The Benefits of Being a Generalist with Tal Ben Bassat

On this podcast, I really try to only present sponsors that I would use myself. And this one has seemed like a no brainer to me ever since I visited their demo booth over at the Bridging the Gap conference, different firms are looking for different levels of support in your billing processes, Anchor is your proposal to paid automation platform, streamlining your engagement letters, e-signing and billing that will flawlessly reconcile with your GL software of choice. I was really impressed by the ease of use, dynamic pricing options, and the way that you can pre-program price increases to make that dreaded pricing conversation easier. Listen, it's no secret that a lot of firms struggle to have these conversations that are so essential to preserving your revenue and making sure that you're not having your profit margins being gnawed away at by inflation. So you should check out Anchor today, make those conversations easier and streamline your processes end-to-end when it comes to customer management. Check them out at the link in the podcast notes. Hello, and welcome to the Big Four Transparency Podcast. I'm joined today by Tal Ben-Bassat, the COO and CFO at Anchor, who I met recently at a conference and I was very impressed by, so I wanted to kind of continue our conversation on. Welcome to the pod, Tal. Thank you very much, Dom. Pleasure to meet you again. Yeah, my pleasure. So one of the first, most obvious questions when I was kind of looking at your LinkedIn profile is you're a CPA and an attorney, which feels like a lot of school. Can you can you tell me about how that came to be and why you kind of decided to do both? I usually tell people that that's a great question. I usually tell people it's either formal or I really wanted to impress my mom. But to be honest, growing up, I was super attracted to TV series around law firms. So in the beginning, it was Law and Order. Then at some point it was Suits. And that got me really attracted to be an attorney. But on the other hand, growing up, I always had a affection for numbers and for thinking about everything related to finance and so on. And and when I went to university, I realized that I probably need to incorporate both of them to kind of satisfy both of those kind of needs or whims to call them. Also, because I felt that. Accounting and law are probably two of the main pillars of every business out there, and my my way of thinking was that if I will know these two, it will give me a really good heads up with my career later on down the road. OK, interesting, and have there been really good synergies between the two? Actually, really good ones, it's very interesting, two different professions. My experience of law school was it really helped me to broaden my horizon and how I think about situations, because in law school, usually the case assignments would be like a story and then they would ask us to discuss both parties' point of views or how both parties will kind of approach this situation. You know, for example, whether it's the person that is suing someone else and the person who's being sued. Right. And the world of accounting is mostly about talking about taking real time events and explaining them in a kind of in numbers, but it also taking the numbers and using them to drive real time events. Right. And to drive behavior, business behavior. And in many ways, both of them really open your horizons and your way of thinking and require you to get outside your box a lot, as far as it sounds to most accountants, to really be able to drive the value you want to drive for businesses or even even personally, by the way. Interesting. I like that. And I also kind of pick up on I find it very interesting that you were so influenced by a TV show because that's something that gets talked about a lot, which is like the portrayal of accountants in media being like a little bit of an issue where like, yeah, there's tons of TV shows that might drive you to be a management consultant. One of my favorite shows growing up was House of Lies. I thought that was like the coolest thing. And I was like, oh, my God, I should be a management consultant. And then, yeah, like suits pushing people towards law. And there isn't really an equivalency of that for accounting, which is a little bit unfortunate. There is one movie, The Accountant, but that's like it's a bit. Yeah, like it's like a hit man, right? Like nothing that like really glorifies what we do. And I don't think that there necessarily needs to be anything that glorifies what we do, but it's interesting where so many other professions and careers have that. Whereas like there's really nothing like that for accountants. And at the same time, I think it's dangerous. Like you don't want to give people like a false impression of what this profession is. And then they, you know, they become an accountant. They're like, wow, there's way less hit men than I thought. Right. Yeah, I find that interesting to hear how many people tell me that like, yeah, TV show X, Y, Z, like influence their entire career trajectory. Yeah, that's really interesting. And when you studied both, you didn't do these one after the other. I did. You studied law and accounting at the same time. Yes. So basically I did two degrees at the same time. One is a BA in accounting and finance, and the other one is LLM, LLB, LLB in basically in law and mostly specializing in business law. Very intense. So you just took like a double course load. Yeah. Yeah. What like how did you get through that? What were you doing? Like. So in the beginning, I think in the first year, I didn't see the light of day. In the second year, I learned how to prioritize very well and to know where to invest my time more or less. It allowed me also to start and take in other activities, like actually to become a TA in university, like actually supporting professors in their courses in accounting and financial accounting in the beginning. So also because I'm always eager to learn and to advance myself. My first three years were mostly on accounting. The fourth year was so law school was four year accounting school was three years. In my fourth year, I also did my final exams in accounting. And so I think for those exams and preparing them and and also working basically at another job and doing a few things, I was also at that point also teaching courses in accounting frontal. So in university, once a week, every class had a few classes. Number of courses like. Solidated reports, it's called, and then financial accounting and managerial accounting and things like that. I mean, it's it's no wonder you've been successful on your journey. That's that's a lot of work. That's a lot. That's a really impressive work ethic. So kudos to you on that. That's incredible. And so out of school, you practiced as an attorney first, I believe. Right. Yeah. So I did. I went to work as a as an attorney and I was actually working as a white collar prosecutor in the attorney's general's office. Tax evasions, again, close to accounting. Right. Because this is kind of the synergy between the professions. So it really gave me a lot of edge on people that, you know, came just from law school. I had the accounting edge really helping to understand business situations and to be able to also address them then legally. So basically prosecuting bad people that manipulate things like that. And after that, I did my bar exams in law, took a two month vacation in South America. I went to Peru and Bolivia. Yeah. Peru and Bolivia with my brother. And it was an amazing time, really. And then I joined KPMG to do my, basically to do my, it's kind of a two year internship, basically training. And there I had a great experience, started in the professional department. So mostly about, you know, accounting standards and advising big companies on how to implement accounting standards. And then actually I decided to move to audit, mostly because I felt that I really want to understand how companies operate. That's part of the journey we talked about in the beginning, is accounting being the kind of a pillar in the business. And I heard from friends that, you know, they've been working with CFOs and, you know, and in general, financial teams and even CEOs. And I said, OK, I want to be in a place that I feel I can actually learn a lot and influence. Learning is very important for me in life in general, even today. And I went into audit and I did the audit of tech companies and audit of VCs for a few more, for another year and a half. And then I realized that I want to move next. Yeah. OK, so before we move on from that, like what was the rationale behind leaving that job as like a kind of like white collar crime prosecutor to move to that big four firm? Because like the first couple of years, my understanding is in law as well, are like a little bit of a grind. And then your first couple of years in accounting, too, I find like the even just salary wise, the salary curve is pretty steep. Like in the beginning, you're not doing super well on that front. And it's just it's a lot of work to kind of get through those sort of initial hurdles. And so were you like very intentionally trying to like build some foundation? Like, did you always know you wanted to be like a CEO, CFO type? And so you were trying to kind of check all the boxes or what was that decision? Yeah. So I would say spot on in a way. But if one of things aside, which I had no idea what I want to do, who I want to be. OK, I when I started my journey, I said I want to learn as much as I can and build foundations and build capabilities. While doing that, I will understand where I want to kind of double down and where I'm not. And as I said, I really believe life is a journey and my journey is to learn as much as I can and to and to feel that I'm moving forward all the time. A law was an amazing experience. I felt there was a lot of cool things there. But I I started to realize early on, I'm more attracted to the business side. And when I went to KPMG and I went to the eventually to the audit team, I realized even more that I'm actually attracted to the business side. So I really want to be more on the side that actually is able to make decisions. But I always felt that to be able to be on the side that make decisions, I need to also learn the side that kind of gives the... Helps to make decisions or supports that when you understand, you know, you can always become a specialist in some field. And I admire people who become specialists in personally. I know that, you know, it takes me a lot of effort to be a specialist in something. I can't do that. I learned early on. I'm more I have more passion to learn a lot of things. So in a way, a bit of a generalist. And I think it's some way kind of also directed me to feel comfortable moving between those. And yes, I can find salary. My first few years I was making like between, I want to say, a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a month, maybe two thousand dollars a month. So money was not a motivation there. Not in the US, right? It was not. It was that was in Israel, actually. Yeah. But but even in Israel, it's very low salary. And I was like working on extra jobs to make more money, like I was working in the university, for example, didn't have my family or didn't have my family support me in some way. Also, because I was feeling that this would give me the capabilities I needed for the future, what I was doing in the future, because, again, I see life as a long game. Yeah. Wow. And so you talked about the importance of learning to you and even today, what do you think you're kind of like doing differently in your approach today versus someone who maybe doesn't prioritize learning as much? Like, what are some of those key habits that you have? Yeah. So I think in general, learning is mostly about how you approach things. Early on, I learned and I think Elon Musk actually also talks about it a lot. Early on, I realized that I don't know anything. I don't know anything. And and when I approaching something, I approach in the position that I don't I don't know anything. I'm going to learn. So and even today, I think. Right. So anything we knew we do, I will go and I will learn. I will talk to people that are doing things like that. I will watch podcasts. Yeah, I will. I will. I will read. And I would use a lot of kind of experimenting and trial and error and improvement by reiteration. So fail fast methodology, for example, as everybody heard about it from tech companies. So and that was always kind of I didn't know how to call it back then. I didn't know how, but it was kind of the way I was doing things in general. That's really certain, because when I was moving from KPMG and I went to be a consultant, it was like on steroids because you always go to a new project. You have to learn everything in a couple of weeks. You have to become a subject matter expert because you need to go to a CEO and explain to them all of the best things they need to do to drive value to their company and to be able to have meaningful discussions with people that are experienced in their field. You need to really be able to learn that and come from a very humble place with that, which is always challenging when you're sitting in front of new people. Yeah, yeah, and I find that like desire to learn above all else sort of it for me anyways, I find it like really like emboldened me to try new things. Right. Like I've tried a lot of things that. You know, my mentality is like either this succeeds or I learn. Right. So at one point I was considering trying to get a job at Shopify and I was like, I'm going to start a Shopify store. And like a lot of people are like, oh, that's like embarrassing. Like you try to do like e-commerce brand, it doesn't work. And I was like, I don't know, like. Yeah, that's good. You know, I. You learn, you learn, I don't know who said it, but you learn the most from failure. Yeah, I think Jeff Bezos said it. Yeah, and I never thought this was going to be like a huge thing, but I was like, ah, you know, maybe it becomes this kind of like passive side side project or whatever. And then, you know, my second or third thing that I was trying just to learn from, like I was just trying to learn no code tools has become big for transparency, which is now my full time job. Right. So I think that curiosity can really like lead you pretty far and you automatically are a little bit less afraid of failing when you say either I succeed or I learn versus like this. This will outright fail. Right. And that's I think what separates a lot of people, because fear of failure is something that all of us have from a young age and all of us have in some way experienced that probably every day. And the fear of failure is something that can hold you from taking actions and learning and listening and things like that. But at the end of the day, everybody fail. And when you learn it better is another mechanism to move forward and advance. It's really release you emotionally to do things also in your personal life, by the way. Relationships. Yeah. And you mentioned consuming a lot of podcasts, like what type of podcasts or are you kind of like all over the place and you're just like listening to like all kinds. All over the place. I mean, I really I like Simon Sinek a lot. He talks a lot about communication and things like that, which is something I'm kind of exploring now. I think it's a great tool to do a great capability to work on a tool. I listen to CFO podcasts and sales podcasts and customer success podcasts and. Product podcasts and because also understanding I cannot learn everything, so I'm trying to taste and learn and see if there's anything I can learn from that, and also I'm trying to make it into a habit and not into like another part of my profession. Well, then what we should make makes it more like a job, because then I will it will be just another thing in my day to day, you know, so I go to the gym. I use that. I walk. I walk home. I listen to something also trying out now a new app or kind of summarizes books a little bit. How is this going to work? Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. OK, so let's talk about anchor a little bit now, because I'm a relatively like skeptical person, like I'm not sold super quickly, but like we spoke at the booth at Bridging the Gap and I was like, cool, where do I sign up? Unfortunately, it didn't work out just because I'm I'm based in Canada and nobody deals with our banks and stuff like that. We're going to cancel. We're going to get there. Yeah. And I'm I'm I'm on the wait list for when you do. So let's talk a little bit about anchor. What makes it unique? And then I kind of have some questions about why you so specifically work with accounting firms as well. Yeah, of course. So why is unique? I want to say the people and all those things, but maybe that's kind of one of the reasons that actually drive it, draw me to join anchor. I fell in love with that with anchor, I would say, for three reasons, two of them more relevant here. One is the people that work for the company and drive it. And that's all across the business. Very remarkable group of smart, motivated people, which is always great to work with. Right. Because you as a person, especially for me, a person who always want to move forward and advance and learn, being surrounded people, you can actually learn from them every day. It's an amazing experience. And that's something I can still say, you know, so many years after joining the company, it's still like this. Second thing is the product, very innovative product. When I was having my firm, I had issue collecting fees for some of my clients, like I guess every accounting firm or every business owner has, I couldn't find any solutions. And the unique thing about anchor is that it's the first real time that there is an end to end solution in one place, kind of a practice in a box, if you want, for your financial relationship. It has that proposal element, which is very important, but it's a smart proposal tool. It's not like a PDF based. You can create packages and optional services for upselling and also incorporate like automations, like automatic price increase. So every year, you know, the price goes up by, let's say, 5 percent. So you're always protecting your revenue. I love that, by the way, that that feature to me, I think so being able to programmatically do that because it's easy to know that you should be increasing your prices year over year. Right. But then conversation time comes, you have one moment of weakness, you chicken out and you just say, well, whatever. And like, I'm guilty of that personally, like even within big four transparency, like there's a couple of people who are like my early, early customers. And I was just trying to figure this out. And they're like, I need to do something about it someday. But I just I was like, oh, you know, whatever. I appreciate them being early to punch. And so I just keep them on at the same pricing. Whereas, like, I know that that's not smart, but if I could program that at the time of the contract, that'd be fine. But now it's like I have to have a hard conversation. Right. So I really like that feature. Listen, we heard that a few months ago from our clients. That's a big need. And that's because people are busy. People have clients. They have things they do. They have their teams. They forget about it. Yeah. And also to have a meaningful discussion with your client about increasing the price. It's a big one. But if you build an automatic price increase, which, by the way, you experience that from everyone from Netflix to your probably your mobile operator as well, it just protects your revenue. This is what you deserve to get. Right. So we heard from our clients, it's a need. We kind of model that with them. And we launched that a few months later. And that's something we do a lot. And I think a lot of people that use Anchor see that almost every feature is something people really need. So then you have, as we said, we have the proposal to the automation in place, a few other cool things we add. And then basically once your client received the proposal to sign it, they have to connect the payment method and they can choose between ACH, which is free for them or credit card, which has the fees on them as a default. They actually pay that for us because we give them like a second software as well in that. And what basically it gives you, you now have a signed agreement with a payment method connected. So now you're in control of getting paid instead of using other tools which require your client to take an action to pay. Now you drive the payment. In the second part of Anchor, all your invoices and payment collection and reconciliation to QuickBooks are completely automated. OK, even if it's a one time fee, you can just click a button because the client already agreed. The system automatically send an invoice and collect the money. The same thing for billable hours, for quantities, super advanced. And the third part, that's something that no other company in the industry has. On Anchor, you really have the ability to edit your signed agreements. And this is where we close the loop because all solutions out there give you either the proposal tool or a proposal tool with some sort of payment mechanism that can cover some use cases like one time invoicing or maybe a recurring, but you cannot really change things. And that's something we understand that people need because you manage a relationship. So on Anchor, you can simply click edit and then you can, for example, change the prices, add services, change the scope, change your legal terms, and then this will be automatically accepted with a set amount of days that you can agree in advance with your client. So let's say every five days, sorry, five days after you send the update, the system will automatically accept the change unless the client declines it. And that's because we know that sometimes clients don't have time, but they discuss this with them on the phone. So you just need the mechanism in place. And there is an audit trail, see all those changes, and you can edit upcoming invoices and create invoices in the future and apply credit. And your client also has a view of all of that. They have a client portal. So basically, it gives your client also a place to see their invoices and their agreement, which, again, is something that most tools out there don't really have. So it's less friction for you. And more and more and more features integrated also to practice management tools and things. And can you talk to me about why Anchors decided to almost exclusively work with accounting firms? Because to me, like this tool feels like it could work for like a like a snow removal company, like a lawn mowing company, like a legal company or a legal firm. And so why is it that you've decided to go kind of so narrow on accounting firms? It's a great question, a very smart one as well, because that's kind of why it's actually leading a market. You saw Anchor and I guess you saw one of the main things, this is what we hear from people, it's very simple to use. It doesn't feel like an accounting tool. And that's on purpose, simplifying it, make it really simple to use, because as general, so many businesses need tools like that. So many. And we see that we have people that come from other industries as well. We have law firms, we have schools, IT companies, so many businesses because of simplicity. But when it's all about your billing, your finances, who you trust, right? It's your financial advisor, it's your bookkeeper, it's your accountant, it's your CPA, it's your... You trust those people because, you know, they're the ones you trust with doing your books, right? And giving you the financial advice. So we said, listen, if we can develop a tool that accounting firms will come and say, this is something we want to use. It really helps us to manage our cash flow, to actually eliminate account receivables for us, manage our cash flow, help us manage all the account receivable side. And we can develop a tool that is that good to serve them. Everybody else will just come and say, I want that as well. And that makes sense because, again, the financial... advisors and accounting firms are the financial advisors of businesses. And so you're not yet serving these other businesses, but you think that when the time comes, it'll be really kind of an easy pitch because their accountants are already using it. Yeah, we still using the system. We see businesses like, you know, law firms and other companies, other industries using anchor as well. We're not focused on that now. Mostly because we talked about learning. It's nothing big in the company in general. We always feel there are more things we want to add and improve the system and learn from our clients. And it's a very complex system. It's very simple to use, but it's very robust. A lot of moving parts. It's the billing, it's the proposal, it's the amendments. It's a very advanced tool. And to build that and to add all those components, you know, it takes some time. But we see more and more people from other industries even coming in without us even trying to go there. And obviously in the future, that's also where we want to go. It's cool to see. I feel like a lot of sort of like tech companies have realized the value of the accounting firm in the loop of kind of like being able to sell into their customer base. And instead what anchors done instead of and I'm sure that will come as well, which is an incentive structure through accounting firms to resell it. But what you've done instead is like seeded them as your customer base, which is really interesting because, you know, like Relay, Mercury, like all these other amazing businesses. But like they they've kind of like realized, I think, all at once of like, oh, my God, we shouldn't be selling to the end user. We should be like we should be arranging so that their accountants are telling people to use us because it'll make their jobs easier and they're who they trust on the financial side. Right. So I think it's really interesting to see how that value of the accountant to an external third party business has really, really come into the spotlight in the last number of years. I find that really interesting. And they should because accounting firms are really the ones that every business trust. We've we've, you know, financial decisions, business decisions, you know, for example, if I analyze your data as an account, as your accountant, and I see that you, you know, you you reach 60% of your of your targeted revenue, but you only spend 50% of your expenses, then I can come over and tell you, hey, listen, no, you need to spend more money so you can actually make more revenue. And as your financial advisor, that's something I can, that's a great value I can deliver to you. You know, which otherwise you might miss it. And you might think, oh, I just need to prevent myself from spending money. Or I can tell you, hey, you spend money in that place, it actually delivered this type of revenue and so on. So accounting firms are really big. And that's I think, also, there is a big shift in the industry of people moving more towards advisory, for obvious reasons. And be able to, you know, give accountants more value in that aspect. And also, you know, giving them they can use anchoring with their clients as well. It's just a great value for everybody. It's a win, win, win. Everybody's winning. Yeah, I love that. And, you know, I think that that's going to be a really successful strategy for Anchor. And, you know, I'm just I'm waiting for the day that you come to Canada. I know. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time, Tal. I really appreciate the conversation with you. And yeah, I hope that the listeners are able to learn something. If you're interested in Anchor as well, I'm going to make sure that I link it in the podcast show notes. Again, I'm, I genuinely, honestly can say like, I'm on the waitlist for this product. I really, I really think it's a fantastic product. So yeah, congrats to you and the whole team.