Going Remote and Building Success with Chris Williams

Chris Williams joined System Six as its owner and CEO from a career in finance, where he served as an advisor to, and investor in, medium to large sized businesses. He’s worked for several fast growing companies, holds a business degree from Stanford, and serves in an advisory capacity to clients in addition to his operating duties. System Six’s focus is on providing their employees a “Dream Accounting Job” and on delivering best in class remote accounting and finance services to their 200+ customers.

Transcript:

Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the CPA Life Podcast, where we spotlight firm leaders and industry insiders who are passionate about making some much needed changes to the industry in public accounting and advisory and outsourced accounting, where we’re creating more of a culture-driven, employee-focused firm—firms where people don’t have to sacrifice their lives at the alter of their job to build a career and also have an amazing life outside of work. And today we are joined by Chris Williams, who is the owner and CEO of System Six, a modern, remote, cloud-based finance and accounting firm. Chris, welcome to the show.

Awesome, John, thanks so much for having me. Well said. You know, we really believe here at System Six that accounting can be a great place to work, and it’s our job to, you know, create and build that environment so that our team members can love what they do, have joy, have flexibility, and have time for a family as well.

Something that I think is fallen by the wayside in, in the accounting space for far too long.

Yeah, well, it’s starting to change. It feels like we’re starting to change, which is good.

There’s a little bit of a ripple effect, and I’m like you, I’m starting to see more of a current pull in that direction. You know, one of the things that we like to do before we jump into the meat of things is give folks a little bit of a snapshot of your career track: Where you went to college, how you ended up kind of where you are today as the CEO of System Six. So give us a little bit of what has brought you down this path.

Yeah. You don’t want to go straight to debits and credits?

Not too much.

We won’t touch that.

Yeah, you’ll lose me really fast. I could speak to it as a business owner, but not as a person doing it.

Me too. Yeah. Well, thanks again for having me. So my quick background, and I laugh about debits and credits because my expertise taps out quickly there. I’m actually not an accountant. I came to System Six kind of really through business ownership. So before System Six, I had spent seven years working in more traditional finance roles. Out of undergrad, I worked at an investment bank, and then I spent a couple years working at a big investment firm and then went back to graduate school to get my MBA. And you know, while I was there I was exploring—I really enjoyed my time in investing, sort of big finance, but recognized I wanted to be closer to the results, closer to, you know, feeling like my time, my action was really making changes quickly and whatever I was doing, you know, and I was part of a large organization before. Nothing against it, but it’s hard to have that happen when you’re in a big company.

So, you know, I was thinking about startup or I was thinking about, you know, going to join in an operations role at a medium sized company, and then I found this path, it’s becoming increasingly popular, which is basically go look for a small business to buy yourself or with some investors and then take it over kind of, first off, try to stabilize and make sure there’s no choppiness in transition. You know, you’re generally buying the business from an owner that wants to retire, you know, and then six, 12 months later kind of, really start to try and bring your energy to it. Try and grow it, try and improve it.

That’s really the short story of System Six. You know, I spent about a year looking for a good small business to buy in sort of the financial services space, because that was my background, stumbled upon outsourced accounting as sort of a business line that I thought was very interesting for a lot of reasons and it was a sales job—built a list of about 30 firms that looked to be between 10 and 50 employees. That would be kind of the size for me to start at. Sent Jeremy, who’s the owner of System Six, a cold email in like probably October, 2020, and nine months later, myself, a couple of investors, you know, bought the business and three and a half years later we’re still going strong, believe it or not.

Well I would say “going strong” is a little bit of an understatement. ’cause you guys are not only growing and doing it well, but I got to tell you, one of the things that we built our business around on the recruiting side of the house is really partnering with firms that are passionate about creating workplaces for their people, where they’re really bucking the trend of the century-old grinding mindset that’s existed in this industry since God created rocks. And when we initially spoke a few months back, one of the things that really resonated with me was a tagline that I saw, and I don’t remember if it’s on LinkedIn or on your website, but I grabbed that and I threw it in our client file with you guys, and I pull it into a note that I want to read real quick, because I think that this really is, it’s an aspiration I think more firms should have that they’re trying to do.

It says, “System Six is a modern, remote, cloud-based finance and accounting firm focused on two equal passions: Providing dream accounting careers to our team members, and freeing up our customers time so they can focus on their business, their family, their nonprofit, or wherever their interests lie.” Tell me what that means to you, because that is not something that you would typically hear from an accounting firm leader, whether that accounting firm is an outsourced bookkeeping firm, accounting firm, or a traditional CPA firm—that’s just not something that you hear a lot.

Yeah, well, you know, I got to give some credit. First, I think, you know, in a lot of ways, you know, System Six was started in 2008 when I got here in 2021, you know, a lot of that foundation already existed. You know, the firm was already fully remote, most of our team members kind of choose the hours they want to work: Do you want 30 hours? Do you want 35? Do you want 25? You know, we can flex up and down, not every month, but you know, throughout your time here at System Six. So a lot of that ethos was already here. I think I’ve worked hard to sort of call it out and just vocalize it more.

But I think really what it means is, yeah, I really think about our business in a lot of ways is kinda like a marketplace. You know, customers come to us and at the end of the day, you know, we can all talk about, we’re productizing accounting, we’re using technology, but they’re still really, you know, buying time from our team members. That’s what professional services is, as much as we’ve got workflow, automation, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, alright, so then you realize, okay, well our product is really our people’s time, so how do you deliver the best product? Well, you’ve got to have good people, of course. But then for them to deliver their time well, they have to be in a good spot. And that’s really what it all comes down to, is if our people aren’t in a good spot, they’re not going to put in the extra effort, they’re not going to be extra friendly on the call, then kind of the whole marketplace crumbles.

So when you really think about, I think, look, obviously the customer is super important. We don’t exist without the customer, without the client. But you know, in some ways I think this kind of mindset of client first, client first, client first, 24/7, actually ultimately doesn’t serve the client well because then you grind your people because every client email is urgent. Every client needs to be responded to immediately. And then your people start to leave. And then your client suffers from people churn. So when you really start to think, and we tell clients this: “Hey, we’re a people first firm, and you know, we have a 24 hour response policy, and that’s good for you because it means you’re not going to have to deal with a bunch of churn because we let you burn accountants and bookkeepers out.” So yeah, I mean really what that whole statement means ultimately to us is I know that our product is our people. We have to put them first. And not every person needs the exact same thing on your team, so you got to know. We got some grinders and let ’em grind. You know what? They want to work 45 hours, go for it. But we also got a ton of moms and dads that, you know, can get off and go to soccer practice, and so let’s scope their kind of employment to meet their needs. You know, some people are on salary, some people are on hourly and have preferences. So that’s really intentionally in that statement, the people part comes first because, you know, we really do try to start with the people.

And then, yeah, the other thing I’ve just realized with the clients is, you know, I always thought, hey, every client’s going to want CFO advisory. They’re going to want, you know, a fancy model on how they can grow their business 20% in a year for the next five years. Some don’t. Some are like, “Hey, I got a great business. I just want to make sure my payroll’s done. You guys do my bookkeeping ’cause I want to go spend time doing X, Y, Z.” And so again, like you know, you’ve got to meet your team where they are and you got to meet your client where they are. Be willing to kind of be custom a little bit, we don’t have to do the exact same thing for every client.

It’s interesting you say that ’cause that’s, you know, one of the things that we constantly talk about in our business is not every employee, not every candidate that we talk to is a superstar. We’re going to have people that, you know, that the way that I was put it with our staffs, you know, we’re going to have employees or employers that may not have a great opportunity. In fact, the reason that job may be open is, you know, Joe died at his desk last week after being with the firm for 32 years. While we may look at that and go, man, there is no way I’d ever do that, inevitably we are going to talk to somebody that when we ask them what they want, they’re going to say, man, I’d like a company I can work at 30 years and die at my desk. There are people out there like that, and I think that in the world that we live in today, the one size fits all model that I think business was built around for decades, I think I can safely say post-Covid has drastically changed. And leaders like you, regardless of the industry leaders like you and others that we talked to, that get that, I think are going to continually be able to attract better talent, because you’ve got an environment that says, Hey, what works for Bill may not work for Sally, what may not work for Jim, what may not work for Jill.

Yeah. And then it’s just our job to know really well, you know, our people’s skill sets, their desires, and kind of, you know, match that in the marketplace against the client that we have coming in. And we go through that, you know, when we get a new client, we, you know, sign 3, 4, 5 new clients a month and we know some are going to be a good fit for this team and some aren’t. I mean, sometimes we’ll move clients within System Six, we’ve been serving this client for three years, there’s been a little bit of personality damage over time, you know, let’s just move it to a new team. Let’s hit reset. And again, like not everything, just because one team. Didn’t enjoy serving them anymore after three years doesn’t mean that another team can’t do great serving them. It’s nothing bad about that team, it’s just, hey, you know, time for a little bit of a reset.

So, yeah, I think, you know, you got to have systems around it so you don’t get completely unwieldy. We can’t have a hundred people here doing a hundred completely different things, but having some level of flexibility, I think allows a variety of employees to find their definition of joy, their definition of flexibility here. You know, that’s one thing. I think we had some hiring challenges maybe 18 months ago, and one of the big takeaway from that was, you know, a great workplace can mean different things to different people, and you’ve got to make sure you identify during the hiring process what their definition of a great workplace is, and then make sure that what we are matches.

Yeah. I think that in the marketplace, today especially, that the leader that can somehow balance the act of, for lack of a better way to put it, creating a psychologically diverse enough business that every single person thinks that this business was built for them, but still maintaining some semblance of connectivity throughout it is the leader that’s going to win more times than not.

We’re trying, easier said than done, but we’re trying.

It really is, and especially like you guys, you’re a fully remote firm, you’ve got people from coast to coast, and obviously the drivers of somebody possibly sitting in the northeast may be very different than the drivers of somebody sitting in southern California.

Yeah. And you know, same thing with clients. And sometimes again, it’s just about knowing expectations. Our salesperson, he records every sales call and you know, our delivery team gets to review them before potentially assigning it to the right. You know, ’cause yeah, sometimes there’s personality differences or you got to pay attention to time zone. You know, he’s works in a business on the East Coast that needs to be able to talk with us in the morning sometimes, well then we’ve got to make sure we don’t put a West Coast team on him. You know, again, I think it does like being fully remote, having this ethos of flexibility, for sure creates challenges, and it creates more operational complexity. But I’d rather deal with those couple of challenges here and there, because it allows me to just, it’s so hard to find good accountants, as you know. So if I can be way more flexible in what I’m able to hire: “Oh, you only want to work 25 hours? Like great. We can find a way to make that work. You want to work three days a week because you and your husband split childcare? Great. We can find a way to make that work.” It’s hard, it takes extra work, but I’d still rather hire that person for 25 hours or three days a week and do a little bit of extra work to sort of make it work than not hire them and keep searching for another two months. When you find a good person, how can we make it work? And you have to be kind of a flexible organization to do that.

Yeah. I think it calls for a little bit more work on you as a leader or even on your leadership team when you look at situations and say, okay, the easy answer is this person, for 40 hours a week. That’s the easy answer.

Nine to five.

But maybe a better answer is these two people at 25 hours a week and 15 hours a week.

Yep. And you know, look, it’s what we’ve found and we’ve had to communicate is not every single decision that we make does our team get to quote unquote “win.” You know, talk a lot about, we want this to be a great place to work. So that means if we have a pain in the *** client, like generally we’re going to talk to the client and if they don’t get better, we’ll let them go. But you know, we also have quarterly goals of how much churn we’re going to have every quarter. And so if we’re in a quarter where, hey, maybe we had a couple more clients roll off than we expected, then “Hey, I know you want to fire this client right now, but like, give me a few months.” You have to communicate with your team like, “Hey, you don’t always get to do everything that you want, but just know over time we’re bending towards that.” Like we’re generally landing on the side of what the employee wants, you know? “This client’s too hard for me to serve. I’m over my skis.” “Okay, great. It’s going to take us a couple months to get that off your plate, so bear with us.” You know, but that’s sometimes been a challenge internally, people are like, well, I thought we were, you know, a people first firm, and why are you making me do this for a couple more months? And the answer is, look, not every single thing can go that way, we’ve got a broader business to think about, but I just think in general, you know, deciding things, people first will really pay off for folks.

Talk to me about the growth of the firm. ’cause I know that you guys have been previous to this year and are still on a path of growth through acquisition. I mean, organic growth. But if the right partner comes up, there’s a potential for acquisition. So talk to me about kind of what has been attractive to you through that process of the firms that you’ve acquired, and what do you guys typically look at moving forward?

Yeah, so I mean, look, I don’t want to gloss over what you said, which is organic is still super important. You know, we grew from, call it two and a half million in revenue to about five sort of organically, and then since then we’ve started to, you know, I was doing a lot of biz dev, a lot of sales, so we didn’t have time to really do acquisitions until over the last six, nine months. Obviously, you know, I bought System Six, so that was kind of acquisition one, but our goal is really we want to continue to grow organically, but then also do strategic acquisitions. We’re not, you know, trying to buy 20 firms a year, like some of these large private equity players. What we’re looking for right now are, it’s kind of two different types of acquisition opportunities: It’s one, either a firm that’s just so similar to ours that it’s just going to be very easy for us to fold in, meaning, you know, similar culture, fully remote, Karbon as their practice management system. So we bought one a couple months ago and it was exactly that. It was, you know, I’d been introduced personally to the owner, had a level of trust with her, you know, a bunch of references I could kind of background check on her and recognized as a good person, exact same tech stack as us, similar sized clients, similar culture. And yeah, like acquiring firms can be a nice, you know, financial way to grow your business. You get more cash flow to reinvest back in sales and marketing. So I’ll look at those kind of easy, just put ’em into System Six firms all day long.

Kind of plug and play?

Yeah. The most important things there are like similarity of tech stack, similarity of culture, meaning it’s got to be remote, they’ve got some flexibility in the organization, you know, of course we look at financials, but I think that one thing that gets overlooked, probably the most important number for us is customer retention. You know, we just need to see a history of customers sticking around, you know, ’cause especially if the owner’s going to leave, we need to know they’re sticky customers.

So that’s kind of one, you know, we’re looking at another one right now like that, you know, we’re 40 people. The last one we bought was four or five. This one is seven or eight people. So kind of these small teams that we can roll in. And then the second opportunity that we spend time on are, you know, I have a vision, I want to become sort of a one-stop shop of professional services to small businesses. So acquisitions with a new service line. So we don’t do taxes right now, we want to get into tax. So we’re looking at a firm that does tax. Or acquisitions that maybe their tech stack or their culture isn’t exactly the same, but they’re like experts in, yeah, CFO, tax, or they’re experts in, we’re looking at one that’s got law firms, all they do is serve law firm clients.

Interesting.

So, you know, it’s going to be a little harder to integrate those, but they bring something different to the table that’s valuable: A brand and expertise in an end market that we think is attractive, small law firms, I’m willing to do more integration work there, even if they’re not on Karbon, you know, because I think it’s a better sort of, I’m getting something else in return, right? You know, which is this market presence or buying a tax firm that’s going to be more complicated than just buying a small bookkeeping practice. But then all a sudden they get tax. So it’s if it’s not a clean, easy integration, it’s got to come with something else. So those are kind of the two different flavors of acquisitions we’ll look at. And we’ll try to do another probably one to three this year and you know, a couple more next year and it’s, ’cause there’s a lot of great firms out there.

You said something a minute ago that I’ve kind of held onto in the back of my head and I completely forgot about: You bring an interesting perspective to the table in regards to private equity in this space. Because you’re in this space now, but you’ve also played on the private equity side of things. What is your take, what are your thoughts—good, bad, indifferent, little of both—on the move of private equity into the professional services space, and what you’ve seen?

Yeah, lots of thoughts. I think the first thing to remember is, look, everyone has seen the bad stories about private equity, you know, Wall Street Journal, whatever. There’s plenty of examples out there, yeah, where private equity has done harm to a business. But let’s not forget that regular business owners have done harm to businesses too. You can look at any type of business ownership, whether it’s corporate, you know, or the stock market or private equity or you know, friends and family and there are examples of folks that have made bad decisions that, you know, led to businesses going under or having to fire a bunch of people or whatever. So, you know, that’s not meant to completely absolve private equity of some of the challenges that happen, but it’s just, that’s kind of comment one.

Make no mistake about it, that if you’re an accounting firm and you come under private equity ownership, it’s going to get more intense. You know, they’re going to push you to grow faster, they’re going to push you to drive profitability. They might ask you to lay off some folks that maybe aren’t that efficient or aren’t contributing. But you know, they’re not stupid where they’re going to come in and just, especially in a professional services firm, and fire all the delivery folks. They understand that the delivery you know, and the IT or whatever, like they play a mission critical part of the business and you can’t just let them all go. So, you know, I think it’s, yeah, expect if you know, private equity, ownership, you know, in some ways you give them credit for it. No one’s questioning what they’re solving for, you know, they’re solving for the best financial outcome for the business as possible, and so, yeah, of course that means that they’re going to, yeah, are they going to maybe serve your client less well, because they’re going to make you charge more for that one off random hourly project that before you used to just do for your client, be like, “Well, I really like Bill. Like, I’ll just do that for him, I won’t bill him for it.”

Right.

Yeah, you’re going to have to bill for that now under PE and sure, maybe it’s not as nice to Bill, but the reality is if you’re not charging Bill for that work, it means your team’s not getting paid in one way or another. So it’s clear what they’re driving for, but I don’t think that it’s bad to be driving for like more financial efficiency in your business. And then I also think that look, there’s, not so much in our world, but in the more traditional partnership world, I think they are helping solve a real problem, which is you get all these partners who want to get bought out and the next generation doesn’t have the means or doesn’t want to, so they’re, you know, bringing a solution to that issue. So I’m generally like, I’m okay with it. I think yes, there will be some stories of examples of PE doing things that are very bottom line focused, bu that’s their model. And if you don’t like it, you don’t have to, you know, go do a deal with them. It’s just kind of pure capitalism is what it is.

Yeah. I think that there’s a piece of the industry, I think you touched on it by your answer just there a little bit, that we’ve created the situation that we’re in, because there is a lot of people that are looking at, what is the exit strategy? I mean, I’ve got two clients that we worked with here locally that they had built their exit strategy around a couple of people in their firm, potentially buying their firm, and that didn’t happen. One passed away during Covid, another one decided to be a stay-at-home parent right after Covid, and two other people they hired since Covid to kind of be those people moved on.

Not everybody wants to take out a big loan to buy a business.

Yeah. And so they ended up merging into another firm that has now sold to private equity. So you’ve got to do what you got to do to take care of things. But I think that you’re right. You know when you make the decision to sign on the dotted line, you know what you’re getting into. It’s not like the writing is not on the wall.

Yeah. And I think, look, there’s also, you know, fabulous stories of success where they come in, you know, they’re going to put some capital on the table, go make a couple hires, you know, that the old partners didn’t want to make ’cause they were afraid to cut their take home and they’re going to, you know, a lot of these private equity firms are doing this roll up thing where they’re buying all these small firms and putting them together and now all of a sudden you’re part of a hundred million dollar firm and you have access to, you know, an offshore team, or you have access to a sales and marketing function that you never had when you were, you know, a 30 person shop. So I tend to think there’s going to be a lot of success stories, there’s going to be some negative ones, but you could say the same about accounting firms before PE—there were some great places to work and there were some bad places to work.

Yep. And I think that, you know, from personal experience, private equity made a move into the recruiting, talent management, staffing industry 25, 30 years ago. And that’s about the time I started my career in it. And I didn’t know anything about private equity when I started in it. All I knew was the firm I was with used private equity money to do a rollup of their franchises. Had no idea what that meant as a 26-year-old kid. All I knew was I started realizing people were being let go that weren’t being let go before, and from a performer perspective, what I quickly realized is there’s this list that came out monthly of performers, and usually everybody from about the middle down were the people that were being let go. So my job, in my mind, became real simple: I need to stay above the middle line, and as close to the top of that board as I can get to not have to worry about anything.

And you know you’ll probably get rewarded ’cause there’s less kind of, you know, a lot of the people that are dragging things down aren’t around, you know. Look I mean, I think there’s a broader conversation around that’s, you know, way above my pay grade of, should every business be run with, you know, that kind of absolute bottom line mentality and how does, yeah,

when you no longer have the local accounting firm that’s like doing extra work pro bono, you know, just ’cause they’re friends with folks like, is there something more broadly that’s a bad thing when you kind of lose that type of service provider in the ecosystem and everything becomes bottom line oriented. But that’s—I tend to not think that’s a huge issue. But I think there is a conversation one can have there, but you know, beyond me.

Yeah. I’m with you. That’s a little bit outside of the scope of I think what I’ve been called to do. One of the things that I have respected about your firm since we started working together and talking and even looking back the legacy and talking to some people after we started working together about your firm, you guys have always been a remote culture. I want to talk a little bit about that because that still is in 2025. It’s still a hot button topic. Do we or don’t we, should we or shouldn’t we? What about collaboration? What about culture? All of those things. You guys have built a successful team with solid retention, good people, completely remote. Tell me what the keys to that success, in your opinion, have been in building a remote business?

Yeah. I think the first thing is and it sounds obvious, but you can’t try to be an in-person firm. You know when there’s an urgent thing and if you’re in the office, you can walk down the hall and knock on somebody’s door. Like we don’t have that luxury. Sure, I can message someone on Teams, but I have to know that if they’re not there and they’re not responding, that’s part of our kind of agreement with our team is look, you know, if you need to step out at 2:00 PM to go pick up your kid, we’re not asking you to tell somebody, and we don’t expect you to respond to every single thing within 30 minutes. So you have to be, you know, willing to like, let things sometimes move a little more slowly because you’re just not in the office together. So yeah, if you feel like you need to be. The fastest team in the world and the most collaborative team in the world, yeah, that might need to be in the office. Like you can’t replicate some of that stuff. But then you have all the negatives of being in the office, which is, it’s so hard to recruit, you know, costs, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s kind of thing one, like you’re not in the office.

I think thing two, trust has to be obviously paramount in the organization. It’s one of our core values, but I think it’s not just oh, we trust you to get your work done, but also, you need to instill in your employees that they can trust you as the leadership to speak up when they’re having issues. Because if you’re in the office, you can tell when someone’s overloaded, when they’re stressed. You know, we can’t tell that remotely as well, so I’m hammering all the time and all hands, whatever, you know, my door’s always open, if you have anything you’re concerned about, bring it up, we’ll handle it the right way because our employees need to trust us that they can bring stuff to us so that we know what’s going on and we know, you know, how we can help them.

And then the last thing I would say, try to find ways to get together. Like we do an annual retreat. There’s no PowerPoint. It’s no like strategy, it’s just pick a city in the middle of the country, fly everyone there for the weekend, have fun together. Yeah, it costs money, but that’s very effective way to build rapport and friendship between people. You know, I travel for conferences. If I’m in a city, I’ll try and host a dinner if there’s team members there. So again, you know, you’re not going to have the same level of relationship you have with people if you see them in the office every day. But you can do little things. So that’s kind of the way I think about it, it’s first, you know, you just, you’re not in the office. You can’t think that you run an in-office firm. You can’t have the same expectations, create trust, and then spend time together.

I think that first thing that you just said is critical, and I never really thought about it that way, but there’s so many things that we do as leaders that have just been that’s what we do, that’s how we do it, because that’s how we’ve always done it, ’cause we’ve been in an office. And a lot of those things don’t translate or transition to a remote setting extremely well.

Yeah. I mean I find all the time of I’ll send someone a message at, you know, 4:00 PM their time that’ll be like, “Hey, by the way, no need to respond to this today. Get back to me tomorrow if you need.” You know, just that’s not my nature. You know, I’m fast moving and I’ve come from jobs where you didn’t get that luxury, but it’s you got to remember, it’s a different arrangement now, and you know, that goes a long way.

Right, yeah. And I think that having that grace and that understanding that, hey, not everybody is plugged in a hundred percent of the time—I’m not plugged in a hundred percent of the time—and just that I think there’s something freeing individually as a person, but then also to your clients to let them know, hey, it’s not going to be instantaneous, which at the end of the day, if we roll the clock back to eighties and nineties, that’s kind of how we did business, even though we were sitting in an office together. It wasn’t like things happened instantaneously. They just didn’t.

We’ve gotten our agreements with our clients, you know, next day business response policy. And you know, we’ve had some clients that get real big and they get to the point where they’re like, I need to be able to hear back from my bookkeeping team the same day. And we say, great. That’s just not us. And then we, you know, part ways friendly together.

Yeah, and I think that’s something that I’m sure your people love about the way that you run the business, and that’s just a core value that’s important to you guys. I think that the word that continually comes to mind as we’re sitting here talking about this in my head is “intentionality” from a leadership perspective. You have to be intentional about those things, they don’t just happen.

Yep. You know, look, it’s not easy. We had a big client that, you know, we had to get a lot of stuff done and there were some late nights over the last six weeks getting theem ready for audit. So it’s not 24/7.

Right.

But again, like I said earlier, generally can you know, err on the side of the intentionality, the decision for your team. You know, it’s kind of like, we try to build a trust well, in a lot of ways where it’s like our team trusts that we’re making the right decisions for them. So when occasionally, like they’ve got to suck it up and hey, you know what? We can’t fire that client right now. Or, hey, I do need you to work a little late on this. You know, as long as you’re not asking that all the time, people will go above and beyond here and there when you need it.

I completely agree. I was ready to say, I don’t think that I’ve talked to a single candidate ever since we have, you know, 100% focused on this space. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a candidate that was, line in the sand, “I’m working 40 hours and that’s it. I’m not doing anything more, find me the firm.” That’s not what they do, because that’s just not a reality. But what I have found is numerous people, more times than not that are willing to say, “Hey, I’ll do whatever I’ve got to do. But I’d rather that be the exception, not the rule.”

Yep. And that’s exactly the culture we’re trying to create, which is, yeah, the vast majority of the time it’s going to be exactly what you want. Occasionally you might have to stretch, but we’re not going to make it recurring.

And I’m sure that when you go out to market to find somebody that fits into a remote culture, you know, probably 90% of the people that you talk to when you say remote are going to raise their hand and say, I can do it, I’m on it, sign me up. But there’s also probably behaviors and idiosyncrasies that you look for through the interview process that give you an indication of whether or not, or even just looking at someone’s resume to give you an indication of whether or not that person might be a good fit. What have you found as a leader in a remote firm that typically resonates with you guys when you look for people that you think could be successful in a remote environment?

Yeah, I mean, candidly, and this is a little maybe, you know, shortsighted, but like we don’t like to hire folks that haven’t worked remotely yet, and unfortunately a lot of people now have that experience from Covid. You know, ‘cause we hired a couple of folks earlier on, they were remote for three months and then they went back to the office, so they only had a three month stint ever being remote and come summer 2021, they’re just like, I can’t do this. I miss an office. So we look for that, you know, people that have worked remotely.

We look for people that have a dedicated office space for their remote work, even if it’s in a guest bedroom or something. But “Oh, I’m going to work for my kitchen table on the couch,” you know, we’ve found that’s a challenge. So we like to make sure folks have a dedicated space. And then obviously we’re looking for, you know, the core values, the traits that matter most in a remote environment are like, you know, do you have accountability? Do you have some drive? Are you a trustworthy person, you know, we just got to stress test those harder, because yeah, look, you know, if someone wanted to milk the clock and get paid and not do as much work, yeah, you can do it in a remote environment a lot easier. So we just, we have to make sure that the attributes right, the traits that a person who doesn’t do that has we, we make sure that’s what we’re hiring.

And I’d say the last thing that, whether you’re hiring remotely or not, I think one of the most important things we do is we do blind references, you know, which is, hey, they’re going to give you, they’re going to give a couple references of people they’ve worked with, and those people are always going to say nice things going to list a reference. Who’s going to **** on you? Excuse me!

Right? Yeah!

So what we do is we tell a candidate, “Hey, you know, we’re going to reach out to some just random former coworkers of yours. Is there anything we should be aware of? Is there anyone we need to stay away from?” And that kind of threat, so to speak, sometimes will bubble up some stuff of “Well, my old boss hates me and here’s why.” And then we do it, we go call random folks, message them on LinkedIn, and most of the time they have great things to say. And occasionally you’ll discover something and you’re like, well, I’m glad I found out about that. So that’s a mission critical part of our hiring process.

Yeah. It’s interesting you say that because one of the things that we always talk to candidates about, I don’t care if it is a big industry in a lot of firms and a lot of people, it’s a small world. And one of the things we’ll always say to candidates is, Hey look, I need to know what is the worst thing that my client’s going to hear about you when he picks the phone up and he calls your firm? And let me make it very clear. I’m not saying calling and checking a reference. What I’m saying is there is a high likelihood…

…he knows somebody…

…that he knows somebody at your firm that he went to school with, he met at a conference, he’s played golf with a few times. And he’s not going to call with a piece of paper in his hand saying formal reference check. He’s going to make a call and say, Hey. I have a question for you. This is just me and you talking. Tell me about Bill. And I need to know what’s the worst thing he’s going to hear. Because more times than not, those calls are made, especially in an industry like you guys, where there’s a lot of knowledge of who is who in the marketplace.

Yeah. And look, we just hired somebody who identified to me, yeah, basically, my current boss is not going to say nice things about me, and here’s why. We had a good conversation and I talked about what could you have done better? And we hired her. You know because sometimes people work for bad bosses, sometimes people make mistakes and they learn from them. You know, no one’s got perfect references out there. It’s just about being transparent.

Yeah, I think that’s a very valid point. As you’ve grown the firm over the last couple of years, what has been key to you when you look at the performance of your people, when you look at just the overall approach to the business that they take, what are the behaviors that you typically look for in your people dealing with customers, dealing with clients—again, in a remote setting?

Yeah. I mean, we track a lot of metrics. You know, we pay a lot of attention to probably three or four kind of categories. One is I would say margin, you know, our kind of gross profit on clients, so you know, whether you’re salary or hourly here we do track time and it’s not because we’re trying to hold you aggressively to a time clock, but it’s because we want to make sure that we’re getting paid enough for the work that we’re doing, ’cause all of our clients are on fixed fees. So we look at margins pretty closely every month, and that helps us identify if a team member needs to get more efficient, but more often than not, scopes change, so we need to go get a price change done with that customer and that ultimately means that team member will get paid more, ’cause everyone’s got some version of profit share on their clients. So we look at that type of stuff a lot.

We look at customer retention. We do quarterly check-in calls with most of our customers from a sort of more senior person on the team. So we’re making sure that clients sort of just give us good feedback on those calls. We do not do it as often as we should, like a client survey, like that NPS survey of, you know, rate us one through 10.

Yep.

And then internally we do a quarterly employee survey that’s got some recurring questions. You know, would you recommend System Six as a place to work? Do you like your manager? And then we’ve got some other kind of questions that are changed in that survey every quarter. So everyone gets a quarterly performance review. So there’s conversations that happen there where team members get to vocalize, yeah, as part of your performance review, you have to rank your manager and you have to rank how you feel about your compensation, your workload, et cetera. So just trying to get a lot of data points is the most important thing. I don’t think you have to overanalyze what questions you’re asking, it’s just making sure you’re getting, in a remote environment, getting a pulse check on people, I feel like at least once a quarter, you know, how would you rate your job one to five, and just take a look at that. You know, you can just start there. So yeah, kind of like we pay a lot of attention to margin profitability by client, customer success, and then sort of team member happiness.

And I think it goes back to that, that one simple word of intentionality.

Yeah.

Not just letting it happen.

Yeah. I mean you can’t just wait for your people to quit to know that they’re not happy. You know, like you’ve got to do this ahead of time so then you can identify issues. And if somebody quits and we’re surprised, that’s like, super frustrating. You know, if someone quits ’cause we know they haven’t been happy, you know, then cool, we thought we could, but same thing with customers leaving us. We don’t want surprises. We want to know that they’ve been frustrated that we’ve tried. Maybe we can’t fix it, but surprises are no fun.

No, they’re absolutely not. What you and your team are continuing to build is something a lot of firm owners can definitely learn from. So. If there are leaders out there hearing what you’re doing and they have questions about your overall business or even possible candidates that are looking for a place like System Six to call home, what is the best way for people to contact you or get in touch with you and just find out a little bit more about what you’re doing?

You know, a lot of my ideas came from folks sharing with me, so I’m happy to do the same. Just email me, it’s Chris@SystemSix.com. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. But there’s a lot of Chris Williams out there, so Chris@SystemSix.com is probably the best way to reach out. Yep, candidates, firm owners, you know, maybe you want to sell your firm, whatever. Happy to talk with folks. I like talking with other folks in the industry ’cause there’s stuff I’m learning too, right? You know, it’s not just, I don’t know everything. So always happy to talk with others.

Well, we’ll make sure that in the show notes, we’ll put your contact information in there. We’ll also put a link to your LinkedIn profile so that they don’t go to another Chris Williams, that they want to find you down that path. We’ll put all that together. So, Chris, thanks a lot. I appreciate you spending time and being an open book about what you guys have done well, what you’re still struggling with, what you’re growing from. So thank you very much. Continue doing what you’re doing!

No, thanks John. Thanks for having me, and appreciate the good work you’re doing on the recruiting side.

I appreciate it. And for those of you that have spent some time with us today, learning a little bit more about how firms and leaders like System Six and Chris Williams are impacting the industry, we really appreciate it. I know that time is valuable for all of us in the world we live in today. So thank you for the time that you’ve invested here. And if you like what you heard, give us a like, leave us a comment on the platform of your choice. Also subscribe to the podcast because you don’t want to miss any of the upcoming conversations that we have teed up with leaders who are doing their part to make a positive change in this thing that we call CPA Life. Until next time.

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Going Remote and Building Success with Chris Williams

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