A Quest For Value: The Importance Of Asking More Questions
Welcome to another episode of The Abundant Accountant. We have a very special guest and our special guest is a CPA. She divides her time between working as a wine consultant in Napa Valley and teaching advisory skills through her newest venture,?TheImpactfulAdvisor.com. She’s also a writer and speaker and even tweeting at?EvenANerd.com.
She’s a regular keynote presenter at CPA and technology conferences around the country and has also been named Top 100 Influencer by Accounting Today. Geni is one of the top 25 thought leaders in accounting and one of the 25 most powerful women in accounting by CPA Practice Advisor. She also co-founded a remote bookkeeping business for the wine industry and is also an author.
Before we welcome our special guest to the show, if you feel underpaid and overworked in your firm, keep listening. No matter what’s happening in your firm right now, it is 100% possible to work with fewer clients and fewer hours and get paid more money. I know that all around you, accountants, CPAs, bookkeepers and tax firm owners are working long hours with many clients.
They are probably scratching their heads, wondering why they grind fourteen or more hours a day yet have little or nothing to show in their bank accounts. That is not how we do things here at The Abundant Accountant. I will show you how to create the firm you’ve always dreamed of. How to bring income in that you desire and serve the clients you choose, who are also happy to pay you.?
Have time to do things that you are passionate about. If you’re ready to make the change, start creating the firm you’ve dreamed of. When you start your firm, book a call with me and my team at?TheAbundantCall.com?to start exploring what’s possible for you. Now, let’s welcome our very special guest, Geni, to the show. Welcome, Geni, to the show.
Michelle, thank you. It’s good to be here.
It’s great to have you. I’m so excited to have you here on the show. Even before we started recording, I’m like, “We get along already. This is awesome,” for everyone here on the show who’s been here for a long time. I think you’re going to hear some validation of things that I’ve been talking about for quite a while.
We’ve been doing this show since 2018, so if you’re new here, make sure to go back to the beginning episodes and read them. There are tons of golden nuggets. Make sure you have your yellow notepads and a pen and paper to take notes. For now, I want to welcome Geni to the show. It’s an honor to have you here and for you to take out the time to be here with us. I know I already did your intro, but I’d love to hear if you could share a little bit about yourself, so the readers know who I’m talking to and who they’re tuning in to. Short 30 seconds to 1 minute of who you are and what you do.
I’m a CPA based in Napa Valley, California, originally from Greenville, South Carolina. I somehow find myself working with a winery in Napa Valley and having a ball doing it. I do only advisory service through a CPA firm that’s here locally. I also have a speaking business and I have a training company where I teach other accountants to do what I do in advisory service.
You probably do have a great time. I’ve been to Napa once and the food at the wineries, the wine, the whole ambiance and the beautiful scenery, it’s gorgeous. That sounds like a good niche that you have as well.
It is. I didn’t build it. I fell into this business in 2007. Every day, I go, “I hope they don’t find out I snuck in and send me back.”
That’s a great business to fall into. I sort of fell into working with accountants, CPAs, EAs, tax professionals and tax attorneys. I worked at an accounting firm out of college and I always said, “Everyone’s so smart here. I would love to work with these types of people in the future.” I just couldn’t sit in a cubicle any longer, so that was short-lived.
Fast forward, I am so honored to be working with such an amazing industry and group of professionals with Masters, MBAs, CPAs, EAs and all these different designations after their names. I think that’s a great segue into what we’re talking about. How do you sell more advisory services? You’re a CPA. You’ve been able to do it.
The highlight of what we’re talking about is when you ask more questions, you’re going to give and get more value. That’s why we’re here. Grab your yellow notepad or the white one, whichever is your best choice: your blue or black pen. A lot of times, a lot of people say, “Michelle, I take notes on my iPad. I type them out.” Whatever your form is, great. I highly recommend grabbing that piece of paper because, Geni, I’d love for you to share what worked for you, being the CPA that you are working with wineries and transitioning to only advisory work. I know that’s a dream of so many people here tuning in.
I started out in tax. I was a tax partner in a local firm in Atlanta. The day I made partner, I quit the next day, because I didn’t want to do that anymore. I was frustrated in the impact I was able to have for clients. I went into high tech. I started looking for tools that I could apply in a technology way to help clients do better in their own businesses. It’s that mindset that’s led me ever since. It’s been more than twenty years that I started speaking and talking about things for the profession.
Let’s talk about real quick how you quit after you made partner. There are a lot of people reading who are in a corporate role or at a firm trying to get to partner. You got to partner. The next day, you quit. Share with us that mindset change and how you said you couldn’t make an impact on people. You got to partner, but you’re like, “This isn’t for me. Goodbye.”
I started out in seventh grade, deciding I wanted to be an accountant. I set out to become a partner in a firm. I went to school to be a CPA. I was on this track. I started with Deloitte. I worked for them for a while but always was in tax. I worked my way through different roles and doing everything, but the pinnacle in my mind was to be partner in a firm.
I kept doing it and I struggled. I worked longer and harder than most people, but I also carried the psychological burden of that client’s business outcome. I had tax returns, for example, where a client owed $50,000 and I knew the client didn’t have cash. I would tell them that and then lose sleep at night worrying about the client I knew didn’t have cash.
Knowing also that I didn’t know what the heck to tell them to do about the cash. It was this real sort of angst. I thought, “I wish I could do more to help them pay this. I wish I could loan them the money or anything.” I think many of us have that same connection to clients. We don’t want to see them struggle, but we don’t know if we applied the traditional training we have as CPAs and how to help them.
That’s where I first went into technology to figure out, “Let’s automate some of this stuff or figure out if I can get better insights out of the data.” Through that, I discovered advisory methodologies and then I started speaking about that and applying technology. Eventually, I found my way back to doing the advisory services with these clients, but it’s a common theme.
For me, when you get to the pinnacle and look around, “This is as good as it’s going to get.” I don’t like it. It was the first time I asked myself, “Is this what I want to do?” I went, “Goodness no.” I don’t know what happened. It’s like I had a divine inspiration that night. I wrote down all the stuff, came up with a plan, walked in the next day, and quit.
I said, “This is what I want to do.” I also saw that the environment that I was in, I didn’t align with all the values and the ways the rest of the firm thought about things. It was so clear to me and I didn’t hesitate. I hesitated more afterwards and I went, “What have I done?” I know, as we all do. Also, the moment I walked out of the door, I can remember feeling the weight of the world lift from my shoulders. I had been trying to force myself to be somebody I wasn’t, to be different from my natural wiring and inclination. I searched for something else and was lucky to find it.
That’s great. A lot of people, including myself. I was at Moss Adams. I’m like, “I want to be a partner.” I go to all the partner meetings. I was just an analyst at the time in their M&A group. This cubicle life and getting to that. You’re basically getting another job to work for someone else and bring them money and maybe you’ll get a certain percentage of whatever the dividends are on a share. It was like, “No, I’ve got to go” after three years. I never worked for anybody else ever again.
If you can make it work, if you can find a way and if you have some faith in your own abilities, there are lots of opportunities, especially with the kind of skills that you have, Michelle. An analyst is a hot property right now. In accounting, we can always find work, but we don’t trust ourselves to be able to do it.
It’s always the case. I’d love to talk about the mindset shift because you said something really important. A lot of firm owners who I personally worked with, not only carry the psychological burden of their clients and that angst. You transitioned to the advisory services. I’m going to guess that by doing that, you’re helping relieve that burden and surprise that the client’s getting in advance. Taking more of the proactive approach versus this reactive approach, which is the way you were taught.
We were historians by training.
You were historians by training. I’m not a CPA. I’ve just learned this from having so many clients of you guys. For example, I just got an email literally about an hour before our conversation about what I have to write a check to within the next eight days. It’s just like, “Let me go sell some shares and make that happen.”
It’s probably the 16th, so you’ve got 7 days now, Michelle, to make your estimated payments.
Yes, I have to make the estimated payment by the 17th or 16th, or whatever day it is. I think it’s really important to think about it from your perspective. I don’t think my CPA cared to send me that email, to be honest. They’re like, “Here’s how much. Send the check.” I’m like, “Got it. Thanks.” We do have such a personal connection to our clients.
I’ve found a lot of firm owners that I wish I could loan them on money. Should I give them a discount on the fee of what I’m going to charge? You always are chipping away at yourself and it doesn’t ever help solve this problem and make you feel any better. I’d love to hear about the mindset shift that you went through. Going from tax to being a historian to going into the preventative, proactive approach 100% now. I love the winery niche. I can’t imagine the amount of bottles you have lying around from all the different wine clubs from all your winery clients.
They don’t last very long, Michelle.
I bet.
First of all, I want to talk real quickly about a word that you mentioned, which is “sell,” about selling and sales. Sell is a four-letter word and accountants don’t like that at all.
I know.
We hate to talk about selling, but what we like to do is help. We want to cure. We want to heal. I think we’re healers. A lot of people are saying that we have that same connection with clients. To me, advisory is about helping a client move the needle forward in the direction of their dreams. That means we have to know what their dream is, which most of us don’t ask, we just jump into the task at hand.
The mindset shift we make is to be curious enough to understand where that client is coming from. That involves asking different questions. Again, I didn’t know how to do this. I wasn’t trained to do this. I went first to technology and then in order to apply the technology, I realized I needed to learn new skills. I went in search of training and I found it. That’s the training that I now deliver.
I’ve been working with these tools since 2004. I’ve been speaking about them and sharing them with both clients and other accountants who want to do it, too. I needed a methodology that I could follow. It starts with asking questions outside of the burning pain that the client has when they come to you. For example, they come to me and say, “I need to file my tax return.”
We jump on getting the stuff and do the tax return, but what we need to do is say, “Let’s back up a minute. Let me understand what you’re trying to do in your business, where you’re trying to go, what your goal is for the business.” Why did you become this winery, in my case and how can I align what I’m doing with that? That goes far beyond getting the taxes done.
We can do that, but we want to make sure that what we’re doing, in all aspects of the connection we have, supports what you’re trying to do. If we don’t ask, we can’t possibly get them there. When we ask those questions, the why, the first question, the Simon Sinek start with a why question. “Why are you a winery?” They look at you and go, “To make a profit.” We immediately go, “No, you didn’t because if you wanted to make a profit, you would pick a much easier business.”
You have some connection. We get them to tell that story and then we ask them what’s happening, not just in the financial areas of the business, but in customers, operations people and then an end in mind. Are they in alignment with that end in mind? Are they going to hand it off to the kids? Are they going to sell it? There’s a whole picture that we generally don’t get when we’re in this reactive firefight mode. By broadening the perspective and pushing that client back, we have already elevated the value of the service we deliver. It’s because we’re not like the traditional historian accountant who’s focused on balancing stuff and putting it in the right bucket.
I love how you said you come from a curious place. If you come from that curious place, it’s the same thing that I’ve preached for years. We’re probably very different in many ways, but we’re coming from the same principle that the questions that we ask is the thing that provides the most value. It also provides a different experience for your clients. You’re not like the historian. As you said, we’re not coming from the reactive firefight mode.
Firefighting mode where we’re just putting up the fire and not fixing the problem.
We’re not getting to the root cause, but we’re also not understanding, “What does this person want to do?” People like me, taxpayers, it’s something we have to do. It’s like going to the bathroom, you have to do your taxes every year. You have to do it multiple times a day except going to the bathroom. It’s that thing you have to do when you’re born.
I haven’t had that analogy before.
That’s what I think of it every year. I tell my boyfriend that every year. I’m like, “Don’t delete any important emails that say tax or statement.” I’m very organized. I put them in folders. I’m very electronic. I upload it to the server. We need more of the preventative or proactive approach to things.
Yeah. What can we do in advance of the end of the year to figure stuff out? Why do we have to wait until the end of the year to get stuff from you? That’s where automation can help. That’s why both automation and new mindsets are what we have available now to apply to this challenge. We can automate some of that painful process of getting your stuff together at the end of the year. Take it as you get it.
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It’s so painful. I can’t even tell you.
Yes, I know. I pay taxes too.
I hate it. I try to get it done so fast in advance and I just like it done. This is going to be the interesting part of our conversation. How did transitioning to advisory services, making this shift and coming from the proactive approach remove the psychological burden that you had? Being so attached to the client outcome, or do they have the money to pay their taxes, or “I feel like I have to loan them the money.” How did it remove that angst that you used to have?
By the whole approach that I have now. Just sitting down and understanding what they’re trying to do and what the components are. Focusing in on something we can work on that has the biggest impact for the least amount of pain and suffering on their part. I know that I can move the needle on their business. I have tools.
Do you have a story that you can share, like an example of one of your wineries that you worked with where you were able to make the biggest impact?
It’s part of the whole process that I apply when I’m working with clients. It’s just technology. I do consulting around technology as part of the advisory. I’m trying to find out what they want to do and how they want to be positioned. You look at their automation, their tools in this industry tend to be really bad, so that you can’t get insights that you need immediately.
One of the things that I did, which is part of my training, is that I did a process mapping section with this client. I sat down with their team and we had everybody talk about their role. We used what I call sticky notes. It’s not the trademark name Post-it Notes. You have everybody write down their step one at a time and then you arrange those notes in an order and you can see the process.
We had people in the room who hadn’t heard what everybody else did. By the end of this session, it was clear how screwed up a lot of the tools was and how messed up the process flow was. We were able to have the owner sitting at the table and hearing what everybody said. Everybody else seeing what everybody else was doing. Come to an agreement about the fact that timeliness matters more than accuracy.
We had everybody doing spreadsheets over again and redoing work. At every step in the process we looked at, we had inefficiencies. When the owner finally gave everybody permission to get things out quicker, even if they weren’t 100% accurate. A lot of the angst went away and a lot of the duplicate effort was eliminated.
I didn’t know what their process was, but I facilitated a method so they could share what they were doing. The value of that meeting was the discussion and the enlightened view that everybody had about how the business works. It became clear what to do as soon as they left the meeting. It’s that kind of thing.
There are all kinds of things like that, but that’s what’s so different about this. As accountants, we expect the deliverable to be the value, the thing we do, the tax return, “Here’s your value.” In this way, it’s the enlightenment that often occurs around the discussion. Whether the process map document is pretty or not or done in Visio, or I use Lucid Chart correctly.
The value came from that meeting. The value I delivered was facilitating the meeting, giving people an equal voice and giving them a way to communicate what they were doing. That’s the shift and it’s a big one. We’re trained, as accountants, to be the experts. We know the tax code, the FASBs, the GAAP, and everything else.
When we come in as the expert, we’re used to telling people what to do. When we come in as an advisor, we are making our clients feel smarter. That’s the biggest thing that we can do. We don’t make them feel stupid because they know. Wineries, you think I came in from South Carolina knowing anything about wine? I couldn’t even pronounce much of what people are selling in Napa Valley.
I realized my lack of knowledge was a plus when I started because I asked all kinds of questions and nobody expected me to know. They didn’t think I was ignorant. They knew I was new to the industry. It was a real opportunity for me to see how valuable it is to not make assumptions and to ask those owners and leaders in companies what’s going on. Show them how much they know and then help them leverage that knowledge to get better and faster insights.
I think you mentioned earlier your clients are the smartest.
They are. They’ve been in that business for a long time. There’s no way I know the business, but I know the accounting environment and I also know automation. I can help them put data to the things that they often know intuitively. One of the best results you can have as a consultant or advisor is to present data to an owner and have the owner say, “You’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know.”
I’ve had that. At first, it used to make me feel bad like, “I’m worthless. This wasn’t worth anything.” I went, “But wait a minute, that’s a good thing. Now you have data that supports what you thought you knew and now you know that it’s true.” I’m validated what you know with data instead of just you thinking, assuming, or hoping. Now you’ve got data to back up what you intuitively or instinctively know as an owner. There’s huge value in that.
For the business owners, too, not only is it validation, but they say, “Geni gets me. She gets my business. She understands.” You’re also sitting on the same side of their table and coming from their position.
That’s right. The beauty of having a focused niche is that you really can. You start to see patterns. I have relationships with the vendors who provide unique software for our clients. I work with those companies. I know the tools. I know the processes. They’re pretty much the same. There are variations. I know the types of wineries that I’m going to run into.
There is estate wine. There are other people who are buying and selling. There are all kinds of different permutations. You have the luxury of going deep in pretty much everything that they’re worrying about as owners. Again, that’s one of the places where you start. What are the things that are top of mind for you? What are you trying to do? Where are you trying to go? How can I align everything that I do with you in support of that?
Do you have any other golden questions that you’d like to share with the audience?
My favorite question is to ask an owner, “How do you know if your business is on track? Right now, across from me, I want you to tell me exactly how you’re doing in this moment. Where would you go right now to find that answer?” Most people can’t go anywhere and find the answer. They’re going to say, “I look at my bank account.” If that’s how they’re running their business, they’re in trouble.
They may have something else. That tells you what information is most useful for them and that’s where we should align our efforts. “Let’s get that to you faster, if you can’t get it right now at the tip of your finger. Let’s make sure your systems are making that as visible as possible in the fastest amount of time.” That question to me is a great one. When they get bleary-eyed and can’t answer it, there’s a lot of potentials for you to help them get better insights.
Yeah and that’s where your advisory service comes into play.
It’s a huge door opener and a really good opportunity to open a discussion with the owner.
I have a question, Geni, because you are a CPA. You were in tax. You’ve got to partner level and quit your job, and now only doing advisory. I’d say 90% of the firm owners who I work with, and maybe a handful here reading, are working with so many clients on the tax side, on the compliance side. They call them they’re low-value clients, they’re low-paying clients, they’re a pain in the ass clients, PITA clients. You name it. I’ve heard all the different terminology.
How would you say one would shift into advisory services? When they’re so bogged down with the doing of the work and with the minutiae of the work. Also, their mental state and mindset of their psychological burden like you had and their angst with tax season every year. After that, it’s like, “I’m going to make a change,” and then that change never happens. You know what I’m talking about? That vicious cycle. That hamster wheel.
I used to do a presentation called “Stop the gerbil workout” when I first started in it. The message there was to automate to stop doing some of the repetitive stuff, but it’s the same message. First of all, we have to stop putting our clients ahead of ourselves.
I love that. When someone books an appointment with me, I put, “Congratulations on putting yourself first.” That’s in my confirmation message.
It’s great. That’s what we do. This client needs me, so I’m going to take them. Even though I’m not billing them what they’re going to need to pay me and I’m not going to enjoy doing the work. It’s a cycle of misery that we’ve created for ourselves. I’ve done a whole bunch of speaking and training and I have a bunch of tools about how you find capacity.
That’s the number one excuse people say for not doing advisory. You don’t have capacity because you’re doing a bunch of crappy work and not getting paid for it. You’ve got to either fire a client or elevate your fees on the ones that you do so you don’t have to have as many and get rid of some. The training that I do was created by Edi Osborne, who’s the person that trained me. I acquired the rights to the training. It’s called Level 5 Advisory.
One of the things that she says is if you don’t lose 20% of the proposals you’re sending out, your prices aren’t high enough. We’re trying to get the price down, so it’s affordable, rather than getting what it’s worth to us to do the work. I do individual coaching and I do cohort group training around the online training program that I have.
I’ve got two people in the last week who asked that same question, “I can’t raise my prices. They can’t afford me.” I talked to them. Both of them went out and got higher-price projects immediately. They just didn’t have the confidence to bill what they were worth for the work that they were doing. One of the easiest ways for me is to start with that intake of a perspective. New clients are easier to shift.
You start asking these questions. I have a format where you ask them, “What works? What doesn’t work? What’s your ideal outcome in five areas of the business, finance, customers, operations, people and end in mind?” It’s called $COPE. That’s the abbreviation. You ask them what works, and nobody’s doing that. We always ask what’s broken in the financial aspects of your business.
We don’t ask them about customers or operations, any of that stuff. We don’t celebrate what they did right. We ask, “What’s your ideal outcome?” When you finish that discussion, when you’re trying to onboard a client, it takes you out of competition with anybody else who’s in accounting, unless they’re trained by me or other people like you.
That initial onboard intake session, where you broaden the perspective of what you’re doing and elevate your own value gives you permission to do other things. Our firm does traditional service and we offer multiple tiers with advisory, dashboards and all kinds of stuff on top of that. Just by sending out a proposal with multiple options, you again show prospective clients what you’re capable of.
Even if they can’t afford it yet, you want them to aspire towards some of those other services. The easiest thing is to get rid of some of those. You have to say, “I’m not doing this anymore.” You have to come up with the lowest amount you are willing to take for the work that you do. “I have a bar. I won’t do anything for less than $1,000. It’s not worth it.” Whatever that number is for you. I’m not going to screw around with this. That’s $1,000 a month or it could be $1,000 an hour. Whatever it is. If I’m going to do a thing and it’s going to be a piddly amount, it’s not worth it. Just the starting and stopping makes it not worth it.
Even lifting up your finger with a pen just to write something down wasn’t worth it. It all stems back to what we were talking about, which is how do you give more value to get more value. That’s in summary of this discussion. Geni, thank you so much for being here on the Abundant Accountant show and sharing some great questions. The end part is something about what works, what doesn’t work, what’s the end in mind. Celebrate what they did right. Get the ideal outcome. There were five things underneath each of those tiers.
I have a little grid I can provide. Maybe you can post it somewhere, Michelle.
The biggest thing is nothing under $1,000. That’s a great marker. If you’re not closing 20% of your business that you’re getting, then you’re not charging enough. I always say 50%.
You want to be pricing it high enough so that the clients you get are worth your while.
Totally. That’s so true. Otherwise, it’s not worth your time. You’re going to be miserable. You’re going to stay with all the psychological burden that Geni used to have before and you might have right now. Thank you again for taking out the time to be here. I really appreciate it. It was an honor to have you.
Thank you very much, Michelle. My pleasure.
Thank you all so much for joining Geni and I on another amazing episode here at the show. I always love to hear from the CPAs directly so you know it is possible to make these changes. When you ask more questions, not only are you going to provide more value, but you’re going to get more value in return. You’re going to remove the psychological burden you might be feeling, or the angst you feel with the burden of the clients you are so attached to.
Remember to always be curious, caring, and concerned about where your clients are in their life and business when we’re asking these important questions. It might be new to you. It might be different. It might feel weird at first. Just know that it’s all normal. If Geni can do it, so can you. We have to stop the gerbil workout to find our true capacity and fire the clients we don’t like. Elevate our prices, worth and work.
Remember for yourself, celebrate what you did right, too. What are you doing that you can celebrate that you’re making yourself go in the right direction? If you still feel that you’re on the gerbil workout or feeling totally underpaid, you need support in doing this. No matter what’s happening in your firm, having fewer clients, working fewer hours and getting paid more money is possible.
If you are a firm owner, an accountant, EA, CPA, bookkeeper and you are currently working long hours. You still have way too many clients still, you keep scratching your head and you are sick of the psychological burden you feel every day, make sure to head over to?TheAbundantCall.com. We will show you how to create the firm you’ve always wanted, bringing income you desire and know you deserve.
Choose the clients that you want to keep on your roster and get rid of the ones who no longer fit your roster, so you can have the time to do things that you are passionate about, that you love. Spend more time with your family and friends. If you’re ready to start making that change and creating the firm of your dreams, head over to?TheAbundantCall.com. Thank you all so much for joining Geni and I here on an amazing episode of The Abundant Accountant show. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.