Taking a Look Back at Season 1 with John Randolph

The tables are turned as CPA Life producer Justin Grant takes the role of host to interview John Randolph, founder and principal of Benaiah Consulting Group—not just your regular host!—on Episode 32. John delves into his history in the recruiting and accounting space and the lessons he’s learned from his vast and diverse experience: the importance of finding a niche, the role of private equity in firm growth, the impact of company culture on the employee experience, and more. Through it all, John stresses that the niche he has determined is best for him and Benaiah is serving small, local CPA firms, because the passion he has for helping those firms succeed is something that can’t be duplicated.

Transcript:

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of CPA Life. And you’re probably wondering where John is. But don’t worry—we’re going to be talking to him in just a moment. My name is Justin Grant. I’m the founder of ProfessionalProductions.net and the producer of the CPA Life Podcast. Today, to kick off season two of the show, John is going to be the guest. So, John, welcome to your own show.

It’s a little unique and a little bit different. We’ll see how quickly I can slide into the guest seat and be comfortable getting the questions, versus giving the questions.

I have a feeling it will be pretty natural for you, because you’re a natural at this anyway, and I’m looking forward to the conversation.

I’m excited about it. We’ve talked about this for a while. So, looking forward to getting it done.

We have, you know—wanting to let the listeners learn a little bit more about you and your thoughts. You know, you’ve shared them throughout episodes, but really getting to to delve a little deeper into it, into the issues that are approaching—the staffing crisis that’s just going to be intensifying as time goes on, also be a bit meta and talk about the show within the show and how it came to be. And maybe we can get into some of your favorite moment, some of mine, and we’ll see where it takes us.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

So to get started, you know, the old saying of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—that may not be something that applies to the profession of accounting right now, but I do feel like it fits here pretty well on this podcast. So let’s go with what works. Let’s start by introducing you a little bit. You are, of course, in addition to being the host of CPA Life, you are the principal and managing partner at Benaiah Consulting Group, which provides recruiting solutions to local CPA firms and leaders, helping them compete against the big, top 100 type of firms out there in the talent space.

Mmm hmm.

So even though you’ve alluded to your own career path throughout the first season of the show, why don’t you go into a little more detail about how you came into recruiting as a career and how your focus came to be on CPA firms, especially—as well as the circumstances when you left your then current position over two decades ago now, to strike out on your own and found Benaiah. All that good stuff, if you would.

So recruiting and especially third party recruiting is not something people typically step into as a career choice. It’s not something that I mean, there may be a little bit of a different mindset in the world that we live in today, but in, you know, when I first started in this business over 25, 30 years ago, it was not something that people rolled out of college and said, hey. I want to be a recruiter.

Mmm hmm, or into college.

Yeah. Exactly. I didn’t even know the industry existed, when I stumbled into it. So I’ve got a background and degree in journalism and marketing. My first real job out of college—I went to college when I graduated from college, I played baseball in college and then went to Mexico to play baseball to prove scouts wrong that said that I did not have the talent to play any higher than that.

Yeah.

I quickly realized after about four to five months, there’s a reason why talent scouts get paid to evaluate talent, and, quickly—

—Your first reality check.

Yeah. Exactly. I mean, I literally remember Justin playing in a baseball game—my last professional, if you will, baseball game. We’re in Mexico. It was a doubleheader. The pitcher that pitched for the other team pitched both games.

Oh, geez.

So he threw 18 innings.

Wow.

And I faced him five times. And the rumor going around was this guy had made it to AAA with the Dodgers, but he wasn’t good enough to make it to the pros. I faced him five times. I struck out five times.

Wow.

And I remember—I’ve always said one of my strengths is that I’m very self-aware. And I remember walking back to the dugout thinking, this guy is not good enough to make it to the pros, and I can’t touch him. I gotta go get a job. So I literally stumbled into—well, I took my journalism degree and I went to write. I had been writing part time at our newspaper where I went to college where I grew up in Kingsville—sportswriter, love sports, and got a job in Albuquerque. My first full year as a sports writer. I made $14,762.

That would be decent money it seems like these days, actually.

Oh my God. $14,000. And I remember getting my W-2 and thinking, this is not what I went to college for.

Yeah, no.

I was making more money than that working two or three part time jobs and piecing things together while in college. So I threw caution of the wind, threw my stuff in a car, moved to Houston to go look for a job, moved in with a buddy of mine that was my best friend since we were three, four years old together, and I landed a job at a recruiting firm, had no earthly idea what recruiting was all about. It was recruiting accountants. I was lucky to spell CPA, let alone know what one did.

I remember in my first couple of weeks, one of first orders that I got was for a senior auditor from what was at that time, Price Waterhouse—it’s now PWC—but it was Price Waterhouse at the time. And I remember asking, I had a script in front of me, and I remember asking this audit partner, well, can you give me a job description and tell me a little bit about what this person’s going to be doing? And in his wonderful Houston, Texan stereotypical, accent, he said something to the effect, well, son, if I have to explain to you what an auditor’s going to do, you are not the recruiter I need to be working with. And he hung up on me.

Oh, wow.

So I figured I probably needed to learn a little bit more about this thing that I was doing than just trying to find people. So I kinda became a student of the game and, didn’t go back to school to get an accounting degree to spend as a time as I could digging into more than just the one or two accounting classes I had in college—trying to understand really what it meant to, you know, what was a debit? What was credit? What did an auditor do? What did a tax person do? What made somebody good in that space?

And so for the next 15, 16 years of my career, I worked for two very large national recruiting, executive search firms, grew my career with them from a desk level to, when I left the last firm that I worked for, I was regional vice president running half the country.

Wow.

And the second largest piece of business that we had, a little over about $550,000,000 in revenue, it it was Absolutely. The time of my life. I was a part of 32 different startups or turnarounds. So I typically tell people if you need to know what it takes to run a firm into the ground, I can tell you. Because, one, I’ve done it a couple of times by mistake.

Yeah!

And two, I’ve stepped into several that were at that point. So I also know what it takes to fix and build a firm, a service related business, into a firm that is well run, clicking, making money where people are thriving. That’s kind of the career track that I’ve taken. And I had an opportunity in the 2003 timeframe to step away and do something on my own. I figured at that point in my life, if I was going to do it, now was going to be the time to do it.

Okay.

And so stepped away in 2003, started Benaiah Consulting Group around that time frame 2003, 2005, and, really, at that point, Justin, was doing a lot of consulting with other recruiting firms on how to fix their firm, how to grow their firm, how to train their people better, how to attract people better, retain people better, and then also doing some recruiting on my own. I started a firm in 2015 with a couple of guys. 2018, we parted company.

Mmm hmm.

Just wasn’t working well. And at that time, I did what I know how to do: I put a recruiting hat back on started trying to figure out what I was going to do, and I’ve got a brother-in-law that runs a state and local tax consulting firm in Houston, and he called me and said, hey. I I know that you’re trying to figure out where you’re going and what you’re doing right now. Don’t know how much you have on your desk, but I need to hire nine people. Can you help me?

So I didn’t have a lot going on, so we started working on trying to find state and local tax, indirect tax people for their firm. And through that process, obviously, came across people that weren’t state and local tax people. They were federal tax people.

Sure.

Didn’t have indirect tax experience, had direct tax experience. And I’ve always been in the mindset in this business that you sell what you have from an inventory standpoint. So if you have toasters, you sell toasters. If you have microwaves, you sell microwaves. If you have federal tax people, you sell federal tax people. Well, knowing that those nine positions were going to eventually get filled and I needed to figure out what I was going to do, I got on the phone and started calling public accounting firms. But I did what I had always done at that point, and that was picked up the phone and started calling PwC, KPMG, Deloitte, Baker Tilly, Moss Adams, and got really frustrated really fast.

Yeah?

Got frustrated with the process, got frustrated with the fact that I was one of 25, 30 recruiters that they were potentially working with. Things would go into a black hole. I wasn’t getting feedback. And I literally just asked myself at that point, because I’ve done so much consulting in this industry—if you were consulting with yourself, and you walked in and saw what was on your desk, what would you tell you? And my answer was, fire all your clients and go figure something else out.

Nice.

So I called all those farms and said, hey. I’m not going to be able to work with you. Sorry. Bye. What I quickly realized was I picked the phone up and I called a couple of smaller firms that I had had some relationship with. Got the owner, the managing partner on the phone, started putting some ideas and thoughts together about how can we put some legs on this thing, and within about six months, quickly realized that where we wanted to be from a relationship standpoint, from a value standpoint, from a focus standpoint, was working with firms where the person doing the hiring was the person losing sleep at night because they had positions open.

Right.

We wanted to work with firms that were committed to building a more forward-thinking environment and culture. Through the process of all of the growth that I’ve done in my career, I was able to spend two years at home when my kids were—my girls were nine and ten years old. I pretty much unplugged and did nothing for two years but be a dad. I did some consulting work, I started a couple of other businesses that have nothing to do with the recruiting industry, but my commitment to my wife and kids, because I had traveled so much was, I’m going to stay home and I’m going to be dad and husband.

Yeah, that’s awesome.

Through that process, the way that I typically put it, is I was able to put fingerprints on my girl’s that’ll never come off, ever. I believe that every single person should have the opportunity to do as much of that as they possibly can.

Yes.

And that’s just kind of been one of the foundations of why we do what we do. I just don’t think that people should have to sell their soul at the altar of their job to build a career anymore in the world that we live in. So we passionately seek out firms that are run by people that have that same mindset.

That you do, and that was quite a story, and especially the way you concluded it, I mean, that’s the ethos of CPA Life as a podcast too. So, not that you didn’t just talk for a long time, but why don’t you talk a little longer, about what your thoughts were with that as your ethos and goal for why you started the podcast, how the idea came to you, and kind of what you hope to accomplish by adding podcast host to that very extensive resume you just went over with us.

So part of what I learned through 32 startups and turnarounds is every single office that I took over that was a turnaround situation, that was failing miserably, or the couple of startups that I was a part of early in my career that did not do well—the one common denominator in all of those failures, one common denominator was that we were trying to be everything to everybody, and we ended up being nothing to anyone.

Yep.

So I quickly became an advocate for the necessity to niche unless you work for a firm that has a bottomless pit of dollars to throw at marketing, unless you work for a firm that has a bottomless pit of dollars to throw at talent, you’ve got to be willing to put a stake in the ground and say, this is who we are, this is what we do—and not wiggle from it. And that’s kind of how we ended up in this niche: locally owned CPA Firms.

That was the 2018, 2019 time frame. Again, being self aware, evolution of things through that process, one of the things I also realized was that for the most part, the way that I was doing business in 2018, 2019, from a transactional perspective, it was the exact same way that I did business in 2001, 2002, 1990, when I got into this business. Nothing had changed. The only difference was I was doing it on a computer. That was it.

Yeah.

So I’m not a young guy. Well, I guess I am young. I like to think I’m young.

I like to think I’m young, and I’m younger than you, so let’s both be young together.

Exactly. I’ve got a lot of runway behind me. Let’s just put it that way.

Okay, that’s good, yeah!

And again, one of the things that I’ve been told and through all the personality profiles and everything that I’ve done is that I’m extremely self-aware. I recognized and realized that things needed to change in the 2018, 2019 time frame with how we were doing the business. So I went out and found a coach. Started working with that coach on what are some things that we could do different? How do we do things different? And that’s a coach that really works in the recruiting space.

So we really pivoted, we changed a lot, we niched down even more than we already were. We stopped transacting business in a lot of the traditional manners, picking the phone up a hundred times a day—started engaging more on social media, driving more business from those channels than we were old school emailing, picking the phone up, trying to sell stuff. One of the things that came through that conversation with Donnie was you need to start a podcast. Okay? And I told Donnie, I don’t have time, I’m busy, I have a lot of stuff going on, plus, I don’t want to do a podcast. What am I going to say? Who am I going to… no!

So we kicked this thing around, he’d kick it back at me, then I’d kick it farther down the road, for about a year, a year and a half. Finally, probably I would say somewhere in ’21, late ’21, beginning of ’22, I finally decided, okay, all these things you’ve told me to do, they’re working. But that’s the one thing I haven’t done.

Yeah.

And you can have all kinds of strategy in the world, but if you don’t put it into practice, you’re never going to see the results. We’ve been very blessed. We’ve put in a lot of work on the branding side of Benaiah Consulting Group when we changed and flipped how we did what we did. We haven’t had to pick the phone up and make any kind of a cold call introduction conversation, hey, do you have any openings we can fill, kind of thing since 2019.

Okay!

Almost a hundred percent of our business has been driven through referrals and previous clients, and our social media channels, and the content that we create and the thought leadership that we constantly are putting out there.

It’s brilliant.

So it was hard to argue with anything that he had told me because it was working, but we hadn’t done the podcast.

That one last thing.

Yep. So I finally picked the phone up and called Donnie, and he said, okay, let’s figure this podcast thing out. So that’s kind of how CPA Life came about. We spent several months kind of kicking around ideas and thoughts and how do we do this, what do we do with it, what’s the focus going to be? And I really wanted to be able to give a platform to, first of all, firm owners that are doing things right.

Yeah, 100%.

There are so many firms out there, Justin, that are doing so many things right, but nobody knows about them. And so kids coming out of school, people in the industry that are thinking of leaving the industry, they believe that their only options are Big Four, Top 50, Top 100, where I basically say goodbye to my life for 6 to 8 months out of the year, I’m going to work 25, 26, 27, 2800, 3,000 hours a year. I’m not going to see my spouse. I’m going to miss my kids. But I’m going to bite the bullet, and I’m going to do this for two or three years, and then I’m jettisoning the industry.

Right.

Or the people at that 2, 3, 4, 5 year period, and they believe, hey, I did my time, so to speak, I’m going to take the shackle off, and now I’m going to go to the corporate side of things. We wanted to show people like that, there are firms out there that get you—that have an environment and a culture that you can be a part of and have the life you want to have in this industry and do the work that you enjoy. We wanted to be able to give firm owners a platform to talk about their story, because there’s some pretty cool stories out there.

Real cool stories.

Yeah.

And pretty cool differences in the way that they do things different, between each other, all of which are working for them.

Absolutely. It’s the whole concept and mindset of “not wrong, different.” There are so many different ways to skin this cat, and there are people out there that are doing everything that they can to show hey, here’s one way to do it. Whether it’s Henry Huie or Randy Crabtree or Marcus Dillon or Carrie Bradshaw or John Mark Prewitt, there’s so many people out there that are saying, hey, here’s the way we’re doing it. It’s not necessarily the only way, but it’s here’s how we’re doing it.

It’s our way. Yeah.

Exactly. There’s great options. So that was kind of the first mindset with CPA Life. The other thing that we want to do is we want to talk to industry insiders. We wanted to talk to people on the consulting side of things like an Amber Setter, that can bring some value to the table and show people, hey, there are some opportunities in this space, if you’re willing to look outside of the main lanes that people drive in, i.e., Big Four, Top 10, Top 100 firms.

Yeah. Great! So, John, one of the reasons CPA Life has grown like it has in the first year, and we’ve been very happy with the numbers we’ve seen, has been the quality of the guests you’ve had on. When I joined with you, I thought, well, I think you had maybe nine episodes in the can at that point, and I thought, man, how is a startup, you know, CPA podcast pulling in guests like this? We might be a little short on time to list all of them, but there’s kinda two in particular that I have in mind—the very first one, and the second most recent one.

So Tim Petrey of HD Growth Partners was with you for episode 1. As it turns out, he’s just announced an agreement between HD and a private equity firm, Ascend. You’ve, on other episodes, as I recall, and just in discussions we’ve had, you’ve expressed some misgivings about private equity and some strong opinions, but he made it pretty clear that the way they’ve arranged it seems at least from the outside looking in to be actually quite favorable. Employees will get vested ownership in the firm from very early on, kind of flipping the traditional accounting firm model process on its head, where you’re in there for decades, oftentimes, before you’re getting into a vested partnership role.

Yep.

But I’d still, I’d like to have you expand a little bit on just how you felt about your interview with Tim as well as linking kind of your rating of the importance of private equity as that continues to ramp up in the profession, and anything you think maybe firms need to look out for.

So Tim was my first conversation, but I just ask!

Fair enough!

You know, building my career with a sales mindset, and I think it’s one of the reasons why we’re as successful as we are as a firm, is I’ve tried to maintain the mindset but also get people that buy into the same mindset that in my dad’s wonderful, deep south, eloquent way of saying, “You don’t ask, you don’t get.”

So when I started the podcast—when I started looking at guests for the podcast, I should say—was summer of ’22. Accounting Today had just come out with their list of the top 100 firms in the country to work for. So I just went to the 50 small firms that were recognized as the best place to work and shot a message to the owner or managing partner and said, hey, this is who I am, this is what we’re doing, we’ve got this podcast that we’re starting. And, man, I would love to talk to you because there’s a reason that you are one of the best places to work, and that is really kind of the environment and culture that we’re trying to highlight. So let me know if you’re open to talking.

Yeah! Perfect.

And, you know, I had some good response from that. Had a lot of crickets, but, it’s sales. You know? It’s putting yourself out there asking a question, and some people are going to say okay, and some people are not going to respond, and then some are kind of in there in the middle. And still to this day, Justin, you know, one of the things that’s interesting is obviously we run a recruiting firm.

Yes.

So there’s always this either back of the mind question or just overt, they ask. And that is, you know, what does it cost? You know, do you want to fill our positions? That kind of thing. And it’s trying to get people to understand that, look, we’re not doing this for the financial reward to get you as a client. If a client comes out of the podcast, that’s great. Our desire is get the message out that there are some great stories and some wonderful options for people in this industry.

Yes.

We don’t need to continue to lose 85% of the people after you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 years in the industry to corporate America where they realize, you know, they’re going to be bored to tears or still working the same crazy hours.

So Tim was one of my first conversations, and over the course of the last year and a half that Tim and I have connected, being able to see the growth that they’ve gone through, being able to see that what this guy talked about is not just talk, it’s a walk, it’s a way of life, it’s a commitment, really kinda laid the foundation for that’s the type of leadership that we want to engage with on the podcast.

Nice, yes.

And that’s the type of leadership that we want to engage with as a customer where we’re a service provider. HD has done so many things right. And, obviously, you know, Tim will be also the first to say there’s so many things that we’ve done wrong, and gone away from.

Yeah, absolutely.

But that’s the way that you get better. You make mistakes. You go through some trial and error. I think one of the things that Tim and I talked about was just the mindset of, hey. We could always go back and do it the way we were doing it before, but if we don’t try anything new, then we’re just going to be the same old same old.

Yep. Spinning your wheels.

Absolutely. So being able to see that through Tim was wonderful. And then seeing the most recent announcement, them taking on a private equity partner. Again, just the ability to have the capital to grow the way that they want to grow and need to grow is huge. It’s significant. And, you know, again, I’m going to say this statement again, and it’s just a statement that I’ve embraced in my personal life, it’s a statement that we kinda raised our kids with and that I’ve brought into the work world. “Not wrong, just different.” Private equity isn’t wrong from my standpoint. It’s just different. I don’t know if I would do it.

Sure.

If a private equity firm approached me, I don’t know if I would do it. It’s because of some experience I had with a couple of firms that brought private equity money into the picture. Right. There is a ton of value that comes with that, but the flip side of that—I don’t want to say “but” because another mindset mantra that I have is everything that you say after the “but” negates what you said before. It doesn’t matter.

You’re right.

It’s kinda like, you know, hey, Justin. I’m sorry, “but”… well, no. You’re not really sorry.

Exactly.

You might as well not say you’re sorry. So I don’t want to say private equity is good, “but”… Private equity is good. Money coming in that allows you to do the things that you want and need to do is good. There is nothing bad about that.

Right.

The flip side of that is that nobody’s going to give you money without wanting to assert some control.

It’s not money for nothing like Dire Straits would say.

Exactly. Dire Straits made a lot of money on “Money for Nothing,” but the rest of us don’t.

Right!

So I would just, I mean, my only caution to anybody that’s looking at considering private equity money is, what are the strings that are attached to it? Because there are strings.

There always is.

Absolutely strings attached to it. And if those strings are strings that you can live with, and you believe outweigh, you know, the potential negative is not outweighed by the drastic good that it can deliver, then absolutely, take that step. Take that step. There are a lot of firms that do not want to align with a Top 100 firm. We talk to firms every single week that want to grow, need to grow, but don’t have the capital, and the last thing they want to do is be a part of a Top 50, Top 100 firm.

Yeah.

There’s a reason why they’ve been successful to this point with their environment, with their culture, with the reduction of turnover, with the growth of staff, with the retention of people, There’s a reason they’ve been successful and they know that they know that they know, and it’s stereotypically because the leadership came out of one of these environments—they know that when they merge into—and I think that that’s really an interesting term

“Merge into?” Yeah.

Yeah. Because let’s get something straight. And I, again, 32 startups and turnarounds, a big part of those were acquisition integrations. A part of my career, I was a part of the acquisition integration team for a staffing firm that went from right at about $45 million in revenue when I joined the company, to over $2 billion in revenue in a 7 year period.

Oh, man.

We did that through acquisition and private equity. Now you can call it a merger. But when a $250, $350 million, $2 billion firm buys your $4 million book of business, it’s not a merger, it is an acquisition. The name on the wall is going to change. The way you answer the phone’s going to change. Everything about your firm, for the most part, is going to change. That’s just the reality of it. And if you think it’s not, I don’t want to say it’s delusional, but it’s not reality.

Right.

It’s just not. That Top 20 firm that’s in New York or Raleigh, North Carolina, or Los Angeles, they’re not buying you because they just want your client base. They’re buying you for your resources, they’re buying you for your geographic footprint if they’re not already in your market. And, again, the name on the door is going to change, the name on the business cards is going to change, the way the leadership addresses things is going to change, the way that you bring people on and on board, that’s going to change—everything is going to change about the way that you do business.

So if you’re going to commit, commit with clear eyes, not starry eyes, seeing that money coming. Keep all the elements well and truly in mind as you make that decision.

Absolutely. Whether that is private equity, whether that’s a merger, an acquisition, wherever that money’s coming from, there’s going to be strings attached to it. And there’s a handful of firms that we’ve worked with that have taken on private equity money and it has been a great step in the right direction to them.

Mmm hmm, yeah!

Again, my only challenge and my only caution coming from the world that I came from is most of that money coming into the industry just like it did in the staffing and recruiting industry back in the late 90s and early 2000s, mid 2000s, that money was coming from firms that did not have a strong position in the recruiting and staffing industry. So, understanding that we didn’t have tangible assets, we didn’t have equipment, we didn’t have inventory, we didn’t have any of those things. What we had was, we had relationships. And when numbers are not being met, in the manner that they expect numbers to be met, well, if you don’t have a plant that you can close, if you don’t have a product line that you can sell off if your largest expense is people, the way that you’re going to have to cut is people.

Yeah.

That was kind of frustrating for me because again, stereotypically, most firms run on a calendar year end, we ran on a calendar year end at the two firms that I was with that took on money. Calendar year end means November, December. So, yeah, typically, there’s a phone call that came in November, December that said, hey, we need to let 22 people go in your region. And here’s who they are. Now you need to call them and let them go.

Wow.

And that just was never fun. But, you know, there were some positive things that came out of it. We were able to grow. We were able to leverage, you know, where we were doing well, and grow those product lines because we had the money and the capital to do that.

Right. But it’s not a panacea, bottom line.

No, there’s—every choice we make has a consequence to it. Good and bad. You just need to step into it with open eyes.

Great thoughts. And the other guest I wanted to talk about, and I love the synergy here, the second most recent guest you’ve had on, you’ve mentioned him, Randy Crabtree: He was just named one of Accounting Today’s Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting, which, he wasn’t at the time that you set up the interview with him, unlike Tim, being on an Accounting Today list. And Tim made his announcement on Randy’s show just a week ago as we’re as we’re speaking or sometime this week, I don’t know somewhere in there. So that was an interesting little coincidence too. A nice full circle kind of thing.

You and Randy, especially Randy, his energy is just palpable, and you guys were playing that off of each other quite a bit. It was a great conversation, and you did a two parter, and that’s been the hallmark of of the podcast really in the first season is how many two part conversations you’ve had because there’s so much good stuff for the guests to share that you just can’t get through it all in one episode.

Yep.

You did focus in one particular part on corporate culture and making it your business to know your people, demonstrate you care about them as human beings. You’re going to talk about your Talent + Advisory Model a little bit later and how you integrate that into the plan. But just sticking with Randy for now, that and that survey mentioned earlier, one of the other answers that was given by the survey respondents said they didn’t like public accounting, just generally speaking, and that was 22%, and then 18% gave some other answer. I imagine even some of that other answer, 18%, was probably kind of “I also don’t like public accounting,” but maybe they were more specific—the atmosphere, the culture, just like that’s been their office experience, that sort of thing.

Mmm hmm.

And that’s why they want to get out. So talking to people as you do in the recruiting space, how much are you hearing those kinds of sentiments, and what kind of advice would you give—and and certainly any that you heard from Randy or other people you’ve talked to—would you give to firms so that they can stand out in that respect because Tri-Merit is a really good example.

Randy—I’ll have to say this, Justin—every single podcast episode that I’ve had, there has been at least one to two nuggets of gold that I’ve walked away with.

Absolutely.

I think that all of us in our lives, I won’t just say careers, but in our lives, we are an amalgamation of the people that we interact with, that we talk to, that’s so into us. There’s a nugget here. We get a nugget there. We get—and we take those things and it makes us who we are, prayerfully better than we were, going into that. Randy said something in our conversation that I have held onto, and I’ve used several times in talking to other clients. And the fact that Randy gets an email every time a new hire starts and has a conversation with that person. I don’t want to speak out of turn—I don’t remember if it’s within their first day, but I know it’s within their first week. And it is not a conversation about systems and processes and software and how we do taxes. It’s not about that. It’s about, who are you? Your family, your kids, your spouse, your hobbies, the entire mindset of John Garrett’s, you know, What’s Your “And”?

Randy’s favorite person to reference on his show, John Garrett.

Well, I reference John a lot too!

Yes, you do, yeah!

There’s so many things that come out of what John does, what Randy does, that I think really resonate with where we are today in the culture that we’re in. I’ll just real quickly, kind of a story about that: When I stepped back into the workforce after two years of being home with my family, I was interviewing for jobs. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know if I was going to stay doing consulting, doing my own thing, go to work for another firm. But I had an interview with a regional recruiting and staffing firm to step into their organization as VP of Operations.

Okay.

And my last interview was with the CEO of the firm. And I’ve had three interviews at this point. He’s the last interview. We get to a point in the interview where he says, you know, I know that you took off the, you know, the last couple of years and, you know, you did that to stay home with your family and be a part of their lives. Would you do it again? And I said to him, I would do it every day of the week and twice on Sunday. And I said to him, that was the first time I said it—it was something that God just put on my heart at that point—but I said to him what I said a little while ago, and that is I was able to put fingerprints on my kids’ hearts that will never ever be scrubbed off, and that is priceless to me.

I then took his business card—it was laying on the table. This goes back to What’s Your “And”? And his name was Ricky. I said, Ricky, here’s what I need you to understand: If you hire me this title right here that would be VP of Operations—and I was pointing at the title on his card as CEO—I said, this title right here that’ll be VP of Operations, I need you to understand. That’s not who I am. That’s what I do.

Right.

And I’m going to do that as good or better than anyone you’ve ever had work for you, as long as you understand, that’s not who I am. Who I am is Lacey and Alisa’s daddy and Cindy’s husband. That’s who I am. And Randy and John Garrett—they get that.

They sure do.

And the fact that Randy takes 15, 20, 30 minutes in the first week of every new hire and wants to find out What’s Your “And”? Who are you? That, to me, is priceless. Hey, anyone that’s listening, you want to know why Randy has only lost, like, one to two people in the last 10, 15 years?

Yeah.

That’s a pretty simple thing you can do.

There it is.

Is it the Pandora’s Box of perfect answers that butterflies and rainbows fly out of? No. You gotta do a whole lot more, but that’s a great start, man. That is a great start. Those kind of things create a culture that people will go through walls for you for. Because when you do that, because that’s who you are at the heart, you do that because it’s more than just playing notes on a page. And I steal that from a guest that we’ve got coming up in an episode—he and I were talking about the fact that he played music growing up, and he finally had a teacher come to him one day that said, hey, you play those notes on the page so well. I want you to learn though to play music from the heart.

Yeah.

When you start doing those things from the heart, not because it’s just the right thing to do, but it’s because who you are, people know the difference. People absolutely know the difference. If you want to start talking about impacting your culture, that’s what Randy does. That’s what John teaches people to do. Those are the things that people can do to impact their firms. And those are the things that we absolutely love to help people uncover in our Talent + Advisory Model.

Thanks for joining us for part one of our look back on the first season of CPA Life. Be sure to subscribe to the show, leave a five star rating, and visit our website at CPALifePodcast.com to catch part two, as John continues as a guest on his own show. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life.