of your time in school should be dedicated to networking. I'm in an audit class right now and I allocate, what, three, four hours a week to studying and getting homework done and keeping on top of things. Why not just allocate an hour every day for LinkedIn? Why not just allocate an hour every day to cold outreach to someone you want to talk to? That's what I did. So I started doing that my freshman year of school. I did it for a year and a half, had over 200 phone calls with people before I landed my first internship that I really wanted. And that's the type of effort it takes. You have to be able to see the long view instead of just right now, like, oh, I applied for 200 internships and got denied by all of them. Well, it's you up against a computer. They're just OCRing your resume. If you haven't had any experience yet, you're screwed. You're not going to get the position. But if you know the right person and you've showed them what you are, how you are on the inside and what you're doing with your head, that's going to get you internships. And then you take accounting, for example, cloud accounting specifically, and look at the types of people that are here. Randy Crabtree, you Dom, Mike Manalak, Blake Oliver, all these people are so willing to talk and so kind. And if you just get out there and start to get to know them, it's going to change everything and no other students are doing it. You were there at Bridging the Gap with me. I was the only accounting student there. And it was nuts. Like, everyone wanted to talk to me because I'm the only student there. I don't think I'm doing anything out of the ordinary or, like, amazing. But if you're the only student at a networking event, if you're the only student at an accounting conference, you are going to stand out immediately. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Part of the secret to getting over the, you know, the, like, oh, is this weird thing? Is that people who have done well, they often have a lot of gratitude for someone along the way who helped them. And people kind of feel this obligation to start paying it forward. This is probably a recent thing in my career. Early on, I felt like I had to fight for every little scrap and everything. But where I've now benefited from things where I'm like, wow, this person gave me a shot when there was no reason that they had to. Right. And like, that's always going to be in the back of my head when I see the next person asking me, hey, can you give me a shot? Or can you give me an intro to this person who's going to give me a shot? And that, like, that really is kind of the thing where it becomes a bit of a numbers game where you catch the person who kind of has that gratitude within them and feels the need to pay it forward. Right. So, yeah, good on you for doing that. I think it's going to pay off, like, massively. And I think, I mean, it already has, but I think this is just going to continue to compound kind of throughout your entire professional career in a huge way. So more people need to be doing this for sure. And it's not just about like where it's going to take you with your career. For me, it's about the relationships, like the friendships I've developed in cloud accounting because of doing this. Like that's what matters to me. Like we just hopped on a call the other day. We text, you know, every couple of weeks to check in with each other. And I have, you know, probably 20 or 30 people in cloud accounting that if something were to happen to me or, you know, I needed something, like I could call them and I know they're going to help me. And that's way more powerful than any amount of money you can make or even the firm name that's on your shirt is having those relationships. Yeah. Yeah. So talk about firm names and all that. I mean, if you hadn't been doing all of that outreach, you would have been at one of the big four because you had an internship there and then you kind of decided that that wasn't the direction you were going to go. And I assume basically, you know, that's probably largely based on the input you got from the people you're talking with. Let's talk about kind of what's going on at the firm you're working at. So Actuate, you know, a small firm, nothing like the big four, so your experience is already going to be very different. And then a cloud accounting firm specifically. So how are you seeing your early years of experience kind of differing from that of kind of most of your classmates? Well, I'm at a firm that values my opinion, even when I was an intern and now as an associate, which I talk to people at the big four all the time. That doesn't happen. Right. You're just seen as a cog in the machine. Just go get your work done. Every team member at our firm is involved in helping build the firm. And that's amazing to me, that collaboration and that care that our firm owner has to involve everybody in the process. It just it makes everybody else like buy in. It reminds me of a startup, right, because at a startup, everybody essentially has skin in the game, not just the co-founders, because if it works out, there's a huge payout. So we kind of all have that mentality of like, OK, we're going to help usher in the next generation of accounting. Let's like do this the right way and let's work as hard as we possibly can. I think some of the other things that are really amazing about the firm I'm at that I wouldn't have gotten at the big four or at many other firms in general, we're fully remote and we have flexible work schedule. If my daughter has a doctor's appointment, as long as I don't have a client meeting during that time or I didn't already have a previous work commitment, I can go take my daughter to the doctor. I don't even tell anybody. I just go do it. We don't care about hours as much as we care about output. So there's this big push in cloud accounting, right, of this focus on your billable hours, especially at the big four, right? There's the whole thing of eating hours and then sitting on hours, right? You eat hours if you're behind schedule and you don't want to get yelled at by your manager and you got to stay under the hourly budget or you sit on hours if you got your work done before and you don't want the hourly budget to go down. And for me, to be completely honest, I was scared to death about that when I heard about it because that seems completely dishonest to me. Yeah. There was a huge kind of political game that I was not very good at, to be fair. That's not honest. I don't feel like I could be a person of integrity, especially to the client, knowing that I had sat on hours so that their bill was larger than it needed to be that year. But in cloud accounting, there's this push for value pricing. There's this push to charge a fixed fee, a reoccurring fee, and then you add as much value as possible with that fee, right? And granted, these fees are 20, 30, 40, 50% more than maybe what your regular cloud accounting firms are doing. But what it allows the team, it allows the team to do actually good work without totally worrying about the hours, and it allows the client to get the best value possible. And it takes a huge stress off of me, right? Because we still record time to know where we're going with things and where we're at. Are we pricing our clients right? Are we really adding the value to them that we think we are? But it's not recording hours because that's the bill that's going to go to the client. So I love that. The stress it takes off me, the ability it gives me to just work freely and get shit done, that's really amazing. And to anyone listening, by the way, I don't want to scare people away. I interned at the Big Four, I did my first couple of years there, and I learned a lot. It was good overall. You hear some really bad stories sometimes. I had a really good managing partner, I had a good team, and it was nice. And I learned a lot. But there were certain things that, looking back, I probably could have identified relatively early on that it was maybe not going to be for me. And these are some of the things that you told me a couple weeks ago with what you were doing at your firm, which were totally different. So I was super interested in process improvement. I was really interested in tech improvement, things like that. At one point in the middle of a project, I was like, Oh, our FX tracker tool is really bad. And I just built a new one. And it became what everyone in my office was using. But that isn't the type of work that that type of firm is going to reward. Because again, with such a large organization, they can be a little bit stuck in evaluating you in a very standardized fashion. So I was super interested in business development initiatives, like selling work, things like that. And that was also not going to be recognized for me for many, many, many years to come. And ultimately, it's not anyone's fault. The partner that I worked with tried to find a way to make it all work. And it just doesn't in a firm of that size, or at least it didn't in my experience. And so hearing you talk about, yeah, we're thinking about implementing this software, this other software, when you're an associate still in school is pretty unbelievable to me. So I think that that's awesome. What does that add to your experience? How much enjoyment are you getting out of that? Because you get the full big picture. I want to go to work every day, right? I think some students also have this misconception about remote work of like, Oh, there's no one watching me making sure I'm doing my work. There's no one like, in the desk next to me to like, ask if I need help. But we have an incredibly collaborative environment, I can screen share and call people at any time. And then also when I need to lock in and just get work done, I don't get bothered. But like, for example, how exciting it is. So I'm wearing my tax dome shirt right now, right? We just we just got done with a Axtone tech implementation, and I was the lead on that. I started that lead as an intern. Name another company where the interns are helping with a brand new project management tech implementation. And did you help in the selection too? Because you're like consuming so much of that stuff, right? Like that you would be a great person to help with the selection. Yeah, so I wrote up a whole report comparing Carbon, Canopy, Taxdome. There's a few others. Financial Scent came out after this, I think. They're relatively new. But yeah, I broke it all down. I did demos with all of them. And that was so eye-opening to me too, because in the classroom, not to be crazy here, but I've had professors that don't know how to use Excel, where everything is on paper still in the classroom. So students can't see past that. The accounting industry in cloud accounting is moving at light-year speed. You're implementing new tech. You're automating things with AI, and that is incredibly exciting, because it's not just the mundane debits and credits, right? And don't mistake me here. Technology cannot replace your knowledge of debits and credits. If you do not have a foundational accounting knowledge, you will fail as an accountant. Technology will not make up for that. But technology can get more of our time away from that stuff, so that we can spend more time adding value to our clients. So to be involved in tech this early on in my career, not only is it so incredibly valuable to me, because I'm learning about how these things work on the backend, how to implement them, how to interact with the sales and support teams at these tech companies, and then on top of it, like see it change the value add for our clients, right? Like how much easier Taxdome has been for our clients this year, just like the upload process, the whole process of switching gears between the tax return of like going from the intern to the manager to the reviewer, like it's all just seamless. That's so incredibly satisfying. Yeah, and are you like starting to already own some of these like client relationships and like interfacing with them directly as well? So everybody at our firm gets to interact directly with clients, our interns from day one got to start interacting with clients. So yeah, it's amazing, and it's what a cloud accounting is. And I'm kind of on a mission right now to convince more cloud accounting firm owners to bring on interns. If you're a cloud accounting firm owner, and you have pushed and pushed and pushed away the idea of hiring US interns, please reconsider. It can be a game changer. Not only are you adding to the US, and if you're a Canadian firm, you know, to the Canadian economy, but the students are bright, and they wanna come in and they wanna learn and they wanna enhance their learning experience during school. Like what's been amazing for me is being in the classroom learning about tax, learning about audit, and then going to work right after and being like, oh, I just saw this in my textbook. Connecting the dots, like your brain literally locks it in better because you're doing it and learning it at the same time. And with our remote flexible work schedule, we've been able to allow students who are full-time students to still participate at the firm where most firms, like if you're going to KPMG to do your internship, like you gotta take a whole semester off to go do that. We don't have to do that. Yeah. Yeah, the application of kind of that type of firm versus what you're learning is like very close. I remember like when I was in my tax two class, like I was working on, you know, a tax optimized reverse takeover to take a cannabis company public. And it's like the overlap between what I'm learning and what I'm actually doing is literally zero, right? And that was super cool. That was super exciting. I really liked the work I was doing, but again, like if I then go out on my own, I don't think that's the type of transaction I'm gonna be doing, right? Like versus if you're doing the type of work you're doing, I think that translates really well because you're learning all of the kind of firm mechanics, like, you know, what happens behind the scenes with customer relationships and things like that, which then if you do go out on your own, there will be far fewer surprises. So yeah, no, I think you're on a fantastic path, Chaden. I tell you this all the time, but I think you're doing a lot of things right that are gonna pay off in a huge way. And yeah, I'm curious to hear like, what do you think is kind of next for you? What's on the horizon here? Well, I'm locked in here at the firm. I believe in our mission and our people and I absolutely love it here, but I'm just looking to help transform the accounting, maybe vision or the accounting field for young professionals. You know, obviously there's the perception that you have to go to big four. I don't want people to have to feel that way. If that's where you wanna go, great. You know, for a lot of people, that's the fit they want. If you wanna go be a CFO or a controller at a large private or public company, like you kind of have to go that way. But if you wanna own your own firm someday, if you got a little bit of that entrepreneurial drive inside of you, we gotta get more of these students into cloud accounting firms. We gotta get them to Zerocon. We gotta get them to Bridging the Gap Conference. We need to show them what's actually going on behind the scenes, because I talk about this stuff in the classroom and people look at me like I'm crazy. They have no idea this stuff even exists. And I just, I wanna get that to as many people as possible and show them how good the journey can be, that they don't have to be a cog in the wheel. They don't have to work 65 plus hour weeks for, you know, half or a quarter of the year, because they always say that the busy season's just at the beginning of the year. There are broken up segments of a, quote, busy season throughout the year. Why not go somewhere where you don't have to fight that fight? Or if you do, you can roll over onto your couch like I am right here and just go to bed as soon as you log off. Like, I just, I wanna turn the perception around and I can't do it myself. I'm talking to as many students as I can, but we really need firm owners to see this opportunity and talk to as many students as possible. Even if you don't have the capacity to bring on interns, like, go try and talk to the local university and see if any of the professors, like, will let you come and talk to their students. Like, it could be as simple as that. Yeah. We gotta get the word out there, because students don't know what cloud accounting is. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely a balance there of, like, all you hear about is kinda, yeah, the big four, like, the bigger the firm, you know, the bigger the success you are as a student and stuff like that. Whereas, like, there are different paths that will work better for different people. And for some people, that's fine. For other people, you know, going the different path might serve them better. So, yeah, thanks for all you do on that front, Chaden. I think it's super important that you're shedding light on this. And, yeah, I'm happy that I finally got the opportunity to have you on. Yeah, man, you're doing great things, too. You know, really helping out the young people in the profession know what they should be paid and take advantage of it. So. Yeah. That's, you're adding as much to the journey as anybody else, too. So, thank you, Dom. Thank you. Thank you.