Launch Your Firm: Empowering CPAs with Ronnie Withaeger

Ronnie Withaeger, the owner and founder of Ronald Withaeger CPA, has transformed the traditional CPA firm model by creating family-friendly, sustainable work environments. Prior to starting his own firm, Ronnie worked at RSM and a small local firm, gaining substantial experience. He later joined Anderson, where he had the opportunity to modernize their tax practice, which included implementing new technologies and systems, but eventually recognizing the need to pivot to his own practice.

Passionate about teaching and community, Ronnie founded Launch Your Firm to support and mentor other accountants looking to start their own practices. He regularly hosts events and provides ongoing support and training, ensuring that new practitioners can build successful and client-centered firms.

Transcript:

Hey everybody. We are back and excited about getting a chance to hang out with you for another episode of the CPA Life Podcast, the podcast that’s passionate about showcasing some of the firms and firm leaders in today’s marketplace who are building more modern-minded, people-centric organizations, places where people don’t have to choose between a great career or a great family or personal life. And today we are going to be talking with Ronnie Withaeger, who is the owner and founder of Ronald Withaeger CPA in Las Vegas. And we’ll talk about geography in just a little bit. But the firm is based out of Las Vegas, and he’s not just working on building a firm that’s like what we just mentioned, but he’s also passionate about teaching others how to do just that through his own Launch Your Firm community. So Ronnie, thank you for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, John. This is exciting to be on with you. And just looking forward to being able to share kind of, part of my vision and what I’ve been doing in the space for the last 10 years.

It’s hard to believe, you know, when you look back at, I know for me sometimes you look back and go, man, it’s, it’s been 10 years? You know, a whole decade of doing this. And like we were just talking about before we started recording, I’m sure there were days in the early stages of that 10 years that you had to ask yourself, am I doing the right thing?

Oh yeah. I mean I spent the first like five or six years of my career working in traditional firms. I went to RSM out of college and spent two and a half years there, and then I went to a small local firm for two and a half years. And I think I kind of maybe pulled what little hair I had left out there and definitely had to make the pivot when the time was right.

Yeah, it’s always tough. I think we make it tougher mentally than it really is, but it’s always tough stepping away from the safety net of a W-2 job.

Yeah.

But you ultimately did that, and you were talking about kind of the history of where you came from. You had a pretty traditional start coming out of college, as you mentioned: RSM, working for a local firm. And then you spent a little bit of time with Anderson for a little while, correct?

Yep. So when I kind of got to that five or six year mark, I kind of really knew that I was ready to make the jump. And you know, at a small firm, it’s hard to make the jump because they’re small, and they want people that are going to be staff. And so, you know, they kind of had told me like, well hey, go build a $250,000 book of business and then, you know, we’ll make you manager. And it was like one of those things where I was like, “Hey guys, I’m sorry, but if I’m going to go build a $250,000 book of business, I’m just going to go work for myself.”

And so, you know, that didn’t necessarily go over too well when I kind of said that. And, you know, I got an opportunity to go to a company called Anderson, which it’s a very robust company that is legal-based, but had a tax practice because they did a lot of educational events and you know, I ended up working for lawyers for four years. And like for my people who were like non-traditional, like our traditional six years in, Hey, you gotta go, you know, work your way up to partner. You know, this was an opportunity where I went there and you know, the lawyers didn’t really know how to run a tax practice in a traditional sense. So they looked at me like, “Hey, this is a guy who kind of does know.” And for whatever reason they were kind of like, “Hey, we want you to do this. We want you to like bring our tax practice into, you know, the 21st century.” And so I got a really cool opportunity working for the attorneys to build a tax practice in the way that I thought was good.

You know, they let me hire people. They let me change softwares. They let me implement a paperless system. They let me do all the things, and so that was fun. I also got to teach events. I got to go on the road with, with the partners and, you know, they carved me out four hours to teach tax seminars and stuff like that. And so it was a really cool opportunity to just take some of the things that I knew needed to happen in the traditional accounting practices and implement it into a firm that I thought was really good.

Yeah. It’s amazing how when you—and maybe you did go into it with this kind of a mindset—but it’s amazing though when you look back how God really lines up and ordains those opportunities for you to hone your skills, get better at your craft to prepare you for what that next step is, which, you know, obviously in 2018, stepping out and starting your own firm. You would put down a lot of the foundations, and I don’t mean this negatively, but ats somebody else’s expense and risk, if you will, to be able to then have the confidence and look back and go, you know what? Maybe now is the time. What, what ultimately was the impetus that got you to the point to say, you know what? I think it’s time. I think it’s time we do this.

So when I had left RSM, I had gotten like these threats of legal action and all this kind of stuff. You know, when you talk about like kind of God putting a pathway there for you, for whatever reason, I was able to see that I would never sign a non-compete ever again. And so one of the things that I started doing early on was telling whoever I worked for, hey, I’m entrepreneurial-minded and I’m going to go build business. I have no problem building that business into your business, but if I ever leave, then I will want to take that business with me. And so that was one of the steps I figured out very early on. And you know, when I went to the small firm, it was a win-win for them, ’cause they’re like, yeah, sure, bring business in. That’s totally fine and it could remain your business. And so I never really needed to do the moonlighting thing because I kind of just had that agreement with the people that I worked with.

And so, you know, what I had kind of done was slowly built a small practice within the firms that I was working for. That was a major step. The next thing that ended up happening was that Anderson was growing at a very ridiculous rate. We were doing amazing things and you know, after I had kind of done a lot of those things, I mean, I don’t know if it was just the millennial in me, but like I ended up telling them from the beginning that like eventually I would start my own firm and they were like, “Hey, we’ll take you as long as we can have you” type of thing, and they were super supportive of that transition. And so when I got to four years in, there were a few little things that ended up kind of pushing me off the edge, but I realized that I could go from having 4,000 clients to having 400 clients, and I would be able to make more money. That’s ultimately what it came down to.

It really is sometimes that simple to look at. You know, it’s interesting you talk about the non-compete issue and just the whole mindset. I’m a firm believer that there is a reason and a purpose for non-competes. The people that have an ill intent to go out and do harm to an organization, there’s a reason it’s there.

Sure.

I worked for a boss years ago. His mindset was a non-compete. Is not really designed to put you out of business or keep you from working if you do it the right way. A non-compete is designed to be kind of a Roman crucifix. If you do it the wrong way, we’re going to hang you from it and make your life miserable. But if you do it the right way, and you know, in our business we have non-competes and I tell my staff all the time, you know, look, if there gets to be a point that you want to go out and do this on your own, I want to train you so well that you can do that, but hopefully your desire is to stay here. But if you do decide to do that, let’s sit down, let’s talk about it, and let’s figure out a way to let you go do that and go do what it is that you want to do, make the money you want to make, and still be able to run into each other at the grocery store, shake your hand, hug your neck and say, “Hey, how’s life going?” There’s just something powerful about that.

We’ve got a client here in the Dallas area, they’ve been in business 40 something years, and when the firm started 40 plus years ago—and they still operate this way today, they’re a pretty large firm here in the Dallas area, they’re 120, 130 employees—the owner of the firm started the firm with the mindset that if you bring in business and you leave, if it’s business you service, if you hunt it, kill it, skin it, and it’s on your desk, whether it’s you or your team that’s doing it, if it’s in your purview, your focus and you leave, you can take it with you. Now, if you bring in business and it’s being serviced by another part of the firm, you can’t take that with you. You know, if you’re a tax guy, you bring in audit work, that kind of stuff. And they’ve got a [turnover] rate of about 7½, 8%. Yeah. People just love staying there. They take very good care of their people. So when you stepped out and you started your firm, so you had at least a cushion of a book of business that you were able to take with you and pick up and start running with?

I did, yeah. The timing worked out good. I knew that when I did jump out, that a lot of my concerns would at least in some ways be alleviated because I knew I had like a core business. And I mean, I know that’s one of the things that a lot of people get concerned about is they go, hey, you know, like I’m leaving my $120,000 job and I’m starting at zero. Like how do I do that? And so like when I kind of sat down at some point, I wrote down 10 things that I would need to do to feel really comfortable, like a bulletproof jump, and it was centered around having money saved, and also having a certain level of my own book of business. I totally ended up having like, I feel like I calculated it out really well. Like when the time to jump was there, it was crystal clear, it was time to make that move.

And so part of what I want to do with people similar, you know, like, you know, to the firm that you were talking about is it’s like, or what you were saying is let’s create a win-win, let’s create something that works for everybody. And when I left Anderson, they did the same thing: “Hey, we want to continue to have a relationship with you.” I mean, we worked out a deal where they sent out an email to the clients and said, if you love Ronnie and you want to go work with Ronnie, here’s his email address.

Wow.

And we worked out a deal where I paid them for that. And so like, the pie is so big in the industry that there’s room for everybody. So we should keep relationships really strong, and that was evident. Now in my traditional firms, that was not evident. They used non-compete as a power play to try to punish you. They used a non-compete even—I mean, I got threatened with non-competes before any of the clients ever even called me. And when you’re like making 70 grand a year and you got two kids under four, and they’re saying, well, we’re going to bring you to court and all this kind of stuff, that’s the kind of stuff where it’s like, Hey, when I see it in public, I really have a hard time respecting you. And so, you know, like there is some places out there unfortunately who are still flexing some of that kind of weight, which I think is ridiculous. But we’re through it and I’m grateful for it.

Tell me a little bit—let’s talk a little bit about your firm. You’ve been in business now, almost 10 years. You obviously have built a successful business that not only makes a good living for you, but also provides great solutions for clients. Where are you now today in regards to staff size? Is there a focus or niche that you have? You know, from the standpoint of delivery of service, how much of that is compliance versus advisory consulting work? And do you guys do CAS or outsourced accounting, or is it focused on strictly tax?

Yeah, so my firm’s kind of, it’s interesting, it’s went up and down. And so I think that one of the best things about owning your own practice is that you get to do this thing exactly the way you want to do it. And so when I jumped out, it was me, and then I had one staff person that had worked with me at Anderson, and then we used another girl who I hired at Anderson, but left just before me, and we kind of had like this whole, it’s me and then I have like one employee and then one contractor and, and so we rolled with that for a couple years and I ended up kind of taking my firm from probably a hundred grand to about 800 grand over like a three or four year period.

Wow, nice.

We kind of all, were like sitting there like, this is like kind of too much for our lifestyle. I mean, it’s not too much for everybody. There’s plenty of people who could just go hire more staff and all that kind of stuff, but I kind of treated my firm as like a family firm, so the people that work with me, I’ve known for 10 plus years, and so that’s all the people that I work with. We ended up getting a little too big and it was like, we just don’t want to be stressed. I’ve got four daughters. I’m active in that. I’m active in my church community. I have hobbies. And so like for me, I was like, I don’t need to build like this mega million dollar firm where I’m gaining 10 pounds a year because I’m stress eating all the time and all that kind of stuff. Just like three or four pounds a year.

Yeah!

No, I’m just kidding. So what ended up happening is the girl that was a contractor, she kind of approached me and was like, “Hey, I kind of want to start my own firm.” And so I said, “That’s amazing. Let’s do it. Like, what do you want to do?” And she’s like, “I’m stressed about kind of like just getting clients.” And so like, you know, me, I’m good at getting clients, I get clients every day type of thing. And so she was like, you know, “Will you help me get clients?” I said, yeah, I’ll help you get clients, and then I was like, “What if I sold you a book of, of business?” So what we ended up doing is we carved out $180,000 worth of business, and I sold it to her.

Very nice.

And so, yeah, a lot of that stuff was my Vegas clients. And so what I ended up doing is moving to Utah—we decided to move our family to Utah and live in a smaller town than Las Vegas and just try something different. And so I said, hey, the timing works out good. I’m like, why don’t I just sell you my Vegas clients? A big chunk of those ones, and then some of the other ones you’re familiar with, and then, you know, like, we’ll work together on stuff. You know, we could still tell everybody that, you know, like I’m kind of here if they ever want to consult or anything like that. And it’ll let you kind of transition into taking those clients over.

So I helped Emily start her own firm and gave her the base. And it was a win-win, ’cause she like paid me out on installments, and so that was a good way where I was getting too big to be able to like scale back. So it’s like, okay, now I’m back to like 600k, which was an okay spot to be in. So Emily kind of like moves out now she’s doing her own thing and it’s like, well now we don’t have like a contractor anymore either to like help us. And so this other guy I know, he was at a firm and he ended up like kind of wanting to quit and so he ended up quitting and I said, well, come on and replace my contractor and I’ll, you know, I’ll pay you a monthly amount and work with us. So after about like six months, we ended up like, you know, loving working together and all this kind of stuff, and then he was like, “Hey man, like you think I can kind of like do that thing that Emily did? You know, like I’d love to maybe like do the same thing.” And so then I was like, well, yeah, let’s do it. So then I broke off 250 for him and so I basically scaled back about 40 or 50% over a two year period and helped two people start their own firms. And so from a client perspective, we kind of just told everybody like, “Hey, I just took partners. And so like I have partners now who spearhead tax prep, you know, like I’m still happy to talk anytime or any of those types of things.”

And so we kind of all like work together, share tax software, share our paperless system. We’re kind of like a team, but not a team. We all have our own S-corpS and do our own billing and stuff like that. But so like today, where I’m at, I do about 550 or 600,000. I would say about 50,000 of its bookkeeping, 100,000 is advisory, and then the rest is tax compliance. And it’s, you know, 50-50 between small business and personal tax. So a lot of s-corps, a lot of you know, personal returns that go through with that. In professional services, I have some athletes and some high net worth people that I get some bigger fees from, some construction companies that I get some bigger fees from, but. I’ll help whoever needs help, we’ll do somebody’s tax return for who’s a teacher in a school district for 350 bucks. I mean, like, we just like helping the people that we’re connected to. And so we kind of do a little bit all over the map and you know, we’re in a spot where our practice is really good. It’s in a great spot.

Yeah. It’s interesting because you hit on something a minute ago, and I think that there’s so much truth to that, and it is the fact that when you run your own firm, there’s no cookie cutter. You do what fits your wheelhouse. And there may be somebody who looks at what you do and says, Hey man, it’s not niche enough. It’s not narrow enough. Or it’s not, or it’s too big. I don’t know if I’d want to do that much. And then there’s someone else that may say, you know what? I want more. There’s a saying that we’ve had in our house for years about life in general, whenever we don’t agree on things, and it’s real simple: It’s not wrong, just different. And I think that’s what people have gotta get their head around in the space that we’re talking about here, is when you run your own firm, when you run your own business, how you want to do it is the right way to do it. It’s not wrong, just different.

A hundred percent.

So you’ve touched on some stuff that I think is really a, a great place to segue and springboard, kind of like you did into a piece of your business that you spend a lot of time in, you’re passionate about, and that is the community that you’ve built called Launch Your Firm. Tell me the birth and genesis of that and where that is today and what your focus is with Launch Your Firm.

Perfect. So one of the pieces of being able to run your own practice is you get to diversify your time into other things that you’re interested in. And I would say for the first, you know, five years of my career, I learned from people who were, you know, 50 years old and above, who was just like, “This is it, we grind 80 hours a week in accounting and like, if you’re not down with that, you’re not cut to be in this business” type of thing. And I always kind of rejected that. And so, you know, all those days where you know, maybe I, my preference was to come in at six o’clock in the morning and leave at six o’clock at night so that I could go have dinner with my family, versus the people who rolled in at 8:30 or 9:00 and then stayed till 9:00 and tried to make it seem like I was the one that looked bad, like all of that kind of stuff, just stuck with me.

And it was one of those things where it was like, okay, let me diversify my time and get involved in the things that I want to do. Like there’s more to life than the accounting firm. And you know, you just sit around and look at all the things that people complain about when it comes to the industry, I mean, we know hundreds of thousands of accountants have left the industry in the past 10 years, and so it’s like, why are all these people leaving the industry when I’m like sitting here, like coasting? Like I feel like the way that I have things, this is like, I’m almost on easy street to some degree. So why is everybody leaving? And so that was kind of like where I’m sitting there and I’m like thinking about all of those types of things from a leadership perspective, it’s like, oh no, everybody just needs to learn that they can do this.

When I went to Anderson, people told me I was committing career suicide, you know, I’d be back in public accounting before, you know, I knew it and that I couldn’t, you know, that the partners would always make it seem like you couldn’t do it on your own, that you had to have the guy who had 20 years of experience, and all that kind of stuff. It was like, no, you know what? Somehow I was able to break through that, and I know that like, accountants are very risk averse, and so I need to spend some time just teaching my people that it is possible that you can do it, and that there are so many people and resources who are willing to help each other. There’s people that you can bounce ideas off of or ask if a certain treatment or attack position can be done a certain way. We have so many of those types of resources that it was like, okay, let me try to build a community of people who I hype up and encourage to get to a point where they can start their own firms.

So my brother-in-law’s a big events guy. He loves events. And so I was sit, we were sitting at a Five Guys one night and you know, I was explaining this to him and he goes, “Let’s do a big hype event where like you teach people how to start your own firm,” and so we just did it. After tax season a year ago, we said let’s just book a place, let’s just start telling people we’re having an event, let’s see what happens. And so we did it, we got 25 people to come to a, an event that we called Launch Your Firm, and I just trained people over a two day period on how to start their own firm, how to get over the anxieties, how to, you know, like, position yourself for success, how to get new clients, how to, you know, market yourself on social media, all the things, like create partnerships with other people. And we just went through and built out a whole like two day, kind of four or five hours a day type of networking event where it was just a think tank. And you know, we had some people there who wanted to start a firm. We had people there who were actively trying to acquire a firm. We had people who had started their firm, you know, within, you know, one to three years and were just, you know, wanting to network and hear more. We had all kinds of people. Bookkeepers who were starting, fractional CFOs who were starting—it was really cool and everyone was like, I love the event. So then we’re like, let’s keep doing it. Let’s do it again. So, you know, for me, this is like a good way to contribute to, you know, the accounting community and show people like, hey, you don’t have to leave the industry. You can create a world that works for you and it’s not really that hard to replace your salary once you start your own practice.

You’ve done this now for over a year. I’m sure that you know, outside of the formal Launch Your Firm event that you guys have done, and I think you’ve got another one coming up, don’t you?

We do. We’re doing it end of July, yeah.

Okay. Outside of that, I’m sure that you have consistent discussions with people, if not daily, at least weekly of, “Hey, Ronnie, I’m thinking about, or, Hey Ronnie, I did and I feel like I’m just treading water.” What would you say are the two to three biggest misconceptions that people have about starting their own firm that keep them from either taking that step or being as successful as they could be in a quicker fashion?

They don’t think they can replace their salary. So the confidence to say, “Hey, I’m making 10 grand a month, or I’m making eight grand a month,” they don’t have the confidence like, how am I going to replace that? So the risk aversion to that is always huge. I would also say that people don’t think they know enough. So they think that their technical knowledge isn’t at a certain level that it needs to be at to be able to do it. So they’re not comfortable with decision making. And that’s something that I was just talking to somebody yesterday about where it was, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And you know, I was like, hey, like this is what I would do. You know? I was like, the cool thing is, you’re the one that’s making the call now, and so they’re not comfortable with that because they’re going and just like asking a partner, what do we do? So some of that decision making is something that is a little bit foreign to them, and kind of being in that seat is not necessarily a comfortable seat.

The other thing is just having confidence that clients will want to work with them. And so in my experience now with helping several people launch their own firms, and you’re right, the conversations do happen quite a bit with having those conversations now, like I haven’t had one person tell me, “Hey, I regretted starting my own firm. This has been a disaster.” Never, never one. And so like from that perspective, it’s just putting yourself out there. Once you put yourself out there and you start saying, “Hey, I have my own practice. Look, here’s my logo,” there’s just people out there who are like, “Hey, I’m in a spot where maybe I could switch, or I want to work with that person.” Let me support that person. And we all have networks of people who are willing to do that. There’s also people like me who are out there who I’m like, I’m happy where I’m at. And so when I get referrals now I’m kind of like, “Hey, I’m not really taking new clients right now, but you know, I know somebody else is.”

And so I’m sitting here passing on work to other accountants right now, and it’s just because they’re part of our community. They’re people that I want to help. And so you build those kinds of relationships with people. There’s going to be people out there that are going to support you and are going to help you get to the point where you are full. Some of those bookkeepers that are like, “Hey, will you help me build my practice?” Like they’re full within six months and they’re just like, “Dude, like, thank you. Like this is such a game changer for me.” So those are the three biggest things. It’s just, it’s a confidence thing, you know? We really help people just kind of get rid of those things that they don’t have the confidence in. We send out monthly newsletters on how to run your firm efficiently: tips and tricks and all kinds of stuff like that.

So, you know, within that Launch Your Firm community, which I’m still building, like we want people to come to this event. And it’s not an arm and a leg either. Like I know there’s a lot of people right now who have gotten into like coaching when it comes to, you know, the accounting space. Like that’s something that I’ve seen blow up over the last year. But it’s one of those things for me where I’m like, come to our event for 450 bucks and that’s it.

Wow.

Like you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m kind of in a spot where I’m like, this is not like my bread and butter. I’m not sitting here trying to like earn a living off of a coaching community or anything like that. Like for me, it’s like I just want to help the industry overall. Like I want to get us to a spot where like, we don’t need to send the work to India. We don’t need private equity to acquire firms. Like those kind of things don’t need to happen in this industry, and the clients don’t want that.

Yeah, there’s, there’s a couple of, and I don’t remember if I saw these on your website when I was doing some research, or if I saw it on your LinkedIn page, but there’s a couple of comments that were made. And you know, people could say, well, that’s just marketing stuff. Yeah, but there’s a lot of truth in the marketing that we put out there. There were two phrases that came off your, again, your website or your LinkedIn page for Launch Your Firm. These are two things that really resonated with me. One was, and it’s kind of what you’re talking about: “Go from curious to capable.”

Yeah.

I think that is a great way to put it. ’cause I’m sure there’s a lot of people that just, they don’t know what they don’t know. And that mountain, we’re miles away from that mountain, but it looks so big from a distance. And the reality is once you get closer to it, it’s probably not as big as you think it is, like you’re talking about you’re walking away from a $100-$110,000 a year salary at the end of the day, is it really that hard? It’s not easy, but is it really as hard as you make it out to be to replace that?

Right. Yeah. You need like 50 clients that pay two grand a year. It really is not hard to get, and I mean, even in like my—every single practice has probably a contingency of their client base who like feels like they’re in the lower end of the practice. You know, we all have like a bottom 20% of our clients, right? And in a lot of ways, those clients probably also feel that to some degree too. And when more people are out there, like putting themselves out there, and somebody starts their own business, you’re going to be their number one client. So there’s just this natural progression of people that are going to switch, they’re going to support, and if you’re putting yourself out there and you have capacity, right? Because that’s the other thing. So many accountants are overworked and have too much work and all this kind of stuff, aren’t giving good service—that is naturally going to flow to somebody who does have capacity and can do it. And so that’s huge.

There’s so many people who like just signed up for it to where they’re just like, if I could just email you every once in a while when I have like a tricky issue and you give me your opinion on it, like that’s worth it to me. They just need a friend in the space. And so that’s another thing we just trying to do is just be a friend in the space, be supportive any way we can. And even though I’m a $5-600,000 firm right now, I know how to be a $4 million firm. Like, I did that at Anderson. Anyone can come to this event and find a positive experience with it.

Well, and that’s kind of a perfect step into that second thing I saw on y’all’s website—it said, “People outside of accounting are always dogging it. People inside of it are always lamenting it. We found a way to maximize the very best of accounting for our personal and family benefit. You can do the same. And it’s not any harder than working for a firm. You just need to know how.”

Yep. I have five businesses now. Like, so I have my accounting practice. A space that I think is heavily underserved is the educational side of the industry, so I created The Prosperity Society—that’s a website that is like a knowledge base that just has tax planning measures, and I record five, 10 minute videos and teach people how to reduce their taxes and how to be compliant. So we created the Prosperity Society. We did Launch Your Firm. I have a wedding venue in Vegas that I’m a part of. I’m opening a cold plunge and sauna place right now in Salt Lake City.

Saw that.

Going to be done in two weeks. And so like, this gives you the flexibility to be able to do whatever you want. That is so foreign to so many people to where they just think to themselves like, I’m only the accountant, like, I’m gotta be tied to my desk for 60 hours a week during tax season. And sometimes I still am. I mean, like there’s times where I’m still tied to my desk for 60 hours, but I get to make all the money. You might work 60 hours a week for three or four weeks if you just billed 80 grand. If you can do that, then you’re going to do it. So the work ethic is not actually that much different, it’s just that we didn’t want to work 60 to 80 hours a week and make, you know, like $3,500 on our check. And so like that’s the difference is that like you are in control of all this now and when you want to ramp up your work, you get to do that. And then when you don’t want to ramp up your work, then you’ll be like me and go to Europe for 30 days, which I did last year, and just answered emails while I was out of town. But I took my family to Europe for 30 days, you know, and that month we billed $4,000. It’s just one of those things that you get to be in control of that, and there’s nothing better in an industry where you can literally turn on the fire hose if you want more work. If you want tax work, it’s there. I could post on my Facebook account right now and say, Hey, I’m looking for 10 clients, and I’ll get 10 messages.

Yeah. The business opportunity is there. It’s not going away. It’s one of the things that I constantly talk to people about in the space that we play in, in the recruiting world. We’ve not picked the phone up and made any type of an outbound cold marketing attempt at all since probably August, 2020.

Wow.

There’s more business than we could shake a stick at. You pick and choose what you want to do. You determine when do I want to turn that spigot on? When do I want to turn it off and be able to build a business that you want to build? And for somebody, it may be a $4 million business. For somebody else, it may be a $400,000 business. Again, not wrong, just different. And again I’m assuming that through the coursework you’re doing and your teaching, mentoring, you’re also showing people, hey, you could, do you want to do a fixed fee firm, do a fixed fee firm, if you want to do a subscription, you want to do hourly billing, do what you feel like works for you.

Yeah. I tell people not to do hourly billing. I’ll say that like when people say like, hey, how do we bill? I’m like, you know, like, stop counting your time. Like, do not count your time anymore. So that’s kind of one of the things at the, at the event where I’m like, I don’t, we don’t track our time really at all anymore. We know approximately how long stuff is going to take us. But like, I would never make my staff person show me her billable hours.

There’s a gentleman in the subscription billing, fixed fee pricing world. Ron Baker, I don’t know if you know who that is or if you ever read anything that Ron’s done, but he was on our podcast, I think last year and he had a great quote. He said, the only people that I believe should track their time in 15 minute increments are prisoners.

That’s awesome, yeah, yeah.

And I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

I did the six minute increments for a long time. I’m like, I’m never billing somebody for 0.4 ever again. And the clients appreciate that. Like that’s the other thing is we teach people how to, what the clients are going to love. Most of the time the clients love not being nickel and dimed. They want something that’s like all in, so you’re just like, “Hey, we’ll do your tax return for 1500 bucks and your tax planning’s included in that. Like, you can call or text us anytime, email any question.” It’s an all in type of thing. And people love it, they’re just like, they love not being nickeled and dimed. “What am I getting this $60 bill for?”

Yep. Takes a lot of the questions off the table that you don’t want to deal with and the person receiving the bill doesn’t want to deal with.

Yep. So now we’ve got remote work, we’ve got no time tracking, and so like, I don’t know, like my employee, she’s like, man, I save like two hours a day on commuting, getting ready, and like all that kind of stuff. Like you just create win-wins. That’s like one of the biggest things that I’ve ever like, just tried to live by when it comes to life, personal life, social things, is it’s like let’s create win-wins. Let’s think win-win in everything that we’re doing and in the accounting industry, we can easily do it. So, yeah, I mean, but I think people need to come to the event to hear it and see it. Like we’re a very visual learning group. I think people on your podcast hopefully enjoy kind of what we’re talking about today, but like, they may want to come to this training and just be like, alright, I just need to like ask questions. I need to see it, I need to see some numbers. I need to see like, how this could kind of work. And we as accountants are very visual that way, and need to talk to other people about how it can work before we’re willing to like just take some of those steps. So that’s just what we set out to do.

One of the questions I was going to ask you is there’s probably a place for people that are, you know, they’re all in, they know that, hey, when tax season’s over, I’m probably going to start my firm, or at the end of ’25 I’m going to start a firm. But there’s also people probably that are—it’s just a thought in their mind.

Yeah.

They don’t know if, they don’t know when, they don’t know how. It could be ’25, it might be ’28, and I’m sure there’s a place for that person at your event as well, because they’re going to get questions answered. Is that a safe statement?

A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, the reality is you need some foundation no matter what. If somebody was like saying, Hey, right when I graduate college, I’m going to go start my own tax practice, or I’m going to start a fractional CFO company, I’d kind of be like, eh, that’s going to be, that’s going to be tricky. Like, I fully believe that there’s people who are one to three years into their career right now who are kind of like just getting their CPA license and the juices are spinning there. Like you’re just like, you know, you’re thinking it: “Hey. I’m going to do this at some point.” And yeah, I totally think that the event is designed for anybody who is thinking about starting their own firm in the future or is early on in the stages. I even have one guy who wants to come, who’s been a partner at a very traditional firm for about 30 years. He wanted to move, and so he was like, I’m going to have to like, kind of take some clients with me, but also restart. But he’s also like, “Ronnie, I don’t know how to run a paperless firm,” so he’s like, “Could you help me like run a modern firm? Like I’m talking to people who are, have more experience than me about running a modern firm.” And even those people would benefit and are welcome to come to that event because we show technology type stuff too. So like we have a technology section that says like, Hey, you know, use this practice management tool, use whatever you want, time tracker tools or whatever it might be. We have some of that kind of stuff at the event, so. We’re like talking to everybody about it.

There’s a lot of different nuggets you can pull from there.

There’s so many. And even some people who are kind of like, I didn’t really think that I could start my own firm, like, we get even a little bit of that. I mean, it’s less common, but like a little bit of that.

Yep.

Last year we had a student that was at BYU who came and soaked it up a little bit. I mean, so even him, he is like, I’m four or five years out. We want to tailor this to where it’s for like just literally anyone who’s thinking about making the jump.

I think that what you’re doing in the CPA firm space with the Launch Your Firm community, your other business interests, just life in general, there’s a lot of good stuff there. So man, just keep it up—we need more real people doing real things online and in real life. If there are folks that are kicking around the possibility of starting their own firm, folks who are thinking about making a career change, or even folks that are in the Salt Lake City area that want to go do a coal plunge. What is the best way for people to find you, connect with you, link up with you and talk?

Yeah. Get with me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s great to start and then like if you just like message me through there, like I’ll give you my email address and I’ll drop some links for you to kind of sign up for our newsletter and kind of look at what we’re doing. So I would say that’s a great start is finding me on there. But yeah, if you want to go cold plunge and you’re in the Salt Lake area, that’s like a preferred way for me to do business. I love doing business in the sauna, so.

That’s awesome. I will make sure that in the show notes, we have the link to your LinkedIn profile, your website, also the website for Launch Your Firm. We’ll make sure that all of that information is in the show notes. And for those of you that are listening, thank you guys for investing a part of your day with Ronnie and I today. If you liked what you heard, please leave us a comment below. I’d also like to encourage you to subscribe to the podcast on the platform of your choice. We have some great guests coming up, some conversations planned over the next few weeks that you are not going to want to miss a single one that really gives you a glimpse of what CPA Life could be like. Until next time, Ronnie, thanks a lot.

Hey, thanks John. Appreciate it, man.

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.

Launch Your Firm: Empowering CPAs with Ronnie Withaeger

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