Practice Success Podcast

Andrew Lassise on Building a Successful Tech Stack

• Canopy • Season 2 • Episode 5

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Andrew Lassise, founder of Tech for Accountants, shares his journey from entering the financial planning world during the 2009 recession to transitioning into IT and tech consulting for accountants. He discusses the importance of a robust tech stack that can scale with business growth.

KC Brothers:

Welcome to the Canopy Practice Success Podcast. I'm Kasey Brothers from Canopy and I'm here with Andrew Lassise from Tech for Accountants, but most recently purchased by RightWorks. Andrew, tell us about yourself.

Andrew Lassise:

Well, hey Kasey, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for having me. And Wow, about myself. So this guy that, uh, I grew up thinking that I was going to be a financial advisor and I graduated in 09 with a financial planning degree during the recession.

KC Brothers:

Yeah.

Andrew Lassise:

So Um, turns out nobody wanted to hire a financial planner with no experience in financial planning during a recession. So did restaurants for a decade and randomly landed in I. T. I'd always had a passion for it. Worked at this startup that went from 10 employees to 500 in less than a year. And

KC Brothers:

wow.

Andrew Lassise:

The pure chaos of being part of that. And then some friends said, Hey, we're starting a company. And I was like, eh. Startups are risky, even though I was in like a complete crazy thing then. Um, but I was 26, 27, no family,

KC Brothers:

a little bit

Andrew Lassise:

of savings. And I was like, let's do it. You know, see what happens, right.

KC Brothers:

And they went

Andrew Lassise:

out of business in three months, but despite themselves though, I was running the whole tech department and made an agreement with the owner. I'd always wanted to do my own thing and sort of use the technology. That as the jumping off point. And I said to the owner, I will continue to do everything. And we don't have to tell people we're out of business. They pay you for two months. And then every time the phone rings after those two months, I'm just going to update their billing. So everybody keeps paying you. You don't have to pay me. And we'll see where that takes us. And, you know, here we are 10 years later, it worked out pretty well.

KC Brothers:

Well done. Well done. Well, I feel like you have so much to offer, which is probably why a company like WrightWorks saw the good things you were doing. It was like, we need to have Andrew on board because the accounting industry, I'm just going to go off of some, uh, two companies that, I'm fairly familiar with that have been around since the seventies that, um, aren't super tech forward solutions. And so as a result, I think the industry got used to that, that that was the status quo and that there, there wasn't necessarily challenges there. Um, and I've seen a lot of accountants that they go in just like any entrepreneur, um, to build a business with the skill set they have. Not realizing that by being a business owner of sorts, wherever you're at in the firm, however, the larger firm is, there are business needs you need to engage in. One of the most important being tech. So where, where do you start when you're talking to people who the status quo for them for tech is stuff that looks like Windows 95?

Andrew Lassise:

Yeah, we do run into that quite a lot. And I think for a lot of people, status quo, you know, what, what did we do last year? Well, let's just do it again this year. Comfort worked and we know how it works. We know where it's good, where it's bad, but we're at least familiar with it.

KC Brothers:

Yeah.

Andrew Lassise:

And so, you

KC Brothers:

know, versus the devil, you don't

Andrew Lassise:

exactly. And so usually people will come to us in a, when it comes to consulting with a tech stack in a. Our way used to work when we had three employees. Now we have 10, 15, 20, our old way does not work. It does not scale. We have a million emails with a million different things. One person was working with one client exclusively. They left. Everything is in their brain. There has to be a better way. That's usually where the, the tipping point is, where if something Big happens. And then there's, there's people on the other side that are sort of in the, the alcoholic realm where, where they're like, I've got 7, 000 apps and I know that there's 500 more and I want them all

KC Brothers:

hand overwhelm. I feel hearing that.

Andrew Lassise:

Yeah. I used to be in that category as a business owner. Every time. We would run into some obstacle with some piece of software. It's we have to get another one, a different one, newer, better, faster. And then really what we came to realize too was just because it solves the one pain point that you have in one spot doesn't mean that it won't come with things that you took for granted. On your other software that you thought, well, don't they all do that? And then it turns out they don't. So really getting things to talk with each other, integrating, having a central source of truth and building off of that is. really the starting point for a lot of the tech stack conversations.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. Um, and in 2024, right, you can't in a world too, where we have recent launches of AI in various forms. I know there've been conversations of Is AI going to replace me? I want to say like a tax prep activity, some level of tax preparation was one of the first examples put into, um, chat GPT when it got really big just in the last year or so. Um, and there was this. Fear there, but I think now and I don't, I know you've had content and maybe we share that out in the description of this later where you've talked about that, um, addressing, okay, is it really going to replace my job or not, but where do you see? AI taking firms of all sizes, right? And maybe we split it up a little bit into, I mean, however you would like to segment these sizes.

Andrew Lassise:

So I think we have to just look back historically when there have been things that are disruptive to a industry at large. And, and I think a lot of people are on board now where. This is right now we're 1997 AOL and saying what the internet's going to look like, or we're 2010 talking about the first iPhone and what that's going to look like that's this generations. Disruptive things that will change everything. I don't think at this point now, Chad, GPT has been out for almost two years, 18 months ish. I don't think anyone's going to argue that anymore. That's been the side that I've been on and firmly still. I think the argument

KC Brothers:

more now is, um, how can you prove you're using it? Cause if you're not, you're going to be left behind. I feel this in my job in marketing where it's. We, there's a level of proof that I feel like, and this hasn't been set out, said to me, I feel like maybe I'm connecting some dots here, that we need to say that we're involving ourselves. So that our CEO can talk to a board of directors or investors because it's, it's crucial. Now there's not a point at which we are just able to say, no, we're, we're fine without it. We can. Move on. It's like, uh,

Andrew Lassise:

yeah, well, especially canopy. I mean, you guys were the ones that had the AI integration when it was, and I guess now it's been a year or close to a year since it was canopy, the one

KC Brothers:

that

Andrew Lassise:

has the AI built in, help your communications, this and that, but, uh, what I was getting at before though, with the displacement of jobs, if we, if we go back 200 some years, about 40 percent of the population, they were farmers and that constituted ditch digging and all sorts of things. And then the tractor comes along and the tractor got rid of tons of jobs and irrigation started becoming automatic. And all of these things started changing the way agriculture worked. So At the time there were not operators of these machinery, so people were no longer farmers. They were operating the machinery. So fast forward 200 some years and where we're at now, 2 percent of the population are farmers, but all of the opportunities and things that came out of the machinery and things that were built as a result, that's where they have spread out. And you don't hear about farmers saying. Uh, I wish tractors weren't invented, you know, that's just made things so much worse, but go back then people were probably feeling that way. I mean, just anecdotal, but I would take a guess that a lot of what people are feeling now with, well, accounting, will it take my job and. That was the example. Look, we did tax prep. And so, I mean, a lot of the low level compliance things, yeah. I mean, people have been building software for this all along. So you've got things like TurboTax that have existed and these have been available to the market. There probably isn't a single client that a tax preparer has or firm has that isn't aware of this. That there is TurboTax as an alternative or that you could do it by yourself for free. So this is a little different in that it's a lot more accessible and who knows, maybe I'm wrong with this, but these things have already existed. It's just different and shinier and all the apps for a long time, pre chat GPT, when chat GPT came out on GPT 3. 5, there were GPTs before. That so a lot of software has had AI analyzing these things, machine learning in the background. It's just now the public has their hands on it. And can see the opportunities and potentials and threats. And I think that's really where we're at now. And like you said, with marketing, you know, some of the things that, that I know firm marketing firms would do, so maybe not internal, but it would be higher content writers for one off things for blogs and, you know, you would pay X dollars and now. You could at least get a framework or just have it type the whole thing. Maybe have someone come and edit a couple things. I'm not in that world, but you know, a lot of the just sort of grunt work will get automated and then the, the need will be for how do we do the higher level things,

KC Brothers:

which I see is so exciting. Who likes the grunt work?

Andrew Lassise:

I mean, maybe the,

KC Brothers:

Maybe there's a time and place where like, okay, I could use a busy work day. So I can have a Netflix show running in the background. This needs to get done, but then I'll enjoy whatever it is I'm listening to. But I see that more as a, okay, if I can get this grunt work taken care of again, like you said, I can focus on these higher earning activities and maybe even work less, go figure, right?

Andrew Lassise:

Right. I mean, and I mean, I do a lot of marketing as well. So just a, for instance of something that was very. Unique on my plate that most likely AI wouldn't have come up with. And I mean, yeah, we'll probably look back on this five years later and be like, not only could it have, but we asked it to go back to this time when you thought of this and it found a million ways that you failed, but for us, we focus a lot on cybersecurity and the FTC safeguards rule essentially said. You need to have cybersecurity if you're doing tax or you have access to people's books. So pretty much all bookkeepers tax prep have to abide by these laws. And so, and they had a deadline on, it was June 9th of last year. So 23. And so I saw the writing on the wall that this was going to be a giant need because a lot of people aren't that tech savvy. And so we built up a whole lot of marketing and underground infrastructure to be able to get this out, scale it and all these things. And where if you just said to AI, what should my next marketing campaign be? Oh, well, we recommend sponsoring Habitat for Humanity. You will get your name out there to people that are nice people that contribute to charity and they will catapult your company or just, just very generic ideas, but where it's like, we work specifically with accountants and bookkeepers. This is something that will apply to all of them very uniquely and understanding the market and things like that. And it's not that AI couldn't, but unless you knew what you were talking about as the user of the AI, if you very, very specifically said, we do it. Specifically for accounting firms, cybersecurity, there's going to be new cybersecurity requirements. How could we put this together? You would have to be prompting it. And so it's really about how you use it and using it correctly and effectively. And not just the generic do my job for me, but teaching it the specifics.

KC Brothers:

Well, and knowing how to do that. I think too, we've reached a point where tech technology companies like Canopy have seen that it's, I mean, we moved pretty fast. We saw what it meant, knew we needed to act and not drag our feet. Um, and it paid off for us and I, and more and more companies have felt similarly, right, and have integrated it in some form or fashion. And I think that the issue is no longer. How do I, as an accountant, utilize this? I don't think we need to encourage accountants to perfect their prompting skills, but rather to your skill set is looking at the tech stack that has incorporated AI in a way that is most beneficial, um, because it is getting into everything in a way that. As long as you have the right tools, you are going to be leveraging AI in an easy and approachable way to you. Because again, it's not just this, I have to come up with ways to utilize open AI on my own. Um, I don't have to come up with ways to utilize AI on my own rather. As long as I do the, the work to find the tools and integrate them into my business, I'm going to be reaping the benefits of AI.

Andrew Lassise:

That's very true. You don't have to become a prompt engineer just to be an accountant and help your clients. However, being able to leverage it as well. And understanding the nuances, being able to safely put information in and say, these are the things that I'm going to talk to my clients about. What else could I be looking at? What might I have missed or my client's goals are to minimize their, their AGI this year or flip side. My customer is looking to sell their company. They don't want to focus on ad backs. They just want the, the end of the year return to look as good as humanly possible for prospective buyers. So, you know, the story that you want to tell and not just popping it in, understanding how to use it is great for that. But like you said, picking a technology stack. That already utilizes these things and does it for you so that you can just say my client needs to send me documents. I am furious. Send this in a polite tone.

KC Brothers:

Seriously?

Andrew Lassise:

Yeah. And keep

KC Brothers:

my mood in check. Yeah.

Andrew Lassise:

Yeah. I'm going to list 10, 000 reasons why you are the worst and it will politely say, This is, this is the nice way to do it. Like one time I, I, um, my, my, uh, wife, her and her parents went to Costa Rica with two of our children. I was home with the one, and then my wife was like, we want you guys to come. And I was like, how do I tell her no without making her want to kill me? And, and, and I was like, leverage your daughter. Say it's not safe to fly with a one year old.

KC Brothers:

I love it. I've used chat GPT in my marriage. Um, my husband's a big words of affirmation individual, and it's not my strength. And I put something in and asked like, Hey, give me a list of 25 affirmations based on my husband's qualities. And I listed 25. Some things out about him and I would text him affirmations and he never caught on that it was written by AI, but he loved it. It filled his cup and I was wife of the year for a month.

Andrew Lassise:

Um, I'm in the same boat as you like, I know I should, maybe I'll just have AI make an app. Makes the affirmation, sends them from my phone, and just like lets me know what was said in case it was brought up.

KC Brothers:

I love it. Um, well, on that, um, sorry, I just had a pregnant moment and I'm trying to think. I had a thought. And I'll, I'll edit this out. I apologize. Um,

Andrew Lassise:

no worries. The fact that you're even doing this, kudos there. It's your affirmation. You're a hard worker that deserves the world.

KC Brothers:

Um, there was, Oh, I feel like I've said this on the podcast before in various forms, um, because I feel like it applies so much to accountants and the accounting industry, but a phrase I love is just slow down to speed up. And this can be hard as. Ambitious individuals as an entrepreneur, as an owner, as someone who's responsible. I've got all this on my plate. How in the world am, you're telling me to slow down? What do you mean? And how is slowing down going to speed me up? And the reason I bring this up now is because We've been talking about tech stacks. If you're not familiar with the latest technology in the, in the industry, you need to get familiar and it is important to set aside billable activities, whether you're doing flat or hourly rate, I don't care. You need to, it is essential right now, where if you have not looked at what is in the market and 18 months. You need to take, I mean, how much time would you recommend? I was almost about to say a full work week. If you're a partner. I

Andrew Lassise:

mean, it's, it's a gigantic pill to swallow because what is out there, there are infinite things. I would say though, when trying to filter things down a go with, and this isn't just because it's, you know, recorded for a canopy, but we'll just say. A market leader that is well recognized with a lot of clients and not try to find, well, here's this random one off obscure thing and we're going to be their fourth client ever and help them build it like it's so great in theory. But the reality is a lot of companies disappear. A lot of companies haven't had a lot of eyeballs on them to help them build over time. So it's not that they can't be great or won't be great or aren't currently great. But when you're really looking for a tech stack to utilize going with the market leaders and just kind of price, obviously will play a role in anything, but really look at who is leading the market and kind of. Pieced together, they're probably the, the big names because they're doing something right and everything has its flaws, you know, that's, that is going to be a given no matter what you get. And recognizing now the, at least comparing the big names and what they have available.

KC Brothers:

Yeah.

Andrew Lassise:

And then there's so much documentation that you can ask peers how to use it. These are all mistakes that I made early on. Where I was just trying to find the best product for what I thought we were going to be doing. And then, you know, despite ourselves, we grew from me and my living room to, we had 50 employees in six offices at one point and nothing that we started the company with was built for any of that.

KC Brothers:

Yeah,

Andrew Lassise:

literally would have been better on a spreadsheet and at least have a CSV.

KC Brothers:

Well, and that actually brings up another point that I feel like I've picked up on with accountants, uh, more so than any other industry I've worked in, they're just not a typical, or for me, typical to me, um, buyer of tech, of software. Um, so, Maybe, maybe we wrap up our conversation is talking about how do you evaluate software? What are the things you should be thinking of? What do you think about before you even step into looking at software? I'd love your thoughts.

Andrew Lassise:

When evaluating software stack, what I'd really start off with is not looking at everything that's available and making your list of what is important to you at this time without being swayed Well, everybody seems to have this feature and this one doesn't have it. And therefore I can't use them because this feature that I never even thought of that, frankly, I don't know if I will use or not, but you know, this FOMO and overanalyzing. So starting it off with where are my pain points currently?

KC Brothers:

Yes.

Andrew Lassise:

And then building off. Getting

KC Brothers:

really clear and to your point, sticking your ground. This is where I'm most frustrated. This is where things fall through the cracks in our workflow. This is where I, things fall through between me and, uh, people internally or me and my clients. But yeah, getting really specific. Yes.

Andrew Lassise:

Yeah. And because we've, we've been through this. So many times. So I'm not even speaking from a consultant point of view, but just a business owner point of view that's gone through this so many times. And the problem that we ran into was we were growing so fast that changing our stack, just, you know, the best time to change your stack is yesterday. The next best time is right now. Yeah. Unless you're planning on just your practice going to the ground, I mean, there's, there's really no downside to having good technology that runs, especially if it's got a lot of different modules and can be for the most part, that single pane of glass and that single point of truth. Where it's easier to train people, get them to understand and things that you just take for granted. Like RCRM doesn't integrate with anything. And when it was just me, that's fine. Cause I know all the clients by name. I know they're things I don't even need to really look it up, but you have five people and. Now all of a sudden, okay, well, yeah, we'll just document it in a documentation app that doesn't talk to the CRM and we'll just manually update the CRM every time. And we did a giant overhaul. I've got so good at coding Python and Zapier just to kind of get things. To work where it's yeah. Where it's like, wouldn't it have been great all along if just things integrated, you know, QBO has a million apps that connect with it. And it's like, you just don't think about how convenient the integrations are, unless you're the dude that is me that spends so much time reinventing the wheel, all for these things for decisions that I made. On the tech stack that, and you know, it's great. Now I have the skills and things, but if you're working in the accounting industry, probably that's not best place to leverage your skills. And you had mentioned people coming in as the, the technician. I'm very good at what I do, but now I am running a business and. That is very different than the things that I came in doing. And so not just owning a job, but owning a company and, you know, all the things that, that come with that.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. Tech is a big part of that. Um, it's the. Cogs and wheels in between the big machinery, the machinery being your employees who have these killer skills. If you don't keep those cogs and wheels lubricated too with updated functionality that keeps things running smoothly and And fast, like it's easy to feel bogged down. It's easy to work 60, 70 hours a week, thinking that that that's what you have to do. It's easy to feel like, um, there just isn't time in the day to do these slow down to speed up work on the business instead of just working in the business activities. Um, tech. Yeah. You can't, you can't live without it. You just got to face it. Right. And like, again, hopefully the big takeaway here is that there are so many solutions, like even in, um, I frequently look at our G2 grid of practice management, and just in the last year and a half, there have been several entrants into our, um, competitive landscape. To me, that says that there are people who recognize that there is a gap, that there is an opportunity to better serve accountants. And, um, makes me grateful to work at Canopy and that we've been around the block for as long as we have and are serving the industry in that regard and is actually just an affirmation, positive affirmation to me that we're doing the right things. Um, but you see that in all, in several other aspects of accounting as well, where there are just more and more providers entering because there's a need. And so. So to your point, maybe we wrap it up really quick with that process. Identify your pains, jump in and look at some, um, Well recognized brands, uh, as it pertains to the solutions that you're looking for. Uh, be clear with your, the sales individuals that you interact with. Don't feel like you're going to hurt feelings. They're there to sell, you know, and you'll have different interactions with different companies. Hopefully they're all good. Hope we're past the days of terrible salesmanship.

Andrew Lassise:

That car dealership. Yeah. Mentality.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. Sales reps know that there's that stereotype and I think they realize like, I just need to be a human. Anyway. I, I love our sales reps. They're some of my best friends at work, but, um, but be, be real. Don't be afraid to shoot straight with them and, and then make a decision and, and recognize that, like, I don't know, lastly, if you want to end on some sort of takeaway on implementation and, um, Adoption because it is, it's hard. It's hard to make a change. It's hard to train your team. It can be hard even sometimes to prove ROI.

Andrew Lassise:

Yeah. The implementation piece, I mean, for better or worse, what I have done is I work hand in hand with the implementation team at the company, and I am. Documenting every step of the way, because no two companies are going to use something exactly the same. So I kind of put together our flavor of how we are going to be using the software. And once I have that down, then I start rolling it out to everybody else so that we can have an ongoing piece of documentation where people can look to how do we do it and not just have me be The one everybody, cause then everybody's asking me how to do things. So I'm a big fan of documentation so that you can scale and remove yourself. But having a very, very strong understanding, and especially if you're, if you're in a company where you're wearing a lot of hats and you understand. Okay. Maybe I don't work in sales, but I could talk to a couple prospects, see what this process looks like. I could do double entry. I can do it the old way as well, just because it's tried and true. And that translate that into the new system documented. And then when you are a thousand percent ready. Then you can roll it out to the team and have a switch over date of, we have 60 days or whatever to fully integrate into this system, because then if everybody's doing two things, two ways, it makes things a million times worse. And everything I'm speaking of is just anecdotally of. I mean, we, we at one point had three different payroll things going on. We had a Google doc and paychecks and ADP and we were checking everything against each other and it was. Nightmare. We couldn't, we didn't even know which was right. It was big headache. So having the cut over date, knowing how to use it for the way that you run your firm and then having your team understand and present to them, you know, how you hate this great news, we will no longer have these pain points. So you can get them on board. Yeah. Because. Nobody likes change so it's difficult to just say, Hey, we're going to be changing. Why are we changing because it's time to change? And I could see the potential ROI and pitfalls and integration that are all these things then, I mean, not a lot of people are thinking about the exit and succession succession in a company, but, you know, at being somebody that's gone through the last year of due diligence and integration into a larger company. And every piece of software we have, they're like, what is this? I don't know how to use it. So then I have to be the one getting all of the reports and explaining how everything goes. Whereas again, if we were using just a name brand thing to begin with and technology, it would have, there's so many instances. And I couldn't even imagine to quantify the hours that I've spent Putting, uh, square pegs in round holes because of having not the correct stack from the beginning.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. Well, hopefully we're helping people avoid some of those mistakes just with this conversation. Um, just to wrap up Andrew, if anybody wanted to work with you, RightWorks or not, how might they do that?

Andrew Lassise:

Uh, you could find me on LinkedIn, Andrew L A S S I S E and, uh, also tech for accountants. net with the number four right works. com. I mean, there's, there's a million different resources and ways to connect and. You know, fortunately being part of a team of over 700, um, I'm not the bottleneck anymore. Our, our bad tech from not, I say bad, just not bad, bad, but could be better. Tech that we used to use in tech for accountants. And now right works says, Oh, we're going to run like a real company and you will use real software.

KC Brothers:

What's your big boy pants on. Yeah.

Andrew Lassise:

And now that migration that you are afraid of internally, you have to do it anyway.

KC Brothers:

Yeah.

Andrew Lassise:

Yeah.

KC Brothers:

Well, thank you again, Andrew. It's been a pleasure.

Andrew Lassise:

Oh yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.