A Pioneer in Public Accounting: Looking Forward with James Rainwater

James Rainwater is the CEO and founder of RainwaterCPA, a fully remote CPA firm based in Baltimore, Maryland. Included on the Baltimore Business List’s Top 25 CPA firms, RainwaterCPA offers tax advisory, compliance and resolution services for a fixed fee.

James has nearly 30 years of experience in various areas of accounting and in both public and private practice. RainwaterCPA was named to Inc. Magazine’s Top 5,000 businesses and Top 1,000 fastest growing private businesses lists for 2023.

Transcript:

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the CPA Life Podcast, the podcast that focuses on talking to firm leaders and industry change agents from around the country who are committed to proving that you can build a highly successful, people-focused firm in today’s world. Today, we’re going to spend some time talking to someone who’s doing just that: James Rainwater is the owner, principal, and founder of Rainwater CPA, a fully remote tax and accounting advisory firm that is based in Maryland, but with a fully remote work staff. James, thanks for joining us today.

Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks, John.

Excited to dig in, learn a little bit more about the firm, kind of what you’re doing, and where you came from. We’re going to jump into all that pretty quickly and talk about some of the things that you’ve focused on as you’ve been building your firm—some of the non-negotiables that have been cornerstones to your success. Before we do that, we’d really like to learn more about your background, kind of where you’ve come from, and how you’ve evolved to the point that you’re at today in your career. So give me a snapshot of what that looks like.

Sure. So I have a very non-traditional accounting background, where I’ve kind of bounced all over the place. I started as an AP clerk in the early nineties while I was finishing up my degree at night. Eventually got my degree, got my CPA, and went on to get my master’s degree. But did a mixture of working in private where, you know, like I said, I started as an accounts payable clerk, worked my way up into the accounting department, decided to go work in public for a little while, went to CohnReznick and worked there in their audit division, bounced back and forth between their tax division and audit to figure out what I liked. Started really liking tax, but then went back into private for a little while because I thought I hated public accounting. Nothing against CohnReznick and that group; they’re a wonderful firm, but I thought I hated public, so I went into private for a few years, controller, CFO, director of finance, and then realized I really missed public. I really missed working with clients and wanted to have that type of day where I was working with different clients, helping people, making an impact in businesses.

So I started my own firm, built a small firm, eventually sold that, went back into private for a little bit, and then in 2012, started this firm that we have now. Along the way, I also spent a couple of years teaching at the University of Maryland, which I really enjoyed teaching, and it’s been something we’ve incorporated in the firm. But I didn’t necessarily enjoy teaching at the university level; it’s a lot of work. But teaching has been a core component in the way that we run our firm. That’s the high level.

So you definitely have a very non-traditional path that you’ve taken to kind of get to where you are today. But, you know, one thing that is traditional, I will say, is something that you just said: The conversation so many times we have with candidates, and we’ve talked about this, is the mindset when we talk to candidates in our recruiting business is “I hate public accounting, get me out of here, I don’t like what I do,” and so many times, really, the conversation turns into getting people to understand that, hey, it’s not what you do that you hate, it’s probably where you do it, or the type of work that you’re doing where you do it.

Exactly.

Because there’s a lot of dynamics and exciting things that you’re doing within that, like you talk about, and the variety of it. So when you think about the things that you missed, what were some of the key components of public accounting that you look back on and go, “Man, I missed these things?” Or even on the other side of things, these things on the corporate side of things were driving you crazy?

Yeah. So on the corporate side of things, I’ll answer that one first, because going to the same office every day, knowing, depending on what day of the month it was, what I was going to be doing, that kind of monotony, I didn’t enjoy. You know I worked with some great firms, we built some great stuff, but just that everyday routineness of knowing exactly what my job, my day was going to look like, I did not enjoy that a whole lot. With public, I enjoy talking to different clients. You know, one hour I’m talking to a client about their tax strategy, the next hour, I’m talking about how we might be able to help them grow their business. I’m constantly amazed at how many different ways there are to make money in this world, and the different types of businesses that we work with and the different ways that they make money and build their businesses, and I get to see all that. I get to see the nuts and bolts of it and work with the owners of those firms. That’s fun for me. I enjoy that a lot. I enjoy that variety, seeing the different things, seeing what people are creating and building and being a part of that. And then tangibly being able to help them with that is super fun for us.

I’ve got a mentor in my life, and you know, one of my pet peeves in the world we live in today is we tend to paint with very broad strokes whenever we talk about people or groups of people or whatever the case may be. Greg and I, this mentor I have, Greg and I have always marveled about how there are people in this world that talk about how they can’t find a way to make money or they can’t find a job or they can’t, you know, things like that. We talk about the different ways that we see people in this world make money. And yes, sometimes you got to have money to make money, but sometimes you just got to have an ingenious mind that figures out a way to, you know, put two and two together and make money. So I’m sure that again, like you’re talking about in your space, you’ve seen some interesting things where you walk away and go, man, I would have never thought of that.

Yeah. A lot of times it just boils down to solving a problem for somebody. Like, if you can find a problem that you can solve for someone else, they’ll probably pay you to solve that problem, whether it’s a dirty car, or how to sell more widgets, or, you know, whatever that is. It really, a lot of times, just comes down to what kind of problem can you solve, and you can make money if you can figure that out.

Talk to me about, you know, you mentioned you started a firm before, you sold that. Restarted a firm. Are there differences in the firm that you originally started and had and the firm that you have today, and what are those differences? What were some things that you learned with your predecessor firm that today you’re saying, you know, this worked in 2000, 2001, 2002, whatever the years were versus, hey, today this probably isn’t going to work, we’ve got to do things differently.

It’s funny, because we’ve talked about this a little bit around the edges where that first firm was like the traditional type of CPA firm, where we did payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable, we did monthly bookkeeping, year-end cleanup, tax prep, and we did some business, but a lot of individual 1040s. So I would work like crazy during tax season, you know, 90, 100-hour weeks to get through tax season and get all those returns done, and I just didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t enjoy working that way. This was exactly in the early 2001, 2002 timeframe when it was kind of pre-social media. It was, you know, you got business by being out there on the street and going to networking meetings and Chamber of Commerce and all that kind of stuff to drum up business and try to meet business owners that were, you know, ready to make a switch. But this is a hard way to do it. Especially as a small firm owner, I had one person helping me at the time, and trying to get all the work done and get new business was just exhausting. I said, I need to sell this. Maybe I do belong back in private, so that’s what I did.

Now the new firm, yeah, it’s totally different, whole different business model. We only work with business owners, a couple of high-net-worth individuals, but 95 percent of our clients are business owners. We do strategy planning, we do the tax prep as well. But mostly that strategy and that planning, we have a different business model. We have social media and advertising and all those great ways to get new clients that are predictable and repeatable versus just hoping we get a new client this week. Much different firm and a lot more fun to run and be a part of now.

Let’s talk a little bit about the business development aspect. We were talking about this before we started recording, you know, that it’s just a different world and a different mindset. I was telling you about a candidate I spoke to recently that wanted to leave the firm he was with. He was on a partner track and his most recent review was, “Hey, this is an eight to ten year track that you’re on because you got to build a half million dollar book of business by learning how to play golf and going to Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club meetings and all of these things.” And as you and I have talked about, that’s not a part of your business.

No, not at all.

The flip side of that though, is if somebody is on Facebook or Instagram and they’re looking at tax-related info, there’s a pretty high likelihood that James Rainwater is going to pop up on their feed somewhere. Where did that start from, how does that play out, what does it look like in your organization, what platforms are you on, and how have you found that to work differently or better than traditional business development mindsets?

Yeah, it never made sense to me that we’re going to take somebody that is great at tax, promote them to manager, and then promote them to partner and say, “You’re great at tax. Now you’re going to be great at sales and marketing, and have to go out and, you know, recruit people to be clients of the firm.” Like, that just doesn’t make sense to me. There’s no other business that really exists like that other than CPA firms, attorneys, maybe a few other firms. We wanted to change that and say, you know, I mean, we advise our clients, “You need predictable, repeatable revenue and sales in your business to be sustainable.” Wasn’t that the same for us? Why don’t we run this like a real business and get repeatable, predictable sales in our business?

So that’s where we switched over, and it was a very iterative process. We didn’t start where we are now. We’re on all major platforms now—we’ve got email campaigns, newsletters, new short form content that goes out every day, long form webinars that we do every month, we have teams that cut that up and put that out, we have a whole advertising team that runs our ads on Facebook and Instagram. So we do, we’re all over the place now, but it just started with LinkedIn. You know, let’s get some marketing on there, messaging on LinkedIn, maybe some email campaigns, figure out our product market fit, figure out how to communicate to clients, solve their problems, and then we just kept building on that to get to where we are now. Now we’ve got, you know, the sales is done, not even by me anymore, but by our sales team. They handle the new sales. We’ve got all the marketing and advertising that brings those leads in. And it’s surprising to me sometimes that an owner of a $50 million business will click on an ad on Facebook, and that’s how they find us. But that’s how it works; that’s our economy now. Like I said, it’s a much more fun way to do business than Chamber of Commerce meetings.

Well, I think the other value proposition in that, from a business standpoint for you, is we’re not limited to the 10-mile radius of our office and have to be a generalist provider of, we’ve got a doctor over here, a computer design person over here, we’ve got an engineer over here, a financial planner over here, all different people in the space that you’re playing in, you can dial in that message and target a little bit more. It doesn’t matter if that person sits in your neck of the woods in Baltimore, or if that person’s sitting in Florida, Texas, or Nevada.

Yeah, we can target for the problem that we solve, the solution that our clients need, versus trying to target geographically to a fixed number of businesses. I’d imagine most towns are the same, but I mean, there are hundreds of CPA firms here in Baltimore and we’re all competing for that same geography versus competing for solving a specific problem. That’s a much better way to reach clients that have a need right now.

What do you say to the person that you’re talking to, whether it’s someone you’re sitting down face-to-face with or, as you mentioned, you do coaching with other firm owners. Or someone watching this podcast or listening to it, the person that says, “Hey, yeah, that’s great, but how do you build a relationship with a guy sitting in Las Vegas, Nevada, or Boise, Idaho, when you can’t go to his office and grab a bite to eat with him?”

It’s a good question. It’s definitely harder virtually to build those relationships, but we’re starting that relationship by saying, “Hey, we’re going to save you $50,000 or $100,000 in taxes by working with us.” That’s a much better way to start a relationship than salads or whatever, a steak at lunch. Not that those things aren’t great for relationship building, but our relationship with a client starts out much differently because we’re doing that plan for them right out of the gate and we’re making an impact, we’re getting results, versus, I know not everyone agrees with me, but I think tax prep on its own is starting to become a commodity. So that’s very different, starting a relationship over the commodity sale versus an advisory sale, where we’re actually helping them, making an impact in their business. That gets that relationship off to a better start.

It’s interesting. I think the most recent statistic that I saw is that people under the age of, I don’t remember if it was 40 or 45, 62, 63 percent of people under the age of 40 or 45 are either currently in, or have been at some point in their life, a relationship—a husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, fiance, whatever it may be—they’re in a relationship that started online. I was talking to a prospective client a few weeks ago, and his concern was, talking more about people and hiring people, and his concern was how do you build that relationship, that connectivity, that culture. I said, “Look, we live in a world where if people are willing to start something as intimate as a relationship that could last a lifetime, if they’re willing to start that over a computer connection, what makes you think that person has a problem starting that connection as an employee, employer or client service deliverer?”

Yeah, we were talking about my fiancée before we started today and she and I met online. That’s how our relationship originally started. Now we’re living together and engaged. It’s very possible. With sales, you talk to sales experts and coaches, and volume is usually the issue. Getting through volume in a local geography is tough, because you’re somewhat limited. But when you’ve got the whole nation to reach out to through the channels that we do, we can get volume that’s just amazing and allows us to grow at crazy rates for accounting firms.

Talk to me about that growth because, again, we’ve talked about the growth of your firm, really over the last, say, five years. What kind of growth have you seen as a firm, year over year, in that timeframe?

Yeah, it’s super exciting. We’ve doubled in size over the last three years repeatedly. We made the Inc. 5,000 list for 2023, we were in the top 1,000 fastest growing private businesses in the country, which is almost unheard of for CPA firms to place in the Inc. 5,000, much less the top 1,000 firms. That tells me that we’ve got a couple of things right, we’ve got the product market fit pretty dialed in, and our model for acquiring new clients is working, and we’re delivering that value because they stick around. That growth and then being recognized by Inc. 5,000 is kind of a testament to the fact that we’re not perfect, you know, we don’t get everything right, we’re working on things, but we get a lot of things right in that mix that allows us to grow and add clients.

And just think about it, if we measured success in the public accounting advisory space the same way that success is measured in baseball, all you’ve got to do is get it right three times out of ten, and you’re in the Hall of Fame. So, you know, you’re getting it right a whole lot more than that.

I want to talk about another topic that can be a fairly divisive topic in the space that we play in today when it comes to service delivery, when it comes to building a culture, when it comes to growing your firm at the pace that you’ve grown, obviously you need people to do that.

Yeah.

Not only have you bought into a geographic-agnostic client mentality, you also run a geographic-agnostic firm when it comes to your employees. It doesn’t matter where that person sits, let’s get the best person in the game for us. How has that worked for you? When did you make that transition? What have been some of the hurdles to get to the point of where you are today? Again, you’re probably still not doing everything right, but you’re learning along the way.

Yeah, it’s definitely been a learning experience: getting the right people on board has been challenging, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount about recruiting. We started with remote work right out of the gate. Like everybody from our team, our first employee was remote on the East Coast, our second employee was remote on the East Coast. You mentioned I’m in Baltimore, we don’t have any employees other than me in Maryland. Everybody’s spread out, we’ve got people in every time zone now, which is nice because we have clients in every time zone, so we’re all over the place.

And I’ve just found that, again, just like clients, we’re finding team members and people that want to work with us. If I’m restricted to Baltimore, I have a very restricted candidate set that’s out there and available, looking to make a change with the characteristics we’re looking for right now, that would be a good fit. But if we can open that up nationwide, that’s exciting, because now we can recruit from a much larger pool, look for people that are amazing, but maybe can’t commute to an office, especially in our office, but it just opens up that world of getting the right people. And we can be a little bit more picky too, because we’re looking for the right skill set, we’re looking for somebody that’s going to fit our culture, enjoy the work that we do. So we can be a little bit more picky in all those things because we have a lot more people to choose from.

Yep, absolutely. You tend to be able to make that sifter, if you will, a little tighter, and pick and choose what I’m willing to give on, the things that are non-negotiable, the things that are negotiable, what do we have to look at. Whereas if you’re in a smaller market, even in your case, being in the Baltimore area, even though somebody lives in Baltimore, it still could be an hour commute, hour and a half commute, depending on traffic and where they’re coming from, if you had said, hey, I need you in the office three days, four days, five days a week.

What have been the challenges in your mind that you guys have faced, building a culture that you want to build, with the people that you want to build it with, with everybody deployed?

Communication is probably the biggest one where communication has to be really intentional, because we’re all in our home offices, spread out across the country, making sure everyone feels connected to the team and feels a part of the team. Quite honestly, we’re not for everybody. There’s a lot of people in the industry that would probably not enjoy working here, but for the person that is right and fits with our culture, they love it here. And having the tools, the right tools, it took a while to kind of get those right, our tech stack and how we communicate and how we interact with each other, and the cadence of meetings and those kinds of things were rough at first to figure out. I think we’ve got a pretty good way that we do that now and it works for the most part. Like I said, we’re not perfect.

One of the things that you mentioned just now, that I think is so critical for people to not just glance over, because I think it really does boil down to this one simple word, simple word, but not a simple act, and that is intentional. In a non-remote, even if it’s hybrid in the office two, three days a week, you really don’t have to be as intentional about it, because you’re going to walk by people’s desks, you’re going to pass each other in the hallway, you’re going to stumble across each other in the kitchen, and you can have some of those conversations: How’s life? How’s the project you’re working on? Where do things stand with this client? Hey, you looked a little stressed. Is there anything that I can do to help you out today? All of those things happen.

But in a remote environment, as I always tell candidates, we’re always looking for people, when we’re talking about remote roles, people that have a proactive mindset to the way that they attack work, because I always tell candidates, no one’s going to show up at your house at eight o’clock in the morning to knock on the door and say, hey, how are you doing today? You need to be the kind of person that if you’re challenged with something, if a problem arises, if there’s something that’s going on, you need to be the kind of person that has no problem raising your hand and saying, hey, I’m stuck. I need help, those kinds of things. So how do you build that cadence? Because obviously as a firm owner, you’ve still got to deliver for your clients, plus you’re also dealing with global problems in the firm. How do you build that into your cadence of your day or your week to make sure that Bill, Sally, Sue, and Tom are getting what they need from me as a leader day in and day out, week in and week out?

That’s a really good question, and it’s definitely something we’re still working on. I think it’s something we’ve done a really good job at. I’ve heard in the industry that a lot of firms are going back to being in the office and they say that remote doesn’t work, everybody needs to be in the office, and I really take issue with that. I disagree with that. It’s not that remote doesn’t work. Let’s say that we don’t have a management structure and a communication structure in place to support remote work, because that’s, I think, really what the problem is. Not that remote work doesn’t work.

So if somebody has a personal issue, I don’t expect them to jump into the general chat and announce that. But we do have relationships in the firm where I think everybody has somebody that they can communicate with about an issue, and bring that to. We also have weekly team meetings, one-on-one check-ins where those issues may come up. That’s where that intentionality on both sides comes into play, where as a team member, you need to remember that nobody’s there to see the look on your face necessarily, to read you and see that something’s wrong, so you kind of need to bring that in. But on the other side, we give you the opportunity to share that too, through the one-on-ones and team meetings and so forth, whether it’s a professional issue, personal issue, it’s woven into our culture.

I think it comes back to that issue of intentionality. I can’t agree with you more emphatically about the fact that it’s not that remote doesn’t work, it’s that we haven’t set up systems, processes, training, development. One of the things that we started asking firms through conversations over the last three to six months, especially firms that have any kind of a remote component to their business, whether it’s hybrid or fully remote, is when we start talking about employee development and we start talking about retention, one of the questions we’ve been asking is how much of your training and development dollars or time over the last year has been focused on either one, teaching your leaders how to be more effective leaders in a remote environment, or teaching your employees how to be a better leader or team member in a remote environment? I don’t think that those are natural skills that we have because it’s not what we’ve been conditioned to through the course of our life. So to throw people in that and say, hey, figure it out, I don’t think is the answer.

And what’s been interesting, James, from our standpoint is when we pose that question to the clients in our Talent + Advisory business that we’re working with, 100 percent of the clients to date, the answer is zero. They have zero focused dollars or time going towards employee or leadership development as it pertains to remote work and remote leadership.

Yeah, it’s definitely an investment. It is a time and financial investment to get that right and make that work. I’ll bring up another one of my kind of pet peeves with the industry, is we’re on the older age side of the spectrum in the industry, where it does take a lot more work and intentionality for someone my age to make online work. But it’s fun, we have some really young team members. It comes to them natively. They know how to work in this environment, they enjoy it, they appreciate it. You don’t have to tell them to communicate and be intentional about it, it just happens. So it’s fun to have that as part of the culture too. Sometimes I’m learning from them how to make it better and improve it. But like you said, it definitely takes time, effort, and money to make it work in this environment, especially for a team that’s growing pretty rapidly, to be able to keep growing and have the size team that we have and make that work definitely takes effort.

Yep, and you’re right, it’s that generation that it is a little bit more ingrained in who they are, it’s a little bit more of their fiber, as you put it, they come to it natively. There’s some things that we can learn from them. There were communication issues we had in our firm because we’re a remote firm, and there were some communication issues in the beginning of remote that I had, and I had a couple of my younger staff come to me and say, hey, we could try this platform and it would make it a little bit smoother other than just sending a bunch of emails or text messages to each other. So we moved things to Slack, and then we moved things to a platform called Monday, and then we moved back to Teams. But we’re figuring it out along the way. I’ve made it very clear, I’m probably not the best guy to figure this out. I joke, unless you guys want to go back to phone calls and smoke signals, I’m probably not the best guy to ask for this. Just tell me what you guys need, show me how to use it, and we’ll make it work. So it’s funny you say that, because it is teaching us new muscles and learning how to become accustomed to that.

I’m reading a book right now called Attributes, and it talks about the inherent attributes that we all have. I know that you and I have talked about the culture index that you use when you’re looking at people, and this really focuses a lot on those attributes, the book that I’m reading, and one of the things this guy was talking about is how we train our brains to deal with things in a certain manner. His example is, whether you walk into a Target in Baltimore, Maryland, Dallas, Texas, Los Angeles, California, there’s a mindset we have trained ourselves to have when we walk into that Target. We know what we’re dealing with because it’s Target, and for the most part, it’s the same.

He said, now imagine if you will, you walk into that Target, but when you walk in, there’s an Olympic-sized pool and there’s people swimming when you step in the door. You’re going to have to go through a whole reframe of what is this place, and how do I get around it, to get whatever it is that I need. That stuff is still there, it’s just learning how to deal with it. And I think it’s the same thing when you’re talking about the remote aspect of the world that we’re in today, there are some things that in our generation, my generation, your generation, and the generation in the middle of that, we were just used to rolling out of bed, putting on our clothes, whether it was a suit and tie years ago or business casual, and driving to the office, seeing people, and doing our work.

That kind of goes back to the business development piece of things: We’re going through an evolution where there’s still going to be that. I don’t think it’s ever going to go away completely. But firms are going to have to get on board that people are going to be more demanding about the flexibility they want from an in-office requirement. I agree with you. I think it’s a cop out when you say it’s hard, and it’s not easy to do, it can’t be done. It’s just hard and you need to find a way to make it work.

We’ve got team members that have never been in an office. They’ve never been in a meeting in a conference room. That’s a foreign thing to them. But they’ve been on Discord for years, and that’s natural to them and it works really well with us. Like you said, it’s a definite reframing of how you do business. And meeting in person, you know, I enjoy in-person meetings, that’s not going to go away. That’s really important, you know, connecting with people one-on-one in person, but that doesn’t mean service delivery has to always be that way.

Yep. When you look at one-on-one or people getting together, a lot of the remote firms we work with either have it in place or plan to, bringing people together either annually or semi-annually to build a little bit of that connective tissue, as I call it. Is that something you do as a firm? Is it in place? What are your thoughts on that?

We’ve been a little behind on putting that together. We have plans for a retreat to bring everybody together, something we want to do at least once a year, where we bring everybody together and meet in person. We’ve grown, like we were talking about earlier, grown so rapidly, and the team has expanded so quickly, we haven’t done that yet. But that is definitely something we want to do and get everybody together and see each other as real people, in 3D instead of just in Slack and on Zoom.

Absolutely. One of the other things I want to touch on is, again, you and I have talked about in regards to how you put your business together versus how it looked a decade ago, two decades ago, your pricing model is a subscription-based pricing model. Is that 100 percent of the clients you work with? Is that, maybe not 100 percent, but hey, that’s the rule, we deal with the exception when it arises? And how have you gone about growing a business in that space and not feel like, either one, I’m leaving business on the table by holding this line, or, not getting the potential business that you could be getting? What’s been your view on that?

Yes, we’re all subscription-based. We have a few clients that aren’t subscription-based, but really nothing that’s hourly. We do annual tax prep, but we still consider it subscription-based because it’s fixed-fee annual prep. We do resolution and we do some specialty tax products like R&D and cost segregation, but that’s all fixed-fee. We don’t do hourly. We did a lot of research and studying on pricing and what a job should look like, and we don’t always get it right. We’ve got a client recently where we blew the hours and blew the budget on that client, but that’s really rare. If we get pricing right 80 to 90 percent of the time, it’s not an issue.

That has always been important to me because when we’re talking to a business owner, if we can say, this is what your price is going to be, we know that ahead of time, this is what you can plan on and budget for, that helps them—it takes out the uncertainty of getting a bill 30 days after the work is done and being shocked. As a manager or partner in a firm, you’ve seen that client that comes back mad, they got a big bill, now you have to, you’ve already eaten some of that time that you didn’t even bill them for. Now you have to renegotiate that price and maybe eat some more time to make the client happy, or they pay it, or however that works. It’s not the foundation for a good relationship. If we can agree on that price ahead of time, this is what the price is going to be, I’ve done my research, so I know what the price should be based on the work you’re bringing to us, that’s a much happier relationship at our firm and with our clients, and it’s more of an adult relationship where we just have the hard conversation up front, then we go and do the work.

Like I said, we don’t always get that right. Sometimes we have to come back and rework it, or they don’t tell us about five partnerships they forgot about somehow, and we have to come back and reprice it. But overall, that model works much better for us. At the moment, and this may change, we don’t even track time. We focus on getting the pricing right, getting the right people on the job, and not worrying about billing hourly or tracking people’s every 10-minute increment.

And I think that, from a value perspective internally, it becomes an issue of, hey, we’re adults, let’s just get the job done. Let’s knock it out, let’s make it happen, let’s get the job done. And on the flip side, from the value standpoint, from the perspective of a potential client, there’s value in not having to worry about, hey, if I call James with this question, at what point in the conversation does he flip on the meter and start charging me? I can just call him. Obviously, two calls a week is probably going to be a little excessive, but if I’ve got a problem, a question, an issue, something I’m thinking about, I know I can call and say, hey, can I bounce something off you?

Yeah, and we did a lot of research on that side too, of what’s the right cadence for meeting with a client, and we finally settled on quarterly. We meet with our clients every quarter, go through their tax projections, go through their plan, make sure everything looks good or we make changes if we need to. We also answer any questions they have. That cuts down those phone calls and emails. We still get phone calls and emails, but it’s considerably less because we’re being again, intentional about scheduling those meetings every three months to meet with them, go through their taxes, then answer any questions. They can think of stuff they’ve been putting together over the last three months to ask us when we meet, or things that may be coming up in the next three to six months that they want to go through. So that intentionality helps a lot with the clients too, and takes away a lot of that phone calls throughout the day and random emails, helps a lot with that.

You’ve obviously done a lot of things right, and probably some things not so right, as you said, you’ll still be working on some stuff, but either way, you learn from both of those, and that’s the beauty of moving forward, making mistakes, adjusting, and getting them right eventually down the line.

If there are firm owners or potential candidates that are thinking about a possible career change going into the 2025 tax season, or a firm owner that’s thinking, man, I’ve been hearing about taking this step and putting my toe in the waters of social media and getting my name and my brand out there a little bit more, if they’re thinking, hey, James may be able to help me with some of this, James may be able to give me an idea of what I’m dealing with, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you? Where can people find you?`

If you google RainwaterCPA, you’ll get all of our socials. We’re pretty much everywhere, except for YouTube, where we’ve got some weird username, but everywhere else, we’re RainwaterCPA. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, that’s RainwaterCPA. Our website is RainwaterCPA.com. I’m James@RainwaterCPA.com. So we’re easy to find, by design.

I’ll make sure we have all those links in the show notes down below, and I want to thank you for taking a little bit of time out of your day and talking to us about kind of where you’ve come from, the success you’ve had, and may you continue to have that kind of success. I appreciate it.

Thank you, John. I really appreciate it, and it was a fun conversation. Thanks for having me.

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A Pioneer in Public Accounting: Looking Forward with James Rainwater

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