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The Next Chapter of CPA Life: Fill Your Cup
For Episode 79 of CPA Life, a different sort of show: John Randolph and producer Justin Grant take a candid look at the evolution of the podcast itself. John, inspired by his recent break from social media, reflects on the boundary setting, creating margins for yourself, finding joy both inside and outside of work, and what productivity actually is and means. From stories about aligning personal values with professional roles, the impact of meaningful client relationships and more, John drinks directly from the podcast’s well in exploring the direction he plans to take Benaiah Consulting Group in as well. Tune in and find out what’s in store next!
Important Links:
Contact John to suggest a potential guest!
About the Guest:
Justin Grant is the founder of Professional Productions, which provides bespoke, high-ROI podcasting services to busy professionals. A podcast producer and audiobook narrator with over 25 years’ experience, Justin has overseen the launch and production of more than a dozen podcasts, including two that rank in the Top 10% of podcasts worldwide according to ListenNotes.com: The Upstream Leader, and The Unique CPA.
Justin volunteers as the podcast producer for London-based charity The Avocado Foundation, which aims to improve financial literacy worldwide, particularly among the disadvantaged. He also serves on the board of The Ecology Centre, a charity headquartered on Kinghorn Loch in Fife, Scotland. Justin graduated from the Arizona State University College of Law in 2012 and passed the Arizona bar exam, then earned a Master’s at the University of Edinburgh Law School in 2019. His wide-ranging expertise includes other forms of digital media and marketing.
Transcript:
Hello everybody and welcome to CPA Life. You may recognize my voice from a past episode or two where I’ve joined John. This is Justin Grant, the producer. John and I are here, so you’ll be hearing from him momentarily, but we’re excited to have a little bit of a different approach to the episode today and just talk about where the show’s going next, and talk about why John has been thinking, “Where is the show and where are a lot of things going next?” There have been some interesting developments and I’m excited to hear about them. I really d on’t know many of the details, so we will be learning these things together. John, welcome to your own show. It’s great to be here with you.
It’s good to be with you. You get to deal with today what typically my wife and a couple of my employees get to deal with, which is external verbal processing.
We all get to deal with it!
Yeah, exactly. There are people, you know, my wife is the type of person that when she says it, it has been thought about for days, weeks, and maybe even months. So by golly, that is what we’re doing. That’s the path we’re going down. We aren’t deviating from it. It has now been spoken. I, on the other hand, tend to think about things and sometimes go, “No, that’s not the path we’re going to take.” So I don’t think that’ll be the case with too much of what we talk about, because this is stuff that I’ve been thinking about now for the last two to two and a half months.
It sounds good. And let’s get into exactly that because I think at this point the listeners are probably wondering why we’re here and why we’re doing this. So why don’t you go ahead and just start going into that verbal processing.
So it’s been an interesting last two and a half months not being on any social media. I mean, I would pop in every now and then to just see what was going on, but yeah, I think I was looking at my phone time the other day to kind of get an idea of where it was versus where it’s been. And part of the step back from social media was also driven by the fact that it was taking up a lot of time. And it’s one of those things that you can have the greatest intentions in the world of being limited in what you’re doing, even in a platform like LinkedIn, which is valuable to the business, but you look down and you realize that you’ve spent two and a half, three hours of your day on a platform that can literally suck the life out of you and take you down a lot of crazy paths. So I’m stereotypically not on a lot of other social media platforms. During COVID, I completely extracted myself from Facebook, deleted TikTok accounts, have nothing on Instagram. I don’t know if I’ve ever posted anything on Instagram. I probably need to look at doing something there for the business.
But anyway, I just felt it necessary to take a step back. And it was kind of the driver for all of this was really six months away—well, not even six months away. I guess it was five months away, June, July, August, September—yeah, five months away from my 60th birthday, which is a month from yesterday. And just really kind of hitting the pause button to understand, “Okay, where are we? What are we doing?” I think too many times we just get on the treadmill and start going, and I know that the last couple of years in our business we had done that as well. And yeah, so just the ability to stop, pause, step back and say, “Okay, what are we doing? Let’s cut the noise down. Let’s be quiet.”
And so I originally thought, “I’m going to do this for a month.” And then when I looked at the calendar and saw the things that I had going on in my life at that time with work, outside of work, with the family, with mine and Cindy’s marriage mentoring and marriage coaching ministry that we do, some trips we had on the calendar, I just felt, “You know what, let’s take this thing until mid-September, and really spend some time in contemplative thought and read a little bit more and stay off of social media.” So that’s what the driver was for the last, whatever it’s been, almost 75, 80 days.
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more that resets like that, they can be so good because at some point you’re just absolutely on a diminishing return cycle, and it can take you a while to realize, yeah, I’m really, like, I could document this as productive time that I’m spending, but is it really? And the answer is generally no after a certain point. So this was quite the uplifting and kind of creative juices sort of exercise for you.
Yeah, I think the necessity to have some guardrails when it comes to technology—really anything—I think anything in excess can be bad for us. I don’t care if it’s social media. I don’t care if it’s TV. I don’t care if it’s food, if it’s alcohol. Whatever it is, too much in excess can dull the senses. So having guardrails in place, and I had started last year around this time, putting some of those things in place when it comes to notifications on the phone, things along those lines. Going into this year, I had deleted emails off my phone, done some other things with notifications on my phone, had deleted Facebook, put Facebook back on, because I think there was something I know I was looking to purchase, and probably 90% of my time that I would go onto Facebook was to look at Facebook Marketplace to find out if I could get what I needed locally, quickly, at a good price. But again, it’s just like anything else in life—you go onto Facebook to look for the thing that you’re looking for, that you need at the time, and you’ll see something that a friend posts and next thing you know, two hours later, laying in bed or sitting on the sofa, you’ve had two hours of your life sucked away that you’ll never get back.
Yeah. Well, and in stark contrast to that sort of effect, you’ve told me that you’ve come up with some really interesting directions and possibilities that you’d like to take—where the podcast will go and what kind of changes ahead. So, listeners, I’m in the same boat as you—I have not heard any of these ideas yet, so we’re all going to hear them here together, the big reveal.
You know, I don’t know if it’s that much of a big reveal, as much of it is just really trying to get hands around who are we, what’s the message that we want to continually send, what’s the message that we want to continue to amplify in the marketplace as it pertains to clients, candidates, the market that we serve, the folks that we act as a talent advisor to? And really just looking at this thing from a complete holistic perspective. Not just how to hire, how to retain, how to attract, but really how do we become better technically at what we do? How do we become better people at what we do? How do we become better at those that we interact with, not only in our professional circles, but in our personal circles as well. We’ve spent so much time over the last two to two and a half years on the podcast really talking about how to build a firm that is more people-centric. How to attract people, what took people down those paths, what are people looking for in a firm like that?
But I think that there’s so much more than that that we could dig into and that we could talk about, and the journeys that people have taken that allow them to run the kind of firms they run, which I think resonate with a lot of the types of candidates that they’re looking to hire and that we enjoy engaging with. We’ve got a client that we work with, that their business model is, they deal with a lot of functional medicine, functional fitness providers around the country. Well, we’ve been able to take that passion for what they do, and one of the things that, even though it wasn’t a requirement, but spend time talking to candidates about their own health journey, and how potentially a non-traditional medical provider has brought value into their life or their family member’s life or a friend’s life and how that’s something that they really connect with, and find a candidate that fits not only the technical aspect, but also a passion for what it is they do.
We worked with a client earlier this year and these are all kind of some of the things that came through the last two and a half months of really digging into who are we and what do we enjoy doing, worked with a client that does a lot of work in the not-for-profit space. And one of their largest clients that they ironically referred to us that was looking for a controller, is an organization that works with people that have addiction issues, whether it’s drugs or alcohol. They work with people to get them back on their feet, teach them a trade, teach them a skill, they have an in-house place where these people live for a period of time. While they’re doing that, they also have to work on site at a cafeteria they have, and a store they have, they also have a restaurant that’s a public-facing restaurant. So they have to work through all of that—that’s how they pay for services that are provided to them. And again, even though we weren’t out looking for it, we found a candidate that has dealt with her own recovery issue, not only her, but a family member, and being able to put that person in there has not only been a great technical match, but also has been a great personal match of being able to put people in places that resonate deeper than just, “Hey, can you do a 1040 or 1120-S?”
Yeah.
And I think that’s one of the things moving forward that we really want to start looking at as an organization. Again, I’m not saying that, “Hey, if you are not someone that has a passion for real estate, that you can’t work for one of our clients that does a lot of work in the real estate space.” But I think that those are things through the course of conversation with people begins to bring more value to the table and create more stickiness for people when they do step into an organization that’s more than just, “Hey, what’s my J-O-B?”
And so those are some of the things that as a business we want to start amplifying, and I think that we can begin to start to amplify as well through podcast is not only how did you end up where you are and why do you do what you do, but what are the things that bring you joy? What are the things that bring passion into the space of the work that you do? I mean, that is something that I think gets all of us—regardless of who we are and regardless of what it is that we’re passionate about—those are the things that people enjoy talking about. I think it was Dale Carnegie that said that people love to talk about two or three things: They love to talk about their job, they love to talk about their family, and they love to talk about where they’ve traveled to and where they’ve been to. Those are things that if you start to ask people about themselves, they’ll talk all day about those things if they’re passionate about them.
Now, sometimes with work or even with family, that passion cannot be a positive thing at times, but they’ll talk about it. You open that door, they’re going to talk about it. But if we can find things that we can start to amplify in the lives of people that they are passionate about, I believe that’s really where we start to be able to make a difference in not just a firm’s talent acquisition and talent retention, but also in the lives of the people that we’re matching up with them.
Yeah. Great reference by the way, because Andrew Carnegie was born about three miles from where I live in Scotland, so that’s a eally nice coincidental connection there, yeah.
Nice! I think that we just have the opportunity when we’re focused on more than just a placement, when we’re focused on more than just a deal and a transaction, it gives us the opportunity to really start to dig in, to understand what is it that’s going to make this person drop anchor, grow some deep roots and be a part of an organization long term? You know, we are pretty committed to working with the types of clients that we’ve been blessed to be able to partner with: Forward-thinking, progressive-minded firm leaders that are looking to build the antithesis of the stereotypical CPA firm. We’ve been able to amplify those stories over and over again and create impact in people’s lives, pulling them out of firms where they don’t see a future, they don’t see a hope, they don’t see anything other than 60, 70, 80 hour work weeks.
But if we can start to now dig into more of what brings you joy—not to steal a Marie Kondo, is it Marie Kondo? Not to steal anything from her—but truly what is it that brings you joy and how can we leverage that from a career standpoint? And Justin, you and I have talked about this from a mindset perspective. I don’t think that you have to love what you do, right, to do what you do for a vocation. I don’t. I think that’s a lie that we’ve sold to this generation, that you have to love what you do. Now, again, I don’t remember who it was that said it, but you know the great colloquialism, if you will, of, “Find what you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life,” there is a lot of truth to that. But I don’t love recruiting. I enjoy what I do. I enjoy the impact that we can make in the marketplace and the change that we can bring about in people’s lives. What I love is playing those things that are behind me. I love writing music.
That’s your life’s calling if you want to call it that.
Exactly. And so I’ve said for years that sometimes what we do as a vocation is the vehicle that pays for us to be able to do the things that we love. Because unless you hit the right note—pun intended—in the right place in front of the right people, those things aren’t going to pay for you to have the kind of life or pay for me to have the kind of life that I want to be able to provide for my family. But doing what I do for a living does allow that to happen, and therefore, there’s joy that comes out of that. So again, I don’t think you have to love what you do, but I think that if we could begin to mirror more an understanding of what it is that people want out of life and how we can connect them with firms that make that a possibility, I think that’s really where we start to bring more value to the table other than just, you know, I have a hole, I have a peg, let’s put them together. Now we have an employee.
Yeah, a hundred percent. And importantly, even if you—well beyond you and I liking what we do—if it takes up all your time, you’re still going to be miserable. Like there’s just no getting around it. It doesn’t matter how passionate you are about whatever your particular role is. So, you know, we’re not just trying to fill a hole with a peg, but at least the beginnings of something that people can really take pride in, they can really enjoy, that can give them the time and space,
nd leave them with enough energy, particularly, to actually go enjoy the stuff they really, really want to do? Love that. Great idea. And along those lines of what you just said, that people like to talk about these things, these kinds of stories, I also—call me crazy—feel like people like to listen to stories like this, so this is great. I’m loving where you’re going with these ideas.
I think that one of the other things that, again, I’ve leaned into really more than just the two and a half months, it really was a journey that I started March of this year, April of this year, as I’ve alluded to in a couple of LinkedIn posts and you and I have talked about: Big milestone birthday in a month. Forty didn’t bother me—and it’s not that sixty bothers me, I want to make that really clear. Forty didn’t really affect me mentally or emotionally. Just didn’t. When I was turning forty, one of my goals was that I wanted to do a triathlon before I turned forty. So I ended up doing three before I turned forty. Between thirty-nine and forty, I did three tri—not full Ironmans, but did one sprint and then two Olympic triathlons.
Once upon a time, there was no such thing as a full Ironman. People thought it was crazy enough you were doing a triathlon. So, I mean, come on.
That’s true! That is true. So, you know, I set that goal. I accomplished that. When I turned fifty, again, it didn’t—there was nothing going on in my head worrying about stuff, you know, from a health standpoint…
‘Cause that feels more like the big one to me. That’s half a century. That’s a nice round number. You would think it would be the one if there was going to be one.
Exactly. So, you know, fifty didn’t jack with my head much. I set some goals for fifty. There were a couple of adventure races and Spartan races that I wanted to do, and so I did that when I turned fifty. Fifty-five? Again, I just kind of rolled through fifty-five. Didn’t really think much about it. I was in the middle of building Benaiah Consulting Group, was still in the middle of having a full-blown music ministry that we were doing somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 to 200 concerts and ministry dates throughout the year, all over the country, predominantly in the South and the Southeast. So there was all that going on. We were right in the midst of COVID while all that was happening also. So, you know, fifty-five didn’t hit me really that big.
But as I started looking towards sixty—and part of it probably was also my dad had open heart surgery, quadruple bypass, when he was sixty, there’s been health issues with men in my family for years. I’m very blessed—I don’t have any health issues, don’t take any pharmaceutical drugs, medicines, anxiety medication, depression medication, heart issues, blood pressure, cholesterol, nothing. Take a ton of vitamins, but that’s about it. But sixty started looming bigger for me back about March timeframe. And I think part of it was, I’ve said for years jokingly to people that I’ve got more runway behind me than I do in front of me. And in conjunction with that, there’s a part of me that has always felt that—my mom lived to be ninety-one—and there’s a part of me that’s always felt one of her secrets to longevity was as long as I can remember, if you asked my mom how old she was at a birthday, in general, in conversation, whatever it was, my mom’s answer was always the same. I don’t even remember my mom, honestly, saying how old she was. My mom’s answer consistently was, “I’m twenty-one.”
I love it. That’s just like my wife.
And I think that she believed that. If you knew my mom, you would say, “Yeah, I would say Anne Randolph believed that.” She just—she was smart as a whip. She was going to school, literally taking classes online at eighty-eight. She stopped at eighty-nine ’cause she started having some dementia and Alzheimer’s issues. But up to eighty-eight she was taking classes online.
Amazing!
She had two bachelor’s degrees, a master’s degree, and a PhD. Hyper intelligent. So all of those things combined just really started to mess with me going into sixty, you know, thinking about, “Okay, what does this next chapter look like?” And wanting to lean into really getting a lot more healthy, taking my health serious—I’ve always worked out, I’ve always taken care of myself, but I really wanted to take it to a whole other level. And I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve probably had more blood tests than I’ve had in the past two decades, measuring pretty much everything in my body that you can measure. I’ve let it be known to my kids that I’m middle-aged because my goal now is 120—not more runway behind me than in front of me, I have the exact same amount of runway in front of me as I do behind me. And I believe that we’re in a world today where if you lean into understanding what it is that drives you as a human being, not only emotionally, not only from a health standpoint, but passion, heart, soul, what is it that drives you? I think those things that you’re passionate about help you live a more productive, help you live a more fulfilling, help you live a life that puts you in a position where you have more opportunity to give.
You know, I’ve made no bones about it, whether it’s through clients I talk to, if it comes up on our website, here on the podcast: I’m a believer. And one of the things that God’s Word tells me as a believer is that we are to do things that we do for other people out of the overflow of our heart. Well, the only way that we could overflow is we’ve got to fill up. There’s no other way. I can’t take my pitcher and say, “Hey Justin, let me put some in your cup,” if I’m not taking the time daily to fill up my pitcher. I think that one of our amazing opportunities in our firm is the opportunity to help people get into a position where they can fill their pitcher up daily and through that process fill up the pitcher of other people in their lives, whether that’s their clients, whether that’s their employees, whether that’s their employers, it doesn’t matter. I think that the opportunity to do that only comes if you have margin in your life, if you have space in your life, and you have the opportunity to fill up yourself.
It’s interesting to me, Justin, the couples that Cindy and I work with through our marriage coaching and marriage mentoring, it never fails: the couples that we meet with that are making progress—and I want to also make it clear we’re not only dealing with couples in crisis. I’d say probably 90% of the couples that we get to work with, that we are blessed to work with, they have very good marriages, but they want great marriages. Only about 10% are in crisis—but it doesn’t matter whether they’re in crisis or they’re in a good position, the couples that are making progress at building a great marriage, they all have margin in their lives where they make time individually a priority. Not only together, but individually. Because you can’t pour into other people if you are not filling your own vessel up.
So it’s always interesting to us whenever we get together with a couple—we try to meet with the couples we meet with at least once a month, sometimes every other week. But when we sit down and we start to sense tension, when we sit down and we start to see that there’s disconnect, one of the things that I’ll always ask people is, “So how’s your individual time been from the standpoint of filling up and taking care of yourself? What has that been looking like?” And inevitably the answer is constant. “I haven’t had time. I’m too busy. I just, I haven’t had time.” “Oh, maybe that’s the problem.” And I think that this business has a way of sucking so much out. I think life does in general, but I think this business—
There are particular ones that are worse, yes.
Public accounting has the ability to suck so much out of you. I think that if we can, if we make it a priority—we’re not going to win every time—but if we make it a priority to find out what those things are that allow people to fill those buckets up, we will start to create a lot more stickiness with the candidates we work with, the clients we work with, and for lack of a better way to put it, the marriages that we create between the two.
That’s really well said—really well said. And I think we’re curious to hear how that connects to what’s coming up on the podcast. And thank you for sharing all that, by the way.
You are more than welcome. You’re more than welcome. So there could be some interesting topics that we lean into with, you know, people, not even necessarily in the public accounting space, but people that focus on coaching, teaching, working with people to become better at who they are and what they do, whether it’s from a health standpoint, a mental standpoint. I mean, I know that in the past we’ve had Amber Setter on the podcast, you know, leaning into more people like Amber. There are people out there that are wonderful coaches in this space that spend a lot of time teaching firm leaders and firm owners how to build a more people-centric firm, leaning into some of those resources. Those are some things that I see us being able to do, to be able to bring more value to our audience, not just “Hey, let’s talk about the firm that you’ve built.” That’s important, that’s critical—but helping people understand how they can get to the next level in their careers or get to the next level in building the firm that they want to build—those are the things that I think are going to bring us more joy and bring more joy to the people that we get to interact with and engage with.
Absolutely, and I mean, it’s called CPA Life, so of course, yes, it’s focused on public accounting, but personally I’ve always enjoyed the episodes where you go outside that kind of framework a little bit. And Amber Setter, a great example where, yeah, no, let’s talk about something that’s maybe a little bit more universally applicable, but everybody should be really keen on and really aware of the ways to make these things work for your people and just to improve their experiences. Even just leaving out the human aspect of it, it’s going to repay over and over again everything you put into that kind of thing.
Yeah. It’s one of those things that I don’t think that you can really sit down and quantify the ROI to business on.
Yeah, exactly.
But it is huge when there’s more that connects a person to your organization or more that connects an organization to you as a person than just a job and a paycheck. So that’s some of the stuff I’m thinking, some of the stuff that we’re going to be leaning into, I won’t get into right now ’cause I’m still trying to just think about some stuff, but one of the things that I’m kicking around is, right now we have three business models: We have our Talent + Advisory model, we have our engaged model that we’ve had forever, right? And a stereotypical contingency model. I’m seriously thinking about completely unplugging our engaged model and getting rid of it.
Interesting.
Leaning a hundred percent into our Talent + model. Only working either Talent + clients or contingency clients, and then somewhere in the middle of that, creating some kind of a hybrid that says, “Hey, if you want to work with us on an engaged basis, the only way that we’ll work with clients on an engaged basis is basically you need to hire me and pay a small retainer on a monthly basis that will go against any fee that we would charge you.” You know, so like easy math, you know, so if I did a thousand dollars a month, like, hey, that’d be $12,000 a year. If you hired somebody at, you know, $100,000, our fee would be, you know, 15% or $15,000. Well, you’ve got $12,000 that you’re going to pay this year, so we would just, you know, if you’ve already paid $6,000 of that, let’s say. So the net effect difference at this point is $9,000. So that’s what we’ll do, which will allow us to really focus more on the Talent + business that I want to continue to grow and work with clients on.
Well, and that’s the key, isn’t it? The touchpoints, they’re not just points anymore, there’s continuous interaction going on when you’re in the Talent + Advisory, because it’s advisory! That’s the entire point, that you’re getting more involved, you’re really on the pulse of each firm’s needs and what they’re looking for, and so it’s not just a mad dash, particularly at those couple stereotypical times of the year, “Oh, we need this many people by this time because, you know, January soon.”
Yeah.
So, yeah, it makes it better for everybody involved.
Yeah. I promise you, we will have ten phone calls—minimum ten, potentially more—but we’ll have ten phone calls after Thanksgiving of people that I’ve talked to once or twice in the last three, four, five, six months, that have said, “Hey, we’re all good. Don’t need anybody. We’re doing well, everything’s great.” I promise you we’ll have at least ten phone calls sometime between the Friday after Thanksgiving to a week and a half to two weeks into December—it will be hair’s on fire, “I’m dying. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with tax season this year.”
Wouldn’t it be great to avoid that altogether? It sure sounds like it would be.
Well, you know, like Justin, we have a client that we’ve worked with for two years now with Talent Plus—John Mark Prewitt and Cohesion Business Advisors.
Oh yeah!
So coming out of the April tax season, they reached out to us and said, hey, we’re going to need to hire at least three people, four people between now and September 15th. We’ve got some vacations going on. I’m going to be out. This guy’s going to be out. So we really probably aren’t going to start looking, really looking. Plus we also want to review, some people probably going to start looking June, July at the latest, so let’s target that as interview, start dates, and then, you know, looking to hire employees that’ll start sometime August to October kind of timeframe. So we had a three month runway to start building out a pipeline, we filled four positions with them.
Had a phone call with them today. “Hey, where do we stand going into Q4? Beginning of Q1? What are we looking at?” “We think we’re good. We think we’re good, but let’s start looking at tax associates because there’s a chance that we may lose one person and we may promote somebody. Even if we don’t do those, we just signed up eight new clients, so we think that we can sustain probably at least one, if not two people between, you know, November 1st and mid-January.”
There you go.
Those are the kind of conversations that we can have. Now, on top of that, we’ve continued to reach out to them and put people in front of them to interview even though they didn’t have an opening. If we interview somebody that is, you know, culturally a solid fit for who they are, they’ve hired a couple of remote people, but in their perfect world, we’d love people that are in the Dallas area. Come in the office two, three days a week. So when we find somebody that’s in Dallas that checks all the right boxes, that fits their culture, we always call them and say, “Hey, don’t know what’s going on. You know, based on our last conversation, we’re good, but we’ve also talked about this and we just talked to somebody that may fit who we are.”
Yeah. What’s the harm in making the connection—the harm’s in not making the connection!
Absolutely. There’s nothing to lose. Have a conversation, have it just like any other KPI as a business leader that you run your business with, that there are touchpoints in my week where even if I don’t need to hire somebody, there are touchpoints in my week where I am doing recruiting type activities, talent acquisition type activities. And that activity may not necessarily be interviewing people, looking at resumes, you know, that activity may be, “Hey, I probably need to rewrite this job description because it’s pretty stinking boring, and I haven’t rewritten it in five years. So, let me rewrite this job description, and that’s my task this week of the two talent-driven type tasks, that’s one of them that I’m doing.” So just anything to move the needle on your business is huge when it comes to being proactive with people. So I’m leaning towards doing that. Don’t know when, don’t know how deep I’ll drive that stake in the ground, there’s a part of me that says, “If not now, when, and if not deeply, then don’t do it at all. Don’t halfway do it. Don’t give yourself an out to say, ‘Okay.’”
I had a client that we haven’t worked with in two years, and I was thinking about this while we were on our trip to Boston and in Boston, and he reached out to me while we were in Boston and said, “Hey, I’m going to be going on vacation next week, do you have any time to talk this week? I’m going to be needing somebody, would really like to see if you guys could help us.” And I thought, let’s try this out and just see how he reacts to it. And his reaction was, “Send the different pricing proposals over to me. I’m probably leaning towards, you know, working with you guys on a Talent Plus basis, ’cause not only this position, but I’m probably going to be looking for two more senior tax managers plus a tax manager plus two to three more associates in the next year to eighteen months.”
Amazing.
Yeah. So it’s one of those jumping off points that’s leaning more towards you just need to figure it out.
Well, you’re practicing what this show preaches, which is differentiate, offer more value—that’s exactly what you’re trying to do, and why not? As you’ve pointed out so many times, there are so many similarities between these two overlapping worlds of recruiting and accounting, and so it absolutely makes sense to be doing just the sorts of things you talk about all the time.
And you know, and just like our clients or prospects turn down business, they also try to at least be a resource. And when I say be a resource, I don’t only mean from a knowledge standpoint, but when somebody says, “Hey, I need X done,” well, we’re probably not the answer for you. So can we refer you to a couple of people that are? One of the things that I’ve done is reach out to four other recruiters in the space that I know deal with folks in the public accounting space to have a conversation with them and say, “Hey, this is a path that I’m looking at taking. If I take this path, are you a resource that I could at least refer people to and give them options to consider?” Yeah, there’s enough business out there. I don’t care what the business is, whether it’s recruiting, podcast production, public accounting, there’s enough business out there for anybody and everybody. So working on making sure that those resources exist, that I don’t have to send somebody into the abyss and say, “Hey, here’s someone that I think can take care of you. Reach out to these two people.”
Yeah. Make sure those tides are rising, all our boats are floating higher.
Absolutely. So thank you guys for joining us for another episode of CPA Life and listening to a little bit of the rambling of where we’re going to be taking the show, and some of the things we’re going to be doing a little bit different. So I’d love for you to subscribe to the podcast, give us a like, give us your thoughts, your comments on the platform of your choice. But the other thing that I’d like to hear from you is if there are people in the public accounting space or people that you believe could be valuable to people in the public accounting space, drop a comment down below, shoot me a message directly—we’ll make sure that we put my contact info in the show notes and let me know who some of those people might be—because we are looking to do everything that we can to expand the horizons, not only of our podcast, but also the industry in general to give people the opportunity to live the best CPA Life that they can.
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