TRN Podcast|

 

Joining Eric Green this week on the Tax Rep Podcast is Sharrin Fuller. Sharrin is the CEO and founder of Glass Wallet Ventures and is a managing partner in multiple accounting and financial services businesses including A Simple Office Solution. After successfully starting her own virtual practice, she scaled and sold it. Sharrin developed the Remote Firm Scaling System and Remote Team Roadmap to help accounting firms position themselves for growth and eventual acquisition with maximum productivity from their teams. Listen in as Eric and Sharrin discuss virtual practices and how to set yourself up to eventually sell your practice and maximize your asset.

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How To Build A Saleable Accounting Practice With Sharrin Fuller By Tax Rep Network

Joining me is Sharinn Fuller. If you don’t know Sharrin, she speaks all over the place. If you Google her, she’s not hard to find. If you’re not familiar, though, Sharrin is the CEO and founder of Glass Wallet Ventures. She’s a managing partner in multiple accounting and financial service businesses. The reason I was so happy to have Sharrin here is that one of her specialties is talking about how to scale and make your practice saleable, which is a topic I’ve touched on, but I’m not an expert like she is.

After successfully starting, scaling, and selling her accounting and bookkeeping practice, Sharrin developed the Remote Firm Scaling System and Remote Team Roadmap to help accounting firms position themselves for growth and eventual acquisition, with maximum productivity from their teams. She’s also created a virtual accounting firm, which is awesome, as a way of avoiding all the costly overhead that usually goes along with most firms. You were way ahead of the COVID curve.

She’s speaking at the AccountingWEB Summit in San Diego on May 10th. I was very excited until I found out we’re in competing time slots, which is why I was like, “I have to invite Sharrin onto the show,” because it’s going to be a great talk. If you’re going to be at the AccountingWEB Summit, obviously, my talk is great, but if you’re not going to sit in my talk, you may want to grab Sharrin’s. Sharrin, first of all, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

All joking aside, there are two reasons why I decided to bring on a guest. One is that they’re doing something important in the accounting tax space, or they’re an expert in something that I’ve touched on, and I think that we could go deeper with it, and you check both boxes. I think what you’re doing with virtual practices is very cool. Your focus on helping accountants make their practice saleable. We were talking about this a little bit before we got started, many people wait until the end, and they get to the point where it’s now October, “I can’t do another tax season.” They’re now trying to sell under the gun.

Sharrin Fuller’s Journey From High School To Accounting

Their practice is all wrapped up around them, which is a problem. By the way, it’s why law firms aren’t saleable. It is because of all personal goodwill. If Eric Green drops dead, is the phone number worth something? Probably. The goodwill is going to evaporate along with me. It’s a topic that most people don’t think about until it’s too late. For everyone tuning in, I think that this is something that they want to be thinking about. Before we go diving into that, why don’t you tell us about Sharrin? Sometimes I say, “Let’s go back to high school.” We don’t have to go back that far.

That’s a long time ago.

I’d never know. Anyway, I’m completely gray. I have four kids. I tell them it’s because of them.

That’ll do it.

Did you always know you wanted to get into accounting? How did you find your way into accounting?

I did not want to be in accounting. I wanted to be a lawyer or a psychologist, which are honestly the completely opposite realms of the career path. I realized how much college I’d have to go through. When I was in high school, I started taking college classes, and as I was sitting there, I thought, “This is like paid-for high school. This is terrible. There is no way I’m going to pay for this and sit here for eight years.” That’s out of my mind. I started managing companies. It was fun. I enjoyed it. I got my nail license. I’ve always been a Jill of all trades. I like to keep busy.

After I got my nail license, I bought a salon. When I bought that salon, I had to start learning about accounting, handling my own QuickBooks, understanding what payroll taxes were, liability, and workers’ comp. As I’m doing that, I’m realizing I enjoy this. I sold that salon, moved to California, and started working for a company where I was operations manager again. That company sold. I thought, I’m so sick of working for other people. Everybody keeps selling their businesses or whatnot.

At that point, I found a niche. There were all these companies that rented space inside our cold storage facility office space. All of them said, “I wish I could hire you, but I only need you 3 or 4 hours a week.” I’m like, “There are ten of you. That’s a full-time job.” I initially started my company, A Simple Office Solution, as your mobile office manager. That’s what I did. I went to offices, typically to pick up everything I needed. I’d go home, handle all the bookkeeping, and anything that needed to be done.

Over time, that translated into or turned into working with tax accountants and things like that. We eventually evolved into a full-service fractional CFO and controller advisory firm. That started in 2006. That’s where I found my love of accounting and working from home. Honestly, the remote thing is completely selfish. I don’t enjoy putting on pants if I don’t have to. I don’t want to do it. I want to roll out of bed, come down to my desk, get things done, and then roll back out of my office and go sit on the couch during the weekdays. After back and forth in the grind in San Diego for so long, remote was my thing.

You have these ten clients. At what point do you end up scaling up to being a full bookkeeping accounting firm, or have you always kept it small?

It started smaller. What I found is I was good at it. Not to toot my own horn, but what I found is I’m not going to charge hourly anymore. I’m going to charge a fixed fee because what takes somebody else ten hours takes me two. The value I’m bringing is still worth the same dollar amount. I found that I was efficient and could get everything done. I’ve always been very organized. I started scaling as much as I possibly could with myself. I think around 2010, I realized I needed help. I hired an assistant to handle some of the low-level things. I started scaling up in 2015.

For some reason, every client that I’d had over the past nine years decided that they wanted to refer someone to me, and it grew. I got to the point where I thought I either needed to turn all these clients down or I needed to grow a team. I grew a team, and that was very scary because now I’m in charge of all these people’s livelihoods, not just my own. I can’t say, “I’m not going to do that,” because you have bills to pay. Anyhow, that was the point when we scaled. After about five years, I got the offer. In 2020, I got several offers from people trying to acquire my business, and I didn’t want to sell it. Eventually, it came to a point where I got an offer that I thought would be perfect. It all worked out.

Leveraging Automation To Scale Your Accounting Practice

There’s a lot to unpack there, but what’s fascinating is a couple of things. One, the ability to leverage now has never been better. You hired a team. More and more, I’m less inclined to put people in place. I’ve had on the show Andrew Lassise, he has the Tech Talk for Accountants podcast. He and I were goofing before we got started. I was talking about my workflow, and he said, “Eric, just to let you know, we can automate all of that.” I said, “These systems don’t work together.” He said, “I can make them work together. There’s something called Zapier.”

What we’re now doing internally is implementing automation, not because I want to get rid of people, but because it will allow me to punch above my weight. We can now do way more because if we can cut out even fifteen minutes a day per person, that’s hundreds of hours by the end of the year, maybe even a thousand hours. When you look at that, what we end up doing more is value billing, flat-fee billing, because I don’t want to do it per hour. I’m investing in this, and the client’s not getting to pay less. That’s not the way this works. They’re going to pay more because our profit margin is going up since I can now get it done cheaper. Interestingly, you weren’t looking to sell when they came knocking.

No. It was my baby.

A couple of things before we get into the sale part, for folks who are now, I think, and I said there’s a silver lining to COVID, which is that clients who used to insist on coming in have had to learn to use Dropbox or SmartVault or whatever. They’ve had to learn to use Zoom or FaceTime or whatever. It is now maybe a real opportunity for people to take their practice and begin moving it more virtual, even if it’s not.

For instance, when our lease is up, do we need the amount of space we have? Do I need space at all? There are places like Regis and Stark, office shares. If I have to have a meeting, it’s like $150 a month. I’ll pay per meeting, but I’m charging the client $500, $600, or $700. What do I care? From your perspective, are you seeing more of that? I know you’re consulting now for a lot of folks. Are you seeing people embrace this? I’m wondering how many people are set on getting back to the way they used to be.

You would be amazed. It baffles me when I look at companies like the larger ones, Google or Facebook. They’re like, “We’re going to come back to half in-office.” I’m thinking, How terrible. Can I be in the office on Tuesday and Wednesday or Wednesday and Thursday then? Don’t make me come in on Monday or Friday. I feel like when it comes to, especially smaller business owners, they’re one of two ways. For the ones that can be remote, not everything can, but the ones that can, service-based work can be, they either are completely against it, won’t do it, and they’re going to stay in the dark ages.

That’s where they’re going to live. Their clientele is going to be that dark-age clientele because those are the ones that don’t want to adapt. When that business dies out, that style of business dies out. That’s what it is. No one’s going to want to acquire that business because their clientele is stuck in that mode, and they don’t want to be stuck in that mode. If you buy that business, you’re not going to get them transferred over here to this remote workspace. You’re going to lose all those clients.

You’ve got the newer ones that I would like to say are younger and hip. I am neither of those things. I’m lazy and selfish. You’ve got those of us that are like, “Let’s do this. Let’s embrace it. Let’s say, this is what it is. Here’s how we’re going to do it.” I think the way for firms to transition into that is, first of all, they have to want to do it. The owner has to be behind it. Two, you have to have a process laid out. You can’t tell your clients, “This is what we’re going to do.” You have to send them a thing and say, “This is how we’re going to do it. Here’s my calendar link. We’re going to book you here. Here’s what we’re going to use to communicate.”

They have to see it and know that you’ve thought it through, how you’re going to function. Otherwise, what’s going to happen is you’re going to be sitting there, not thinking it through, and you’re going to have all these clients emailing you, and you’re not going to know what to do. It’s something you have to put a little bit of thought into beforehand and find out what works for you because another big thing that kills your clients, and I know this is a little off-topic, is changing platforms over and over. They have to download something new and learn something new, and a lot of clients don’t want to do that. Consistency is key along with efficiency.

Consistency is key along with efficiency. Share on X

Embracing Virtual Practices In Accounting Firms

One of the things you learn, especially when you sell for a living, I sell for a living, even though I’m a tax lawyer, even though I do handle cases or whatever, at the end of the day, I am a marketing person because I need to keep the phones ringing, keep people coming in. There is a value proposition that you’re making to your clients, and one of the things is, look at Amazon, look at Google. What they do well is make it easy. Amazon, you can order, and it shows up at your door. Do you want to return it? Print the label, slap it on, and you can even leave it at your door or walk into a dozen different places. They make it easy.

The idea is it used to be when you sold, you made it hard. In other words, you’d send something that, when they tore it open, now it was too difficult to go and get something to return it. People don’t want to deal with those companies. These days, with social media, everything is more transparent. People want to know who you are and what you’re all about. If they don’t like that, they’re going to move on to another company that has a similar product and a better why. A lot of it now is who you are, and you need to make it easy.

I’m not surprised to hear you say younger folks embrace the virtual, which is right up their alley, almost in a negative way. I’ll tell you the truth. It bothers me that there’s an in-person social awkwardness, but everyone’s got these avatars or whatever you want to call them online. Suicide rates are going up. At professional organizations, they don’t want to show up because they think their friends are all on this thing. What they don’t realize is, I have found that network to be worth my weight multiple times over in gold.

The point is I would imagine they would embrace it because they’re used to virtual. They’re used to doing everything on the computer or on a screen. It is going to be interesting that eventually, like everything, like my clients, they’re going to get left behind. My clients had to learn to use Zoom. “We’re not meeting, period. End of story.” Did you at some point plan to be virtual? In other words, did you start it, or did you pivot to it?

Immediately. Virtual wasn’t a thing back in 2006. We didn’t have a lot of apps. QuickBooks wasn’t online. Everything was a desktop. In the beginning, there wasn’t a lot of virtual, but the first thing I thought was, How can I do this from home? I think I found LogMeIn or something like that. The first thing I’d do when I would get to a client is install LogMeIn. That way, when I’m at home, I can log in, and remotely access a computer. That way, all I had to do was, on Mondays or Fridays, whatever day we decided, I’d go drive around to all my clients, grab everything because getting people to scan and email at the time was horrible, take it home, and do it there. That was pretty darn close to virtual that you could get at the time.

Once I had all those things, I was creating online and stopping paper. Anyhow, getting people to embrace it at that point was a little bit harder. It was about building a level of trust, like, “This crazy person’s not coming into my office, stealing my mail, hacking into my computer, and I’m never going to see her again.” I feel like it’s still that way, to be honest. You have to build that level of trust. From the beginning, I didn’t like being in offices.

Nothing was worse than that alarm clock waking me up at 6:00 so I had to wash my hair and brush my teeth to drive an hour and a half in traffic to sit in an office and work for eight hours, to drive an hour and a half home. That’s three hours of my life completely wasted that I could have been productive and had more to my day. That’s what it all came down to. I did live in San Diego. I didn’t want to be in traffic. I wanted to be at the beach and the bar. The sooner I could start my day, get my work done, and stop my day, the better.

Why Work-Life Balance Should Be A Priority

To unpack, the way I’ve put it to many of my tax rep members, your practice works for you. You don’t work for it. Your practice is set up around the way you want to live. I did an episode, and it was right before tax season, and I started getting bombarded with emails. I’m dreading this. Do you have any advice? I said, here’s what you do, get your favorite drink on a Sunday, run the list of your clients, how much they’re paying you, and who has receivables. Rank your clients from A to F. The Ds and the Fs, just fire them. Get rid of them.

Immediately send a letter saying, “Due to my schedule, I’m unable to continue working on your account. I believe you have all of your documents. If not, we’re shipping them to you. You’re going to need to go seek a new accountant. Thank you very much.” Don’t let the door hit you in the ass. Bye. The C clients, if they owe you money, first of all, if they owe you money, collect what you can collect and fire them. Otherwise, they’re going up significantly. Bs are going to go up something. As can go up a little, but they go up every single year. What will happen, if you’re lucky, is a third will leave. Good.

You’re now going to make the same money or more money for less work. It is because you train your clients. If you’re reading this, you have trained your clients to treat you the way they treat you. If they’re cheap and they pay slowly, you have allowed them to do that. One is that we have to break them or get rid of those people. If now you can get your practice to a point where you’re charging what you want, you’re working with people you like, and you’re being paid properly, also, by the way, doing less work. Who says you have to work until midnight during tax season? Why can’t you be home for dinner?

Why do you have to work seven days a week? You have chosen this. It’s like a disease that still is hanging around from the ’80s. The ’80s are before your time, but it’s not during my time. I’m not going there. The point is that I’ll tell you, big law and the big accounting firms, and I say it’s like a disease. Ally McBeal, the old TV show, I think showed this well. It’s like a culture, I’m going to stay until midnight, we’re going to eat dinner, and I’ll be out at midnight at the bar. It becomes like this weirdo culture where you’re expected to.

I’m with you. It’s not because, first of all, I am super disciplined, but I’m also lazy. I have set myself up because I don’t want to work evenings or weekends. My kids, for some weird reason, like to hang out with me. My wife, for some weird reason, likes to hang out with me. This idea that their practices are out of control, I did this show where you got to get your arms around this. You start with getting rid of everything bad. Fire them. Get rid of them. You now start building the practice that you want.

For those folks who have not thought this through, who are like, “Eric, I’ve got this space and I’ve got five people,” and so on, I want to talk to you about some of the advice to, one, make the practice more saleable, but also this transition. It is because most people, I don’t think, I know, you called yourself lazy, but it was also a little bit of, it wasn’t lazy. It was, “What do I want my…” It’s fascinating. If you go back and read one of the earlier episodes, and this is a true story, I called Brent Robertson. Brent is with Fathom.

There’s a software company, Fathom. This is Fathom. They’re consultants here in West Hartford. They do big companies. They do a lot of that. I’m friends with him. He’s one of the founders. I called him on Saturday. We were talking about something, and I said, “Can I ask you something? The law practice is growing. My marriage is good. My kids are great. The coaching program keeps growing. Why am I so miserable?” He said, “Let’s unpack that for a moment. What do you want?” I was like, “What are you talking about?”

He said, “Tell me what you want. Describe what you want your day to look like. Describe what you want your week to look like.” Easy question to ask, hard to answer. Think that through. You’re going to engineer backward. I thought it was brilliant. All of a sudden, I began to realize all these things that I was doing or setting myself up for that I could change and cut. For folks who are tuning in, because often they’re already in it, you, I think, again, you said lazy. I think it was more that you had a vision for how you wanted to run your life, and you built yourself around it. I don’t think it’s lazy. I think it’s brilliant, or at least understanding what you want, which a lot of people don’t.

Go back to the culture from the ’80s that we all came out with, is that’s what you do. You work like a dog. Everyone hates tax season. Why? It doesn’t have to be that way. For the folks who are already in that, what do you do for people like that who are already like, “My life is chaos eight months out of the year? It doesn’t slow down like it used to.” Remember summers? The accountants went golfing during the summer. No more. It’s now year-round. How do you help people break themselves from that?

With a golf club, just kidding, that’s a terrible joke. Honestly, the first thing I ask them is, how are you managing yourself when you get up in the morning? What are you doing? To me, that’s where it starts. What’s your project management tool? How are you doing? How are you answering calls? Some of these people are answering texts all night long, and responding to emails all night long. They’re never getting that break, so when they get in the morning, they’re already so exhausted because they had no time off in between to rebuild and decompress to start over again. Usually, I find out, nine times out of ten, those people will be like, “I don’t know, I have a pad and paper,” or, “I don’t know, I look at my email.”

I’m like, there’s your number one problem. You’re not organized. You’re not managing your time. Manage your time. Give yourself a set time, “I am going to work from 9:00 to 5:00. That is my time. Here is my day. Here are my priorities. This is what I need to get done today. These are my hard deadlines. Move the next things over until eventually, it all trickles down.” You have to be disciplined. Some people aren’t. In the remote life, a lot of people aren’t. Some people can’t, and some people thrive or enjoy that chaos. You’ve got to identify that right away, and you’re like, that’s where you’re going to be. Maybe you should go work in a daycare because that’s on it too, but at least it’s 9:00 to 5:00.

Anyhow, honestly, I think it comes down to management. How are you managing your days? If you can get them to convert, to use some tool, and to set guidelines for themselves, as you mentioned, and stick to them, then they start getting into better habits. You’ve got to figure that those types of habits have been going on since they first started, so decades, and it’s hard to break someone overnight. One little piece at a time. Always, they’re worried their customers are going to go away.

If you can manage your time and be disciplined, you start getting better habits. Share on X

The ones that are driving you nuts and won’t respond to you are not worth it. They respond all the time, out of the time you’re texting them, you’re on the phone with them, you’re dealing with them. I guarantee you’re losing money, regardless of what they’re paying. Tell them, this is how it’s going to be. They can get on board, or they can go somewhere else. You’ve freed up so much more time, like you mentioned, to handle the rest of your clients. Maybe you have some great clients who want more from you, but you haven’t had the capacity to do it. That is me taking your question and running in circles with it.

Twenty percent of your clients take up 80% of your time.

They do, 100%.

I told a joke, I think it was at AICPA, at the Engage conference two years ago. Somebody had mentioned to me, “What do you do with the clients that don’t respond, whatever?” I said we would send an email each week, like, “Where’s the stuff?” Third week, it comes from me, “Clearly, you’re not ready to move forward. If we don’t hear from you by Monday, we’re closing your file, and I’m going to return the balance of your retainer.” The comment came up, “Don’t worry about them leaving.” I said, what’s interesting is I got a lot happier, and my practice runs a lot smoother once I realized I didn’t give a crap.

For those clients, the amount of time you’ve spent trying to track them down and beg them to get their information to you, you’ve already spent the allotted time that you were supposed to work on them, so you are at a loss.

For people who are interested, the best that comes to mind and the best discussion about this, I don’t know if you know him, he wrote a number of best-selling books, Jocko Willink. He has a podcast. Former Navy SEAL. He was interviewed by Success magazine, you can find it on YouTube. They said, “We know that you’re super disciplined, scheduled, and everything.” He said, “That’s not true. I schedule part of my day.” Here’s what I’ve taken from it, first of all, you cannot call me directly. I’m on Do Not Disturb. Everything goes to my assistant. That’s one of the things Brent Robertson had me do. He said, “You need to build a wall between you and everyone else.” You’ve experienced this, everyone here has, where you are crazy all day, and nothing got done because you’re reacting.

When Jocko was interviewed, he said, “Parts of my day are very scheduled, which gives me freedom in other parts. In the morning, I will schedule hardcore from 7:30 to 2:00. I am scheduled. I do not randomly pick up calls. At 2:00, I’m tired, the afternoon slump. I’ve got work done. From 2:00 on, I can return phone calls, people can come in and sit and shoot the breeze with me about a case or whatever is going on, and when I leave at 5:30 or 6:00, no matter the chaos of the afternoon, I got stuff done. I knocked off what I wanted to knock off.”

His advice was, “Don’t try scheduling eight hours. You’re never going to stick to that.” He said even in Navy SEAL operations, people get lost, boats break, and you have to build in extra time. He said, “You don’t schedule 8 or 10 hours. You’ll never stick to that. Schedule part of your day, and it gives you the freedom in the other part to react and deal with whatever fires come up.” That’s been helpful for me, but it is a hard thing to break because my life for many years was chaos.

Coming in the morning, listen to voicemails, and immediately return those voicemails. Why? I don’t know. Respond to emails. It’s noon, nothing’s been done. People want to come in and talk to me. At 5:30, nothing got done. At night and on weekends, I’m doing work, and my wife would say, “Can’t you get your work done during the week?” I’m like, “You don’t understand,” and she was right.

It is true. I’ve worked for a company like that. It was terrible. You got it. My boss, his way of thinking, he came from a Big Four, was you get here before your boss gets here, and you don’t leave until after your boss leaves. That was the mentality we had. The same thing, we had to get things right then. Anyhow, it was crazy. I think at the end of the week, I was working 70 or 80 hours, and I think I had Sunday evenings maybe to myself if I was lucky. I took Sunday mornings for mimosa brunch so I could handle Sunday evening, but that’s not a life.

By the way, you probably weren’t being very efficient.

How can you be efficient in that? You drop the balls left and right, and then clients are mad at you, and then your boss is mad at you, but you’re still working 80 hours a week. Where’s the downfall?

Mastering Strategy In A Chaotic Profession

You’re not doing your best work because you’re reacting, everything is reacting. In many ways, clients come to me for strategy. I teach offers and all this stuff. What I like about my work is there’s a real strategy to it. I can’t give you my attention and focus if I’m constantly in a state of reaction. I need to come in in the morning, fresh coffee, look at it, and sometimes I’ll say, “What about this?” Things will come to me that didn’t come to me a week before when they first called because I can sit quietly and think this through.

Again, do not disturb. My phone does not ring, and my staff have learned, I don’t care who it is. The commissioner can call. I’ll call them back. It’s not that important, and you get work done. For people that are in this chaos, what I’m thinking goes in two places. One is, can you pivot to slowly make yourself more virtual? We touched on it. I think the answer is yes, how do you do that? Do you think the virtual practice is more saleable?

Absolutely. 100%.

To me, it’s a foolish question.

It is because it can be anywhere. You don’t have to be in Timbuktu and live there to go to this brick-and-mortar or fly in to manage it. It can be wherever, and your team can be wherever, and your clients can be wherever. You also have a bigger, more scalable product at that point as well. You’re not stuck to this very small, limited demographic.

With a virtual practice, your team and your clients can be wherever. You also have a bigger, more scalable product. You're not stuck to a limited demographic. Share on X

How Embracing Technology Can Improve Client Relationships

The other thing I wanted to mention to people tuning into this is if you can embrace technology, whether it’s automated bookkeeping, or having the systems talk to each other, here’s what I found. I have done more of this, and I get to spend more time with my clients. My clients, in many ways, get more access to me because I’m not running around in all the details. We can streamline a lot of it. My staff do a lot of the back stuff, and now I’m more freed up. All of a sudden, I have more time, and by the way, I’m in a better mood. It makes a big difference.

First of all, you want to try to automate everything. If you’re sitting there going, “I don’t even know where to begin,” Sharrin can help you. At least look and say, “You can automate that. There’s software for that.” Dawn Brolin, when she dragged me into Scaling New Heights to the exhibit hall, I was like, “Oh my god.” I couldn’t get over it because, again, I’m a lawyer, and this is accounting. Not just one, but many competitors in inventory, and bookkeeping, I had never heard of Xero. What the hell is Xero? There’s a real company called Xero.

One is that there’s probably a software solution. You are not the only one who’s thought of this, so you don’t have to start programming. There’s probably something out there that can be done, and then there are people who can help you implement it. Sharrin, if you need someone to help you automate things, Andrew Lassise and there are other people. One, I would obviously automate everything. How do you start transitioning clients? You were running around picking things up. Did you find you had to transition those people to Zoom, or when this stuff came along, did you find it was a natural transition?

It was a natural transition. It was nice because I remember what we had back in the day, some virtual phone line that would have one-on-one calls, and it was a big pain in the butt. RingCentral, I think. Anyhow, it was hard for people to get in. Zoom came along, and that was great. Fortunately for us, the type of clients that we specialize in and work with tend to be in the tech startup, the SaaS industry. They’re technology-friendly, and they love it. In fact, a lot of times, they’re like, “Try this. My buddy made this app,” and we’re like, “Great.”

That transition is always easy. It’s those few that are a little bit older that have a harder time. What we do is create an instructional video or a step-by-step with screenshots. That way, for our clients who are like, “I don’t know how to do this,” we’re like, “Here, you can watch me do everything you need to do, and you can do it step by step.” That seems to honestly work the absolute best because they can replay it over and over. If that doesn’t work, what we’ve also done is logged in to their system or done a screen share and walked them through it ourselves. We have someone on the team who can always do that.

It’s one of the opportunities created because of COVID. I went from every client wanting to come in and see me, and I get it, my clients are under severe stress. Criminal investigations, audits, they owe money, they’ve been levied or liened, whatever. They’ll say, “Can you send me a Zoom link?” They don’t even ask to come in anymore.

I would say there isn’t a gallon who wants to go anywhere.

By the way, it’s still too cheap. It should be $16 a gallon, like in Europe, if you want to help the environment. The point is there’s an opportunity now to say, COVID is still around. We have people, who make it up, who are compromised. We’re doing everything virtually. We will send you a link. You’ll have a handful, generally older people, who have difficulty. If they want to drop stuff off and you have a human being scan it for now, fine. Eventually, there are services for that. They can go to Kinko’s or Staples.

You can set something up as an accounting firm so that your client can mail it in, and that place will put everything in a scanned PDF and send it over to you. Almost every issue that you can think of, of why people want to meet in person, is 100% solvable with technology.

It is because of COVID now, that the IRS embraces it too. With my laptop and my phone, which will work as a scanner, not the photo, a real scan app, I can scan documents, upload them to the IRS, I have e-fax, and I can receive e-fax. Literally, with a laptop, I can go anywhere. I’ve been in Florida, I’ve been in Chicago, I’ve been in Israel, and I can run my practice, have meetings, call the IRS like I’m sitting at home in my office.

No one needs to know.

Usually, it’s interesting. They’ll say, “Where are you today?” I’m like, “I’m in Tel Aviv.” They’d be like, “I’ve never been there.” I’m having this conversation with an IRS person in Philadelphia. It used to be, years ago, the internet. Now, it’s everywhere. Maybe your hotel’s not great, you got to move somewhere, but the point being is that you can do this from anywhere. If you do have a practice, you can start transitioning to a more virtual one. It might take you a little time, but you eventually could get to the point where your people can work from home. You don’t need that overhead, the office space, all of that stuff, and you can be a little freer about where you choose to do what you do.

One thing I always tell people on top of that is you can also decide where you want your team to come from. You don’t have to, and no offense to people living in San Francisco or New York, but your cost of living there is extremely high, and wages are high. If you have a business there, you can hire amazing people elsewhere, and still pay them way over whatever their cost of living would be there, so it’s amazing to afford to grow and run your firm.

It’s something for a startup to think about, like, “I need someone, but I can’t afford a $180,000 person. If I get someone from, say, Missouri, they’re top of the line in median income. I could offer $90, and they are rich as can be. I’m now getting an amazing person, they’re growing with my firm. Maybe I want to get them to this amount, which is what the goal is, but now you’re able to grow your firm in that way.” I think, honestly, the employee pool is, to me, one of the biggest benefits of having a remote team. We have so many more options of people out there, and to be quite honest, we find almost all our best employees in Texas and Florida if that’s not odd.

One of the biggest benefits of a remote team is the larger employee pool, giving so many more choices. Share on X

I think a lot of people have left New York, the Northeast, and moved down there.

They can now.

They can, and with remote work, you can get talent that you may not have locally. We’re in New Haven. New Haven is a lovely town, we have Yale and everything else, but it’s not a huge talent pool. If you are willing to deal with remote work, now you open up to the entire country.

I get people from other countries. They’re like, “I will work for hours, I want to come to the U.S., I need to work and improve.” Anyhow, you do open yourself up way more than what you had before.

Different time zones, believe it or not, are very helpful. When you can have people covering, like, I’m on the East Coast, it’s 5:00 here, but it’s only 2:00 there, you could theoretically have coverage later into the evening if you’re in that kind of business. There is a huge advantage. Again, if you’re in a business that can, and most in our audience are accountants, you can embrace getting people from all over.

In fact, what’s interesting is that I now have tax rep members who’ve posted, we have a whole online forum, “I’m looking for per diem work,” and other members are like, “I need help.” You’re trained. I don’t care if you’re sitting here, you can be in Illinois, you can be in Florida, you can be wherever. As long as you get the work done, I don’t care where you are. It is a huge advantage. I’ll ask you, if I want to make my accounting practice saleable, is that something that I should start thinking about early on?

As soon as you possibly can. I tell people the first thing they need to do is make sure their company is organized correctly because when you go through the due diligence of selling your company if you’ve got a bunch of different companies, everything’s intertwined. You’ve got a mess, and it’s too much to iron out. It’s costly to iron out and move apart, and it also could drive away the buyer. Number one, form your company correctly. Have it to where it’s this piece. If you’re going to have 6 or 7 different branches, that’s fine, create different LLCs, but make sure that this one’s in its own little separate LLC so that way you can sell off that one piece.

When you go through due diligence of selling your company, you're going to want everything organized because when it's a mess, it's costly to iron out. Share on X

The second thing I tell them is to keep all your finances for that company in that company. Don’t use it as your personal piggy bank. Take owner’s draws if you need to, but don’t just swipe the card. I try to also tell people to keep anything owner-related off the P&L. If you’re taking draws, don’t put it as your wages, keep them on the balance sheet, because then, when you’re putting your draws over on the P&L, you’re drawing it down. When you go to do due diligence, they’re going to ask you to pull that out anyway because they want to see how profitable your business is without you. Those are extremely important things.

Your contracts for your clients are everything. The number one thing that people want to see when they’re buying your company is that the contract is long-term. How long is it? Is this month-to-month? Is this an annual renewable agreement? What am I buying? Depending on how long that is, it’s going to be longer. From there, honestly, it’s your files. I always tell people, to make sure every T is crossed and every I is dotted. If they aren’t, do a little simple audit on yourself. See what you’re missing. Your HR files are extremely important. Do you have everything for your clients? Have they all signed non-disclosures? Do you have their agreements signed?

You have to make sure that’s all in line because when it comes down to it, that’s what they’re looking for when they go to buy your business. They see you, they see your product, and they decide that’s what they want. They’re now looking behind the curtains, and they’re making sure everything’s in order. If it’s not, that’s a deal breaker. Those are all little things, if you do it right from the first time, it’s cake, it’s done as you go. My due diligence, I think, was two weeks. It was so quick because they’d ask me for documents, and I was like, “Here, I’m done.”

I’m very organized. I’m a weirdo in my own little area over here, but for the most part, a lot of people don’t have that. Even some of the companies that are VC-backed baffle me. I’m like, “You go through due diligence quite often. You’re going to raise more rounds of funding. What are you doing?” That’s one of the first things we do for even our clients that come on, that we know are going to be acquired or raise funds, make sure their file tree and their due diligence are accurate.

If you’re somebody thinking, “Oh my god, we’re a mess,” you can clean it up. You have to get started cleaning it up. You can start getting NDAs on your employees. You can put an employee handbook in place. You can send out pricing and get longer-term agreements with your clients. In other words, it’s great if you do it from the get-go because it’s in place and you’re doing it. If you don’t, it’s a process to get there. It’s going to take you a little bit longer, but you can get there.

You can, and the best thing to do, as I said before, is to template it. Have your file tree, have your templates, and then go through. I’m a big list-maker. I use project management tools like crazy, and I would honestly template out my entire project, what I need to do, and check off one by one until finally it’s done and I’m good to go. It seems overwhelming in the beginning, but you start one little piece at a time and then move from there. If you don’t want to do it, you can pay someone to do it. There’s always that beauty.

Preparing Your Accounting Practice For Future Sale

Sharrin, thank you. This has been terrific. For folks who want to find you or get a hold of you, where’s the best place?

My website, it’s GlassWalletVentures.com. Every possible way to get a hold of me, social media, all that fun stuff, catfish photos of me, all of those are on the website, and I can be reached there.

I know you’re going to be at the AccountingWEB Summit in San Diego. Anywhere else coming up?

I am going to be in trouble because I know that I am set up to speak about a few more things. I cannot remember. There are quite a few coming up, they are all on my website. CPA Crossings, I know I’m recording some instructional videos for CPA and such as well.

In fact, I’m doing a four-hour offer workshop for them.

I needed to get my hundred minutes in, and I’m still stressing a little bit, but it’s okay. Once I start talking, I usually don’t shut up, so I think I’ll be fine, especially if I’m talking with slides.

With that, thank you very much for doing this. If you want to get a hold of Sharrin, I will put a link to her website in the description of the episode. Certainly, you can reach out to her. I’m sure she will be happy to consult with you and help you make your practice both virtual and way more saleable than it is now. Sharrin, thank you.

Thank you, have a good day.

Everyone, thank you for joining us again. We will talk to you next week on the show. Bye.

 

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