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A Modern Mindset: Building for the Future with Matt Patrick
Matt Patrick, the president and founder of Patrick Accounting and Whirks, has felt called to entrepreneurship since a remarkable sequence of events that occurred early on in his initially very traditional career. He joins John Randolph on Episode 70 of CPA Life to discuss the vision he’s executed to build a modern, efficient, people-centric accounting firm. While focusing on the importance of retaining great employees, creating a family-friendly work environment, and developing a sustainable business model, Matt also delves into the challenges accounting faces today, the impact of technology, and the keys to retaining talent. The episode underscores the significance of hiring based on core values and fostering a culture of continuous learning and trust, while also seeking out advice from others who have been there before and made the same mistakes you’re making.
Important Links:
Matthew Patrick, CPA on Linkedin
About the Guest:
Matt Patrick is the president and founder of Patrick Accounting and Whirks, a payroll, HR, and employee benefits provider. With an undergraduate degree in accounting from Huntington College and a Master’s from the University of Memphis, Matthew started his career at Arthur Andersen before transitioning to Deloitte. In 2003, he launched his own firm, and he has grown Patrick Accounting and Whirks into a thriving venture. Matt is dedicated to creating a sustainable, family-friendly work environment and values the development and growth of his team, utilizing key values of “hungry, humble, smart,” and making use of “Ideal Team Players.” Matthew is known for his strategic leadership, commitment to technology, and innovative approaches in public accounting.
Transcript:
Hey everyone. We are back with another episode of the CPA Life Podcast, the podcast that takes a few minutes every couple of weeks to connect and spotlight firms and firm leaders across the industry who are really committed to building modern-minded, people-centric firms where you’re not required to sacrifice your soul at the altar of the job to build a thriving career in public accounting. Today, we’re going to spend some time talking to Matt Patrick, who is the president and founder of Patrick Accounting and Whirks, a payroll, HR, and employee benefits provider. Matt, welcome to the show.
Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it.
I am looking forward to digging into what you guys are doing. I know I spent a couple of days with you guys a few weeks ago, and you seem to be doing a lot of things well around people, process, systems, client delivery. I know it hasn’t always been that way, so we’ll spend some time talking about lessons you’ve learned along the way, but before we jump into all of that, typically what we like to do at this point is give a little context of your background, where you came from, and what’s evolved in your life to get you to the point where you are today. You had a pretty traditional college, public accounting start to your career. Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, absolutely. Undergrad in accounting at a tiny school in Montgomery, Alabama called Huntingdon College. Got my master’s from the University of Memphis. Started my career with Arthur Anderson. I was with Arthur Anderson in Little Rock for three years and went up to Boston and worked with them and was in Boston when Enron happened. So I looked for a job really fast, was lucky enough to find one at Deloitte. I was at Deloitte about 18 months, and through conflicts of, they had acquired the Memphis Office of Anderson and all kinds of stuff—I probably was a crappy employee—but I was let go. Had a nice little severance package and didn’t know what I was going to do. Thought I’ll keep looking, but you know, we’ll see what happens.
I was lucky enough to be renewing my CPA certificate, and the guy I was renewing it with at a Pak Mail franchise said, “Hey, I see you’re a CPA. I just moved here. I need a CPA.” And I was like, “What do you mean by that?” And so that was, in theory, client one. That was at the very end of 2003, so a little divine intervention. He said the guy next to me just said he needed a CPA too, and I asked him if he knew one, so you might want to go talk to him. That guy led me to a BNI. Next thing I know, within a month or so, I had like 20 clients. My wife was in a Bible study at church, and the lady next to her was crying her eyes out and said, “Do you happen to know of an accountant?” That was like my epiphany: Somebody named God may be more involved in this than me. And so by the end of 2003, early 2004, I hung my own shingle.
I love stories like that.
I always love telling it, ’cause it’s funny.
You know, anytime I’m in tough positions. I was telling someone this the other day ’cause of some things we had to make some decisions on with our business recently. Someone said, “Well, do you pray for wisdom?” And I said, “No. I do not pray for wisdom because I am going to screw it up. I do not ask for wisdom.”
You never pray for wisdom or patience, right? Those are the things you’re never supposed to pray for.
Yeah. I ask for clarity and remove all of the options and point me clearly at the one thing I need to do: 20 clients, your wife at a Bible study, that’s pretty clear. You know what you’re supposed to do, right?
Yeah, pretty quickly. Like, “Hey, I think you might be onto something.” You know, I had come from a tax background, so I never had really been involved in hiring or even defining price. I mean, really as a public accounting manager at the time, you kind of are adopting clients as they get handed to you and they’ve already been set by price by somebody else, and here’s your team you’re going to work with. And I’d been involved in recruiting on campuses before, but never really had hired anybody. So I got to do all the joys. I was 29 years old trying to figure it out. It’s been a long journey to get to here, and never in a million years would I have thought that this is what I’d end up doing, but I’m very thankful and blessed to be where we are now, and it’s been a lot of fun along the journey to get here.
So give us a picture of what the firm looks like today as far as number of FTEs, where are those people located, what type of business do you guys do, revenue numbers, things like that.
Yeah. Okay, happy to. So today we have 42 employees, around 25 in the Memphis area. We’ve got a distributed team, both onshore, so we’ve got about 12-13 people that are remote onshore, and then we’ve got some remote offshore as well—we have people in the Philippines and in South Africa. We also use an outsourced firm, Analytics, to help us with our offshoring out of India. Our goal this year is to do $10 million between both brands. That’s about 60/40 accounting firm versus the payroll/HR/benefits firm.
Got it. Now, 20 years when you started, did you start a firm that was in a smaller iteration of kind of where you came from, meaning we’re charging by the hour, filling out form sheets, all that stuff?
Oh yeah. All the stupid things that every person does when they first get out there. You know, my first hire was a family member, hired my mother-in-law. Common mistake every small business owner makes. I thought I’d have a tax practice—I’d been into QuickBooks before. I mean, coming from Big Four, QuickBooks wasn’t a thing. My first client said, “Hey, we are on QuickBooks. Can you help me do W-2s?” I went, “I probably could figure that out.” I did about a hundred tax returns that first tax year. I thought I’d have a tax practice, way underpriced everything, said yes to anybody who even remotely sounded like they needed accounting services done.
I’m kind of a tech nerd by trade, so if they asked me to implement a new software, help them migrate their inventory system, or switch from Sage to QuickBooks, or whatever, I was saying yes early on. I made like $6 an hour or something. I’m not even sure I made $6 an hour. It was about three years in where I went, “I did $100,000 in revenue my first year and made 60 grand. I did $200,000 in revenue my second year and made 60 grand. I did $300,000 in revenue my third year and made 60 grand.” I went, “I’m not the smartest accountant in the world, but something’s broken.”
This doesn’t look right!
I was lucky enough—this is back in the web forum days—I was on a Thomson Reuters web forum called Arnie, and a guy by the name of Ray Busch, who, anybody who’s been in PASBA or anybody near PASBA knows the name Ray Busch: Longtime firm owner in Chicago. He said, “Hey, you got to look at this group called NASBA.” Now it’s called PASBA. All they had on the website basically was not even really a brochure site, it was like a table of contents of the books they had written, this Blueprint for Success. All I looked at that list of the table of contents was, “I need to know how to do all these things.” And I went, “How do I get the books?” They said, “Well, you’ve got to go to the conference.” I’m like, “It’s 2,500 bucks. I don’t know if I want to spend $2,500 just to get a book.” You know, the tight accountant in me came out.
I ended up going to my first conference in Tucson, Arizona, in spring of ’07, and it changed my life, and that’s honestly how I say it. I met a wonderful group of owners, all with empathy to know that we’ve all done this, and we’ve all made the same mistakes, and we’re all trying to make it better. But more importantly, they had a system and process to run a firm, from what you sell to how you staff it, to how you price. So I got a wonderful group of mentors from that organization to help me frame my practice into what it is today. I came back with like, 30 pages of notes. I drafted the letter to every client I served and said, “Your new fee is this amount. It’s going to be fixed every month. This is what we’re going to do for you. Here’s what we’re not doing anymore.” We sent out 25 of those letters and 23 people said, “Yes.” So that was kind of the line in the sand of how I can run a firm better.
That really shaped how we’ve hired and staffed from that point on. Obviously, we took that core principle and plugged our own way into doing it. I always say PASBA is kind of my toolbox or my system, and I plug different tools into it, but the system’s still right today. It really did change my family tree is the way I think of it. At the time I was working around the clock and never seeing my kids. Now today I have a firm I’m super proud of with great team people working with me, and we work on clients we love, doing stuff we really do help them succeed. That’s the joy I have—I get to be an owner of a business instead of an accountant, which is a big deal for me. And I’m very lucky to have a great team.
I think that’s one of the things I recognized in you when I was there for a couple of days, and we haven’t had a chance to really talk in depth about this. One of the things I recognize is that you’ve got a very solid tactical mindset of what we do, how we do it, but you have also evolved into a strategic leader that steps back, lets your people run things day in and day out, and you’re figuring out the charting of the course: Where are we going? How are we going to get there? Now let’s let people drive that for us. At what point in your career in the 21 years were you able to say, “Okay, I’ve got to do less of this tactical stuff and start figuring out where we’re going?”
It’s definitely been an evolution. Part of my early goal with PASBA was to make sure we have the right clients that we can serve really well, let’s make sure we have the right people on the team that can do that work at the right step for the economics of the firm, the right price, the right person with the right skillset, doing the right work. So that was some of my early stages. And then, knowing that in order for me to run a business, I can’t have everything running through me—I can’t be the chief rainmaker and the chief decision-maker and the chief tactician and run admin teams and lead payroll services and be looking at what’s new. I just couldn’t do all those things.
I’ve been very fortunate to find people that have grown and developed with us. I mean, our leadership team has been with us now on average well over 10 years. They’ve all started in an entry-level position at the firm—either a staff accountant, a salesperson, or a general administrative person in our office, and they’ve all grown and developed with us. What it really allowed me to do was take myself long term—it’s evolved, like, I was still in production till probably seven, eight years ago. Every year, I probably only had 10 billable hours last year, maybe. Realistically, 10 billable hours. Now we’re working on the second level of that: My leaders are also not carrying books of business down, which gives them the capacity to train and develop others. It’s allowed us to have a better mindset of growth and development of all of our people having those capacities in the office.
When you embrace a mindset—I had a mentor I worked for years ago when I was in my late twenties, early thirties. You know when, as young business people, we know everything, or at least we think we do. I had a mentor that I worked for, and Johnny was from Long Island, so I had a wonderful, thick New York accent and lots of colorful words that he would use around it.
I say those same colorful words, and I’m not from New York, but I still know them.
He called me—he was about my age now, and he would call me “Youngsta.” He would always say to me, ’cause I had a really tough time letting go, “Youngsta, a good man can do the work of 10 men, but a great man, he gets 10 men to do the work with him, and then he goes and builds.” It takes a little while, I think, with maturity to realize that you don’t need to be a jack of all trades.
What really was an epiphany for me over the years was I found I could do a lot of different things okay, but nothing, I’ll say, great, and the more I let people take responsibility, they handle clients better than I do, they do people development better than I do, they lead sales team leaders better than I do. So while I could do a little bit of all those jobs and not do them well, there’s a little bit of your own ego that’s hard to leave at the door. You are like, “God, they’re not doing it the way I would do it.” It’s hard because you go, “I know no matter what, I’m willing to own that all the way through till completion.” So you have to give up some of that control knowing they’re not going to do it the way I do it or at the speed I want them to do it at, but in the long run, I’m better off.
Well you touched on something that I think allows that to happen—the tenure of your team, the tenure of your leadership team. I mean, the tenure of your team, in general, is pretty solid, but the tenure of your leadership team is something that I’ve been very impressed with, because when you’ve got people that have been with you 10+ years that are in key decision-making seats that are both tactical and strategic, it’s like, yes, they are going to do things their way and put their own spin on things, but there’s also the faith and trust that you’ve got 3, 4, 5, you know, mini-Matts running around that at least view the problem a lot of times the same way that you would view it. They may not come up with the same solution, but you know how they’re looking at it and analyzing it. I’m assuming that gives you some comfort because, like you said, they have grown up in the firm and have been there for a while. There’s a solid foundation.
Yeah, I mean, it’s trust. The key word is trust. And that’s the same as any delegation, right? Anytime you’re delegating anything, you’re only as good as the trust you have in the person you’re delegating it to, and the proven track record they have of taking that responsibility. I’ve been very fortunate. I think about our team as a whole—our team has continued to evolve, and one of the things we really worked hard on is developing and instilling trust in others. We’re intentional in our leadership development, we’re intentional in our development of people as a whole with the idea that our role as leaders is to develop leaders who develop leaders. We have to make sure that we constantly are putting that through the lens of if there’s a failure of development, it falls on the leader. It doesn’t fall on the person who wasn’t developed. So we’ve been very fortunate and very focused on people development as critical. And tied to that, having, I’ll say, laser focus on what we do well and what we don’t, and not being afraid of having difficult conversations, and being focused on the clients we serve best and ones we don’t, and holding people accountable to what we think are our standards.
Tell me what you think has been the key to the success of retention with your firm. Let’s be honest here: you sit in the middle of an industry that across the board, now obviously there are some bigger players that impact these numbers, but you’re sitting in an industry that statistically has 20 to 30% turnover. If you pull out the Big Four, maybe even the top 50, it may drop that turnover percentage lower, but I’ve got to believe it’s still going to be in the double-digit range, 10 to 12, 10 to 15%. You guys have held onto people. People don’t leave when they come here.
It hasn’t always been that way. I think back, you know, we had a retention problem during those middle years. I think some things really came to light as we started understanding what our limitations were with retention. We weren’t consistent in our hiring processes—that’s the number one. We would wing it. We’d wing it and say, “Well, this time we’re going to interview this person, and we’re going to ask these questions.” We didn’t even put them through what I’d say is an objective process. We would like them, and by liking them, that means they could get a job with us. And then we would know that they don’t have the skillset to do that job, or we put way too much on them too fast and not been patient enough with them and burn them out. And we weren’t the right fit because, at the time, we didn’t have the resources, the skillset, the development to help them and give them the patience they really needed to learn on the job.
We were bringing on both sides: work that we couldn’t ideally do, or people that we didn’t really identify the holes in their ability to do the work we were asking them to do. And so both tightening up our client list so that we know the work we’re really doing is going to be something that we can repeat every single time—we talk about these three things: it’s repeatable, scalable, and profitable. So we know how we can do that work really well. And on the people side, we have a very set standard by which we hire people now, and if they don’t meet those criteria, we’re not going to bring them in. We’re going to be very intentional with hiring and development for the long term.
And so it really has, you know, kind of allowed us to solidify—our hiring process really dictated everything else. And so, you know, as we go back, you know, is really firming up and communicating firm values, and we hire based on firm values. We have hiring criteria—we talked about this when you were in town, which was, you know, we’re going to follow ideal team player a hundred percent of the time, we’re going to measure those people on the front end of determining do they have the skill sets and the core values of our firm before we bring them in. If they do, they have our core values, we’re going to have the right person, and then we determine if they’re in the right seat on our team, based on their ability to do the work, their capacity to do it, how much they want that job. And so that allows us to really find the best candidates we can find, and we just have to be picky, which means we limit our growth to some extent because we can only grow to the extent of our capacity to do work. And so there’s always that balance between people and sales, and that’s the same as the inevitable, I always think about that beer commercial when the guy goes and sells a bunch more beer to sell, and then they go, that’s great, but we need another plant, and we need 14 more people to produce the beer. And so it’s always that constant battle between those two sides. But it’s a lot of fun.
Yep. I was listening to—I think it was either the most recent podcast, you guys host a podcast called One Step Better, and I don’t remember if it was the most recent podcast or the one before that, but you guys were talking about something that I believe really summarizes what we’re talking about here, what we’re going to spend a little bit more time talking about, and I believe it’s also one of the things that’s helped your firm grow and get to the level that you’ve gotten to over the last two decades. You said, “Our big goals are a lot around people. I want to see the development of our team continuing to flourish. I want to see the continuing growth of our people taking on leadership roles.” And it goes back to what you said a minute ago: We want our leaders to train leaders to train leaders.
Yep. I mean, it’s a multiplier effect. As anybody knows, a bad person in a role will handle 1x. A great person in that role will handle 5x. The multiplier of having the right people in the right seat, doing the right things the right way at the right time, it just, it has a wonderful exponential effect on everything you do. And so I think where firms, you know, if you think about the firms that are having retention problems, it’s hours. So how are you managing the workload that you have? How are you pricing the work so that you are still profitable? And the only way that some firms are able to overcome that number is by more hours. I think it’s the type of clients they’re serving, and the way they’re serving them.
And so by us being focused on one type of client, you know, we don’t take tax work that is outside of monthly accounting work. We typically won’t take an accounting client that we don’t do their payroll. So we have some very standard rules and go, I understand we could do that, but It’s not the best long term for us. And so we want to have a very standard set of rules by which we work on the technology we want to work on, so we can have it be really proficient. And we know that the market’s big enough for us to find the work that makes sense for us to do really well.
Well, I think that what you start to realize as a business owner is there are certain things that are non-negotiables. Those got to be there. Like you’re saying, we’re typically not going to take on bookkeeping work if we’re not doing your payroll. We’re definitely not going to take on your tax work if we’re not doing your bookkeeping work. And my experience has been every single time that you create that exception, because it just feels like it’s the right thing to do for whatever reason, more times than not, it ends up biting you in the butt somewhere.
Yeah. It always bites you in the butt every single time. “That big new project is going to be great and it’s going to lead to this, and this.”
Yeah.
It’s never the case. You end up getting over your skis, and the stress of that one big client is not worth it sometimes because you put off the trade-off and opportunity cost of what that meant and what that means for your overall firm profitability is not going to be nearly as good. But it sounds great when you talk about this great new client every single time.
It always sounds a whole lot better than it ends up being. I’ve said to my staff many times over the last few years, “Hey, the next time I start talking about X, you guys just slap me. You have the green light to just slap me because it never works.”
I’ve said the same thing—and they’ve come close to slapping me. I’ve put some filters in place, finally. I’m an eternal optimist too, which makes things go a little haywire sometimes when it comes to new clients, ’cause you go, it’s not great now, but when we get it cleaned up it’s going to be great. And they never get cleaned up and so. Having learned my lesson over time, I have some people now that create filters and they’re a little more pessimistic, I would say, and so they do a better job of asking the difficult questions and not thinking everything’s going to be rosy on the back end.
Well, I think that common theme, when I talk to firms that are doing a lot of things right, like you guys, there’s a common theme between those table stakes, those non-negotiables. It doesn’t mean they’re all the same. Everybody’s a little bit different. There’s a firm that I worked with last year, a couple of years ago that one of their things was, you know, “Hey, I did this for 16 years for other people.” This was the owner talking. “Like, I did this for 16 years for other people. And one of the things I quickly realized is every fight that I had with a client—didn’t matter what the fight was about—every fight I had with a client, the common thing with those clients, they were always behind on their taxes. Always. So I do not take on a client that’s behind on their taxes. I just don’t.”
We don’t either.
“I may be losing some money, but the headache that comes from that client is not worth it. We do not take on clients that are behind.”
We talk about one of our criteria, a healthy fear of the IRS, and we find that clients that have had, now we’ve had clients that we’ve come in like, “Hey, my husband took care of this forever. He passed away. I kind of froze. I didn’t know what to do. I thought they were going to handle it. They didn’t handle it.” And they recognize the problem and they’re coming to us.
Right.
That’s a different scenario. But for the most part, like same owner, “Yeah, I got behind, you know, I figured it would be okay, we’ll catch up eventually. I just didn’t care enough.” And I’m like, “Well, then you’re not a great fit for us.” And so we walk away from that a hundred percent of the time.
Yeah. I think that those things are important to have in place in your firm. And so much of what you’ve talked about since we started working together and since we’ve been talking today really revolves around your desire to hire great people. You can give them an environment that they can flourish and grow in, while also not being just a great employee, but being a great mom, a great dad, a great brother, sister, aunt, uncle, just an overall person. Tell me—talk to me about that. Because I think so many times in the profession, there is a mindset of, “Well, I had to do this to get here, so they should too.” And I had a partner one day say to me, we were talking about it, and he said, “John, just because we had to do it doesn’t mean it was right.”
As my parents used to say, two wrongs don’t make a right. I remember, you know, when I, like I said, I started the firm, my oldest was nine months old and I was already feeling that my wife was working, I was working. You know, kid gets sick, what do you do? And they go to daycare and they’re going to catch everything under the sun, every ear infection that ever goes through. Every person with children in our office has kids that have sporting events they want to attend and dance recitals and fifth-grade graduations and all the things. And so, yeah, I think it’s just understanding today’s world is a little bit different. We’re so fortunate with technology—I don’t know why firms fight this. I think as we talk about is we talk about a professional 40. You know, I expect our team to work a professional 40 hours. That means that they need to flex in and flex out as they can, to do the things they need to do. We have a very production mindset still, and I’m okay with them going to their kids’ sporting event, knowing that our technology allows them to log back in at night, or work through a lunch, or come in early. You know, it’s not that they’re not going to get their stuff done.
And so with a production mindset of, “Hey, just take care of the stuff that you’re assigned to and I know you’re going to own it, and if you have too much on you, I’m okay with you raising your hand and going, ‘Look, I have too much. This is what’s going on. I need help.’” Our team’s all in this together. We all have flexibility. You know, I kind of say like, we have a headquarters here in Memphis that we love people coming to, we love hanging out in, but it’s perfectly okay for you to work hybrid or remote as you need to. But my desire would be that you want to come to the office some, for the community part of it, the rapport, the education, the training, development. All that comes with having peers and people you like working around. And so that’s kind of been somewhat my intention. I want a place that people like to go to, they don’t have to go to. There’s a fine line there.
There’s a big difference, and I think it’s one of the challenges that every business is faced with today. CPA firms aren’t singular in that, but the beautiful thing about it is that it’s a business that, like you said, with technology, it literally can be done anywhere. It just goes back to what we’ve been talking about for the first, you know, three-quarters of this conversation, and that is hiring the right people, putting them in the right seat, and giving them the opportunity to succeed.
Yeah, and it goes back to trust. I mean, a lot of firms, they have a problem trusting people that aren’t in the office and they don’t know what they’re doing. And I’m like, if you don’t trust them to do it, not at your office, how do you trust them to do it at your office? If you’re having to manage them at that level, you have the wrong person. You know, our expectation is, we compensate based on production, we hold people accountable to production. And so to the extent that you’re able to get your work done, everything’s going to be great, the extent you’re not getting your work done, things aren’t going to be great. And we have an expected level of production that any person in any role has, and we hold them accountable to that. And if they’re not able to do that, we need to find out what’s causing that issue. But if you don’t trust them not to be in your office and get work done, then you have a trust problem in general.
Yeah, and I think, again, there’s so much of this that goes back to your hiring. You’re onboarding, having a foundational understanding of what are our core values? Let’s hire to those. You know, you mentioned the mindset of the book, The Ideal Team Player. Talk a little bit about how that is something that’s ingrained in the culture of the firm and the entire mindset of “humble, hungry, smart.”
Yeah. “Hungry, humble, smart.” You know, our firm values: “Own it. Challenge it. Team First. Empathy for others. Passion for our purpose.” That’s what we measure through our hiring process. Along with “ideal team players, hungry, humble, smart.” You know, for us, for me, this is how I define them. Maybe not exactly how the book defines it, but for me, humble means I’m coachable, I’m teachable, I want to develop. Hungry means I want to keep learning. I always want to be someone who is in a learning mindset. And then people smart is, I have to deal with all types of people. All different types of personalities. I have to, you know, kick some in the butt and pat some on the back. It’s like being a good coach. And I find those three things, you know, that’s what we’re going to really do our best to measure them on the front side. Any one of those three that aren’t superlative, you’re going to run into issues. So if someone’s not coachable and teachable, they’re going to be set in their ways. If they’re not hungry to keep learning, they’re going to be, you know, not going to want to take on and improve things. And we want constant improvement. People smart is, you’re going to have a client that needs you to kick them in the butt sometimes and pick up the phone, and you’re going to have somebody that does understand this stuff or is, I’ll say, a little too needy. And you have to coach and develop them as well as clients and other people on your team. And so all three of those are so critical for long-term success because if they don’t have them, it’s going to become really apparent to everybody.
Yeah. And that’s, you know, again, in talking to your team when I was there, it’s that common sense of understanding what those things mean and where gaps have existed when, you know, we talked about people that hadn’t worked out over the last few years. You know, the things that were missing around there. When you look at the firm today, where do you think your biggest challenges lie in continuing the growth that you guys want to have and build over the next 3, 5, 6 years?
Yeah. I mean, I think we are getting bombarded by a lot of things. A, I think, you know, technology is a major disruptor going on right now. You know, not just AI, but all the different tools that are out there, all the different technology based on the industry you’re in. Our industry has a thousand tools, but every other industry we work with has a thousand tools.
Yes.
And so making sure that we’re picking the right set of tools at the right time, systematizing in a way that becomes something that an outsource model still makes sense for, the gap between tactical and strategic, the push to advisory as an industry whole. What does that really mean in the scale of our client? We work on a scale from a client that has a financial literacy of two to a financial literacy of 40, you know, if you’re doing a scale of one to 10. And so knowing how to best serve all those types of clients is important.
And then from the people side of things, it’s, you know, utilizing all the resources that are available to us both onshore and offshore to best deliver the best work. And so those are challenges that we face. I think every firm is struggling with finding quality people both locally onshore in the states, but also using global workforces. And the more you get distributed, how do you get intentionality back to a core belief? And so that’s where I find our growth challenges. We’ve never had a hard time finding work—it’s finding the right work.
Yeah. That’s a great way to put it. I mean, what you guys are building at Patrick Accounting really shows the rest of the industry what’s possible in today’s marketplace and in today’s CPA firm world if you place a high priority on your people. So my charge to you is: Continue doing what you guys are doing because it is absolutely showing people what the possibilities are and what exists if they continue to push down that path. So if there are firm leaders who would like to learn from you—what you guys are doing right, where you’ve made mistakes, where you’ve course-corrected in that process—or even if there’s folks that are listening that are contemplating a move in their career sometime soon, somewhere where life can be a little bit more sustainable than currently where they sit, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you?
I’m on LinkedIn, Matthew Patrick, CPA. You can check out our websites, PatrickAccounting.com and Whirks.com. Spelled weird, W-H-I-R-K-S. and you can feel free to email me anytime, MPatrick@patrickaccounting.com. Love to talk, love to connect.
Perfect.
I love talking to business owners, both accounting firm owners and non. I have a lot of empathy for anybody who is out there, both looking for a job, trying to run a firm, small business, trying to grind it day-to-day. I love those conversations and I am right there with you. So I love to have the empathy in the room.
You know, I think there’s something that is powerful, whether it’s two people like you and I talking, or a room full of people, there’s something powerful about sitting there and going, “Wait, I’m not the only person that sucks at this?”
I mean, that’s, I always say that was my first thing. I went to PASBA, right? It’s like, holy crap, today there’s 300 members all feeling the same pain that I am and going through it at different stages. I have made every mistake you possibly can make as a firm owner from bad hires to bad technology that I threw away, to bad decisions. And so I’ve been there, I’ve done it, and I will probably do another million of them before I finish my career.
And I think that’s one of the ways that we learn the best. Well, Matt, I truly appreciate you spending some time with us today. Thank you very much for being an open book and talking about some of the things that you guys have been challenged with.
Happy to.
We’re really thankful that not only you, but other owners that we’ve talked to are willing to lay cards on the table, be transparent about things. If you’re listening to this and you like what you heard, leave a comment below. And also don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast to make sure that you’re in the loop for some great conversations that we have teed up for future episodes, showing you what a career could look like at a firm like Patrick Accounting and many other firms who are building more people-centric cultures. Until next time.
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