Taking the Leap with Jaimie Nichols

Hello, and welcome to the Big Four Transparency podcast. In today's episode, I'm joined by Jamie Nichols, founder of Mountain West Tax, probably the newest firm owner we could have possibly had on the pod. Welcome to the podcast, Jamie. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. So to start things off and kind of introduce you a little bit, you're quite large on Twitter as at Mountain West Tax, I believe. And I think that's where I had seen you and you're tweeting about your journey of leaving your job and you just kind of tweeted out like, this is it, I'm starting my firm. And there was a ton of uptake on that. And I thought it'd be really interesting to have you on the pod because your firm is now like three months old or something, and you just got past your first deadline, March 15. So I'm curious to hear how are things going with all of that? Thank you. Yeah, things are going really well. About three months in and I have about 44 clients so far. Yeah, and it's been really busy, but really exciting. And definitely the encouragement from Twitter was one of the biggest helps because I think tax accountants in general are like a risk averse group of people. And even though I had the money saved, and I had been like planning to be a business owner for a really, really long time, having that support from so many people made me feel so much better about taking the leap. It really provided a lot of context around the potential success that could happen. And even people who had said that they had tried it and that it didn't work out for them, that they were so glad that they had done it. It's a really incredible platform in that regard. And I actually can't imagine how people started their own businesses before the internet because I don't know that I would have ever had the bravery to do this if I didn't have that support. I don't know. I mean, it's tough to say. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's obviously a huge leap. And what I really like about your story is you kind of almost forced yourself to do that leap by tweeting about it. That's something that I'd be curious to hear about your mentality around. But basically, you tweeted out that you were starting your own firm before actually like putting any of that in motion before actually like having left your old firm. Was that kind of like the means of just forcing yourself to kind of jump in and take that jump? Or, you know, was it just kind of unfortunate timing, I guess? So I feel like I have to provide a little bit more context. I worked so I switched careers from finance to accounting about six and a half, seven years ago. And I was working at Wells Fargo and I had a coworker who is getting his accounting degree. And I'd always wanted to go into accounting. I tried to switch my major actually when I was an undergrad at the University of Florida. And I just had like a really grumpy guidance counselor that day. And he was like, you're going to have to add so much time and it's going to be really difficult. And I just I didn't end up doing it because he convinced me that I shouldn't do it. So anyway, long story short, I worked full time while getting my master's in accounting I had worked in a bunch of corporate jobs and never really found anything that I wanted to do. And I felt like the only thing that I really wanted was to be my own boss. And I wanted to figure out a way that I could like help people and do what I was good at, which has always been more like numbers and finance and things like that. And I felt like there was a path to business ownership with accounting. And I didn't really know what that was going to be. So my husband and I actually moved to San Francisco and I worked there when I was getting my master's degree. And then we moved back to Denver in 2019. And I got my first job at a public accounting firm in downtown Denver by lying that I loved tax. And I don't know I had this I didn't realize that I thought it would be really difficult to get a job in public accounting. I wasn't really sure of myself and I didn't think that like, you know, I had any work experience so I didn't know who would want to hire me. And you know, I actually fell in love with it and found it to be really interesting and had some really great mentors who taught me so much more than I ever thought was like needed to be known for tax and it was so much more difficult than I expected it to be. And that really drew me in about how much there is to know about the profession and how it's constantly changing. And my first tax season was 2020 and COVID and I stayed working in the office the whole time as all those tax law changes were happening. I'm really going on a tangent here, but I ended up working in four different for four different firms in four years. And people who follow me on Twitter know that, you know, I really like to talk about the problems that exist in the tax professional community or profession. And I think that I talk about it because I felt really alone in those first couple of jobs. And I thought like we're providing so much value for these business owners and all of the tax professionals are so unhappy. The admins are unhappy. The partners are unhappy. The tax, the tax staff are so unhappy. Like I was just so confused because I had worked in all of these other industries and I had never seen like people who tripped themselves on purpose so much to make things so difficult for themselves. And I remember I would come home every day and say to my husband, like, I don't know what I'm doing. Like, I don't understand why the partners make themselves miserable. I don't understand why we're working 70 hours a week. Like there are just so many parts of this profession that didn't make sense to me. Like I couldn't understand why a tax staff would work 70 hours a week when they were making $50,000 a year. And there wasn't like a huge jump up in salary ever expected. I just it didn't make sense to me. So I found this like community on Twitter to try and learn about what was going on and make sense of this profession that I had found myself in kind of not necessarily by accident, but really my main goal had always been I just want to I want to own a business and I want to like work with small businesses. And this is what ended up being the way that I could do that. And so I kind of lost the point of where I was going, but I had always had this goal and I it was it's really hard to learn tax accounting. And so I kept thinking that I would find this like Goldilocks firm where I could learn how to do it successfully and how to be happy and how to help clients and how to learn all of the technical tax things that I needed to know. And I thought, you know, there's going to be someone who's figured this out and all I need to do is just work for them, you know, and and, you know, I'll get paid so I won't be like losing money necessarily. I mean, you end up working a lot for these firms and you don't make that much money, but it is a really good work experience. I think it is a fair trade. And I don't think that I ever necessarily found that, but I did start to get really frustrated with the return on my investment at my last firm, which was like a medium sized regional firm. And they're a fantastic firm, but I think that the. Lack of managers to help train staff is becoming a really big problem, I think that. We need I mean, we're relying so much on outsourcing that staff work outside of the country, and a lot of the more difficult work like is getting handed off to the staff in the states, which can be really overwhelming. And there are really limited resources to train on that technical work. And when you get into those deadlines, it's just it's just really tough for everyone. I don't think that there's like a boogeyman, especially when you're like I worked with so many really great people at my last firm. That was the thing about that firm. Everybody was really awesome and really nice and had a really great attitude. It's just that the nature of this business, when you're in those deadlines, is just really difficult. So yeah. So I did. So the reason why I did that tweet was because I was looking at a potential tax season with an associate on my team left. We were a pretty small team and I had been toying back and forth. Am I ready? Am I not ready? Is my technical knowledge ready or or not? Will I ever know enough to really be on my own? And I don't know. Does that answer exist? You know, what is the amount of time that you have to stay in public accounting before you go off on your own? You know, you see people on Twitter who buy firms without ever working in tax and they're doing fine. So, you know, there are people who work in public accounting for 15 years and sometimes they still ask questions. So I think it's a really personal decision. And I just decided that maybe I wouldn't be, you know, doing partnership allocations for large partnerships. And maybe I would keep my firm a little bit simpler with the clients and really only work on the types of clients that I was really comfortable with. But I was terrified. And so I I realized that I was going to be really miserable. And I said I came back from Christmas vacation with my family. And, you know, every day I was constantly saying to them, should I do it or should I not do it? And they had been listening to me on this journey for years now, talking about how all I really wanted to do was start my own business. But I couldn't. I was just stuck at these awful firms. They were sick of it. They're sick of hearing me talk about it constantly. And so the day after I got back, I woke up at four o'clock in the morning and tweeted that I was starting my own firm and it got blasted into the, I don't know, Twitter sphere. And it got 2000 likes and it got retweets. And by six o'clock in the morning, I ran downstairs and showed my website to my husband that I had already gotten three inquiries. And I think within a week I had 40 or 50 website inquiries. I've since stopped counting on the website inquiries, which I shouldn't. I should track those. But I've just been so busy. I had to limit my focus on the things that really mattered for this tax season. So anyway, yeah, that's the story of how I ended up here. That's awesome. I love that. It's it's honestly like it's a really good way of just kind of forcing yourself being like, OK, I'm taking the plunge. I've committed to this. I think it's a good way to like challenge yourself to do those scary things. Right. So good on you. And I'm happy to hear kind of a bit of a breakdown of what it was that didn't work for you. You know, I think a lot of people are probably in a similar boat. And like you mentioned, like I've had people on this podcast who have been in either situation, either they quit kind of pretty early and started their firms. And there was a lot of questions around like, is that too early? Other people waited a really long time. And I had one person who, like you mentioned, just acquired a bunch of firms, no CPA, no accounting background at all. And they all seem to be doing really well, which is which is fascinating and really interesting to hear. So earlier you mentioned actually that you were in finance and you were kind of really in love with the idea of accounting and more specifically running your own firm. I feel like you hear a lot of the opposite, myself included. When I was in accounting, I made that classic switch of like, I'm in tax. I want to do FDNA. And I ended up kind of like bridging from accounting to finance. What was it kind of when you were working in finance that that made you really want to do accounting? And what about it was like running a firm specifically that that you were really interested in? So this is going to sound really stupid and corny. So I had I've worked in a lot of different roles. The one that I mentioned was commercial lending. So I was a credit analyst and I looked at Fortune 500 companies like quarterly financials and figured out whether they were in compliance or not, which is super boring. And just the typical like just doing like wrote calculations for big companies is soul sucking. And I think personally for me, like I would never be able to go work in private accounting. I did work in private accounting in California. For like a tech startup, which I've always preferred smaller companies in general, just because I like to wear a lot of different hats. I like to do a lot of different things. And doing the same thing over and over again is not really good for me. I tend to like I worked in that role. And I remember like they grade you on accuracy. In my first three months, I had like a 98 percent accuracy score. And then every every month after that, it would fall like because I was so bored doing it. And I don't I mean, I can't say that I had like this linear path of what I was going to do with accounting. But my dad is a engineer, so he's a PE and he always said, like, you know, if you want to be your own your own person and be your own boss, like you need to have a license. And so I mean, I guess you could become a CFA in the finance world, but I guess I just like latched on to the idea of a CPA being a license that with a skill that I could sell to people with no clue about what it actually meant. Like I really didn't understand it when I first started going after it. OK, so it was really like the agency service model that you are agency agency adjacent service model that you are really intrigued by, I guess. Yeah, I yeah, because I had spent some my mom worked for a big company. She worked for IBM for 35 years. And my dad was an engineer who started his own firm when I was in middle school. And so I always had this comparison of like what their day to day differences were and also their mental happiness, because I remember that my mom's mood was so like so heavily dictated by who her boss was at the time. And I just thought when I looked at like, you know, what would make me happy and having agency over my own time was just felt really important to me. Awesome. And has firm ownership so far been more or less in line with your expectation or have there been any huge surprises? Um, there have been a lot of huge surprises. It's been a lot more administrative work than I thought. The amount of time that it's taken to get things up and running while selling people and like while selling my services to people, you know, and doing those introductory phone calls and doing the technical work has been a lot harder than I thought that it was going to be just a lot more time intensive. And I think part of that is that I didn't think that I would have this many clients and I really thought that I would I don't know how many I thought I don't have like a number in my mind that I expected, but I thought it would be I thought it would be about half of the workload that I had at my last firm. And I didn't anticipate having so many people reach out and accept my services. So it's just been a lot more work. Yeah, where where has a lot of that demand been driven from? Because obviously you have a very large audience on Twitter, and that really got kind of embraced by the community there. So I know you mentioned you got a lot from there. But is that kind of your main source of leads for the business? Yeah, I would say 85 to 90% of my leads are from Twitter. And there, I did a lot of networking with financial advisors to in January, the month that I launched and I do have that probably the rest of my referrals are either from financial advisors or from local CPAs who are at capacity. Yeah, that's a very interesting piece of the kind of talent shortage is you're not the first person who's told me like, yeah, a bunch of my business is coming from other firms who can serve people. Right. I find that really interesting, actually. Yeah, I will I want to give a shout out to Brad, who's he's on Twitter, but he's also a Denver CPA firm owner. And he's been so awesome because whenever people so he's at capacity. And when people reach out to them, he says, you know, it's very late to be reaching out to people and you'd be really lucky if she worked with you. And so whenever I get clients from him, they're always like, I'm so sorry. I know it's really late. I love that. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's interesting, like just by putting yourself out there, like I have probably in the last three or four months referred many five figures worth of tax work out. Unfortunately, I'm in Canada, so I can't really send them your way. But to like either the old firm I've worked with or kind of some solo practitioners, I know, because, again, I've put myself out there so much, but I'm very much focused on being for transparency and not the tax work. So I'm like, you know, I can't touch this. And a lot of it, I will say, is also out of my league. And I'm like, you need you need the big leagues for this one. Like, this is not going to be me who's helping you. But I do. Yeah, I've referred out quite a bit of work to some firm owners on Twitter and also to one of my former employers who's in the Denver area. Yeah, I do that all the time. Yeah. And I think that's probably part of the business model to like for the big four. I've heard a lot of that. And when I left the big four firm, I technically had some like debts that I was supposed to repay for them covering the cost of my CPA exams. But because I left to like a client, they were like, oh, yeah, forget about all that. Don't worry about it. Right. Oh, nice. So, yeah, it's a very interesting kind of business model where where they just trust that eventually that'll come back to them. Honestly, it has. So so with so much of your growth kind of being driven through Twitter, what did you do to kind of grow that audience? And do you have any practical recommendations for people who might want to do the same? OK, there are two parts to this, because what I did and what I would recommend other people to do are not the same. Twitter's changed a lot since I started using it. I've had Twitter since I think 2009, but it was on a separate private account that I mostly interacted with friends and then like, you know, all the viral posts and Twitter used to be mostly funny stories and complaining and ridiculous things. And you would just retweet. And it wasn't or at least I was not involved in any of the small business tax finance areas at all. And then in covid at my first firm, I started, you know, I don't remember what I just I guess I searched for taxes trying to figure something out for some reason. And I found Matt Foreman, actually the tax attorney. And he was the first person I ever remember interacting with. And I asked him why it was bad to put rentals in S-Forbes. And he responded really nicely. And I remember I was embarrassed to ask the partner at my firm. And I ended up using the reason that he said, like I regurgitated what he said back to the partner. And I like tried to impress them with what someone on Twitter had said to me. And so I started using it to learn from people and to complain. And the complaining part is what got me followers. And I started getting retweeted by big four tweets, you know? Um, and, you know, kind of just ridiculous. It's a little like, this is the worst job ever type of stuff over and over again. And when everybody's miserable in the middle of tax season, things just get retweeted really heavily. And that is how I grew my followers. And that's what I say to my family all the time. And my friends, I'm like, I can't believe that I was able to, like, start a business by this social media account where I was just complaining nonstop. And that's what it was. And I was having coffee with a financial advisor. And he, you know, he kind of said, like, how did you do it? Because he said, you know, I'm trying to build a social media following and it's really difficult. And some people are so good at providing technical, financial and tax accounting by advice on Twitter without sounding boring. But those people are so few and far between. Rachel Camp, who's a CFP is the best at it, in my personal opinion. Also, she lives in Denver, and I met her and she's an awesome person. But there are a lot of people who when they tweet technical advice, sound like they're lecturing you. They sound like they're studying for an exam and you're reading through their notes. Or they sound like, you know, they're just trying to, I don't know, like regurgitate a Google result. Like it's super boring. You can see right through it. Some of it gets interacted with heavily just because I think that people will like it or quote it to read it later. And those long form threads were really popular for a long time. So if you're going to go that route, I think you have to try a lot harder and be like Rachel and make it simultaneously interesting and informative. And that's a really hard needle to thread, in my opinion. Or you have to be super authentic and personable. And you have to really, you know, you have to be yourself and you have to be honest with people and you have to admit to your faults and you can't, you can't project a version of yourself that you're not. Because I think after a certain amount of time, people see through it. Yeah. And I think, you know, I've been tweeting for years and I think that I am too intense and too negative and I have too many opinions for some people. And that's totally fine. And I respect, you know, there are a lot of people who I noticed will unfollow me. And I'm like, that makes sense, because I'm pretty negative. And I'm always, you know, pointing out things that maybe you when you open your app, you don't want to see that. So I don't know if you if you are going to be doing this every day, opening your phone and putting stuff out and interacting with people about the things that you're saying, you have to you have to want to talk about those things every day. So, yeah, I don't know if you're going to grow your following. I would say, try to, you know, make it about things that you're going to be OK talking about and you won't sound like an idiot. I don't get into technical tax stuff too much because I'm afraid of making mistakes in front of people. And when I do post tax things, I will be researching it for like 20, 30 minutes beforehand. Like if I'm responding to someone about if someone tags me and says, hey, Mountain West tax, what do you think about that? I just lost 45 minutes because I don't ever want to say anything to people on the Internet that isn't true. So, yeah, if only more people thought like that, because so many people just put whatever out there. Yeah, no, I mean, that's it. That's very kind of in line with this framework. I think it's from Sean Puri, who's someone I follow really closely, but he kind of shares like success online often can be you can either be the expert or you can be the curious novice kind of thing. And people will love. Yeah, people will love to kind of follow along your journey of learning. And when you kind of adapt, adopt the approach of kind of the curious novice, then it's OK to make mistakes because you've portrayed yourself as kind of like I'm trying to learn and I'm taking you along with me rather than I am the expert. Come here. Listen to me. Right. And I think that's maybe a little bit more in line with kind of the approach you've taken, which I find interesting. One hundred percent. That is such a great description. Yeah, on on some of the kind of like negativity and complaining in the space, I think it's a really interesting dynamic where I think some of the kind of biggest influencers in the accounting space tend to be very. on the kind of complaint driven side, which is interesting, because I feel like it creates this thing where people really kind of band together when they feel, you know, they feel like things aren't quite right in their profession. And I feel like that's what allowed big for transparency to exist in the first place, too, is that like, everyone sort of banded together on like, hey, what the heck's going on? Why am I not being paid properly? And it creates this kind of like tribe, you know, this kind of tribe that everyone gathers around. And I found that to be really interesting. And I'm sure that probably similar has happened with what you say, where it like resonates with a lot of people. And, you know, they just kind of want to be a part of that and feel like it becomes a bit of a community of its own, right? So yeah, very interesting. One more thing that I would add is that when I first started tweeting, and I was working in offices, and you don't want to bring any of that negativity to any of your co workers, especially in busy season. And probably the thing that is the most frustrating for me, but I have no right to be frustrated is that I'm actually like a super positive person. Like, I wake up every morning I work out like I would walk into the office and be super excited to see everybody and like my personal mantras that you should never be negative to any of your co workers like your job as an employee in an organization is to have a positive attitude as much as you possibly can. And I really firmly believe that that's really important to me. And you probably would not know that about me at all based on my Twitter presence. So I guess I just thought that if I could channel all those thoughts into people on the internet, and instead of my co workers, like that was a really good source of my anxiety, you know, and and my, you know, all those worries. I mean, my husband always says that, like, Twitter is the best outlet for me to because before I was saying all these things, like blasting them to Twitter, you know, I was, you know, blasting them to other, you know, him and my mom and stuff like that. And so now I don't have to, you know, make them listen to the same, you know, like loop of my internal thoughts about how silly the accounting profession is, like, they don't have to listen to me. Just with those thoughts anymore. Yeah, I think the positivity comes through a little bit in like your comments and like discussion, like I've been following to don't worry, like, it's not like, who is this miserable person? I think I think I think it does shine through quite a bit. Like, you know, you'll raise a topic and then like in the replies be very, you know, nice and pleasant. So good. No worries on that front. Yeah. So we've talked a lot about Twitter kind of being your your support. And there's a lot of kind of communities around people launching firms. So like, I know that there's like realized by Jason stats. Logan, Logan graph is currently working on one I know, like Brandon Hall has one in a lot of that kind of is meant to support maybe the more technical side as well and provide a community. But I think people might go like, more in depth of like, hey, what kind of softwares are using and stuff like that? Have you found Twitter to also be a good place to kind of discover sort of new processes and new new softwares that you should be kind of using and implementing? Or is it maybe too early to be able to tell that? It used to be right now that I don't see that discussed as much. I really like I don't participate on Reddit, but I do like reading the Reddit tax pro subreddit. They have pretty valuable stuff about software. I'm super interested in joining one of those communities. I'm interested in realize but the price point right now for me is like really high. I don't know, we'll see how it shakes out. I'm, I don't know what my cash flow is going to look like yet. So and I'm not an optimist. So I'm afraid to commit to like a high monthly fee for something that's not necessarily like, necessary. Um, yeah, we'll see. Yeah, I think that's reasonable. And I think that's probably why there's so much room for kind of more and more communities, right of like, what's the level of support you're going to get versus kind of pricing? Yeah, I'm very curious to see kind of Logan's because he he talked about it on here. And he has really good kind of content creation, and is pretty early in his journey as well. So I'm very, very curious about that one. I am too. So I signed up, like I signed an interest form for it. Logan is one of my favorite people because he has decided that he's not going to back down on his values super early. And that's been so inspiring and awesome. I just Yeah, good. And he has such a positive attitude about it, too. I just think he does such a good job. Yeah, no, I love the rise of the kind of content creator slash firm owner. I think it's tremendous. And through doing this pod, like I've almost like convinced myself being like, Oh, firm ownership is like super cool. Like maybe that's something in the future one day. And you can kind of pick your flavor, right? Like I've, yeah, I've really liked kind of like working closely with Brandon to like, he's super positive about it and really empowers his employees and Logan and, you know, in the future you as well. I mean, already you but as you kind of get further in your journey as well, that's gonna be able to see so. So this being a tax firm, and us kind of almost being through tax season, probably being through by the time this goes live. What's kind of your plan for the rest of the year? There's a lot of sort of hybrid firms that do tax and, or they work on some sort of subscription model to be able to spread the workload. I'm curious to hear what your plan is for that. So I have a couple goals. And I don't know which I don't know what the order of importance for them is. So these aren't in order of importance, but I want to have more bookkeeping clients, I want to have more local clients. So I want to do some local networking with CPA firms that I haven't reached out to. I haven't reached out to any local CPA firms, actually, just people that I've met on Twitter. I had contemplating contemplated joining a BNI group, but I don't think I'm going to do that. I what else am I going to do? Oh, CFP, I'm thinking about studying for the CFP exams. And then I, I have a lot of parts of my process that really need to be improved. I need to work on blog posts, and explainer posts for my clients so that I can organize things. And when people ask the same question that I can send that to them. So when people ask questions, I've been you know, I have like a couple different Google Docs where I've been putting ideas for blog posts and things that people generally tend to get confused about, I need to refine my organizer, all of those sorts of things that you pick like one or two, and then the rest, you just push forward year after year. Yeah, yeah. When you talk about process improvement, kind of already having some ideas on that, is there one biggest thing that you're looking forward or needing to tackle? Well, this isn't like that. This isn't that big of a deal. But for my businesses this year, I didn't give them a deadline for documents. And I don't think that I did a very good job explaining what bookkeeping, like final bookkeeping is for some of my smaller, newer businesses. So I need to figure out a way to not be creating a balance sheet in March. And whatever you would call the process improvement for not creating balance sheets in March, that's the one that I need to do. Because I made these promises. I mean, I trusted so many people when they said, I've been, I'm doing my bookkeeping. And even though I'm so tough on Twitter. I was like, Oh, yeah, it's probably right. Yeah. Sorry, it's funny to me. Yeah, I mean, you hear people tweeting about that kind of all the time. And a lot of the people I've spoken with to they're like, Oh, you trust your clients bookkeeping? Interesting. Let me know how that goes. Yeah, it seems like something that is a common pitfall. I had to extend a lot of people. So another thing is that I have quite a few extended returns. And I have some big, you know, like people who have a couple years of tax returns that I'm going to be working on. And I'm also moving right after tax season. So that'll be Wow. Okay, hopefully can get busy. Yeah, I mean, I'm hoping to be able to take advantage of the fact that I, the thing that always really annoyed me about working in firms was that you still had to be in an office when there wasn't any work to do. That drove me not that actually was the worst part about public accounting for me because I never wanted to be there if there wasn't work to do. So I'm pretty excited to have some time to enjoy. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. Well, congratulations. I'm very curious to kind of keep following your firm journey. I guess before I let you go, I have one question that I kind of ask every guest is, if you were a young, I was gonna say young CPA, I guess, if you were a young person who was thinking about entering the profession, or just entering the profession, what would your advice be to kind of make the most of it? The public accounting experience in firms is worth it, even though it's miserable and hard. And if you are an entrepreneurial type of person, it's going to be really difficult to be told to do things the way that they want you to do them. But they have a point. And it's worth learning their methods, even if you change them in the future. So I guess yes, speaking to the person who wants to be a firm owner, if they're wondering whether that time in public accounting is worth it, I would say it is absolutely worth it. Okay, awesome. Well, thank you very much for joining, Jamie. I wish you all the luck with kind of the rest of the tax season and your move. And for anyone looking to get in touch, would Twitter be the best way? Yeah, Twitter or my website. Okay. Yeah, perfect. I'll make sure I link both in the podcast notes as well. Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Jamie. Thank you.