Track 3: Innovation as a springboard

Technology isn't just streamlining work (and commoditizing some of it) -- it's also serving as the basis for brand-new services and opening up new opportunities for innovative firms. This panel will look at how firms can develop a culture of innovation that allows them to make the most of advances in technology. 

Transcription:

Chris (00:11):

Welcome to the session over at this point at the conference and we are going to be discussing innovation as a springboard now. Now there's keeping up with progress and then there is actual innovation. Companies all want to have it, but honestly what do we really mean when we talk about it? How does it really apply to the daily life of the accountants? So to answer this question, we have some two fantastic speakers. Immediately to my left we have Joe Woodard, the guy that you all saw probably just this morning, but maybe for the benefit of the one or two people who may not have been there briefly. Tell us a little about yourself.

Joe Woodard (00:47):

Yeah, well it all started when I was a child in Savannah, Jordan. I'm joking, joking. No. I'm the CEO of Woodard. We are a CAS consulting firm, CAS coaching firm and CAS training firm to, so if we're talking to non credentials, we'd say we're also in a bookkeeping training firm. You'll see both pathways on our site, but it's kind of the same science applied in different ways. So we educate, we coach, we provide resources, we build communities for CAS.

Chris (01:15):

Alright. And we also have Seth Feinberg who is a strategist, a consultant and editor, and an amazing Kara Yoku singer. Why don't you tell us?

Seth Fineberg (01:25):

Thank you. That was a good time last night. Yeah, so those who don't know me, I'm Seth Feinberg, I've been a business editor for over 30 years. Spent 20 plus years covering accounting, the great profession of accounting and I was Tech Editor at Accounting today for a while. And then I was the Editor of Accounting Web. I now have my own sort of practice where, or business where I'm sort of consulting with a lot of the vendors in this space talking to, you know, all talking to accountants regularly to really kind of see the profession move forward. And I'm really glad to be here to talk with this gentleman to my right about innovation and I hopefully this is going to be a conversation and not just kind of us saying stuff.

Joe Woodard (02:15):

Please make it a conversation.

Seth Fineberg (02:16):

We want to hear some ideas. I know we're on day three here. Thank you for sticking around. I think this is going to be a good session though.

Chris (02:23):

Alright, great. So now let's get started. And I think the first thing we really need to do is we need to get our hands around again, what is it that we're talking about when we talk about innovation commonly we associate it with technology. Is that too narrow? What is innovation? Let's start incredibly broad here.

Joe Woodard (02:40):

I'll let Seth lead out.

Seth Fineberg (02:41):

Yeah, It's a great way to jump in because it should absolutely be pointed out that innovation doesn't necessarily mean technology. Obviously technology permeates pretty much everything that you all do on a regular, so of course it's natural to think of that. But thinking outside of that, it's just really looking at new ways of doing things. Processes that might be broken in your firm or ways that you hire, maybe you're hiring differently, you're looking, it looks straight just for a CPA or an accounting professional to come in and do something. I think that's innovating in the way that you and the you work.

Joe Woodard (03:23):

And then Al also, it extends into culture. A lot of times people will do business subconsciously or consciously with companies because of their culture. I just had a Ben and Jerry's ice cream and Ben and Jerry's makes really good ice cream, but they also have a culture that they, they're very proud of and they take positions culturally that either you line with a donut, doesn't stop you from either ice cream, but if you like their culture, you feel extra good or maybe a little less guilty about eating the ice cream. And so as you're building your firm culture, just remember it's inseparable from vision. Vision is the intersection of who you are, the higher principle you follow and the change you want to see in the world. And you don't get too overboard with that. AKA Chick-fil-a's founder got into some hot water. You can too fuse your higher principle with your business sit position. And you can say that Anheuser-Busch did the same recently. So it cuts both ways politically, but if it informs your culture and your core values and the core behaviors of your company without mirroring your personal beliefs, then you'll get that cutting edge you're looking for. And Ben and Jerry's is a really good example of that where culture leads not political position.

Seth Fineberg (04:46):

I do want to add, Chris, I know that we got some more questions to get to show of hands, how many of you actually have a mission statement for your firms? Yes. Look at this. That to me that's innovative. 10 years ago when I started covering the profession about 22 years ago, I would just get funny looks, you know, couldn't really ask that question. So you already are in the right place, in the right frame of mind. That's where it starts. That says, okay, we actually have a chance to truly innovate in a number of ways in our firm. And we're going to hear that word a lot. And by the way, there's no such thing and I got in trouble with an editor once for writing the words new innovation, redundant. It's a redundancy. So don't think, anyway, just wanted to point that out.

Joe Woodard (05:34):

And I want to delineate, so glad you said mission and it was Disney Institute that taught me that vision, mission, and purpose are not synonyms. Just like new innovations, redundant vision, mission and purpose are not redundant. They're complimentary. Yes. And so if you're going to innovate, understand that the mission is something you can do, measure, repeat, perfect. And maybe even eliminate pieces of and add new pieces too. It's malleable. It's how you do something, right? Vision is why you do that something, right? And exactly you do. And mission serves vision. But what will the one that will drive innovation? That's the missing piece that Disney Institute, the kings and queens of innovation. What really is the driving force of their innovation is the missing purpose statement. Nobody thinks about a purpose statement. You hear a vision statement, you mission statement, but the purpose.

(06:34)

So we were just a quick story that speaks to innovation because it will inspire you to innovate based off vision, mission, purpose. Because Seth brought up mission, I brought up vision, let's tie it together with purpose. I went to with Disney Institute to the back of Epcot and they dropped a bunch of a Disney Institute students off in the back of Epcot. And we were given five, no, excuse me, 15 minutes in groups of three with these special tablets to capture as many of their employees going above and beyond their job descriptions as possible. Now just doing their job well, didn't count, had to be something above and beyond their job description. And we thought, well this is crazy. It's the summer in Epcot, you can't even get from one building to another in 15 minutes. How are we supposed to do this? But they just had this confidence. So off we go with our little group and we go to this cat, this French restaurant, it looked like a castle. And there was a little boy going there to get pastry and he didn't understand how to navigate all the turnstiles and things. And there was a lady behind the counter whose job it was to put croissants on the plate. That was our whole job. Or we we're talking minimum wage worker, probably get the tongue put entry level position. Imagine the plastic apron, the whole thing. And she sees this boy standing there kind of not knowing what to do and she puts down her tongs and she gets down on one knee and she gets eye level with the boy and she says, would you like for me to help you select something? And then she walks through the turnstile with him, gets all the way through, helps him to handle the payment.

(08:17)

And then after he leaves, she goes back, she's putting croissants back on the plate. So of course there's one of the many stories we get back and there's story after story after story of this that our fellow students, Institute students found in just 15 minutes. And they wouldn't tell us how they did it right until we got back. The intrigue was just building up. But I had already, spoiler alert, told you how they did it. It's purpose. They have a purpose, not just a purpose statement of purpose that everybody who's employed by Disney is hired to create happiness. They're not hired to put croissants on plates or they're not even hired to be inside the Mickey Mouse costume because again, spoiler alert, there is a little woman in there. Okay, yeah. Yes, there's always a woman. It's always a very, very small woman inside of Mickey Mouse. I'm sorry I just ruined your life. But even if that person's job is not to be Mickey Mouse, that person's job is to create happiness. You need to ask yourself what it is, what is the purpose of everybody in your practice.

Seth Fineberg (09:20):

what are we doing? Why are we doing it? Yes. And as a firm leader, you regularly check in, excuse me, you regularly check in with your staff on that and on that very point, that's excellent. I don't care how big or small your firm is, you can do it.

Joe Woodard (09:35):

As, you can actually fun with it. You can go up to somebody and say, what are you doing? Well, I'm preparing a tax return. You get eh, no, no, no.

Seth Fineberg (09:42):

Or if they go nothing.

Joe Woodard (09:42):

Yeah. Then you can say whatever your purpose statement is. No, I'm protecting a small business journey. Whatever your purpose statement is, and you can get the gotcha game until they start to actually think about everything they do as being that extension of purpose.

Seth Fineberg (09:56):

And whether you're remote or not, you can still have those, if anything, if you have hybrid staff, I mean, it's probably even more important to just make sure, you know, can look at your technology, you can look at the work, you can look at, okay, they are getting things done. But to Joe's point, it's like, you know, have to make sure they really know what they're doing and why they're doing it.

Chris (10:19):

So innovation as it can be a pretty broad turnout. Seth, you had mentioned earlier that there are a lot of different ways that firms can be innovative and we kind of talked a little bit about various things such as culture and purpose and things like that. But I was wondering if for a little bit you might be able to go a bit deeper into the different types of innovation, the different kinds that a firm might be able to pursue that is inclusive of technology but not necessarily all tech.

Seth Fineberg (10:45):

Sure. And if anyone was in my session yesterday, on the other day on automation, when we're talking about whenever you're going to solve a problem, usually with technology, when we're innovating at firms, again, as we said at the outset, it's not all about a technological issue or a technology problem that technology is going to solve in some cases. So you have to start with the thing that is broken, identify that thing that is broken and realize, okay, or can we go out and try to patch that problem or fix that problem with technology? Or are there ways that we can do it in a non-technical way? And sometimes that, I know it's kind of a broad answer, but at the same time it really just has to start with that problem. I, I'd say that's probably the biggest opportunity for you all to truly innovate.

(11:50)

Chris and I were talking before and he's like, you know, can't just point to someone and go, all right, now you innovate. It's, it's up to you. Now obviously if you have a mid or larger firm, you can probably assign that task to somebody who is that out of box thinker a bit and you know, can task them with, okay, look, what's the biggest problem that you see? What's one of, what are some of the, excuse me, I don't want to use always the word problem, but maybe a blocker, something that's sort of getting in the way of a process. Let's think of three or four ways around that technical, non-technical, what have you, and go from there.

Joe Woodard (12:26):

And a good way to identify those folks. I'd strongly recommend that you read a book called The Working Genius. It's a little bit of a misleading title because it's not about being a genius at all. It's only kind of about working. But Patrick Sci only has this book called The Working Genius, where he takes what Seth is talking about, which he defines as the ideation phase. That's the way he would say that. And the book allows you to test the people in your practice and you can actually extend it through to test the people in your client's practice when you're doing some holistic coaching. And you can identify the people who naturally, naturally ideate, which is what he means by working genius. They're working genius, they're working expertise. Their working natural abilities or innate ability is to spot the problem. The problem we run into is we take the people who spot the problem and we assume that those are the people that should be assigned to solve the problem.

(13:27)

And just because they spotted it, just because they are passionate about it, doesn't mean that they have the working genius to bring it to completion. That's what Patrick Len would call the galvanizer. And then the other mistake people make when you're talking about innovation, they don't separate ideation from implementation. Ideation has the people who have the wonder, they're always, they would be looking around at this room and I'm an ideator, they'd be looking around at this room and they would be figuring out why the placements of those vents are not an ideal placement or how that air wall is crooked, which has been bothering me the whole time, which isn't OCD, it's just the fact that I'm always analyzing the environment around me to look at ways that can be improved. I would use different chairs up here because this is killing my back because the only way to relax in this chair is like this. Right? And I've even observed the camera guy, which I've been doing this for 25 years, I've had cameras pointed at me for 25 years, never have I been filmed with somebody sitting in the Indian position. That's so cool. And even what I just said wasn't politically correct. Sorry, that's a cross spotlight positions. So the point is I'm constantly observing all of these things and it's not because I'm better or worse, it's because my genius is wonder, but you don't want me to try to galvanize because I will wonder and then go away.

Seth Fineberg (15:00):

Exactly, you have your ideas people, and then you have your implementing people. Sometimes they're one in the same. Sometimes you have people really, I worked with a gentleman for several years when I was at Accounting web and he was the guy, we were a small staff, but he was always the guy to just kind of look and go, so why are we doing things this way? And he would come up with maybe over the weekend he'd be like, oh yeah, we don't have to do things that way anymore. I fixed it. So that's a rare breed. Sure. But in your own practices, I guarantee you, whether you're a six person firm or a 600 person firm, you have somebody or you have people in there who are like Joe, who can see the big picture. You can see where the problems are. Maybe suggest ways that it can be fixed and then the people to do it get them working. Yes. We have a question.

Audience Member 1 (16:01):

Did the working genius in micro? And I, looking at my whiteboard of how we structured and I was the only person in the program that the second tier of the idea portion of that.

Joe Woodard (16:19):

You mean the second tier would be the activation if ideation, activation and implementation. Okay.

Audience Member 1 (16:30):

To me, that's problematic that there's only one in the firm that it's highly problematic.

Joe Woodard (16:33):

Is, it's highly problematic. All that pressure falls on you. Yes.

Audience Member 1 (16:38):

So you solve for that because to me innovation is critical.

Joe Woodard (16:41):

Outside consultants until you can afford to bring in in-house resources.

Seth Fineberg (16:46):

I was just going to say that. hire a consultant.

Joe Woodard (16:52):

Give them the working genius test to make sure they're activators. Yeah, exactly. So folks, this book is revolutionary and it's, I'm so glad you've read it because I was going to tell you the other downfall and all this has to do with innovation because if you innovate, innovate through the ideation process, but you don't have both wonder and discernment, which are two of the big pieces of ideation, then you're going to end up with a lot of ideas that go nowhere. You're going to waste your time. Then if you go straight to implementation, which is enablement and galvanization without activation, then you're going to end up with under-researched innovations. We had one of those, it was called, because I had that Scaling New Heights conference, it was called Scaling New Heights Online. It was my horror story of what not to do, which is go from ideation to implementation without the proper activation, which is your vetting process, pressure testing specifications, piloting and experimentation stuff. Well, I don't know if anybody came, but if you did, you only came for two hours because didn't work and we had to shut it down. I mean it was the worst failure of my entire career several years ago. That's a great, it was because I didn't understand activation. Yeah.

Seth Fineberg (17:58):

And that's the thing with innovation, if you're going to innovate and we're going to continue to use that word, but if you're going to innovate at your firm, you have to be prepared to fail. Yes. You have to be okay with that. And because just like I'm sure you've heard time and time and time again, it's going to teach you, it is going to teach you. Like Joe knows not to do that again.

Joe Woodard (18:21):

Exactly. But the key here.

Seth Fineberg (18:22):

Well maybe not to do it in that way.

Joe Woodard (18:24):

That's the key. Because the key is found to fail in activation. That's what it's for. You experiment, you learn, you decide. Or if an idea is better or not, you perfect, then you implement. But I failed in implementation and it was extremely costly and very embarrassing. So everybody talks about this fail forward and lean experiment and nobody points out that you're not going to market yet with those things and definitely not putting your brand weight against it. Does that help?

Seth Fineberg (19:00):

Yeah, internally, again, you just can't be afraid to just go, alright, that didn't work. So onto the next thing. But make it a regular part of maybe your meetings or however you get together to think about the next thing that you're doing in your firm and regularly question, okay, why are we doing things this way? That is a pretty good springboard.

Joe Woodard (19:27):

And then the other thing is when you're innovating the agenda for the meeting and the nature of the meeting needs to be clearly defined as this is a meeting around innovation. Because if you don't clearly define that and the inverse, then you're going to end up innovating in your operational meetings and you're going to end up operating in innovational meetings. And every meeting must have a nature. You must preserve that nature. And there are altitudes to this. Everything we're talking about in this panel session is an extremely high altitude conversation and it does not belong in operational meetings.

Seth Fineberg (20:06):

And again, it is the title of this, our talk is innovation as a springboard. So we kind of say, well springboard for what that is a up to you what you want it to be for anyway.

Chris (20:18):

So we see a lot of larger firms with innovation leaders that actually might even be their official title on their business card. Yeah. Is innovation within reach for smaller firms though, on that scale, is it a different kind of innovation? Is it different type? How does innovation in the process of this defer between the larger and the smaller entity?

Seth Fineberg (20:40):

So from what I've seen, I've been more largely in touch. I think with the smaller firms, the solo entrepreneurs, solo practices, and the smaller firms who as we know make up the majority of the accounting profession that we know, I don't think it really matters about size. Sure. I mean you might take longer to implement to get to the implement implementation stage at a mid to larger firm. I will say that, but smaller firms, it's almost like they have to constantly be in or should constantly be in that mode of looking at what they're doing, asking why, and really just having that regular check-in and thinking, could we be doing things better differently?

Joe Woodard (21:35):

Listen to your people who naturally wonder, right? But the other thing I would say is if you're in a small firm, even if it's an extremely small firm, you need to have a quarterly at best, at minimum, an annual retreat, then back to the consultant, bring an outside consultant in who understands the principles of ideation and who understands the principles of brainstorming and knows how to lead a brainstorming conversation in a very learned experience way. Because that's an art, right? They make it look easy. They're just collecting a bunch of ideas on the board, but there's an art form behind it. And this whole go broad to go narrow process, which Chris maybe will, you'll give me the opportunity to drill down on the broad to go narrow kind of thing and maybe brainstorming a little bit. Now, just so you know, because a show host, and I've priced him, if you want, Patrick Lencioni, the author of the book, he's only 175,000 an hour.

(22:41)

Pretty good deal. But you don't have to get all joking aside, you don't have to get that right. You can Patrick Lencioni's the table group organization as people who are certified in his methodologies who are more like 175 an hour. So dollars not a thousand. So you can get people from that organization or other credible organizations are just people that your peers have used successfully to run these company retreats, bring them off site and let those folks steer you through the ideation process. I believe that objectivity, even the firms that have it in-house, would benefit from the objectivity of an outside voice. That's my answer to your question, Chris.

Chris (23:24):

Got you. And so actually then getting in a little bit more specific now to the particularities of the accounting profession, one thing that I found interesting about the description of this panel was how innovation relates to service lines. What do you think would be a great example of innovations that improved existing service lines? And similarly, what are great examples of innovations that just created new service lines? Either one you.

Seth Fineberg (23:55):

Yeah, they're creating new service lines. Well, I'm thinking of a firm down in Florida. I don't know if you guys know if Templeton down in Florida, c p a firm, and I love this example, I got to see it from the very beginning. They were, they were really struggling. A lot of you all probably are with their practice management system. They were really weren't finding anything out there that did exactly what they wanted to do. And it was a problem within their firm. They weren't really reaching out to their clients in a timely manner. They weren't really able to keep track of workflow as bet in the way that they wanted to had their processes. So rather than kind of break their processes, which they liked, they innovated by looking at what was available on this is a technology solution that they found through Microsoft CRM. And they built their own practice management system basically through Microsoft CRM.

(24:57)

And they continued to, it's actually on the market to today through them. So just one of, and they're not a huge firm, decent sized firm, but they just recognized a problem, had people who had the tech savvy to play around with it, build it. And I think there's probably similar opportunities now with everyone on what's everyone's minds chat, GPT. Sure. There's firms right now who are tinkering around with it, seeing what it can and can't do. And it's kind of a child right now, so it's only going to kind of know what you do. And it might break things some things, but it also might kind of point you in some other directions as well.

Joe Woodard (25:43):

The example I would give is Pristine out of New York City, your neighbors, they have a lot of clients in manufacturing, wholesale distribution, inventory, and of course they were doing all the necessary accounting, especially when you start getting into a multimillion dollar inventory, all gap compliance. And that's what a CPA firm's supposed to do, fixed asset management lease amortization. But they realized that in order to serve their clients holistically, they needed innovation and they were constantly frustrated that they weren't able to get the data from their client's operations into their firm in order to take care of their CPA work. So they are now in a poll position among top 100 firms, and I believe they were one of the market leaders in creating value added reseller practices within the context of a CPA firm. And there was this huge controversy for a long time as to whether you can even do it, I guess some people still argue that, but they just went straight into the headwind of the compliance issues and the regulatory issues and said, we can't do our job without this innovation. And now they've built one of the best inventory management system of our practices in the United States as a means to an end as an innovation to solve their CPA problem.

Seth Fineberg (26:58):

Excellent.

Chris (27:00):

Great. So yes.

Audience Member 2 (27:02):

I just ask if you guys can comment on this topic or this theme of the concept of five build or rent in this kind of an area?

Joe Woodard (27:12):

Can I add steel? Buy rent, borrow steel? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, there you go.

Audience Member 2 (27:15):

I'm joking because I've hearing a lot of ready buyer name, but I think what I also hearing this profession with a lot of ready, aim, aim.

Joe Woodard (27:26):

Can I steal that? That's fantastic. That's brilliant.

Seth Fineberg (27:30):

No execution. Yeah,

Audience Member 2 (27:31):

Because I think that you guys know this is, unless you've got a champion and you go all in, then staying all out. So I'm just curious.

Joe Woodard (27:42):

Well, they get stuck in ideation is what happens. They get in this ideation loop because they don't have, and again, I would steer you to the working genius. I know I keep coming back to that, but it's really the textbook for this topic. They need galvanizes in the business. They need to find who those galvanizer are in the firm. And the weird thing is they might be somebody in a cubicle preparing tax returns and you have this secret hidden working genius galvanizer that they need to move over and make a project manager. But that's what they're missing. Partner buy-in is sometimes a problem. But say if you've got power partner but you don't have a galvanizing project manager, then you're not going to take the bruises necessary to get it through. Now to get back to the other thing on, Seth gave an example of build I'M build does work, and I'm glad this firm was able to make it work.

(28:30)

But there's an elephant graveyard of build, right? It's very difficult. CPA firms are not software designers and it two completely different art forms. So if a firm came to me and said, we're looking about building proprietary X, Y, Z, I would strongly, strongly discourage it. Almost every situation, and I'm glad Seth surfaced this one because there's always a diamond in the rough and it's a good example of innovation, but it's an elephant graveyard. I would go with lots of failure. When you mean buy, I would interpret that as subscribe and I would go subscribe. And then as I said in my keynote, I would make sure that Frankenstein stays a creature, not a monster. Not too many pieces with a normal brain and don't over innovate. And the last thing I'll say to you is there is a component of build though that I would always recommend that after you've bought Subscribed deeply, innovate on the gaps between what you buy. And I would use low-code or no-code platforms for that Zapier, Microsoft, automate, and other others in order to fill in the micro gaps. That's a good build place for your innovation.

Seth Fineberg (29:46):

It is hard to, again, I know at the beginning we said, oh, it's not all a technological solution, but it is difficult to look at issues within firms, things that could be better solved through technology because we're just in an amazing time right now. But yeah, I mean if it's not out there, I still say maybe kind of build it yourself, but you kind of need to have the right process for doing that and otherwise you will end up with ready, aim.

Joe Woodard (30:20):

It's Seth mentioned process. Can I inject my brainstorming thing, Chris? Is that okay? Because I was, I'm afraid I'd forget to come back around to it. So brain, just couple of essentials on brainstorming and I want to drill down on this go broad to go narrow concept. So when you're bringing your people together to identify problems and to look objectively at the practice, you want to raise these broad areas like tax, what can we do better with tax? Really do we have a week? But that's the whole point is you've opened up the conversation to where almost in anything goes. Now the second thing is as you start getting answers, even if they're ridiculous answers, I don't think we should be doing tax. Okay, write it down on the board, don't do tax. And you might be thinking to yourself, lame brain, what a way to start.

(31:24)

But you put a smile on your face and you write it down and you validate every idea. Not because every idea's a good idea, but because when people start seeing the ideas validated, they will share more ideas. So there's a saying in leadership that when you stop listening, people stop talking and then eventually they stop, they quit. So there's another saying that says, if you're in the smartest person in a room, you're in the wrong room, right? Because you need smarter people around you. So when people's ideas are validated, other ideas that may be better than that first idea start to come into play. Alright? Then after the whiteboard's full with innovations, some of which are great, some of which are not, you don't become the scratch through dictator. You begin to narrow it down as a group. So what does everybody think about this?

(32:17)

We don't do taxes anymore. And let the group go ahead and mark that one off the board. And then you begin to narrow, narrow, narrow and you circle. But the technique I really like is if say you've got a group of 20 people and somebody comes up with the same idea as phrased differently or they validate the idea in the narrow section I put little tick marks. So next to an idea there might be 10 tick marks. And next to another idea there might be three tick mark, tick marks. So never am I invalidating an idea, but I'm weighing them differently. See what I'm doing? Now all these by the way, now, and this is not a 50 minute session or workshop on brainstorming, I gave you the couple of tips there to wet your appetite to say, if you're going to do innovation as a springboard, you need to learn this art form. And the art form is learnable. So find books that will guide you through this process and then have a brainstorming facilitator, champion or bring one in from the outside.

Seth Fineberg (33:17):

Yeah. And there's your process. It's not going to happen without process. I know I wanted to bring a couple of examples or Chris, I don't know if we were going to get into maybe some examples of innovation in our space. I think a great one around pricing. I know everyone in this room hopefully knows about Ron Baker at Kless talking about value pricing, value pricing. I remember Ron Baker bringing it up at a CPA conference and he nearly had things thrown at him for even suggesting doing anything outside of the hourly billing. It was moral or unethical somehow.

Joe Woodard (34:04):

He did actually say unethical. Yeah, He was accused of that.

Seth Fineberg (34:06):

Exactly. He was accused of being unethical. Now it's at the point where we're starting to see subscription pricing entering. Anyone do that in their firm? People subscribe.

Joe Woodard (34:17):

Excellent.

Seth Fineberg (34:17):

Good for you guys. Excellent. So that to me is an innovation in pricing in our space. Something that you would see outside, it's like, oh, it makes so much sense. Like I subscribe to so many other things, streaming services, airlines, rental cars, whatever services out there. So why not subscribe? I'm not saying it works completely in your firm. There's plenty of firms that do value pricing that also will hourly bill because it just makes sense to do that with certain clients, let's be honest. But yeah, I love seeing it in our space.

Joe Woodard (34:50):

Well, and that can see what Seth mentioned, the pricing as an innovation and subscription and then the by extension that means I would say innovation of measurements. So firms that are on the bleeding edge of motivating their teams, but also measuring what matters are measuring leading indicators instead of lagging indicators. And this is an area where you need to innovate heavily. And a lot of leading indicators are non-financial. For example, one of the firms that is innovating in this area is me measures how many gifts they receive from their clients, their paying clients unsolicited. And the gift could be a trinket or the gift could be a fruit basket or something. But they're paying the accounting firm and they're so delighted that they're the inverse customer's giving the gift to the vendor.

Seth Fineberg (35:48):

Especially during busy season.

Joe Woodard (35:50):

Yeah, they're busy season and thinking about you guys or whatever. And they've created a formula. It's very subjective, but Ron and Ed would say all measurements are subjective, but of how many gifts they receive year over year and is it increasing or decreasing and they rate customer satisfaction and longevity over that. It's cool. It's really cool. That's an innovative measurement. And then to make sure that I really drive Seth's point home, subscription is not about bundling. Bundling is still flat fee. Subscription is about the fact that you don't price on scope. And this may be where they run me out of the room, I don't, but you don't price on scope. You price on nature. So it's okay for a long time. Ron Baker said tears, tears bad because TIERS bad because everybody who's building their tears based off of scope, which is really just masking fixed fee, which is masking a hourly rate, it's all pricing based off effort.

(37:00)

But what the innovators are doing is they're saying unlimited tax notice handling, that one bears an explanation, doesn't it? Right? Yeah. Because innovation seems silly until you break them apart. Yeah. Because if you have 500 tax clients, you're all playing a game of averaging like an insurance company, plus you did the tax return. So if you're doing your job well, right? It just means the IRS or the state made an error. But let's say that one client has five in a year, you've got 50 clients that have none and you just play the game of averaging. But when you start pricing on that, just like the insurance companies, you start making money disproportionately to effort because what will 500 clients all subscribe to unlimited tax notice handling, pay for peace, peace of mind, and pay absolutely for you doing nothing. But that's not unethical because you told them it's only if it's conditional billing and it's insurance notice handling. And then you could end up turning a profit on every notice you handle prepaid across the portfolio. You might be earning three, $4,000 a notice prepaid. Y. That's fun. That's fun. Innovative measurements. I'm getting smiles over here. I like that some of you're looking at me. I have four heads, but I'm looking at her smiling.

Seth Fineberg (38:26):

Well, yeah, I mean we definitely want you to leave. This is all about just kind of planting seeds in your mind. We're not going to solve all of your, this isn't like a big innovation lab here. Maybe next year's conference we do that.

Joe Woodard (38:40):

That'd be fun.

Seth Fineberg (38:42):

But this is just to kind of plant seeds in your head to go back to your firms and say what Seth and Joe got me thinking about. Maybe there's just one thing where we're like, yeah, why are we doing things that way? I'm going to get so and so on that to kind of come up our idea person that there's always somebody, there's always someone who's maybe even suggesting things even when you don't want them to contact that person.

Joe Woodard (39:08):

Yeah, that's your wonder person. Yeah. And you want to lean into that another person.

Seth Fineberg (39:16):

And look at the thing that could be better and what better time than now. Hopefully things have chilled out a little bit till you're at the point where you can think about maybe before the end of the year implementing some or even the end of the quarter, implementing some new process, some new thing.

Joe Woodard (39:35):

Can I give you one to start with? That's really good. Eat so easy to start with this. And you could even do this virtually in a Zoom meeting or something. You've heard the SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Don't Do it. Let me tell you why. I know it's funny. There was like, that's a staple.

Seth Fineberg (39:56):

Doesn't work for everything.

Joe Woodard (39:57):

Well, let me tell you, why doesn't work? It doesn't work because everybody obsesses over the weaknesses and the threats and so you end up spending all of your time analyzing weaknesses and threats, which isn't bad. So I'm not saying I'm being a little hyperbolic when I say don't do it. Instead use the SOAR analysis. Strengths, opportunities, aspirations, results. I didn't make that up. It's an actual analysis so much better because when you run all through your strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and the results that you want to drive, you can come back after that is done in the same brainstorming session or separate brainstorming session and say, now that we have our strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results defined, how do we overcome our weaknesses and mitigate our threats because now they're in the way of our SOAR.

Seth Fineberg (40:49):

Sounds like a good theme for a conference Joe.

Joe Woodard (40:52):

Thank you for the plug. My theme about this show this year, SOAR. That's a complete coincidence, but thank you for the plug. But, and that's a framework for brainstorming where even within soar, you can go broad to go narrow, but it gives people a place to start thinking what are our strengths and then list them out just like I talked about before on the whiteboard.

Chris (41:14):

All right, so we have about seven minutes left in this session. In those seven minutes, are there any other questions that anyone would like to present?

Seth Fineberg (41:23):

Yeah, we could even talk through or start to talk through, even if somebody wants to give an example of something where you're like, yeah, I don't really like the way we do this. We maybe start talking through that James.

Audience Member 3 (41:36):

(Inaudible)

Joe Woodard (41:42):

For key performance indicators?

Seth Fineberg (41:46):

Predictive.

Joe Woodard (41:46):

Predictive indicators. Interesting. I don't know of a website that lists them out per se, but there are some great software tools that manage key performance indicators. And that's what I would start with your Google search. A lot of those will ingest your financial data and will ingest your Google or Microsoft data, which I know sounds strange, but remember a lot of it's non-operational capacity measurements can be measured by people's calendar concentrations and things like that. And it does that. And one that you could start looking at is it's brand new. So brand new that I want to make sure I get the name. You may have to Google around me, but it's strata.io as I'm pretty sure I've got it right, but it just came on my radar two weeks ago and it does key performance indicators where you both feed it information and let it ingest information from other sources. Yep. Yeah, it's brand new. It's pretty cool. Yes.

Audience Member 4 (42:53):

Inaudible.

Joe Woodard (43:07):

So to brainstorming when they don't feel like they're worth it?

Seth Fineberg (43:10):

Their buy-in.

Joe Woodard (43:12):

They are buy-in. Yeah. Right. Can you unpack that for me? What do you mean by their buy-in's worth it?

Audience Member 4 (43:17):

Well, what I'm looking at is the staff is like, well, it's your purpose, so whatever you do.

Seth Fineberg (43:24):

Yeah, that sounds like an issue. Yeah, you'd have to go, well, why don't they feel that way? Absolutely. Thank you.

Joe Woodard (43:36):

It's not Disney's theme park that I happen to flip French fries at or put croissants on plates. It's my happiness I'm trying to create, so it's a purpose problem.

Seth Fineberg (43:45):

So there's an opportunity there. I see it as, yeah.

Audience Member 5 (43:54):

Inaudible.

Joe Woodard (43:57):

Which is why you did the Working Genius. I knew why. I didn't want to say that. It seems self ingratiating, but I got you. Yeah,

Seth Fineberg (44:06):

No shame.

Audience Member 6 (44:08):

I concerned, I guess this and say, and going into tasks and really focusing on that, the invention portion is critical in that process with the client. And if that is not something that I, that seems like.

Joe Woodard (44:39):

Yeah, if you're talking about ongoing client work, instead of consulting into the gap, which would be for your practice development, you have to hire into the gap. And that's the nice thing about the working in Genius plus the DISC assessments is that you can create a portfolio for the person that can fill that gap. You have the tools. Now the problem is it's not a chicken and egg, it's a cart and a horse. And sometimes financially you have to get your cart in front of your horse. You need them before you can start making the money. But the capital investment's so worth it.

Seth Fineberg (45:14):

Yeah. I guess anyone going.

Joe Woodard (45:16):

And you can temporarily, I'm sorry, Seth, you could go temp to perm or you can go part-time to full, something like that. As you know, because heard me speak, I'm not a big fan of contractors, 10, 99 workers, but you can go temp to perm or part to full under a W two, and that's a way of maybe helping to stomach the budget.

Seth Fineberg (45:38):

Anyone building or growing a cast practice these days, I mean you're in it, have to, there's no set formula for doing that. I happen to be in touch with a gentleman who has kind of built some methodology, it's called the measure and hack method methodology for kind of doing these things, but it's really kind of a blueprint for innovation to happen. But if you have a cast practice, you're building a cast practice. I mean you're in it. You have to think outside of everything. I mean, sure you can take advice from folks, but ultimately it's yours. It's very personal. So hats off to you, by the way, because you're moving in the right direction. And I know you're kind of feeling like you're on that tight rope the whole way, but don't be afraid to fail. Yeah.

Chris (46:31):

Alright, so anything else, John? We have exactly one minute left. And in that one minute, let's just assume that if everyone else here forgets every other thing about what you just said, except one thing that they absolutely must remember, what would be that one thing?

Joe Woodard (46:44):

Read the Working Genius.

Seth Fineberg (46:49):

Like I said, I know it a few times, but don't be afraid to fail. Identify that individual in your firm who is that wonder person, and you'll schedule it in schedule time with them and then also your team as well to say, all right, look, not to put them on the spot, but it's a building process, isn't it? Really Figure out that one thing in your firm that maybe isn't working quite right and build something better.

Chris (47:22):

Alright, Great. Well, I want to thank you both again for all of your insight, all of your help on this has been fantastic. And yes, thank you, the audience. You have also been great.