Flexibility, Growth and Trends: Season 3 Kickoff, Part 2

Benaiah Consulting Group was founded at a time when John was “facing his own lions.” After spending 15 years with two large national staffing firms, the decision was made to step out and take the lessons and skills that had been learned and developed from working with several great teachers, mentors, trainers, and leaders and focus on helping other firms achieve some of their own great success.

That first step – whether it’s one time or every day – can be extremely intimidating. Our passion and prayer each day is to have the strength and courage that a man like Benaiah had and work with you, counsel with you, advise you and show you how to chase after your lions!

Sure, there are easier industries to serve. There are larger firms that need services like Benaiah’s on a more consistent basis. A conversation about a job at Google would be an easier conversation than one about John Smith, CPA, a 10-person, locally-owned firm that flies under the radar. But what fun would that be? Everyone knows about Google! People beat the proverbial door down to work at Google. And regardless of who goes to work at Google, Google will continue to be successful and, well – Google – long after that person has resigned.

Very few may know about John Smith, CPA. And the short- and long-term success of John Smith, CPA just may hinge on that next hire! Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that underdog story?

Transcript:

You’re not going to stay at one job when you leave public accounting. You’re not going to go to this firm after spending 3, 4, 5 years at PwC, you’re not going to leave that firm and go to work for one company and spend the next 25 to 30 years there and retire as the CFO. The kids—and I say kids—I’m talking about young adults, mid-20s to late-20s. They recognize that. They’re looking for an opportunity to set themselves up to win. And I think what we have to do as employers is understand, what does that definition of win look like?

Yeah. They may recognize it, but I think many of them, they wouldn’t want to do that even if it were still a realistic possibility.

Exactly. Because I think that they all, everybody’s definition of win today, is extremely subjective. You know, when I was coming up in my career, there was kind of a generic picture of what “win” looks like. Today, it’s very different. So to one person, it might be, hey, I will check in and I’ll work 60, 70, 80 hours and I will do what it takes, and you know what? I don’t care. I’m sold out. I’ll do it. And I want to grow to partner.

Right.

Somebody else in the exact same firm, sitting right next to him, might say, man, that’s not me. I’ll put in 40 hours, maybe 45 hours, but I’m going to be loyal. I’m going to work hard. I’m going to deliver solutions for clients. And I got three kids at the house under the age of six years old, and that’s my priority. Give me a place where I could do this, and I can make good money, but I can have time with them, and man, I’m here until you basically blow me out of this seat. I’m not going anywhere. There may be somebody else that says, you know what? I want to come in and I want to learn all I can learn, and sometime in the next three to five years, I probably want to leave and I want to go start my own firm. Great, not a problem. Not a problem. Now, let’s set up parameters where you’re not taking clients with you, but let’s do everything we can to set you up to win and be able to go do those things.

I think as firm owners and firm leaders, you’ve got to understand that one size fits all is no longer an answer to the problems that we’re facing when it comes to talent in today’s marketplace. And that has to do with geography also. You may have somebody on your team—I’ve got a client here in the Dallas area; they have a physical presence, an office location. They used to be 100 percent in office. They’re a team of 18 people. Two people are in the office every day, all day, five days a week. Fourteen people don’t even live in Dallas anymore. Okay? Now the two people that are in the office every day, all day, they both have multiple kids, one of them has three and the other has five.

Okay, maybe we’re getting on to something.

All under the age of 10. And the guy that has five kids under the age of 10, they homeschool, okay? He is the first to tell you, “I come to the office for sanity. I have to go to there.” And I get that because we homeschooled our kids. I tried to work remotely when the kids were at home.

Yeah, forget about it.

I couldn’t do it! I had to go get an office. It ain’t gonna work. But they’re a firm that understands, “we’ve got to have an environment that Sally fits into, that Bill fits into, that Karen fits into, that Tom fits into, that Akeem fits into, and it may look different for each one of them.” And I think that firms that get that, firms that understand that, are going to continue to attract talent at a significantly better pace than firms that try to fit everybody into “this space right here.” I’m speaking more about firms that are in-office.

One of the things that—I don’t remember who said this to me, but it has stuck with me ever since somebody said it to me, and I think it was on a previous podcast, I could be wrong—but we were talking about people being in the office. And this person said, “John, people need to understand, we have employees in the workforce today that have never, ever set foot in an office, have never ever sat in a conference room for a meeting.” If you think back to 2020 when Covid hit, anybody coming out of the workforce from 2020 to 2022, there is a very high likelihood that some of those people have never ever set foot in an office. And if you own a firm, run a firm, manage a firm, responsible for hiring in that firm, and there is a component of your business that requires people to be in the office, there is a pretty high likelihood that there is a demographic in the population today that is qualified to do that job, that would be interested in doing that job from a culture standpoint, from an environment standpoint, from your leadership philosophy standpoint, from the type of work you do. But the minute you say “in office,” they’re going to pump the brakes. “Nope. Don’t want to do it.”

And there’s lots who have been in offices, taking my wife as an example, who has said she’s never going to work an in-office job again.

Yeah!

Having done 20 years in the charity sector in offices. So it’s both.

And now, are there people that want to be in the office? Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s a gentleman that I talked to that’s in the D.C. area for one of our clients. I originally had contacted him about a fully remote role. Well, through the course of the conversation, 15-20 minutes into it, one of the things that he says is, one of the things that he’s glad about leaving that firm is he just never really felt connected with the team. And he doesn’t ever want to be in a 100 percent remote firm. He doesn’t have a problem working hybrid, but really missed the connection of people.

Now through, you know, 10, 20, 30 minutes of conversation, I did some things to test that, and one of those was to talk to him specifically about the job that I was recruiting him for, which was a fully remote role with one of our clients. And then I also told him about a client of ours that’s in the D.C. area that’s a hybrid firm. And he said, you know what, I’d rather talk to the firm that’s a hybrid firm and commute 30 to 45 minutes each way two days a week, three days a week. I’d rather do that and be in office with some people than 100 percent of the time work remotely. Okay, not a problem. But that’s not, I think that if we continue to try to fit people into a one-size-fits-all type environment, culture, regardless of whether that is geography, compensation, career track, whatever it is, I think that people want options in the world that we’re in today.

That’s great. I think right there, you’ve summarized kind of what you’ve been saying, which has sort of dispelled this fear. There isn’t a decline in the quality of the talent or the work ethic. These firms, some of these firms, are self-selecting themselves out of the pool. The pool is shrinking for them, and it is down to what their choices are, and nothing else. It’s not external.

Absolutely. I mean, Justin, the thing that, we’re dealing with accountants. Accountants deal with numbers all day long. So I don’t necessarily—from a personal perspective—I don’t necessarily like accounting. There’s a reason I didn’t go that track in school, but as a business owner, I understand that numbers sometimes speak a whole lot louder than words ever will. And so we track anything and everything in our firm that we could track. And so I, a lot of times I try to equate that into the work that we’re doing. And so what people need to think about is from all statistics I’ve looked at, people that want to work—and let’s just take in office versus remote—people that want to be in an office 100 percent full time.

Okay.

Okay. So here’s another way to look at it. If I’m looking to fill a job and I am 100 percent in the office, and I want my people to be 100 percent in the office. There’s 10 people in the marketplace, let’s just say, that are qualified to do this job. 10 that are qualified. You’ve now limited yourself to the three, the two to three, as your options to do this job. That’s it.

And that’s without even getting into the geographic aspect.

That’s not getting into the geography aspect of it, that’s not getting into the compensation, that’s not getting into the culture aspect, that’s not getting into the years of experience, that’s not getting into any of that. You’re just saying, “I’m in office, I only want to talk to people that are open to being in office.” Okay, well if we’ve got ten people that are technically qualified, two to three of them. That’s all we’ve got to work with now. That’s it. And now let’s go find out if those two to three are even at all open to making a job change right now, because we’re just talking about people that are qualified.

So to get to the two to three ultimately that may be open, whether it’s you or me as a recruiter, okay, we’re going to have to take that number of ten and extrapolate that out to 300, 400, 500, 600 people that we’re going to have to engage with to ultimately get to the pool of ten people that may say, “Hey, I’m open to talking,” to end up with the one or two that may say, “Hey, I’m open to doing that job in that location, at that money for that client, you know, and being in the office that many times.” So you just have to ask yourself, are you willing to wait? And some firms may say, “Yeah, I am.” Okay. It can happen. We’ve got a client that we work with that is 100 percent in office. We started working on a senior manager, director search with them in January of 2024. The person started the job Monday.

There we go. One year.

One year. Now, through the course of that year, we talked to several people. We screened through a lot of people that said, “Yes, I’ll drive. Yes, I’ll be in office.” But when push came to shove, and it got to a point of possibly putting together an offer, and they had to seriously consider, well, do I want to do this every day, every single one of them pulled out. So that’s just the reality of the numbers that we see day in and day out, real-life scenarios in the marketplace.

And this is great. Explicitly, we’re talking about [number] three with a little dovetailing of [number] two. So the decline of the quality with a little bit of this also falls under some increased competition and the non-traditional stuff. But this goes to the pipeline issue too. You don’t want to be affected by the pipeline issue? Broaden your pool as much as you can. That will mitigate that probably entirely. And then again, it also goes to point number one that you’re seeing from people, they’re losing people, and why are they losing people? For many of the same reasons. It’s just not the right fit for those people in 2025, five years post the start of COVID?

Yep. Yep. There are a lot of different reasons that people leave jobs. Some are shocking, “I mean, I had no idea.” Others are “Well I’m not surprised, we’ve seen some things changing.” But when you start looking at losing key talent, the fear of losing key talent, one of the things that I always ask clients whenever we start talking about the issues they’re dealing with, and the fears they have and that issue comes up, one of the things I’ll ask them is, “Are you ever concerned about losing key clients?” And inevitably, the answer is always, of course. You know, we’re always concerned about losing clients, okay? So, what do you do to offset the potential loss of clients? I mean, on top of taking care of those clients, customer service, ensuring that you’re doing the things that you need to do to create a strong relationship, deep roots, connective tissue, all those things. What else are you doing? Selling? Exactly. You’re doing business development. You’re talking to prospects. That’s what you’re doing. So, when’s the last time you interviewed a CPA? Or sourced candidates, or pipelined people, because you’re concerned about losing people, not because you lost them.

Yeah, outside of explicit hiring time, you mean?

Yep. Inevitably, the answer is somewhere in the neighborhood of 98 to 99 percent of firms don’t do that.

Yeah. So it’s, to mix a bunch of metaphors, it’s a band-aid for them, it’s papering over the cracks, instead of a long-term, foundational, healthy diet and exercise, kind of holistic approach to everything, as far as just employment and hiring go.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I kind of chuckle when you say that because my wife and I were talking over the weekend and, hey, we’re coming out of the holidays, and, you know, the wonderful saying, what is it? You can’t out-exercise a bad diet, you know, kind of thing? So we’ve got a trip, we go to Miami every year in February for her birthday for a week, and so we were joking this weekend about the fact that, hey, we’ve got Miami coming up at the end of February, we need to stop eating ice cream and brownies two or three times a week, like we have been.

Yes.

And so, you know, rather than stay on top of that constantly and watch what you eat and exercise and take care of yourself, you wait for the last minute, you’re like, “Holy crap, I got Miami coming up in six weeks!” So many times, that’s kind of the conversation that I’ll have with firm owners is, hey, you know, the two people that sent me a message today, here’s the difference in those two messages:

One is a firm that we’ve worked with transactionally and have a good relationship with them, but we’ve worked with them transactionally, meaning when they have a need, they reach out to us, okay? So, “Senior Tax Associate gave notice today, we really need somebody going into this tax season, do you have somebody, can you help us out?”

Second firm, is a firm that we work with on our talent advisory side of the business, where we are constantly working to build a pipeline for them. That client sends a message this morning, “Hey, I had a Senior Tax Associate resign this morning. He’s one of the persons that we’ve been talking about that was kind of on the fence. We thought we might be able to make things work through this tax season, but we’re not going to be able to. We put some parameters in place by Friday for him, he chose not to accept those—he resigned this morning. Do we have people we could look at?”

First firm, we’ve got to go build a pipeline. We’ve got to go find candidates.

And by “we,” you mean both of you.

Exactly. Second firm, the answer is yes. Can you guys interview this week? We’ll reach out to some people that we’ve been engaging with and let them know that, hey, ironically, our client does have a need this tax season. Are you still open to talking? So, two very different conversations. One is proactive—we’ve been building a pipeline with them and for them. We’ve been engaging with candidates for six months for them. We’ve been sending candidates information about them. They know about the firm. They’ve done some research on the firm. Some of those candidates have already had initial exploratory conversations even though a job wasn’t there—we had reached out to the client and said, “Hey, I know that we don’t have anything open right now, but we just talked to somebody that is a really impressive individual. They’re not actively looking, but they’re open to talking. Would you have an interest in just having a 30-minute, 45-minute Teams conversation? And if something comes open, we’ve at least got some initial conversations that have occurred.”

That’s great. Facilitating that networking.

Yeah. There’s a couple of candidates we’re going to reach out to that they’ve already had initial exploratory conversations—”Hey, we don’t have anything open right now. John said that you potentially fit the kind of culture we are, he said, you’re not looking to make a change now either, but we’re all about having conversations. So, let’s talk.”

That’s such an elegant and simple solution to what you said was what you kept running into—scenario A. The one you just talked about. You’ve developed this Talent + Advisory system to combat the worst kind of, yes, this is a band-aid, this is a, you know, papering-over-the-cracks situation. Let’s not approach it that way any longer.

Yep. If we could approach it proactively, just—I mean, if people were to just think about it, even if they did this internally in their own organization, and we’ve even had some firms reach out to us and say, “Hey, we’re interested in figuring out how to do this on our own.” Hey, I’ll take time and sit down and work with a firm owner about, put some things in place to at least begin to have some of those conversations. When I ran a larger practice than I do today, when I had 13, 14, 15 people or more working for me in multiple locations, one of my metrics that I measured myself on, regardless of whether or not I had an opening was I needed to interview three people every month to work for me. Every month.

Wow.

I wanted to interview three people. Didn’t matter if I had an opening or not. And the reason why is because I wanted to understand what was going on in the marketplace. And it’s one of the best places to find out what’s going on in the marketplace? Interview your competition. So engage with your competition. What are they doing? How are they doing it? What systems are they using? What’s the volume of work that they’re seeing? How many hours are they working? Are they doing things better than we are? Are we doing better things than they’re doing? I may interview somebody and go, “Holy crap. That person would make us not only a good firm, but a great firm. We need to figure out a way to get that person into our environment.” Or they walk out and you go, “You know what? The people I’ve got for my firm right now, they’re better than that guy. They’re better than that guy. So I’m doing pretty good with who I have right now.” It validates, you know, it’s kind of like watching the neighbor’s kids. You may think that your kids aren’t the best kids on the block because you see them every day, but then the neighbor’s kids come over and they tear your house up and you sit there and go, “Okay, mine aren’t too bad.”

Yeah, that’s good. That’s one of those benefits you would not think about until it was pointed out to you like that. That’s great.

Exactly. So, as a firm leader, just having the ability to always be looking to make your firm better, by finding out what’s going on in the marketplace, engaging with people, and we try to build systems that either one, we do that within four firms, or, hey, it’s not rocket science, we can literally sit and take you through what’s that going to look like for you if you did it in-house, how to do it. I had a firm leader reach out to me back in December that just really didn’t align with what he was needing and what he was wanting and our ability to help him.

And so I told him, I said, “Look, do me a favor, send me the job description you’re using. I’ll rewrite the job description to start to get you a little bit better engagement, number one. Number two, I’m going to send you a link to some resources that a couple are free. A couple are not free, but there are at least places that you could start to potentially engage with possible candidates. ’Cause right now you’re not seeing anybody that fits what you’re looking for. These are some places you can go fishing that at least one, I know the fish are the kind of fish you’re looking for. And number two, the fish in these ponds, they tend to bite a little bit. So I’ll send that information to you. If we can help you out in the future, great. Let us know. If not, hopefully, this will at least put your feet on a path to a little bit more success than you’re having right now.” So we have no problem doing that with firms that aren’t quite sure, do we want to kind of make the investment that we’re talking about working with a third-party advisor?

Yeah, that’s great. And you know, speaking of kind of that line of thinking, you basically the core of who you work with is kind of the—you said “flying under the radar firm” earlier. And you’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of such firm owners on the podcast. But certainly one of the kind of frustrations that type of firm seems to be running into is trying to compete with the bigger fish and just running into economies of scale, they’ve got all these wiz-bang tools and gimmicks and everything else that they’re throwing out there to try to reel in the best choice of the talent marketplace. So talk a little bit about what you’ve heard from those that you work with and ways that you seek to mitigate or just entirely even eliminate that competitive disadvantage.

I think that one of the things that locally-owned firm owners and leaders have as an amazing tool in their toolbox and I don’t think that they—I think they use it, but they’re not sure how to use it to their advantage or really understand that it is something that is to their advantage, and that is that they are the people that are engaging in those hiring conversations. They being the owner, they being the senior leadership.

Going back to something that we talked about earlier with the mindset of people in today’s marketplace, that winning is individual to each one of them? When you’re competing against a larger firm, one of the Big Four, Top 40, Top 100—when you’re competing for talent—there are issues in a big organization that are across the board. So PwC, Deloitte, Baker Tilly, Moss Adams, pick a firm, they’re not going to be able to wholesale make a change and say we’ll do this for you. Now they may say they’re going to, but somewhere in the process, it’s going to have to be run at the chain of command and 15 people are going to have to sign off on it.

Right.

You know, that is unless you have somebody that is a rogue leader like I used to be at a couple of large firms. You know, people would ask me in the interview process, “Hey, what’s your PTO policy?” and I would ask them, “Do you want mine, or do you want our company’s? Because they’re two very different ones.” You don’t have a whole lot of people like that in leadership in most large organizations—there’s a reason why I’m not at a big company. So you can’t individually move those things around in a big firm. In a smaller firm, when you’re sitting talking to somebody about their individual desires and their individual goals, you have the ability to, to a certain degree, you have the ability to tweak that and morph that and make some things happen for those individuals that a big firm can’t. So that is one huge thing in your toolbox that big firms do not have.

The other thing that a big firm doesn’t have when it comes to that particular issue is—I don’t know any other way to put this, but it seems like in the world that we live in today, Justin, the BS meter of younger professionals is a lot better than mine ever was at their age. You know?

Yeah!

And they know when someone is not being straight with them. And the fact that they are talking to you, the owner, the leader, you can be as straight as you need to be. And want to be in those conversations without having to worry about what does the politics of this look like up the chain of command? You’re not, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully to anybody that’s sitting here looking like this, but you’re not a 26-year-old kid with a sociology degree sitting in HR at a Big Four firm that’s lucky to spell CPA, let alone know what one does. You are the firm owner, you are the firm leader. You know what it is that you need to be done. So when someone says, “I love everything you’re talking about, but here’s the deal: I’m the main caregiver for my parents, and I can be in the office one day a week, but that’s it, that’s it.” You can be the person that says, “You know what, I can make that work. I can make that work. Absolutely.”

I’ve got a client that I’m working with right now, we were supposed to have a candidate start working for them this past Monday. And the candidate called, and her initial thought, like, a week before she was supposed to start, was, “I have to turn the job down. I have to turn the job down because I just found out that my dad had a stroke in India. And I’ve got to go to India.” Now, if she’d have been talking to a large firm, the answer would have been, “Hey, let us know when you get back, and if we still have an opening, we’ll talk to you.”

I called my client, and my client said, “Look, number one, she’s doing the right thing. If that were my dad, I’d be doing the exact same thing. That’s number one. Number two, I think she’s got immense upside wherever she goes to work, and I want her working for me. So whether she starts working for me in two days, two weeks, or two months, I want her as a part of my team. So here’s what we need to do: Set up a phone call for me to talk to her. Let’s figure out what she needs to be able to do to go to India, take care of her dad, and if she’s going to be gone for two months, we’ll just set up her start date for after April. If she feels like she’ll be back March 1, we’ll set up her start date for March 1. Whatever she needs to do, let’s make it happen.” Those are things that you as a firm owner have the ability to do to go back to create that environment that is not one-size-fits-all, and that is priceless, priceless in today’s marketplace for most employees or people looking to potentially make a job change.

Yeah. It’s a big flex. And it is flexibility at the same time.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s, you know, it’s the firm that says, “Hey, yeah, we’d love to have somebody that does 40 hours a week for us in this role. But guess what? If we can find two people that are stay at home that only want to work 20 hours, we’ll divide the job up. Not a problem. We’ll make it work.” That type of flex as a firm owner is, it is literally priceless currency in today’s marketplace. So don’t let size be something that you feel is a weakness or a detraction from your firm. Use that as a huge benefit and a huge advantage.

An advantage that can’t be copied.

Yep, yep. You’re small, you’re nimble. You’re agile, and you can figure out a way to make it work.

Perfect. So, not to put you too much on the spot, but this is, after all, the first episode of the new year, and of Season 3. Do you think you can give me at least one thing that you think is going to be your prediction—it doesn’t even have to be just for 2025, but just looking ahead in the accounting space—that we’re going to be seeing, what’s going to develop?

I think that one of the things that we’re going to see develop is there is, and I don’t really think it’s a development. I think it’s going to be a continuation, but I think it’s going to be drastically different. I think that we’re going to continue to see a lot more private equity money come into the space, but I think that the farther we get from, “Is private equity a good thing?” I think the more we are going to have two very distinct, different camps: You’re going to have the haves and the have-nots camps. You’re going to have people that are absolutely on board saying, “It is the greatest thing that could have ever happened to us,” and you’re going to have a group of people, and I’m here to tell you, it’s probably going to be more of the frontline service delivery people that are going to be looking at it saying, “You know what? I don’t want anything to do with a firm like that. Because I’m a number, that’s all I am.”

Interesting.

And I think that firms that either one can still maintain their independence, even though private equity money has been infused into them, or firms that can maintain their independence and grow without that, I think that they’re going to have a leg up over the next 12, 24 months when it comes to attracting talent. Because you’re going to have people that, I mean, there are two firms towards the end of last year that flew under the radar with layoffs that were both private equity-related layoffs. A couple of those people, when we were working with them, they made it very clear: “We do not want to go to work for any firm that has any ideals whatsoever about private equity being a part of the equation in the future. And we understand they can’t make those promises, but if it’s something that is on their radar, we’re going to ask about it in the interview, and if it’s something that’s on their radar, we’re probably not interested.”

Very interesting. That is the first I have ever heard of that kind of taking that hard of an attitude that you’re hearing that out there. So that’s some really great insight.

Well, with that, John Randolph—I appreciate you joining me again on one of these “turn the tables” episodes.

It’s been enjoyable. It’s always nice to talk a little about what we’re seeing in the space, what we’re seeing in the industry, and I think there’s a lot of potential upside for everybody that wants to continue to grow their firm, do it proactively, and do it within an environment that has some flexibility. I think the firms that embrace that this year, or continue to embrace it, are going to be firms that are going to continue to see some pretty big wins moving forward over the next 12, 24, 36 months.

Yeah, it is. It’s great to get to hear a little bit of your expertise from the other side of the booth, so to speak. I always appreciate, as the person who’s the one listening to this and cleaning it up for you from episode to episode, that you have a lot of insightful interjections. But it’s nice to get to really have a sit down with you, especially at a time like this, looking forward to a new year. So thanks again.

You’re more than welcome. Thank you, Justin, for all that you do.

And if you out there enjoyed this two-part conversation, well, I think you are going to love the guests and conversations we have coming in 2025. So be sure to hit the subscribe button and we will see you next time on CPA Life. Thanks for listening.

We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app, leave a five star rating and visit our website for links and show notes at CPALifePodcast.com. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life.

Flexibility, Growth and Trends: Season 3 Kickoff, Part 2

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