Scaling Success Through Relationships & Referrals with Kyle Geers

This week's episode of the Big 4 Transparency podcast is sponsored by Forwardly. Huge thank you to Forwardly for sponsoring the podcast, but also a huge thank you for what they do in terms of helping firms improve your operating margins. So if you are in firm operations, I would encourage you to take a look at how much your payment processing fees might be costing you currently. It may just be a couple percent here and there, but once your firm scales, we may be talking many tens or even maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars that are not going to your firm's bottom line and are not available for reinvestment in your firm. Forwardly helps you not only smooth all of these processes out with seamless AP and AR, but they also do so using ACH payments in an automated fashion, helping you save on payment processing fees. So make sure you check out forwardly.com for your business payment solutions. Hello and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. I'm joined today by Kyle Gears, the CEO and co-founder of Zeroed In Consulting. Welcome to the pod, Kyle. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. We've been a misconnection a couple of times here, so I'm happy that we're making this thing happen. And I was trying to get a bearing about where things are at for you in business, how things are going, because you've obviously been pretty busy. And it sounds like you're forecasting something like 80% growth in 2025, ending the year around $3.2 million in revenue. What's going on at Zeroed In? Yeah, yeah. I know. I feel like I missed you at the Bridging the Gap conference this year. I know that's where we connected last year and sorry to have missed it. I think that's a great conference, by the way. Just a quick shout out there. Absolutely. But yeah, it's been a busy year for us here at Zeroed In Consulting. So we ended, like you said, at the end of 2024. We ended the year at about $1.8 million in revenue. That's for basically our third year in business. And so now, at the end of 2025, we're looking at $3.2 million. And so if you're wondering where that's coming from, a lot of that is coming from a large contract that we were able to score with a large public company, basically helping them out with various accounting resources, positions for about 12 months. But at the same time, understanding that that contract is temporary. So not relying on that for when that runs out, which will be in the next month or two here. So basically, between that and building out the rest of the team, the sales process, putting in sales and marketing so that we have something consistent. We're at the end of it. As we tailor off, we're in a really good place and we're not just reliant on one single customer or client. So that's where we've been. It's been a lot of putting all the pieces together to make sure that we're in that good place. And I know we're not there yet, but more to come. But yeah, a lot of different moving pieces right now. That's incredible. Is this like a new positioning where you're working those kind of like whale contracts like that with those public companies or has that been kind of consistent throughout the life of the practice? No. So we were pretty lucky on this one. So funny enough, one of our hires, one of our team members actually came from this large public company and she had a really good relationship with folks over there. They were going through a tough time, a lot of turnover, a big project that they just needed additional resources on. And they said, Hey, can you help us out with this? And so we were able to put everything together, find the right resources to come in and take on that contract. It's been very successful for us. So I would love to see if we can replicate it, find some other large public companies out there, those types of whale clients to see if we can keep it going, but never really losing sight of what our core focus, our core services are. It'd be great to have this additional growth opportunity out there, but don't lose focus on the main thing. Yeah, for sure. But then I guess like, so you kind of specialize to a degree and you do some sort of advisory virtual CFO type work, but you also said you focus more specifically on kind of US GAAP accounting, outsourced accounting type work. So that would, I would imagine, skew towards quite a large client base, right? Towards very large companies. Yeah, absolutely. So at a really high level, we don't do tax, we don't do bookkeeping. Generally if you're a small business or a startup, maybe in your first seed or series A stage, you probably don't meet us, you're probably not going to be talking to us because you just don't have a need or a requirement for US GAAP. At that point, you almost don't want to have that conversation with us because that gets to a more complex area of accounting. Now as soon as you hit those big funding requirements, let's say you raise a $10 million round, or you're going out for a $10 million loan, that's normally when banks or sophisticated investors are saying, all right, it's time. We want to have the reporting on US GAAP specifically. You need to go through an audit every year. And that's a really difficult moment for a lot of businesses out there because they just don't really know what that entails. So that's where we come in. That's where we start having a conversation with those folks. So a lot of who we like to talk to, it is some of these larger companies that have those on an ongoing basis, right? Public companies every quarter, but also really where we like to focus is some of these high growth companies that it's their first time around, right? First time audit. What is US GAAP? And we can be there to help them out through that process. Yeah. And that's relatively, I find, an unusual market to maybe target for a lot of small firms, right? I think a lot of practices in their first several years of operations will go, we'll support businesses up to $10 million in revenue or whatever that might be, where they're like, we're small, you're small, let's party, let's do this. And that's a very different avenue than what you seem to have pursued. Was that intentional or what was the rationale behind that? Yeah. So my background was, I worked at a top 10 accounting firm. So I worked at Grant Thornton for probably about eight or nine years. I was an auditor there. And then I transitioned into their accounting advisory side, basically doing what I do now at US GAAP. Financial accounting, audit prep, all that fun stuff. I always say it's like the nerdiest of the accounting that you can get into. So built out those capabilities with that big firm experience. And then eventually had the thought in my head of, hey, I think we can do this for ourselves. So we jumped out, we started with doing what we know, which is that audit prep, that more niche specialized thing. Not something that a lot of folks do. So we actually landed in this really, really sweet spot for ourselves because it's either the big firms that are doing a lot of this type of work. Very few small firms have those capabilities to do that, but we have that sweet spot. So we're small, we're hungry, we're agile, but we still have the same capabilities. So it's a best of both worlds situation for us. And so I will want to touch in a second on leaving Grant Thornton and what all that was like. But to kind of, not excuse the pun, but zero in on working with that customer base. How are you kind of landing these sort of larger clients? Because again, often it happens kind of by osmosis of like, well, I'm running a small business. I'm going to all these small business things and I have conversations with them. Whereas you're kind of running in a very different circle of who you're supporting versus maybe like what you're going to for your own kind of knowledge and learning, right? Yeah. So it's funny. We didn't really know that it's almost like a completely different group of people that we need to be chatting with versus just trying to get out there. We obviously have our marketing out there. I'm reaching out to folks at different companies, but a lot of it comes from just the people that you're connected to and you build good relationships with at some of these larger companies, right? Or these larger firms. So the way that we were able to and continue to be able to connect with a lot of these companies is a lot of the times, they are starting to come into these new audit requirements. They need to bring in a big firm, right? Like a Grant Thornton, like a big four. And if we have really good relationships with some of those audit teams that come in and they're telling the client, Hey, you guys are not ready for audits. You need somebody to come in and help you out with this. Also, I know Kyle, he's a great guy. He does great work. That tends to be a really good process for us. So we love building relationships with some of those large auditors at larger firms. And we love knocking it out of the park for them so that every single time something like that comes around, we're top of mind. Yeah. So is that like the vast majority of your sales funnel is like referrals through like audit teams who themselves, and this makes a lot of sense, themselves would be conflicted out from doing the accounting work themselves, right? So it makes sense. Yeah, that's exactly right. And then also, if we do a good job with the client, how many times have we seen where you're at a company, a controller or a CFO is at the company, they get sick of it, they move on to another company, right? And so once they get to the new company, new adventure, new challenges, they say, okay, I remember that good work that was done. So it's a lot of referrals for us, not just on the service provider side of audit teams, but also just word of mouth and continuing on with some of these relationships that we've built with clients in the past. Honestly, we've seen a lot of success that happens that way. That's interesting. And that's like such a good flywheel, right? Whereas like every time you do work, you're planting seeds with probably the company that did the audit, who might get asked for advice. And then you're also planting seeds within the staff, who themselves are probably turning over every three, four years or something like that, moving on to somewhere new. Yeah. And I'd say probably for two or three years, we just missed the value of those connections and all those relationships. It was finally just recently where we've really kind of honed in our sales process and looking at that to say, really, where do we get the most value for the minimum amount of effort and cost? And of course, we're going out there and doing a lot of the marketing, a lot of the sales. I think that's really important to be keeping up. But to have found this really good path that we can narrow in to zero in on, so to speak. It's been really valuable for us, especially recently. And what does that look like in practice? Are these drip campaigns to anyone you've done work with in the past, like collecting personal emails or how does one execute on that properly in the way you've done? Yeah. It's a lot of LinkedIn, to be honest with you. Both myself, my co-founder, John, we're out there on LinkedIn. We're trying to post at least a few times a week. That tends to be enough to come up in front of people, get our faces out there. We do build out. We have a CRM. We have monthly newsletters that go out. And then it's just me reaching out and building those relationships. Hey, RIT audit partner, do you want to go to lunch? Just touch base. Because a lot of the times, a lot of these folks, they think of us, they want to refer to us, but they are so busy out there doing everything in any given day, they forget about us. And that's understandable. But it's really continuing to nurture a lot of these really good relationships, both through the marketing side and also through the business development side. Yeah. Okay. And so as a CPA myself, I avoid technical accounting discussions and topics a little bit like the plague. CPA, but no longer necessarily doing that type of work. What are you putting in those newsletters that are keeping people engaged, keeping people interested? What does that look like? Yeah. So the first year that we did it, I plugged so much technical knowledge into these blogs and posts. And as you might suspect, not many people were reading them. It's just really dense type of subjects. And so what we've taken a step back to is a more digestible format. So for a lot of what we're doing is, hey, your audit's coming up. Here are the top 3 things that you need to be thinking about. Did your company make an acquisition? Did they raise any debt or equity? Is there a new revenue stream that you have out there? Guess what? That probably needs some technical accounting review. And I generally don't dive too much deeper into that because a lot of folks just don't know what they don't know. That's our job. We need to be coming in and helping them out with that. So that's where we're starting the conversations. Interesting. And are there any pools and areas or communities that are really good for reaching controllers or industry folk? I've been looking for them. And honestly, if you got some thoughts in your head, I'd love to hear them. But we've been reaching out to national and state societies. So I'm based in California. So I'm trying to go to more CalCBA meetings. I went to a CFO conference for the AICPA earlier this year. A lot of CFOs there. Go figure at a CFO conference. But those are where I'm trying to sit. But I'm always trying to find more places. Because it's not often. I feel like there's not a lot of controllers and CFOs that are going many places other than maybe to get CPE at various spots. Yeah. I mean, there's this Off the Ledger by Airbase might be worth checking out too. I used that sometimes when I was working in industry. A lot of just general noise in there. But it could be a good hunting ground. But it is hard to find that balance between like, yeah, I'm trying to be a presence here. But you can't be salesy, you'll get banned. So it is very difficult to strike that right balance. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And even, again, we have the expertise. So can we even have a session in there? Can we give people a little update on what's going on in the in the world without, again, getting too dense, losing interest? Yeah. Interesting. I'm changing gears here a little bit. Oh, my God. The accidental pun. Pun. Sorry. Like that was actually fully not even planned. Well done. Well done. Yeah. Thank you. But yeah. So changing gears here a little bit. But when I was at Deloitte, for example, there was some work where I was like, I could go and do this on my own, right? Like, you know, handling people with large rental portfolios or, again, small businesses, a lot of the compliance stuff. But like, I was never doing a provision saying, this is something I could go out on my own and do, right? Like, because it just there's a certain scale to it. There's a certain scale to the clients that like, it just feels like it'd be really hard to get into. So what was that journey like? Like, what was the thought process of like, I'm going to leave this large firm and go do this kind of like enterprise level type service offering out on my own. Like that seems very daunting to me a lot more so than saying like, I'm going to go do kick up a bookkeeping or a tax practice or something like that. Yeah. And it is. It's a very daunting experience. I mean, the more specialized, the more niche, the more pages of guidance there are out there in some of these things, right? Same thing for tax research. I could, I don't, I would never touch that with a 10 foot pole. Right. But yeah, it is. I mean, that's a very daunting thing to have unless you have decades of experience with all this stuff. I got pretty lucky with where I was at just going through my career. Could be replicated for anybody on this call as well. But when I started, I started in audit. That's somewhere that a lot of people start. But the thing that I was very intentional about was saying, okay, what do I like? What do I not like about audit? You get to see a lot of different things. You see tax. You see valuation. You see controls, SOX work. Right. You see. And I saw that I really liked this very niche, uh, technical stuff. I liked going in. I liked researching. I liked solving the problem from a US GAAP standpoint. So what that did at a large firm was to say, oh, you know what? Audit's been great, but there's this advisory firm over here that does exactly what I like to do. I want to go look at that a little bit more. And so for me at Grand Thornton, right at the time that I was having that decision of leaving audit, they were just starting their accounting advisory services group over there. So I was probably employee 15 in the national group. I was actually their first West Coast hire. And so you jump in and all of a sudden it's like, hey, welcome to the group. We have 60 clients that have needs at different questions, different topics at any given time. So much like it was for any of us starting at a big four or a big firm, it was just drinking out of the firehose, right? You're going in and you're just learning new topics. You're working with clients. Quite honestly, you're getting things wrong sometimes and you needed to have partners stepping in. But it got me really comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I think that that was probably the greatest skill or the greatest lesson that I could have learned was like, hey, going in and jumping into it and finding the right process for putting together a good methodology, a good idea of how I think that this should go and working with them on it. That was huge for really building that confidence for that very daunting task that we were talking about. So when I came out of that, 3 or 4 years later, having tackled hundreds of these clients and hundreds of these projects, you say, I probably can. Even if I don't know what's coming up, I think I'm going to be able to get there and put together a good response, a good solution for whatever it may be. So that was what got us to the point, fast forward, of where we were saying, okay, well, I'm working in this young and growing group within a large firm. I'm going out. I'm selling the work. Because again, they just need people to come in and do that. I'm helping hire the team. All of a sudden, you realize that you're doing everything there. And I feel like a lot of folks that are hitting that senior manager position, I would say, are doing a lot of that. It's just saying, okay, I think I probably could do this. I'm not going to do it perfectly. I'm not going to have the bench of big four behind me, but I think I could probably figure out. And no better time than right now when you have access to tools like guides, ChatGPT, at your fingertips to figure it out. Yeah. Well, and at the time, you're seeing your time being built out for whatever it was for you at that point, $500, $600 an hour. And you're like, I'm not seeing a lot of that. Yeah. Yes. But then what's it like making that jump? Did you have some relationships where you're like, okay, I have a commitment from these people that they're going to work with me if I go out on my own? Or was it really just like you left and you're like, all right, time to get this going? What are those first couple of weeks look like? What does that look like? Yeah. So we were very intentional about when we left. And so as myself, my partner, John and Kosey Pennerhose, we were both at Grand Thornton at the time and we both made the decision. But we were very... We made sure not to burn any bridges. In fact, the exact opposite. So it's like we... I came in and I said, hey, I'm giving 2 months notice. So I am leaving. I want to do this. But I want to make sure that nobody's left struggling. So I'll be here for 2 months, continue working on some of these projects, slowly managing handing them over to everyone. And I think that meant a lot to the firm as we left. Because when we left, we actually... There was... We obviously communicated to all our clients I was leaving. We had one that said, basically, I want to follow you guys. And Grand Thornton was fortunate enough, nice enough to let us take on that small client. I think it was just out of their purview anyway. So they gave us an initial client. And they said, hey, you guys have been so great to us. We want to continue to build this relationship. So they continued. Some of our first clients beyond that were referrals from their audit department saying, hey, come in and help us out with this. And quite honestly, it was really what helped us get our feet under us and really get us going. That's cool. And how much of a difference was it that there were two of you who left at the same time? How did you allocate roles? What did that all look like early on? Yeah. Every time somebody asks me about starting up a business or starting up a firm, I always tell them if you can, find a partner, find somebody that can do this with you. Because there's... I mean, and you know this too. There's so much out there when you're building a business to do. And it can be very lonely at the top. I talked to a lot of CEOs, I talked to a lot of single founders, and their biggest issue is they just don't have somebody that they can relate to, that they can connect with, that they can be ping-ponging issues or ideas with. And so I highly recommend to folks going and finding that person. And finding the person that you communicate with very well, but that maybe covers the things that you don't like, that aren't your strengths, that are covering your weaknesses. So I would highly recommend going out and finding that person. I got very lucky with my partner, John. He go figure that... I bring a lot of the external client-facing side of things, sales, marketing, I love doing that stuff. That's what energizes me. He hates that. He loves the operations, the internal, looking into technology and innovation and seeing where we can go. That's stuff I'm not as strong on. So it's really being able to cover these different bases and communicating with each other to figure out what's most interesting to you, what energizes you, what energizes me. I think that was so incredibly helpful. And it's obviously easier said than done to find that person. So I don't say that lightly, but it's really, if you are able to find that person, even if it's somebody on your team that could be stepping up into that role, it's something that I highly, highly recommend. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's interesting. And I left and did this as a solo person. And there are certainly a lot of things that I'm like, oh my God, this is not me. I'm very much, yeah, the external marketing, doing all of that. But then there's some like backend work that needs doing and thank goodness I have some, you know, some good relationships with people that I can bring in as contractors. But I think having a co-founder who does those already, having someone in house who that's what they do would be just unbelievable, right? So I always have my eye on a couple of people, like if I were to ever do something kind of either in addition to or post big for transparency or something like that, I think it probably would be starting to practice. And I have this little collection of people that I have, you know, bookmarks on of like, oh yeah, if that ever kicks up, like I'll be giving you a call, right? So yeah. I love that. And just the one last thing to plug there is one book that I found really helpful for just that thought process, that communication. So we implement EOS at our firm, but it came from reading a book called Rocket Fuel by Genoa Wickham and it was very, very good in that sense. Like it brings a lot of great ideas on who that person is and how to explore that relationship. Yeah. Yeah. I've spoken with a lot of people who implement EOS and are like, oh my God, this was so transformational. This was so important to us. And there's people who are all in on it, like they do 100% of it. And then some people are like, you know, there's these like 60% of concepts that we're going to use as a framework for what we're doing. But I think having some framework in place like that is very valuable for sure. Which kind of leads me to the next topic, which is a little bit of like, you're talking about one of your big focuses right now is sort of getting out of the weeds, so to speak, of client work and all that and focusing more on maybe strategy and operation and the future to scale zeroed in consulting. What are the main challenges to that? What are the main things that are standing in the way of you being able to fully do that tomorrow? Yeah. So it's always great when you first start out because initial clients, everything's taking up too much of your time at any given point. Yeah. So client service is obviously the first and foremost thing to focus on when you're starting out your firm. Just really building that business, building your brand, building your image, building your reputation. But as you start to grow and as you get bigger, as you bring on a larger team, there's just more and more of these things that pop up from an administrative standpoint and being able to continue growing. It can't just be every once in a while, this referral comes in and that'll support us. More heads, more people to feed. And so that's where we just need to continue to be building out the systems, the operation, the infrastructure of the company. And that's something that we're really interested in continuing to do and can grow in a major way. But how hard is it when your first year or two or three has really been that face of the business and going to the clients and working through that client service? Because that's what they remember and that's what they know. So that's where we are working towards. Moving that out is saying, Hey, we want to have the rest of the team knocking it out of the park just as well as we do. We are not the face. Everything is not sitting in my brain. It's sitting somewhere where the rest of the team is able to access and put together these things, templatizing things, standardizing things. So that is where I think... And this is our year one of implementing EOS. We started in January and it's been going pretty well so far. But some of those concepts of just saying, Hey, this person needs to sit in this bucket. This person owns this area of the business. Or really trusting our team to say, Hey, you are leading this client project. Even if you stumble, even if you fall, I am here to support, of course. But we need to just rip the bandaid and go out there and start learning. I feel like it's something that took me a while to get comfortable with. I feel like I've had a problem with control in the past. But it just gets more and more important as you go. Being able to trust the team, helping them get those chops sooner rather than later, those reps. And so we're in the middle of that right now. It's not perfect. But I feel like that's our biggest challenge at the moment is continuing to build out the team and have all the knowledge available for them to succeed. Yeah. So getting people who can independently manage projects from point A to point Z, I guess, basically. And how big of a factor is retention in that? Or what are the main challenges within the team and getting them to be able to be at that point? And what are you doing to make sure that they stick out the journey to be able to do that? Yeah. We've been very fortunate in terms of retention. We've just offered very good compensation benefits. Even if it's not the big 4 salaries that we just can't afford, we find better ways or other ways to provide value there. So really good on the retention front. I feel like we've got a really good mission and a vision out there that is exciting people to come in and join the team. So I feel like that's... We've been very fortunate in that sense. The hard part... And as we were talking about before, especially in a specialized area like us, US GAAP, technical accounting, it's very... There are fewer people out there that just have the confidence to come in and take some of these things and invest it. So that's the big issue for us. And I understand it. It's not like people are just not wanting to come in and take the reins. It's just like, there's so much information out there. How do I know that I'm doing the right thing? And that's been our biggest issue at this point, is how do we get all this that's sitting up here into other people's heads without coming to me or coming to John every single time. And this almost ties into where things are going with AI and that I would recommend with a lot of folks. It's building a knowledge base. It's building this internal repository of information. Every time you have a call with a client, recording that call if they're comfortable with it and making sure that you have proper data security and privacy guidelines around it. But having these transcripts and building those into whatever knowledge base you have, I feel like that's the first step that we need to be start taking to get that process going. Yeah. Well, so speaking of AI and having it build through your transcripts and all that, there's something I... Earlier today, I thought of that I was like, Oh, I should really do this because this is a question I've been asking a lot of people. But I want to make a graph out of this just to give people a level set of expectations. But what were the points at which you would say, A, okay, cool, this is a viable business. And I think we're going to survive out on our own. And B, we are better off from a purely financial standpoint having left the firm to go out on our own. What did those timeframes look like for you? It was quick for us. I'll be honest. When you go out on your own, really, there's not a lot of overhead that you need to go out on your own. When we started, we had to have a laptop and we each made a small capital investment just to make sure that we had cash in the bank. Yeah. So we started it and we said... For me, it was always like set low expectations at the beginning. So we're like, okay, if we can pay our bills through our clients and through our work in year one, that is success in my mind. So really, we set that bar low for that first point that you mentioned. It doesn't have to be a lot. It just has to be getting to that standpoint. And quite honestly, we reached it based on the relationship stuff I was referring to before. We hit that probably at the 3 or 4 month mark, to be honest with you. We were starting to revise our forecast at that point to say, okay, I think that we can actually pay ourselves through this. Nice. And it was probably by the end of the year where we were saying, I think that we've got something here in terms of a business where... And that's 12 months, probably 11 months from when we started out to say, hey, I think this is something that we could replicate, that we could build a team, that we could continue to push forward on. So I wouldn't say that that's as common. I don't know if that's as common for most firms out there. It could be very much just based on the niche area that we went into. But we actually had a very short time horizon for some of those data points that you're mentioning. Okay. And then by the time you left Grant Thornton, you were an experienced manager within an advisory service line. I imagine you're probably, without getting too specific, but probably pushing 135 to 165, let's say, in salary. How long did it take till you were like, okay, cool. I think either I can afford to pay myself that or maybe you weren't actually paying yourself that because you were saving up capital in the bank to hire or something like that. But at what point would you say you reached that? We were probably there by the end of year one. If not at the end of year one, it was by the end of year two. Absolutely. And a lot of what we were doing, like you were saying, is reinvesting in the business, right? Building up that cash account. So we've always had that rainy day fund in our minds that as we bring on a new person, it's got to be a little bit higher. And again, I feel like if you can niche down, if you can specialize, you're really good in a given area that lets you charge pretty significant rates. And they're still lower than what the big firms are charging. So there's a lot of value there. And so that's why we were able to get to where we were. It's just having that really specialized focus on an area that not a lot of folks have expertise in. That's awesome. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to join me, Kyle, and sharing this journey, because this is definitely kind of unique, the area that you went into, who you're serving, all of that, how sales happen within this type of practice. So I hope this will be a value to someone out there. I like to give people a little opportunity to put in a little plug here. We talked about maybe if you are a firm and you need help to support a US GAAP transition, or just support a client with US GAAP rules in general, maybe they should get in touch with you. Anyone else who should be getting in touch? And where's the best place to do so? Yeah. So I mean, you nailed it. Any companies that are just going through their first US GAAP audit, or US GAAP reporting, honestly, any auditors out there that need somebody that can come in and help out with some of your clients, that's who we love to connect and build relationships with. And even on the financial due diligence side, that's also something that we provide. So that would be M&A advisors, bankers, people thinking about their business. So how to get in touch with us? You can reach out to me. My email is kyle at zi.consulting. No.com, just dot consulting. And then you can reach us through our website at www.zi.consulting. Okay, perfect. Great domain, for the most part. I was trying to send you an invite to record on this and Riverside says, please enter a valid domain. But they might just be a little bit behind. Cool domain, though. I like that. Thank you. Yeah, we've ran into a few issues. But overall, I feel like most folks are starting to pick up these good domains.