Technology and Flexibility: Keys to the Profession with Chris Papin

CPA Life’s 50 episode milestone marks the beginning of a conversation between John Randolph and Chris Papin, owner and founder of Papin CPA in Edmond, Oklahoma. Discussing the transition from traditional to modern CPA practices, Chris prioritizes sustainability, employee well-being, and client needs. He shares insights into his firm’s growth, innovation in technology, and the challenges of balancing technical skills with client-facing roles. Looking to flexibility as a way to bridge those areas, Chris has looked to unorthodox schedules, remote work, and offshoring as solutions as he’s overseen his payroll doubling in size. Don’t miss part 1 of this two part discussion on how embracing modern practices and technological advancements can help you foster a successful firm that facilitates fulfilling careers for your people.

Transcript:

Hey folks, thank you for joining us here today for another episode of the CPA Life Podcast. The podcast that shows you that yes, you can have a life and be in public accounting. We spend time on each one of our episodes talking to firm owners, industry leaders, in the profession, who are really passionate about building more modern-minded, future-focused, employee-centric CPA firms. Firms that are not just profitable, but they’re not doing it at the expense of the lives of their people.

And today we are joined by Chris Papin, who is the owner and founder of Papin CPA in Edmond, Oklahoma. And we’ll talk about Oklahoma a little bit because we’re in the middle of football season, so we have to talk about Oklahoma. Not only is Chris a CPA, but he’s also a JD as well as he holds life, accident, and health insurance licenses. Chris, welcome to the show.

Happy to be here. It’s fun to talk on topics you’re passionate about and you try to live towards. So, thank you for the opportunity.

Absolutely. We’ve had some time to share a little bit before recording, so there are a lot of things we’re going to try to unpack and uncover just a little bit. You know, we usually like to dig into your firm, what you guys have done to build out a practice that truly caters not just to your clients and their needs but to your team members as well. We’ll typically spend the first few minutes of the show, though, learning a little bit more about where you came from and how you’ve ended up where you are today. So, give us a little bit of history of, you know, the Chris Papin life and where you started and kind of where you’re at today.

Well, the Cliff Notes version is going to be, mom and dad are entrepreneurs, small business owners. I grew up in that environment, so I don’t really know any other way.

Nice.

During school, there’s an element in there where I was studying tax and accounting work. I kind of had a passion to go down that road, and realized there are elements that we’re skipping, why? The professor was like, oh, that’s all legal stuff. It has to be done by the attorneys. And I didn’t know it was going to lead me to where I am now, but at the moment, I thought, well, that’s dumb. Why do you need two people to do this? That’s not that hard. Fast forward, here we are. So that’s kind of where the law firm came from. The insurance license is solely a creature of client need—a client asked one day, can you do this? And I was like, well, let me get your guy. And he’s like, no, you misunderstood me. Can you do this? I was like, well, give me a few weeks. So here we are.

It’s amazing how in the early iterations and stages of building a business, you look at the solution, and so many times the solution is, well, let me just put more weight in my bag and carry that. But obviously as you start to build a practice, you start to have to determine, okay, what do I hold on to? What do I delegate? What do I train people in? So talk to me about kind of where the firm started: Did you work for another CPA firm or law firm before and then kind of go out on your own? And what’s been the iteration or growth from that to today?

Yeah, so kind of first job out of school was at a shop similar to mine. Still collaborate with folks that are there, think the world of them. There became a point where I just kind of wanted to do it on my own, do it inside of my bubble, had, you know, that family entrepreneurial spirit. So the vision for me is not that I’m a multi-business owner, it’s that I’m representing clients. You know, you think to like mission, vision, value statements. Kind of when I put together the firm, it was, how can we be proactive for clients when you’re always chasing stuff they don’t want to deal with?

So we kind of came up with this approach where we want to be an advisory-first firm that serves not only in the interest of the clients but also the team and the firm. So those are each equally bearing components inside of there, which I think speaks to the mission and the voice you’re trying to get out to folks. It’s not always about chasing a client. If a client can’t behave like a business owner, go find another firm. Because we got other folks that have good, meaningful conversations, we want to have an intentional conversation forward with. As I left, I was trying to build whatever I thought that model might be. Of course, you know, step one is get out, figure it out, make sure you’ve got a viable business. And then up to about COVID was kind of one path: I wanted to be tech-savvy, but we caught a lot of resistance. Adoption from clients was always, well, can’t you just print that and send it to me? And that was the norm to some extent.

Yes.

COVID hit. And real story, a woman, pre-COVID, “I’m not going to do Zoom,” you know, we’ve all heard this where they come in hot and belittle your technology, called us during COVID and said, “I’m so grateful that you’re thinking of my health. I appreciate you adopting all this technology.” I’m like, I had it three months ago too. But that’s where we saw traction and we’ve pushed and run. I started as me, kind of that pre-COVID window was about four team members, now we’re up to about eight. And we’re trying to make sure that we affiliate keeping those three components in mind where there’s not only a healthy environment for me and my team but also for the client, and if we talk to the right people, everything takes care of itself.

Yep.

It’s not a real good marketing strategy and no, that doesn’t say who’s my ideal client, but over time, the value system usually cultivates itself. And that’s where we’ve really had to focus over the years to make sure we’re trying to tell our story as best we know how.

Well, I think that in the marketplace that we’re in today, the CPA firm owners are, I don’t want to go as far as saying you can almost pick and choose who you work with, but you can almost pick and choose who you work with. Everybody is in need in today’s marketplace of a good accountant.

Yes.

Some may realize that, some may not realize that until they’re in trouble, but, you know, I think that when COVID hit and especially when the announcement comes out immediately of PPP loans, and you’ve got people at that point who have either been DIYing their accounting or, you know, maybe their wife or husband or a grandkid has been doing something in Quicken for them, they’re now in a position where they’ve got to go apply for a loan and they have no earthly idea what a P&L looks like, let alone how to put one together. I think that was kind of a big eye-opener for a lot of small businesses that, hey, there’s some value in having this guy in my corner on a consistent basis.

And so I think that a lot of businesses saw the value of accountants, and that has just driven even more so over the last four years, the need for solid people like yourself and solid firms like you guys. So when you look at clients being able to align those values of what’s best for our people, but also what’s best for our clients—I think I saw a post today on LinkedIn. This will air a little bit later, but it’s the 18th of September. And somebody was posting on LinkedIn the other day about, you know, I had clients that I was calling at nine o’clock at night on the 16th saying, I need your paperwork. What do I do with those clients? And the resounding cry from other firm owners was “fire them.”

I agree!

You don’t need that headache. And your people darn sure don’t need that headache.

You know, there’s some grace for the right circumstances. So I don’t want to come in too hot on everybody, but if the business owner’s behavior is only to care when they need to care, it creates an emergency for you. And I’m not in that business. I chose not to be a firefighter or an EMT for a reason.

We’ve got a client that we worked with a couple of years ago and they’ve been in business for about seven to eight years. And when we started talking about some of the differences in their firm, one of the things that he said is, well, one of the big differences, John, is we don’t deal with any clients. We don’t bring on any clients that are behind on their taxes. And I said, what, okay, help me understand that. And he said, you know, I worked for 13 years for two other firms. And of those 13 years, 10 were in some kind of managerial capacity. And when I went back and I thought about those 10 years, about the client fights that I had, the client disagreements, the client arguments about paying your bill, the client arguments about getting data to us, the one thing that almost every one of those people had in common was that they were always behind on their taxes. So I just decided when I started my own firm, if you’re behind on your taxes coming in the door, we’re not going to work with you. There’s enough headaches we’re going to see coming or that we’re never going to see coming. So the ones that we potentially can see coming, let’s just not deal with them. Cut them off, walk away.

And I think there’s a lot of peace in the process when you start talking about the mental health of your people. Whenever you as a firm owner can talk to your people about the fact and not just talk, but actually demonstrate to your people, hey, you matter to me.

There’s always something on the back end that’s going to pop up. And even with good intentions, we omit or we forget, or there’s something. Why do you want to add to that fire? Now, if you are a back tax specialty firm and that is your jam, go do it, because there are systems and there are folks that are excellent at it. But I’m with you, it’s hard to be advisory and looking forward is the way we kind of like to describe that when you’re constantly looking backwards. F1 drivers do not have a rearview mirror in the middle of their dash. They barely have these side wing mirrors, so they can go forward faster. And I think we have to align ourselves like that F1 driver. Let’s look forward, just like you described. If you got an anchor back there of a big giant tax bill, people tend to make decisions differently. How can I plan for you, if you’re always going to say no? Let’s just skip that exercise—it’d be cheaper and a lot more fun!

You know, one of the things that we talked about before we started recording was the makeup of your staff. And one of the things that I heard you say without saying it is embracing and understanding in the marketplace today with as hard as it is to acquire talent, that you guys really have embraced, you know, what I would refer to as a talent stack, if you will, where it’s not just, these are the kinds of people that we’re going to hire, and this is a place we’re going to put them. You’ve got core employees. You’ve got some people that may not work what you and I, and most of the world, consider a full-time, eight to five schedule. You’ve got some people that possibly work contract for you, you’ve got some people also that are overseas. It’s attacking the approach from a lot of different angles. Has that always been a mindset that you’ve had? If so, how did it come about, and why? If it’s something you’ve embraced and adopted recently, what was the driver behind that?

When I started, I wanted the firm to be virtual in all cases. A piece of that is because I’m interested in those things, so it’s fun. A piece of that is I envisioned scenarios where I would be able to travel, and I wanted the ability to knock out a few things and stay an extra day. That same purpose is also a marketing tool: You can recruit and retain talent. You can also communicate with clients, you know, hey, I’m wherever I see it. I hear it. I’ve got it to my team, but I can’t get it to you because there are too many moving pieces for me to handle in an airport on a laptop.

And I think when you start to pull these layers apart and kind of pack all this into a neat little suitcase, if you will, since we’re running with a travel analogy, other people behave the same way and they see kind of what’s going on. So the more I leaned in, the more I started to see potential opportunity. And yes, I get grief from some of my colleagues where, you know, they’re like, you have two people doing one job. They’re both part-time. I mean, don’t you have to cater your review? And at the end of the day, if we meet a firm standard, the review should be the same review no matter what. Yes, I might be managing two personalities or two PTO calendars, but that stuff’s easy to me. You know, you set up the system, let it run.

I also figured out, kind of happenstance, that there are some really talented folks that aren’t able to commit to an eight to five because they have family obligations. Maybe dropping off kids or picking up kids or managing school schedules, or, hey, I just want to be available in the middle of the day in case something pops up. So embracing remote, embracing different time zones—it took me a little while to get to offshoring, but once I fully understood what was going on, and one of the beauties is their workday is while we’re asleep. So stuff can get done while you’re asleep and it’s in your inbox again, and there’s no real lag time.

All of that, I kind of went down a path and I knew I was on a path, so I don’t want to say it was unintentional, but I didn’t know what the end result would be, but I was willing to try. And then as we started to see more and more and more benefits, it became the conversation piece. And to your point, I don’t really care where or how as long as we’re meeting our professional obligations. At the end of the day, that’s really what the client wants. They want an answer to their question, not just an answer. So how do we embrace the system, tools, technology, people, diversity of people, all of the different components, to achieve that goal? And I mean, I’m just a guy so I can’t speak to all my clients in the way that I need to. I need other voices on the team to help me do that.

Yep, yep, and sometimes those voices are not going to fit into the stereotypical—especially in the world we live in today—they’re not going to fit into that stereotypical box that maybe you were in and I was in when we started our careers 10, 15, 20 years ago, where it was in an office, eight to five, punching the clock, so to speak. And it’s just a different world that we live in today. And there’s times that we, I hear a lot of times from people, especially that are my age, a little older. You know, hey, we’ve got a generation of people that don’t want to work. And I just don’t think that’s the case. I think that the generation that is being referred to when people say, we’ve got a generation that doesn’t want to work, I think that generation recognized a whole lot earlier in life, what’s important than I did and probably you did. They realized that in their 20s and early 30s that, hey, our days are numbered. And I don’t want to spend the majority of those working 80 hours a week, Monday through Friday and Saturdays in an office while I’m also commuting an hour, hour and a half each way. So, I think that the ability to diversify your employment pool—from a recruiting and a talent attraction standpoint, has that made that process, and when I say easy, that’s relative because obviously the market’s tough for everybody, but has it made it a little easier for you? Because I would assume the pool that you’re fishing in is a bigger pool.

It is. And you know, the sarcastic answer here is people are never easy. But the truth of the matter is, since we’ve adopted this technology, every hiring decision we’ve made, our first choice has said yes. And I think that speaks volumes in the sense of, we want the flexibility. I mean, that’s probably one of the chief things is folks are looking for in new jobs. They want more flexibility, they want the work-life balance. Where your comment earlier about people aren’t willing to work, there are still some people that aren’t willing to work. I fully agree with that. But there are also people that are willing to work. And as long again, meet the standard, you know, not just a professional liability malpractice standard. We don’t get paid by the client if we don’t deliver across the board regardless of whether you’re on a salary or not, if you don’t deliver, you’re getting fired. That’s kind of the mindset we take to the whole team, which translates back really well. And I think you probably see it as you’re talking with folks too, because they’re saying, I can deliver all of this stuff in half a day. Why do I have to be there the whole day?

Absolutely. And everybody’s wired a little bit different. We homeschooled our kids. I’ve got daughters that are 16 months apart. My oldest daughter is still to this day, they’re both in their 20s now, they’re grown young women, but my oldest daughter is the one that would look and say, okay, where are the lines, and how close can I get to them? My youngest daughter was, where are the lines, and how far away am I supposed to stay away? There’s two different personalities. So my oldest daughter, she would easily squeeze, you know, three hours of schoolwork into an eight-hour day. She was great at that. If it’s a good idea today, it’ll be a great idea tomorrow. So it would take her a while to get it done. My other daughter, she was up at the crack of dawn, she would knock her schoolwork out in two hours, because she wanted to go play. She wanted to have fun.

And I think that when you create an environment and a culture that’s focused on results and understanding that, hey, we may have somebody, like you said, that can give us an amazing four hours, five hours, or even eight hours, but they’re going to do it from four in the morning until 12 noon. Then they’re unplugged. Great, let’s figure out a way to make it work. And I think that type of a mindset, from what we see from a recruiting perspective, there are so many more options as a leader that you can embrace when you have that mindset, and it tends to transcend across the organization, and it begins to attract like-minded people. Do you see that, have you seen that, in the growth of your firm from four to eight people?

There’s a technical element that has to lay in, especially tax accounting, legal, like, you know, you kind of need to know how to spell debit and credit. Things like that are helpful. But you’re spot on. And this is kind of where that value statement comes from. Like our interviewing process is a little bit different. We’re going to do a lot of stuff virtual. We’re going to do a lot of stuff in person. We want it to be a courtship, to some extent—both sides need to make a decision here. And I think when you embrace the human element, that’s why I say people are hard is because, we’re going to do interviews and both sides are going to say, yeah, not a fit.

Yeah.

But we want to invest the time and the people to make sure that’s the correct thing to do, because you spend way too much time with your work family to not like them inside of any organization, different personalities fit in different roles. I tease, like my paralegal, she thinks in words and colors, I think in numbers. If it’s on the left, it must be on the right. You know, it’s just me in Accounting Land. When I flip over to the legal side, I can get into the words mode, but it’s still got an accounting spin to it. So, looking through those different disciplines, and particularly if you just focus on, you know, what’s the role I’m hiring?

A lot of accountants get picked on. You see this all the time. Like they’re the greatest personality, as long as they’re the only person in the room, because they want to click the buttons and they just want to do this stuff and they want to send an email. They don’t want to talk to you. They don’t want anything else. But oftentimes the clients, all they want to do is talk about it. They don’t care about other stuff. So you’ve got to start striking those balances and recognize those differences. I mean, you live in people world all day, every day. And that’s where I think partnering with folks to make sure that that decision is healthy for both sides is important.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that again, what we’ve started to see in the marketplace is people are starting to understand that, you know, hey, while it may be great that I find this one person that can do the debit-credit side of things, but can also do the conversing and strategy and planning and have that engaging conversation with the client, while it’s a perfect world if I can get that one person, it may be a situation where I find somebody that is that debit-credit person, that is that person that thinks, you know, right column, left column, but then I’ve got to find somebody that can be the strategy piece of this conversation. And if that’s what I have to do, then that’s what I have to do.

And we’ve started to see more firms kind of embrace a little bit of a mindset that, hey, we’ve got great people on this side of the equation. We need to balance that out with some people that can do these things over here.

There’s nothing wrong with staffing one job with two people, because there are two different disciplines oftentimes. And to your point, to go find that unicorn, how many do you have on your roster that can sign up for me right now today? I’ll hire them all.

Yeah.

Because they don’t exist!

Yeah, exactly. They don’t grow on trees. They absolutely do not grow on trees. We’ve got a client that we’re working right, with right now in New York, and we’re looking for a senior manager director that can become a partner in, in a year to 18 months when that partner retires. And it’s a high net worth planning strategy group. And one of the things they said is, look, We have got some amazing technical people in that group. So if you find somebody that is like a compliance guru, that’s great. We don’t know if we can use that person right now. What we need, we need somebody that can sit across the table from our clients and have those business focused, personal focused conversations about how are you running your business? What are we doing from a trust in the state standpoint and discuss, you know, things from a people level. So, you know, again, I think that most firms that we see are starting to embrace it. Hey, that might be two people in this role, not just one. How can we make this work?

So, we talked beforehand, one of the things that you made a comment about, and I want to dig into this a little bit, because I think it was an interesting way you put it: delegation as a way of elevation. And we’re talking about, you know, leveraging your talent, and AI, technology, things along those lines. Tell me a little bit about where your mindset is when you say that, and where you go to with that.

So, there’s probably two or three layers deep. And, you know, for the audience’s sake, I don’t want to get lost in the weeds, so you may have to reel me back a little, but the thing I think about first is technology, AI—there’s a difference between automation and artificial intelligence. And embracing tools are going to be essential going forward, especially if AI and the language learning models play out in the way that I think they should. I mean, my sarcastic answer is, why can’t I tell my device, you know, hey, insert name here, can you do the reconciliation in QuickBooks for me? I guarantee you there’s steps away from doing it, but in my feeble mind right now, nothing connects and it won’t do that. But we’re close.

Well, that means the person that’s doing the reconciliation now needs to find a different discipline because they’re going to have to review that, or they’re going to have to have the conversation. And I kind of looked through the lens of, I think technology is going to do analytical exceptionally well. It is not going to human interface very well, no different than when you ask questions of your devices and like, well, I don’t really know what you mean by that. You have to ask the right question. People are going to have to serve as the translators in between. And that’s where we’ve got to upskill our team. And that’s usually where the team has the most fun. They’re impacting people’s lives, they’re fielding questions. Sometimes it’s, you know, somebody’s barking orders at them, but most of the time when it’s a two way dialogue, that’s the most rewarding component of the job.

But when you don’t have the Profit & Loss in front of you to answer what the question is coming at you, you know, client’s always saying how much tax do I owe? And you’re going, how am I supposed to know? You haven’t given me your bank statements for the last six months because you locked us out on the password change? You know, it’s dumb stuff like that that gets in the way. If you can clear all of that, it’s a meaningful conversation about, hey, your tax liability looks like you’re prepaid, you’re green light, spend all the money you want, or red light, you owe a lot of money and I’m not sure you know it yet. But that’s what the client desires.

There’s this technological element, the other extreme is there’s this people element, and this delegation and elevation concept sits right in between because the client is not going to log into QuickBooks to look at the profit and loss, they’re going to ask you the question. Well, over time, they’re going to be able to ask AI that question. And ideally, we as firm owners will have tools that can help accelerate that knowledge. What do you do with the answer? That’s where the people need to sit, because they’re not going to know what to do. They’re going to know there’s three options. They may want to do option number three, but they’re relying on us to know how to do option number three. So interesting in that sense.

And then the delegation element of this is, if you don’t get your people exposure now, you can’t just magically say, oh hey, Junior Accountant, go represent the most complex client I’ve got. There’s no chance. You’ve got to give them exposure. So delegating strategic tasks. This is something we talked about too, being intentional with what you delegate and why. And then explaining, we’re learning internally that we do a really good job with what we call a Tell-Teach-Tell Model. But there needs to be another step involved. There’s like a tell-teach-tell, and then validate.

Because sometimes, you know, I’ve got these colors behind me. You know, if I say orange or red, which one am I talking about? If you see a different color than I do, that’s going to impact the end result. So that’s where that validate concept has come in. We need to realign and make sure that what we’ve taught is in line with expectation on delivery. So how do you get that in your folks’ hands? How do you teach them the next step? It’s hard. And I am no expert at it, but I’m the first to say, I’m going to start, I’m going to try, because I’m going to get left behind if I don’t.

Thanks for joining us for part one of John Randolph’s conversation with Chris Papin of Papin CPA. Part two will air October 2nd. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform so you don’t miss it or any other episodes, and go to CPALifePodcast.com for show notes and more. We’ll see you next time on CPA Life.

Important Links:

Papin CPA

Chris Papin on LinkedIn

Technology and Flexibility: Keys to the Profession with Chris Papin

Transcript:

Important Links:

About the Guest: