Steve Perpich: 0:05

I'm Steve Perpich, and with me is our president, ted Williamson. Ted, today we're going to talk about step three, which is find the talent and provide the training. But we're not going to just read from the blog that we posted in articles verbatim, because that would be silly. You're going to have a lot more to this conversation, because finding talent and the dimensions for human resources in new age accounting is worth a detailed conversation. So, ted, just to kick stuff off the article that I wrote, we start talking about assessment Assessment, and not only of oneself, but of the staff that you have at this time. So when somebody is going to be a new age accountant or strived to that level, what would be the first step when it comes to HR talent?

Ted Williamson: 1:00

Well, if you're talking about looking at who you have and what you need, so for a new age firm, you really need people that understand technology and they're not stuck in old ways and they want to be creative, they want to advance and they always want to find new things. So those I guess, fun people that want you don't always need that. You need grinders, but you need a few people that really want to advance and move forward. So I don't know if I really answered your question, but a lot of it, I think. In the article you're talking about being best in breed yourself or working with the best in breed technology. That was a step one. So working with the best in breed technology is kind of important and to find people to understand that is also important.

Ted Williamson: 1:54

Part of that is that a lot of these best in breed technologies actually provide training for your staff. So when you're hiring them, you can also utilize the training, reduce your costs and the time to get them operating efficiently by just using the tools that are already there with the technology that you're using. That's one thing. Also, a lot of times they offer CPD credits. So if you have a designated professional working for you, they can actually, in a lot of times they can get credits towards the credits that they need for that year. So that's another thing. So looking for those people that are willing to adapt to technology and to different tools and different processes, that you know that they're going to think a little bit outside of the box, would be ideal.

Steve Perpich: 2:51

Yeah, I guess that's kind of Well, that would be, again, the assessment of where you are as an accountant and what your staff is at the current moment and, yes, a self-assessment and an assessment of staff in light of best in breed technology and moving forward. But what happens when you need someone new? Again, I make the point of the compensation is definitely important. You don't want to go too low, because you're, then you're going to have an immediate retention issue. If you go too high, then you're not going to have a progression. But what would be, in your recommendation, the best way of finding someone new, regardless of the position? What would be the first step for a smaller firm?

Ted Williamson: 3:39

Finding someone new. So I'm not an HR expert or recruitment expert at all and so finding somebody new the way I've done it I've usually worked with so I put out my own ads and stuff, but a lot of times I would work with a recruiter and a recruiter would help me. That is one of the biggest things. A lot of times, recruiters have their nose to the ground and they're looking on LinkedIn and Indeed and all those things that you just don't have time. Being an accounting firm owner, you really don't have time to be digging through resumes and trying to find these things. So they're worth the money when you're finding somebody. Definitely worth the money.

Steve Perpich: 4:20

So hiring yourself is not recommended. You use a specialist, just like you're the specialist who does the accounting.

Ted Williamson: 4:26

Yeah, do you want, if you can't?

Steve Perpich: 4:29

retain an HR expert yourself.

Ted Williamson: 4:31

I mean it depends on the size of your firm.

Steve Perpich: 4:32

You might have someone with those duties and training.

Ted Williamson: 4:35

Absolutely, and there are. I know there are some organizations out there that teach people how to find the perfect accountant, employee or team member for new age accounts. We should actually get them on one day. There are a couple. I don't have the names off hand because I don't want to Butcher their names or something like that, so so. But I can put it in the in the comments after, or or you know better yet, if somebody's interested, let me know in the comments and I will put it in there. I'm not gonna just wrote names out there without somebody actually wanting it so it would be great.

Steve Perpich: 5:14

Yeah, I think in a future expansion of the subject, we should have a recruiter on for sure, absolutely so. So say you have a successful Transaction with your recruiter, you find that you find the person to fit a role. They're, they're on boarded, they're in. How do you retain them? How do we? Besides again, besides just talking about the money, what kind of roadmap or development track do you recommend? And again, my viewpoint is a lot of the firms with not large accounting firms, but you know, medium, small, medium firms, what kind of roadmap for progression, say for the bookkeeping group?

Ted Williamson: 5:58

So so the way I like to look at or not the way I like to look at it, but for me in the past what I did, what I did into to attract and retain, was I gave a lot of life flexibility. So in my old firm that we we retained you know not that many of our staff left unless we had to let them go or something for some reason, like we built efficiencies or something. So so Generally the way that we attracted them was we was not necessarily for us compensation, so it wasn't because we were always growing and looking at scaling and I was always reinvesting huge into the company and this is where accounts to put. Okay, my invested so much and then decided to split it into different companies and sold one, and so we're always looking at, I guess, lowering our costs a little bit by offering flexibility, by, you know, offering that remote position, like one of our bookkeepers owned a farm and would work at five in the morning and, you know, for a couple hours and then go and feed the chickens and cows and stuff, and then you know come back and still put her eight hours and and just worked whenever she need she wanted to, as long as she got the work done and got her hours, and so, so that was one way is just them and being able to enjoy because, like, I used to talk to them so much like, oh, I got this job offer and that job offer and this and that and, and, but I stay because of the flexibility, because I enjoy my work, I enjoy the ability to Do what I want when I want, as long as and nobody's you know how many there's there's checks and balances, but nobody's hounding me right, so so that was important.

Ted Williamson: 7:42

That's not that I did everything right, because I'm sure I didn't, and and there's a lot of you know. Well, I know I didn't do everything right, and you won't either, so, but we learned, yeah, well, not you, I mean, I mean our you ever is viewing right, so, so, so All I can do is share my experience with what I found to work and some things that didn't work. What I'm thinking, though, is the hybrid situation.

Steve Perpich: 8:13

I mean, it's a reality ever since the COVID pandemic, which came more of the forefront, but you were doing hybrid stuff before that, correct?

Ted Williamson: 8:23

Oh yeah, Well, now in the accounting industry it's almost becoming a standard.

Ted Williamson: 8:26

So like now you don't have the flexibility that I just talked about, right? So you have to actually have a decent compensation and the hybrid and remote model Sadly so, it drives your costs up, but you're going to get good people that value that. So, like in your post, you're talking about making sure like your, I guess your competitive in the amount that you're compensating and then, on top of that not just being competitive, leaving room that they can move up, they can get raises or move into other positions. That's important to be able to do that.

Ted Williamson: 9:11

I don't have a formula for that, but you just need to know that. You need to kind of look, you need to pay attention to those things. If you give them everything all at once, there's going to be nothing to really keep them. It's not that you want to kind of dangle a carrot in front of people, but they have to know that there's an upward movement, right. And if you give it to them all at once, first of all you're wasting your money because you don't have to, and then they don't expect you to because they expect to be able to move up, and the other thing is that you're not being very sustainable in your business and keeping them right.

Steve Perpich: 9:50

Well, again, that sounds like another role for an HR consultant or professional perhaps not map out the roadmaps based on what the role is that you're hiring for.

Ted Williamson: 10:01

Well, I used to use pay scale. That's what I used to use. Pay scale was good to kind of look at compensation, so that was always good and you know trying to. You know, look at your firm and look at what you're offering. Are you a boutique firm? Are you, you know, a mom and pop shop, or are you, you know, a larger firm? Obviously, your compensation has to match that. What are your billings like?

Steve Perpich: 10:27

Because you don't want to. Sorry, I was talking more about the, the development track for training and qualification. If you have an HR specialist, help you make that oh yes. Yeah, you can overlay that again, it's not and the compensation using other services like pay scale and stuff, for sure to get the right number. But a lot can be said for a development track which can help offset and delay the need for raises because there's milestones that you can equate to it.

Ted Williamson: 10:55

Absolutely. Yeah, that's great, and again my HR person so, so you would actually probably know that more than me.

Steve Perpich: 11:04

Yeah.

Ted Williamson: 11:06

So yeah, absolutely, that's um, that. That's something that you can probably add a little bit more value to than me. I again, yeah, like you said, use an HR person, but not because they also, like you, don't have to hire one in, you can outsource.

Steve Perpich: 11:23

No, they were. You can retain it absolutely. There's a lot of consultants out there. As a matter of fact, just like our, the recruiters we could, we could bring in. I know at least two or three experts Both in the us and canada that do HR planning and consulting for like job descriptions and policy. It's just good to have that because you're going to need it if there's a conflict and it's better to have that documented. But there is a step before that and there's great services out there that you may not need to hire. You might have to. You can also contract companies for specific stuff, for offshore Um and I do mention offshoring as an alternative?

Steve Perpich: 12:06

Um, because if you have a very definable role that you don't know if it's going to be permanent or it's part of an ongoing, you know dynamic, business process, uh, ted, so what would be Some of those instances where you know offshore help could, could be, and not just for bookkeeping specifically, um, any other role that you can think of?

Ted Williamson: 12:25

that just in general, yeah, um. So let's talk about my old firm. So in my old firm we were um Looking at accounts 2.0 actually being a different model. We were looking at it being like a next pilot or um Like a pilot or a bench or something like that. Right, um, bench accounting, pilot, um, and so we were going towards that and we actually Failed that in a way, right Like, so you're gonna get honesty from me every time, everybody just you know Um. So we actually didn't launch that well and a lot of it was the internal Stuff Um I was hiring because we were launching, we were trying to reduce our costs, so I was hiring Um less skilled people bringing them on, and I didn't have proper, you know, hr things in place in order to um to get them trained properly, non-boarded and um, you know Bless their soul, the, the one I had do working on if she was trying really hard in it, but we just weren't able to get it there Um and we didn't have the right management in place.

Ted Williamson: 13:30

So so with that um, we actually ran really high costs um in our, in our labor, as we were trying to bring on this new, this new work for this new concept that we were doing, and, um, because of the management aspect of it, and and and operations. So, um, sorry, give me bring, bring me back to where I was going.

Steve Perpich: 13:54

Well, my original.

Ted Williamson: 13:56

Oh, the offshoring, offshoring. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Steve Perpich: 13:59

Um, okay.

Ted Williamson: 14:01

The reason why that's important, the reason what that whole story I just did, the reason why that's important is after the fact, when we decided we're going to start to, um, rain in everything, you know we're like, wow, we're burning a lot of money, let's rain it in. So we actually because I was dead set on On everything's going to be onshore, we're going to be that firm. You know, offshoring and outsourcing is a, you know, I mean it's not new, but it's more of a fad when it comes to smaller companies and boutique accounting firms, uh, things like that. So it's uh, it's becoming, it's growing a lot. And I didn't want to be that. I was like, you know, I want to employ my neighbor, I want to, uh, you know, help them out and stuff.

Ted Williamson: 14:43

And, as we all know, in the industry, um, it's hard to find good people now in in north america. Um, you can find really good people in places like the philippines or in india. Or we actually offshored in pakistan when we, when we started offshore, uh, we, we offshored some people For some of our clientele Um and uh they were. It was like night and day. The company right, it reduced our costs like crazy. The people that we did have in-house were able to actually manage the. We were actually able to manage client relationships a lot better and everybody was happier. Like the staff was happier that we were internal. You know the ones that we ended up having to or the ones that we kept. They were a lot happier. The people that were off-shore and were happy you know they'd be clients.

Steve Perpich: 15:39

They bring your experience to the table too, correct.

Ted Williamson: 15:40

Absolutely so. I mean you can get for lower costs. I mean it's not always about the cost, but like the expertise that you get at the cost right. So I was paying people at a lower rate here right out of school and stuff, and they had to be taught everything where I could off-shore and, like I said, at the time we were off-shore in Pakistan and they knew stuff. They got us out of vines and fixed a lot of issues for us right Even right now, like part of our process is that we're off-sharing because we know the benefit of it already and some of them are actually producers on this call right now. So this is their first call. So hello folks. But yeah, and so I'm a firm believer in it.

Ted Williamson: 16:27

But it depends on your business model as to whether or not you want that. If you like, some people will go right at rate that the colleges find them and they have a really good system in place to train them, and that's great. Then do that if you can. But a lot of times that's not the case. As we all know, the industry is suffering. There's not as many people going into the accounting industry as there used to be or graduating, and they all have. The ones who are graduating have pretty high expectations like remote work. They a lot of them think they're gonna make like $80,000 out of the gate and maybe some of them will, but it's really that's kind of a ridiculous assumption for them to make and a lot of times it's unrealistic. So in order to, I guess, help yourself grow and to be scalable, you need to think about offshoring or outsourcing.

Steve Perpich: 17:25

Great Well. So, ted, the takeaways for this are assess your current staff and yourself. Use HR professionals not only to help you acquire new staff, but to create roadmaps. And offshoring is a great option for specific job functions. So whether you're testing something and or you're getting ready for expansion of personnel, which you need the business processes in place to be working. So I think that's from pretty good advice for new age accounts.

Ted Williamson: 18:04

Thanks, yeah, no, I think so too. So I wanted to talk about another thing. So we're talking about like labor, and so we're kind of it's like kind of jumping into capacity and so another thing is automation.

Ted Williamson: 18:15

Creating, you know, automation in that work, in the work that they're doing, is really important. So, like higher, you know, finding maybe something like bought keeper to do some of the work ahead of time and you can jump in and finalize it. Then that's again, that's outsourcing, but it's a lot with automation and AI, and then again like managing and managing everything. But I guess we kind of get into that more of that into step four, so maybe I'll save that. Actually, yes, that's our next podcast.

Steve Perpich: 18:54

We'll be talking about processes and scaling them. So everyone, again, I'm Steve Pribich and this is with Ted Williamson, accountants 2.0. If you want to join our community and follow us on Facebook, linkedin, youtube there'll be a link on this post and have a great day.

Ted Williamson: 19:15

Yeah. So YouTube link or like and subscribe. This is that way you keep getting updates, right, and I also want to point this out. So, on YouTube or anywhere, really comment. So let's have a discussion. Well, first of all, what do you do? What do you find is being the best practices for hiring? Like, jump in there, like we might as well. Let's start. Let's get this community rocking and rolling and help each other out. So I think, like, what if you could answer the question who do you use for automation and outsourcing? If you do use them, if you're a successful new age accountant already great, let's help the other ones who are up and coming. Also, what hiring and training practices or resources do you use? Like I said, we used a recruiter and we also used our local federation organization. That would actually help businesses. They actually had good resources for HR and payroll for us and we knew they would actually be able to use them for our clients as well. So, like I said, please engage the conversation and like and subscribe. Thanks again, ted.

Steve Perpich: 20:33

And thank you everyone for listening again. Accounts 2.0, steve Purvich Ted Williamson. Have a great one.

Ted Williamson: 20:40

Have a great day. Consistency.