The Need for Progressive Vision with David Hartley

Host John Randolph continues his conversation with David Hartley on Episode 35 of CPA Life. They delve into ditching billable hours in favor of value billing, the potential for AI to vastly improve efficiency within CPA firms, and the importance of recruiting the next generation through values that appeal to them. Innovation is a key focus according to David, host of the But Who’s Counting? podcast, who has plenty of insight into what’s coming for firms around the country and the globe and what firm leaders need to harness now to prepare for the future.

Thanks for tuning in to CPA Life, where we now rejoin part 2 of the conversation between host John Randolph, and David Hartley of Anders CPAs + Advisors. We pick up their discussion as they focus on value billing, technology, the hiring pipeline, and more. Welcome to CPA Life.

I’d much rather decide where we want to be and be intentional about the steps that we need to take to get there, as opposed to just, you know, hoping that sort of the audit and tax course that we’ve ridden for a hundred years, that that’s going to, you know, continue.

Yep.

Now that being said, those businesses are doing really well right now—there’s a lot of tax work, a lot of audit work that’s out there. Not a lot of people coming in. We can talk about the pipeline stuff if you want, but that is the, you know, you’ve gotta look at those realities, you’ve gotta grapple with them—every business, every firm is at a different stage of maturity. You need to look at which stage you’re in today, where do you want to be, and how are you going to get there?

When we talk about culling clients, talk about looking at your client base, I think one of the things that dovetails into that a little bit is, again, something that I think you’re pretty passionate about, and that is the entire billable hour concept. Give me kind of your thoughts on that because again, that’s one of those hot topics in the industry. There are firms that are running a hybrid model, there are firms that are completely ditching it, but I think if you pack a hundred people in a room, whether they are employees or firm owners, and you say, hey, top three frustrations that you deal with day in and day out? I think at least 99 out of 100, somewhere in their top three is going to be timesheets.

Yeah. It is problematic. And even as your firm gets bigger and as you get more diverse services, like right now within Anders, we have six or seven different business models that are part of the firm, so it’s getting harder and harder for one thing to fit everybody. But in general, what I would say is I do believe in tracking time, because people need to understand, and we need to look at what’s happening and where are things happening in the business, where I sort of disconnect from the chargeable hour, is when we use that to bill. I think we need to understand the inputs and what it’s taking us to get the outputs that we’re creating. That’s where I’m a huge believer of value billing.

In terms of sort of our level of effort, that’s important for us internally, but in terms of the value that we create and therefore what we should charge for it, it’s basically irrelevant. And I think where this is going to come into play, and if your firm’s not grappling with this, you need to, because you will have less experienced, younger professionals that come into your firm, that solve problems very differently, and they solve them using technology. When we talk about AI, a lot of times, one of the things that I say is that it’s basically solving problems you didn’t know you had.

That’s a good point.

Because in the past, here’s the problem, oh, I know exactly what I do, and it takes me six hours to do it. And so you’re going to go and you’re going to do those six hours and you’re going to say, hey. It’s great. It didn’t take me 10, it took me six.

Right.

Somebody else that knows how to use different tools—and these AI technologies are pretty amazing—they’re going to come in and do that same thing in 30 minutes. So the question is, if you took your six hours times 250 bucks an hour, and you were going to charge that client $1,500. Now you’ve got somebody that comes in and does it, you review it, and it’s done in two hours. So do you only charge the client $500? And if you don’t start to disconnect those things—to where you’re recognizing value is different from the effort that we put into it—if you’re not doing that, then that can create a real issue because those efficiencies, what will happen is that rather than you keeping that, because you’re making the investment, you’re training your employees, basically, you’re just going to pass it straight to your clients. Because you’re going to charge them $500 instead of $1,500, and there’s a $1,000 that if you’re following value billing, you would have billed, that you didn’t because you were still following time based billing methods. And that, I think, is going to be the big disruptor over the next couple of years. Because that’s where things are just going to—it’s going to blow up the number of hours times a rate is how much your bill is. That’s not going to work when we start having a lot of these efficiencies coming into the profession over the next couple years.

That’s a great point, because there’s technology that is coming into play now that can get to the end result of what we’re trying to get to, a whole lot faster than somebody, you know, digging into 35 pages of an Excel spreadsheet to get to that one answer.

Yep. The other part of that challenge is that chargeable hours are good, and you want them to be high. Really? That’s what we want? Because don’t we want somebody that could do a six hour task in 30 minutes? How do you reward someone, and certainly not punish them, because they know how to get to an outcome quicker than somebody that doesn’t? Does the person who puts in the six hours, is that better? Because that person put in the six hours, as opposed to somebody who was smarter and knew how to use the tool and got to the same outcome, but did it a whole lot more efficiently? That’s the kind of thing that as a firm, you have to figure out how are you going to embrace this, how do your systems need to change, how do your policies need to change to reflect this reality?

And I think that’s part of the power shift of CPA firms. You know, now I’ve got three decades of experience. I expect I’m going to be the guy on top that you know, knows everything. What I’m finding is that these folks that are coming in, that are straight out of school, they got trained in Python, you know, a lot of different, you know, Power BI, other different tools that they come in and we’ll look at the same problem, they’ll solve it faster than I do, because they know the tools better than I do. They know the capabilities. Things that I don’t even know are possible, they not only know are possible, they know how to do it. And so that’s where it’s kind of the power is shifting a little bit, where a lot of these lesser experienced professionals, because they haven’t done things the same way for 30 years, they solve problems differently.

You, as a firm, need to figure out, how do we embrace that? How do we not have that person that has these ideas that knows how to use these tools come in and get frustrated because nobody’s going to allow them to use the tools and is not encouraging innovation within the firm. That could be the death knell for your best talent, because they will come in, get frustrated, and they will be right out the door to a firm that will let them, or embrace, obviously doing it safely and securely, but will embrace doing things in a different way than you’ve always done.

It’s been interesting, the number of people that we’ve seen on the recruiting side of our business over the last six months, that in the last 12 to 18 months have gotten a master’s degree, you know, pursuing their certification, getting their hours, but their bachelor’s degree is in data analytics, tax analytics, learning how to manipulate data a whole better and a whole lot faster, a lot of the tools that you’re talking about. And there’s been a very large number of them that there was a young lady we spoke to about two months ago, I asked her what drove her decision to get her degree in data analytics, and she worked for a Big Four firm. And she said, well, I went to them and talked about tuition reimbursement and they said that they would reimburse my tuition if I got my degree in finance or accounting or tax, but if I got it in data analytics, they would pay up front for my MBA, If I got it in data analytics. Well, that’s…

Yeah, certainly a persuasive offer and something worth considering.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that embracing those things is going to be critical for firm owners that right now are strictly looking at the dollar value of the out.

Yeah. I think it’s going to be a big difference. I think it’s going to play itself in over the next couple of years. You know, we kind of have some informal bets in different parts of the firm of when are we going to see this automation? What percentage of our tax returns in busy season 2025 will be done using AI? What about 2026? You know, kind of what are those levels? I do think it’s coming, I do think it’s significant, and I think all firms, I would encourage to identify those people who are your innovators, who will try things that are different, that will raise your hand and say, I’ve got a better way to do this. Can we try it? That the answer is not no, get your work done. The answer is yeah, let’s give that a go!

Like a great example for smaller firms to get exposed to some of this stuff is just start using an AI notetaker. There’s probably a dozen really good ones that are out on the market. Have one of your younger professionals go out, do a software selection, evaluate, you know, these different solutions, come back with a recommendation and then implement it. So you just invite this AI notetaker to your meetings, and then, start sharing the output with people within the firm that are in those meetings, so they can see the power of how it does a transcript, how it does so much more than just recording a meeting. It creates summaries, it creates insights, it creates to-do lists. And it’s like, holy cow. And so it’s a very easy, tangible way and you didn’t have to have a note taker sit in the meeting to take notes. You’ve got a great record, and then people are starting to change. Well, maybe I don’t need to go to that meeting and spend an hour. Maybe I can, you know, get caught up on that in ten minutes as opposed to it taking an hour.

So once again, how you use your time, how smart you are, how wise you are about where you’re investing your time, especially during times where we get too much work, that can be a huge benefit. And I think a lot of people will see some good returns on that and really validate the thinking that, oh, wow, this is real. If it can do this, let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this. Get that journey started for your firm.

What else can I do kind of mindset. It’s interesting you use that as an example—one of the things that I challenged our employees with last year was, everybody brings some new technology to the table and at the end of the year, we will all decide which one we like the best, and somebody’s going to get a nice bonus for that.

That’s a great idea.

The one that won that was somebody that brought in the fourth quarter, an AI notetaker to the table that’s designed for our industry. And the person that was the most opposed to it—me, the oldest guy in the firm—because I’m used to talking to people in an interview, and typing a lot of notes. And I got a questionnaire format that I follow, and I was concerned, how was that data going to come back to me? Well, it only took two or three interviews of me not having to take any notes. Just have a conversation and literally within minutes get an email that is, like you said, a summary and paraphrased. I told him how I wanted it laid out. And what’s interesting, you know, when you talk about David, what else can we do with this? I’m sure that just like in my business, there’s things that someone can do with that data, other than, hey, here’s a summary of your meeting.

We spend, again, on the recruiting side of our business, at least probably an hour to an hour and a half after every conversation with a candidate putting together a summary of that person, that everyone can use if we present that person to one of our clients. Well, AI now does that for us. Now we tweak it, and we may have to change a couple of things, but we are literally saving somewhere in the neighborhood if I figured out between 10 and 12 hours every single week per person.

You start doing the math on that—that’s a pretty big number.

Yes!

And that’s that’s the kind of thing that, okay, now you’ve had a win. Now you want your next win. What else is your team going to come up with? And, you know, to your credit, you admit you were the guy that didn’t want to do it. But somebody brought it to the table, you saw how it worked, and you learned, and you realized that is a better way. I will embrace it. That openness has to be there. You’ve gotta be willing to try new and different things. And not everything will work. Some will stink, and that’s okay. You just gotta recognize when they stink and move on and find the thing that is the right thing.

Absolutely.

But I think that mindset of being open and actually looking for new and better ways to do things, I think is absolutely critical.

We’ve talked about two or three different things here, and I want to touch on one last thing, which I think dovetails into all of those points that we’ve discussed, and that is the pipeline issue.

Okay.

Getting people into the pipeline, keeping people in the industry—it is a huge barrier that firms are going to have to get over. I think that all those things that we talked about, the billable hour mindset, the efficiency over, you know, time, the issue of culling your clients, creating a better environment for your people to be a part of, remote work—all of those things in my opinion play into what’s going to attract the next generation into this space. What are some things that you guys are doing as a firm, or that you’re seeing from an advisory consulting standpoint, that you think people are doing right, and other things that people could be doing better?

Yeah. I think, you know, that that’s a great point. And I view this—it’s interesting, we’ve got two opposing forces right now. So on the pipeline side, you’ve got less people coming into the profession, combined with more people leaving the profession. So that obviously creates some issues. On the other end of the spectrum, you have these technologies which are a time saver, and in theory, should make—I was actually on a panel a couple of months ago, because I’ve always been, you know, how much more, effective, efficient can this make us? Is it 10%, 20%? I was actually on a panel where somebody said, give me one professional using the tools to two professionals not using the tools. I’m like, okay—now we’re looking at significant magnitude. The next person said, give me one person with the tools to three people without the tools. And I’m like, okay. This is orders of magnitude, from people who got in and experimented and worked with it, and really see what the potential of it is.

Which I think ties back to one of my recommendations, which would be when you look at this, if your culture is not open to these things, and people don’t come in and see that their input and their unique skills and talents that they bring to the table are not going to be embraced in your culture, then you’re probably not going to get that hire, and or if that person comes to you, they’re probably not going to stay very long. So there has to be this embracing of technology—we are going to try new and different things—because, you know, candidly, the CPA profession has not done a great job with branding itself, and we have an image issue.

And that’s one of the things I love about Anders is our office space to the firm’s credit, well before I was here, you know, going back 10, 11 years now, when they built a new office, we had a completely blank space. We got 55,000 feet in downtown St. Louis. And basically, they hired a firm, and they said, no, no, no, don’t go look at other CPA firms. Get to know us, and design an office for us. And to that point, and we have escalators that come into our office, and there’s a nice video wall when you walk in—it’s very modern, very open. When people do that, they see that, and it tells them something about the firm. And sort of all the things that we say on our social media and our thought leadership and our recruiting team, kind of all of those things when they see it, that’s when people go, ah, okay. Now I see it. Now I understand.

It aligns!

Yeah! So if I can get a prospective employee, or a prospective client—if I can get them to actually physically experience the space, and sort of get the feel of what our culture is like, that’s a huge deal. My win rate goes up 20, 30, 40, 50% because of that. So I think in terms of when you think about firms that are really doing this right, I think they have a plan, they have a vision, they can articulate to the staff, this is what we’re doing, and this is where we’re going, and we’re going to have fun along the way, and I hope you’re part of the team that helps us get there, because we’ll all celebrate together. And along that journey, we’re going to be innovative, we’re going to be open, we’re going to listen to your ideas, we’re going to try some things, some of which won’t work. And that’s okay. But that’s how we’re going to get to the destination.

So I think firms that are really bringing that forward and emphasizing that—that’s how I think you’ll win the talent game both short-term and longer term, because you’ll not only get those employees, but then you’ll also retain them, because their contributions are really valued, and I think that’s the way you can get that to stick.

Well, that is a huge issue in the industry, like you said—it’s, the back door is spinning a whole lot faster than the front door. And being able to slow that down and ultimately stem that tide, once you make the investment to get that person in the door, is critical to show that person, hey, we’re not just saying these things, we actually believe these things. Their values of who we are, they align with who you want to be—let’s go do this together. And we tend to see the firms that do that better like you’re talking about aligning those things, those are the firms that are continually winning in the marketplace.

Yeah. Definitely. I see the same thing.

When you look at what you guys have done well, when it comes to employee attraction, employee retention, what would you say are the things that are pieces of your talent attraction, talent retention side of the business that you could say, hey, these things stand out above the rest, we do these exceptionally well and it’s contributing to who we are today?

Yeah. So we’ve identified our vision, our mission, and our core values. And we really believe those, and we live those. And I think one of the things that the firm’s done a great job of is true authentic leadership. So I’m now, you know, a fairly senior team member here involved in a lot of decisions, and when I look at how much focus there is, on, you know, sure we look at margins, sure we look at revenue growth, all that kind of stuff. But so much of it boils down to creating a great culture and environment for our employees, so we want to be a catalyst for those striving to achieve their highest potential.

So a lot of people think, oh, that just means your clients. Well, it does mean our clients, but it also means all of our people, all of our team members—their definition of success, every single one will be different. But what we try to do is we try to actually look at what people want to do, how can we create systems and environments within our culture that will give people the opportunities that they’re looking for?

So part of that is we have tax, we have audit, and then we have, right now, six advisory service lines. And so people come in, they love our culture, but maybe they don’t want do tax anymore. Maybe they don’t want to do audit anymore. Maybe they don’t really want to be part of the virtual CFO business anymore. They want to go try tax. Well, we are promoting internally that ability to go and try different things. If you’re a great performer, and you mesh with our culture, we want to keep you here regardless of the discipline of what you’re doing. And so if you don’t want to do tax anymore, great! We’ll plug you into a different part of the firm where you can use your talents, and it’s something that really jazzes you up.

And so I think those are some of the things that authentic leadership, that actually having a vision, mission, and core values that mean something that actually guides the future of the firm—and we are progressive. We embrace technology. And I think for a lot of people that just creates a great environment for them where they come to work every day, and they choose the environment they want to be in. Do they want to come to our downtown office? Do they want to come to our Chesterfield office? Do they want to work remotely? Kind of figuring out what works for you, and works for your team—for us, it’s about flexibility and choice, and treating people like professionals and giving them the opportunity to do their best work. And if that’s the case, then generally what we find, we create that environment, good things happen both for the firm and for our people.

One of the things that just, I meant to ask you about earlier—I’m a firm believer that in the world that we live in today, people aren’t going to engage with, hey, here’s the job we’re looking to fill, here’s title, here’s the duties, here’s the responsibilities, and here’s the pay. People want to engage with a story. They want to engage with something that’s compelling. I don’t know if this is something that you guys do by design, or if it’s something that is encouraged or not even looked at and is just done, but the leadership of your firm, there’s a handful of leadership of your firm that are pretty active on social media, specifically LinkedIn.

Mmm hmm.

But there’s a lot of employees that are pretty active on LinkedIn within the firm.

Mmm hmm.

And one of the things that we constantly talk to clients about is look, you can say it about your firm all day long: You’re either bragging or you’re lying. That’s how people are going to look at it, because you’re the owner, you’re the partner. You’re supposed to do that. But when your tax manager, your advisory services director, your audit manager, your staff people—when they’re the people that are engaging on social media about your culture, then the mindset is, it’s gotta be true. It’s gotta be true. So is that a culture that you guys encourage, embrace, just happens organically? What are your thoughts about that?

So thought leadership is a big part of what we do. And we are very open with our thought leadership. We share it freely. So a couple things I would recommend, AndersCPA.com, you know, look at our socials, follow us on different things, because we publish a ton of thought leadership, and we put it out there. And then I, individually, I use LinkedIn quite a bit. And for me, it’s a great source of establishing my own personal brand, advancing the Anders brand, and then also because I connect with people that I like and respect, getting a lot of great ideas and input from them as part of LinkedIn.

So we as a firm, we do things where we encourage employees, we create a lot of great thought leadership, whether it’s video content, whether it’s blogs, whether it’s whatever—it’s everybody in the firm that is involved in creating those things. And then, when you create something great, you also want to share it, and we want to make sure that these things that can actually make a difference in our community and in the business world, that these things get out there. One of the great things, and sometimes CPA firms forget this, but we have great knowledge that within our world, we get used to it. But we are an anomaly compared to the rest of the world. And if we’re not out sharing this stuff with the rest of the world, they’re not going to get it.

So that is one of the things that we encourage. We encourage our employees. We have an employee referral program, so we encourage employees to post on social media about their experience working with Anders, share job postings, different things that are out there. And we, you know, we encourage employees to do that, we have programs to compensate them for that. So it is a lot of what we do. And as we look forward into the future, that’s what we think the business model of the future is predicated on is thought leadership.

So we’re still involved in the community, we’re still heavily relationship based, but when we think about, how do we establish new relationships, more and more of what we get coming into the firm, is because of our social media presence, is because of our website, and because of our people. And you’re right—when you have 430 people out sharing a message with their networks, basically, that gets a fair amount of visibility. And generally, you know, people do pay more attention when it’s not just shilling from the you know, from the firm’s social media machine, but it’s actually people sharing what they think about something, and here’s my take on a particular topic. And when you can do that, and you can get people at all levels doing that, I love when I see some of our less-experienced professionals out there doing that, because in my mind, they’re building and establishing that brand.

And that’s what, when I go speak to college classes, that’s one of the things I tell them. If you haven’t established your LinkedIn yet, you need to, and you need to start building your network. Because you’ll be surprised, some of these idiots that are around you in class, in 20 years, they’ll be CFO of a public company. And you’ll shake your head, but those are great relationships to have. That’s an outstanding network to have. So, yeah, I would encourage people connect with me on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/davehartley. If you do that, you can find me on LinkedIn. I post about a bunch of stuff—a lot of very CPA focused type things, a lot of the Missouri Society of CPAs, I lead the transformation committee for the Missouri Society, so a lot of things about that. Things about AI and technology, given that that’s kind of my background and my bent.

So I think, you know, hopefully, what I try to do is I deliver value as part of my interactions. I want people to learn something, I want to interact with other people’s content, and I want to share my insights as it relates to that. And I think that’s how you do social media right. We don’t pay for it, it’s something that we just think that if we do, good things are going to happen, for the firm and for our people in the future.

Absolutely. I think that when you get the story out there, people want to see what it is that that’s happening, and then they ultimately want to be a little bit of a part of it in some way, shape, form or fashion. And that could be simply just engaging with it, interacting with it, or it could be as far as, hey, looks like an interesting firm. I want to get more information about them potentially work for them, or I’m looking for a new advisory services firm. I like what these guys are talking about. So there’s a lot of things I think that you’re right, that does come out of that. And you are pretty active on LinkedIn, but you also have your own podcast, correct?

That’s right. Yeah. So season 3 of our podcast, But Who’s Counting? So But Who’s Counting is the name of the podcast. So we’re in season 3 now. So season 2 was focused on a lot of leadership experiences and lessons from business executives along the way. Season 3, which we’re launching now, is focused on innovation. So we’re talking with business leaders and executives about how they’ve innovated within their business—obstacles, challenges, successes—kind of looking at all that, some of which is technology and AI related, but it’s also just about how people think and how they’ve developed things. So But Who’s Counting is the name of the podcast. Season 3 is going to be on YouTube. The first two seasons, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, just search for that. You’ll find it.

And then we also produce other—we’ve got three other podcasts as well that we do as a firm targeted for different audiences, and those are under our Summit Virtual CFO by Anders are where those podcasts are located. That’s another way that we share expertise, both in hosting our own podcast, where we’re, you know, creating content with, you know, clients and business owners. But then, you know, in addition to that, being a guest on other podcasts, John, like this, to further get and amplify and get that, the progressive mindset, create awareness of who Anders is, what we’re doing. And then at some point, hopefully, there’ll either be a partnership opportunity, or in some ways we can create value for each other, from everybody that we interact with. And we think through social media, being visible, that’s a way to cause that to come to fruition.

Well, I want to encourage anybody that has not taken the step to Listen to your podcast, But Who’s Counting, to do so, because it’s not just about debits and credits and numbers. There’s been a handful of podcast episodes that I’ve listened to that are operational-focused. And, again, regardless of the industry that you’re running, can bring value to the business that you’re running.

Yeah. There are a few that are kind of industry-focused, but the vast majority of them are lessons that really apply to everyone. Sort of a challenge, how did you deal with it, what did you learn along the way? And then we close every episode with a “make it count” segment. Which is, okay, maybe you couldn’t listen to the whole episode or, you know, whoever the guest is, what’s the one thing that if you could have the listeners take away an actionable item that they actually took action on, what would that be? And so we try to drill down into some things that really, you know, people can take away, and can create value for them. It can give them new ideas, make them better at what they do based on taking advantage of lessons learned from others, and some of the things they’ve learned along the way.

So what would you say along those lines? What would you say is the one thing that you’d want people to take away from this conversation, that could be an actionable item if they’re running a CPA firm today, to flip that switch and start heading in the direction of creating a more future-focused CPA firm?

I think the one thing that I would say is, you’ve gotta start getting outside your world. You’ve gotta start getting influence from other sources. Whether that’s from accounting today, whether that’s from people on LinkedIn, whether that’s going to conferences, whether that’s being part of your association, whether it’s networking with other firms that you respect, locally. Whatever it is, you’ve just gotta start doing something and start taking action. Once you start doing that, that should help you formulate your vision for the future. Then, you need to put together a plan for how you’re going to be intentional about executing that plan, but it all starts with the education process. If you’re not open to learning about new technologies—if you’ve not tried ChatGPT, you need to. It’s free. There’s no reason not to. You can go out and do it. And then during your work day, every time you start a new task, you need to stop and say, I wonder if ChatGPT could help me with this.

And you’ll be surprised how many times that you think it might, so you try it. Not all of those will work out, but a lot of times you’ll be like, wow, that’s really good. In some ways, I view it as like having a room of interns. So when I ask ChatGPT something, I know the interns not going to come back with the perfect answer, but they’ll probably do two or three hours worth of work that saves me a ton of time that if I tweak it and I make it a little bit better, I revise my prompt, I give them feedback that, basically, I’ll get the outcome that I’m looking for. But if you’re not experimenting, if you’re not trying that, then your progress is going to be limited. And I think in how competitive this is going to be in the next decade, I think that’s a super critical step especially for smaller firms—say, 10 to 50 practitioners—where you don’t have the internal expertise in a lot of this stuff, if you’re not looking outside your walls, then you’re not going to find the people that are doing these crazy, impressive things, and then you can steal some of those ideas and bring that into your firm. If you’re not doing that, you’re going to fall behind.

That’s a great point. I, you know, I hadn’t thought about ChatGPT in that light, but that’s a wonderful picture of really what it is. It’s not going to give you the perfect answer, but neither is a room full of interns. But there’s probably going to be a couple of nuggets to come out of that that you can plug in and work with.

Yep. And the other thing is today is the worst day that those technologies will ever be. Tomorrow’s going to be better. The day after that’s going to be better. These things are improving at an exponential pace. So in the CPA world, we were all pounding our chest that ChatGPT couldn’t pass the CPA exam, and I saw media reports, and then three weeks later is when it came out that ChatGPT passed the CPA exam. So that’s the pace that this is happening, and it is real. So if you don’t start figuring out what that means for you, and when you’re going to be impacted, both in terms of risks and opportunities, you’re going to miss the boat.

Great point. David, you’ve given us a lot to think about. I want to thank you for being a part of the podcast today, and I know that you’ve already touched on your place on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/davehartley, right?

Yeah. Dave Hartley. Yep.

If any listeners have additional questions, they want to pick your brain, they’re a firm owner and they’re heading down a path trying to, you know, tweaks some things in their firm, or they’re a person that’s thinking about making a career change and Anders may be an option for them, what are some other ways that people can reach out and get in touch with you?

Yeah. Connect with me on LinkedIn and then use the messaging in LinkedIn. So send me a direct message through LinkedIn—I do get a ton of those, so make sure you say, you know, you heard it on this podcast, so I can determine that it’s a real one as opposed to the hundred that I get that are, you know, somebody trying to sell me something. But connect with me that way. I’m on LinkedIn every day, and I do respond to messages. So, yeah, reach out to me that way. This stuff is fascinating to me. I mean, I’ve been in the profession for three decades, and when I look at where we’re going, it makes me really excited, and I’m excited to be a part of it. So I love sharing this kind of stuff with people, learning from others, sharing what I’ve learned, because we’ve made bumps along the way, and we’ve learned things along the way. I’m happy to share that with others so they don’t have to go through the pain that I and we’ve gone through. So connect with me that way. I’d be happy to interact with you.

Some people ask me, hey, can you look at my LinkedIn profile? Sure. I’ll take a look at it. I’ll tell you if it’s good or not, or what I think you should do. A lot of those kind of things, I think, you know, create value before you expect value.

Absolutely. Dave, again, thank you very much for joining us today.

You bet, John. I enjoyed it very much.

Great. And for those listening, if you want to make sure and catch all of the great episodes that we have coming up in the near future, hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform, so that you can get a little bit of a taste of CPA Life. Until next time.

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.

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