Practice Success Podcast

Will Hill Explores Key Strategies for Firm Growth and Success

• Canopy • Season 3 • Episode 10

Share episode

Will Hill emphasizes the importance of integrating advisory services into the accounting practice. He also discusses the impact that good healthy goals have on a firms production. KC and Will conclude the episode with a focus on how production over hours worked can lead firms to achieve both their professional and personal objectives effectively.

KC Brothers:

Welcome to another episode of Canopy Practice Success. I'm your host, KC Brothers, and I'm here with Will Hill. Will, go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners.

Will Hill:

Well, thank you, KC. I appreciate you guys having me on today. And, uh, to the listeners, I am Will Hill, and I've been helping accounting firms with their growth and processes for the better part of 25 years, which makes me old, KC. That's all it does, and, uh, it's kind of disappointing. But, uh I have my own consulting practice, and I like to live at the intersection of people and process, as they say, and, you know, we can sit in the laboratory, define all kinds of processes and systems well, and we sprinkle in those pesky humans, and that's when all the fun starts to happen, and so I love getting, I love getting involved with that. That attitude may be jaded by three kids. I don't know. We'll see.

KC Brothers:

I love it. Well, and you've got, tell us a little bit more about your experience because you've got quite an experience that makes you very qualified for the accounting space. And then you've pivoted recently in the last several years.

Will Hill:

Yeah, yeah, so I spent, um, the better part of 21 years working at Thompson Reuters, did a lot with, uh, their training consulting group, um, and working with firms implementing software, doing business workflow consulting, helping them with, uh, transitioning their commercial models to be centered on advisory, that sort of thing. Spent some time over there in product marketing and product management as well. And then I left to go on my own and just really helping firms and firm owners that feel stuck and saying, how do I go forward? Um, being a bit of ears to the profession and trying to speak from what I've seen in other firms, physically been in over 400 firms over the years, KC, and just kind of seen a lot of operational things. And it's been great to be deeply involved with firms. Put some things into motion, see the impact and just be a small part of their success story is just very rewarding.

KC Brothers:

Yeah, I mean you're you're would you say you're closer to them in this consulting position rather than you were in Your position at thompson reuters.

Will Hill:

Yeah, I I definitely think so and um, you know and nothing to to knock The old role, the old company in any way. It's just you have a different opportunity on your own and you can get deeper in a lot of areas. Um, and it's been fun to do that.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. Well, the reason why I ask is because, um, when you're closer to it, like you end up seeing your personal impact more and seeing how the firm changes. Whereas like you can be at a company, sell a product, even selling a service at a company, but you're not following. That firm throughout their journey. And I'm sure you get to follow these firms through their journey way more, which I'm sure is just like so fun to see them transform.

Will Hill:

And it's, it's great to be able to then go back to the next firm and say, Hey, I've seen some of the challenges you're going to face six months, nine months, a year from now. How do we prepare for those in advance? Are there some obstacles that we can help you avoid? Um, as, as I've had to navigate them with other firms. So,

KC Brothers:

um, yeah, I mean, and to that, right, you can piece them, I guess, in the sense like you're not alone. You're not the first one I've seen to go through this. And even the way you said that, that was like, hey, I foresee what you're going to experience because because I do. I see what you're going through now is similar to other things. I have personally watched Firms go through and, and abandon and move past and grow beyond. Um, one of those things is getting into advisory, right?

Will Hill:

Yeah.

KC Brothers:

Yeah, you, you chuckled a little. Why?

Will Hill:

It You know, did, did a lot of work with that while I was at Thomson with the Practice Forward Program with firms, KC, and then continue to help firms even now just help them redefine what it means to them and continue to evolve and say, what are the advisory opportunities in front of me now? And if we've positioned our firms to take advantage of those, how do we, how does that look from a practical perspective? And what does, what does that mean? Opportunity by opportunity. And what does that mean in terms of replication, growth and expansion within the firm? And thKCsey, how does that layer against. What the firm's goals really are, right? Because there could be some opportunities that mean, Hey, we got to go hire 12 more people and go chase after this. But if the firm goals are, I want to balance how much time I'm spending with my family and how much time we're spending with work, that's going to be opposed to it. So is that the right opportunity for them to go chase? Maybe not, right? So, as I work with firms, um, yeah, I'm

KC Brothers:

And then a strategy that contradicts each other?

Will Hill:

Yeah, I, I do run into that KC because we don't think about those things in combination one another. We think about them very separately. And so a firm owner will say, Hey, this is why I'm in this business to do X, Y, and Z. This is what I want to achieve. And they put that kind of over in a box and don't connect. What am I doing on a day to day basis? I think a lot of that today comes from, there's so much work that's out there.

KC Brothers:

Yeah.

Will Hill:

No one's, no one's lacking for opportunity right now. And so I'm just, I'm trying not to drown. There's a lot of tech change. There's a, I can only assume we're going to see a swell of, of regulation change towards the end of this year with the new administration in place, right? So. There's a lot of change being forced on us. I'm trying to stay afloat and we get focused in that area. And we don't often cross those boxes with one another. I think it's really important as you look at what am I trying to wrestle through? How does that fit with what I'm trying to achieve? Because that's going to change. Do I want to actually wrestle through this or do I want to punt and run away from it? Some things we can't run away from or there's an opportunity from a positive perspective. There's an opportunity to sit in there. Do I chase that? How aggressively do I chase that? That has to be in line with. Am I hitting my goals? What do my goals look like? And we've got to be able to bring those conversations together. I spend a lot of time with firms in the mix of those conversations.

KC Brothers:

Do you have an example or story you could share that kind of, um, connects those dots for listeners?

Will Hill:

Sure. So, uh, I had a firm that I'm working with come back from a conference and said, Hey, I think we need to hire some more people because All of our friends are hiring people. And, uh, I said, all right, remind me again, what's the goal of your firm is right now? Oh, we've got three young kids want to spend some time with them. Okay, fantastic. Hey, didn't we just fire somebody? Yeah. Yeah. We never should have hired them. That was a pain. We're much better off without that individual. Now, sometimes Those are about the individuals, not about the fact of hiring more. But then we talked about what does it mean administratively to hire more people. And while the work may be there today to go hire one more, the real benefit and margin will come with client growth. What is it that takes the most time? Is it really the execution of the work? Or is it the management of the client relationships? And are you going to hire someone that's going to manage the client relationships or execute the work? And what does that mean for flexibility with your kids sports and your desire to take a vacation here and there? Um, so, after that conversation, then it was a matter of, hey, Look at your revenue for last year. Did you hit enough to achieve both the short term goals as well as continue to put away towards your long term goals? If the answer is yes, I'm going to challenge, do you really need to hire right now? Right? Um, or are we just concerned about what everyone else is doing and what we're hearing from the market? Right? Especially in the small to mid sized, you know, firm space. There's a lot of noise out there and sometimes we feel pressure to do things. But really, when you're the owner of a small to mid sized firm, You have something that others don't have and you've got flexibility and choice, right? I think that's where the advisory realm comes into play.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. How do you define a small to mid sized company?

Will Hill:

Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna run with Less than 20 FTS, including owner, just

KC Brothers:

for fun. That's across all roles, not just account. Yeah.

Will Hill:

Yeah,

KC Brothers:

I'm sorry. And then you touched on another topic. I want to talk to you about, which is advisory. We've mentioned it a little bit, right? Um, there's a sentiment that I'm aware of that. I mean, we chat a little bit before we actually hit record, um, about there not being a great definition. Of advisory, um, but also like it's talked about all the time and encouraged all the time. Um, how How do people get into it? How do they make it more effective? What what does good advisory look like?

Will Hill:

Well, i'm glad everyone's here for the next five hours. I'll answer that question KC um What does

KC Brothers:

Okay, yeah,

Will Hill:

so one I think as we've Evolve through the past 10 to 15 years. We've kind of moved past this. Hey, I know what advisory is. It's everything that's not compliance. It's forward looking not backward looking. And so people have become kind of comfortable with that. Um, but I think that there's still some quiet unsettledness around what does the execution look like? Right? And I think we also need to define a little bit around, do I have an advisory based client relationship? Or am I performing an advisory service in the moment, right? And, and those two are different. There's a lot of firms. Almost every firm is going to offer advisory services. Not every firm has an advisory based relationship, right? And we can look at that from either the commercial end. How things are structured and what the client sees when they pay or typically we would say the client sees a one to one factor of I'm paying one monthly fee for everything I'm getting from you because you're my advisor as opposed to a one to many. I'm paying the tax fee. I'm paying the accounting fee. I'm paying the payroll fee. Right? And, and now you're not really my advisor. You're my service provider in those, in those different areas. So there's the commercial end of that, that, that we look at, uh, from the relationship. There's also the time and connectivity end, right? And not that I want to count hours, but if I've got a real advisory relationship, I have to have space for conversation. And so we're in our relationship. Is there time to speak with one another if it's just when I'm giving you the tax return or just when I need your bank statements, you got a problem, right? It's not a real advisor relationship. How on earth can I be inside of your head if we don't ever talk? Um, so I think that, you know, We need to continue to do well at saying, how do I structure these advisory relationships so that I know when the advisory services are needed or I can see when they're needed ahead of time and position the client to execute on them. Right? So I've got to have some advisory services. Most firms have that, but I have to have really advisory based relationships to position those services well, and that just has a lot of impact on the commercial structure of the relationship, how we spend time, maybe roles and responsibilities of who's doing what within the firm on the client account, and so that's where We start to spread that net of where are you focused in advisory goes a lot of different ways. And then we see a lot of the technology coming in as well. Okay, so you say, hey, if you're an advisory firm, we can help you. That can mean a lot of different things. Generally, it means efficiency to give you time to do advisory stuff. And that all sounds good until we don't have an internal plan of how we're going to use that time, right? And then we're just all of a sudden it's a capacity relief lever as opposed to a growth mechanism or a client relationship deepening mechanism.

KC Brothers:

Yes, I think that deserves repeating. It becomes a capacity relief lever as opposed to

Will Hill:

A growth opportunity. Yes. Yeah. And a client relationship deepening opportunity.

KC Brothers:

Yes. Okay. So as you were talking, I'm thinking we've talked about small to mid large firm or to mid firms. We can talk about large firms as well, but for talking about a 20 person firm that covers all sorts of roles, right. admin. Um, probably a couple of partners, um, lots of junior accountants, people rising through the ranks. Right? Um, is there any other type of role that I'm missing that you commonly see?

Will Hill:

Keep going. Let's see what else you got.

KC Brothers:

Okay. Well, that's where, that's where I'm heading. Cause now my question is, who's, who's offering the advisory services? Is it because I, it's not uncommon that I see and I don't talk to firms as often as you do, um, partners still in the grind, the day to day output of accounting services when, okay, is that where you have like a little team put together like a squad, a tiger team, whatever you want to call it, like we work together to provide the services and then I, as the partner or someone as the team lead, Delivers the advisory or do, or do you all get into advisory or what does that look like?

Will Hill:

Yeah, I, I think that there needs to be a point person per client on the relationship that also owns the advisory, at least the advisory positioning. It doesn't necessarily mean they have to be the one that would deliver every single advisory piece, right? So we may have someone in our. In our firm that's an expert with M& A activity and so I'm going to bring this to, hey, you talked about growth, you've mentioned this other one, you want to look at buying your competitor down the street. We can help you with that. This is, you know, we're going to make sure that it's well timed. I'm going to have some conversations with them, but I'm going to bring in an expert to deliver in that realm. But there's a point person there. That's, that's running through that, right? So whether that's the client partner or if a firm names, a client relationship manager, there's different ways that I've seen that structured in different ways. I've seen structured effectively, right? It's not just like, uh, there's only one way to do it. Right. But I think from a client perspective, it's great that a team is working on my stuff and I don't mind if someone's Tell me to input my payroll hours and somebody else is asking for my, you know, my 1098 forms or whatever else I've got, but I need to know who I go to, who am I talking to when it comes to the strategic end of what's going on? Who's going to review the tax return and talk about, Hey, what do you got coming on next year? You're going to have to make some alterations with retirement planning and HSA, blah, blah, blah, whatever those things may be. So I need to have that. That point person that's really there and, and it's free, I believe free of a lot of other duties. So their focus is how are we helping them? How do we identify that next opportunity? Right? Um, you know, this from your years of experience, not that you're old KC, but, um, uh, you know, The things that get measured matter, and are managed, and are executed against. And so, if Will is the advisory lead, But is also the main cash return reviewer and the main person on three other things. Yeah, we're not going to see a whole lot of progress on the advisory stuff, just to be super technical there with the word stuff, careful when you use that one, um, because I've got a bunch of other things that are heavily measured. And have deadlines and are required. So we've got to ask, how do we free up the time and capacity, right? And that's where we can use technology. We can choose to hire and delegate and have more precise job roles, uh, and be okay with, Hey, this is what you're. I got someone coming in to do this kind of, uh, input and execution and review work and we're not just spreading that to everybody. It's going through one or two people because I need to pull KC out of that so she can focus on the advisory elements.

KC Brothers:

Yeah, you said something there too about having more specific job. Uh, I forget if you said titles or descriptions, but both, right. Um, and you know what, that kind of comes swim lanes, right. Of letting people know what it is that they do, which I think provides people with better job satisfaction too, because they're not spread thin, they can grow and develop hard and soft skills relative to what you're asking them to do. Um, it's interesting to me because I do feel like in the short amount of time that I have been in the accounting industry, um, I've subscribed to a number of newsletters and try to keep my pulse on the things that people are talking about. What's important, what's being published in trade newsletters and are being talked about at, um, large trade shows. And it's not uncommon that I just see a lot of business advice. Um, and I, I see things being talked about that. I've known for a long time in my career in tech, I've just understanding, um, that one that you just touched on is the job descriptions, um, subscription pricing, even I was like, that's very tech centric, and we're trying to adopt that, um, or push that into accounting, which I bring that up too, because you mentioned how, um, Um, people can mistakenly look at advisory as a capacity relief and not a growth mechanism. And you feel similarly to execution or application of fixed fee or subscription pricing. That it's not solving the, the root problem here.

Will Hill:

Yeah, you know, you are, you are correct. I think that we see more business, more accounting firms starting to look at business operational models in other industries and go, you know what, we're still special. But it doesn't mean we can't use what's really good in the other professions. Um, I think on the top end of the market space with more PE coming in, we're continuing to see that right firm structures have to change, uh, you know, and so now we're, we're looking at a PE firm. Doesn't want to come in to a, and leave a 12 partner vote by committee operational model and say, Hey, we're really going to grow our efficiency and bottom line through this. Um, I'm not, I'm not a PE expert. I don't want to try to pretend to be one, but just in conversations with PE experts and in the profession, it's been, Hey, they want to shift the operational model, who's in charge, who's running things, how do we view things? Um, and I think those are even. If you don't want to sniff PE, that's fine. Uh, but, and you've got a smaller firm, there's still good things we can learn from that and say, if we've got really strong vertical lanes of where people are running with their job description and duties, I have a more clear growth pattern for my team, and I think that it makes us have better clarity when it comes to hiring and expectations. Now I also have a better understanding of what a real capacity is. When I've got five people KC that all do everything

KC Brothers:

Yeah,

Will Hill:

how on earth do I measure capacity? How do I consistently set priority? How do I bring someone new in when somebody retires or leaves and either they're gonna Drown or they're gonna swallow a fire hose. Those really the only two choices? I don't think so And so I think we've got a look at some of the job duties differently from a success of the employee perspective From a clarity of insight perspective from the firm and when we have those together Now we can look at what's the client opportunity and how do we leverage the client opportunity and What do we have the scale to go achieve?

KC Brothers:

I love that. I think at the end of the day, to your point, all of these things are meant to help them achieve their goals, whether it's a goal specific to the firm or them as a partner owner CEO or whatever. But it sounds like it's not uncommon that one of those goals is just. A better work life balance, more time with family, more time for hobbies, whatever it might be. Um, and I feel like and tell me if you feel that this is still rather common, that the industry hasn't broken the stereotype, I don't want to say it's a stereotype, but the, the unfortunate norm. There's a badge of honor for working X amount of hours. And it's like, no, like there, I I'm really passionate about, okay, well, if I outside canopy KC is taking care of her health, having fun with her family. Eating good food, seeing the sun that I can show up to work and more productive, effective individual contributor. Um, whether that's directly to like output of tasks or like contributing to the morale of the team and ensuring that like, we all want to show up at work and be contributing adults. Like there's at the end of the day, that has huge value.

Will Hill:

Absolutely. KC. I think we've got to shift the mentality. Away from hours entirely to production. Yes. And, and so even now, if you spend a decent amount of time on LinkedIn, um, it, while many are still in the hours and bill hours and, Hey, you got to put in 60 a week during tax season. Doesn't matter. That's just part of what we do is part of what makes us cool. You've also got. The opposite end of the spectrum that goes, well, the only way to counter that is to talk about how I'm not working. So let that sink in for a minute. So what is, what does the person new in the industry come in and look and they see this? Hey, there's this raging debate about. Hours and how many you should work or how few you should have to work But what if neither of those are the answer? What if the answer is really about hey Our firm has goals for the firm which should support the goals of the owners And if the owners have good healthy goals Employees coming in are going to be able to achieve their needs and what they have and At the end of the day All of these goals come down to money Uh, you know not more more more more more but Hey, I want to be able to spend time with my family doing what sitting in a cardboard box watching tv or traveling because those two things take different amount of money So at the end of the day, all the goals come down to we've got to be able to financially afford those, those things, right? Some are going to argue with me that my goal is to help other people. Yes, that's going to be one of your goals. But to your personal goals to be achieved, even as an owner, it takes finances to get those things done. I don't think you should be afraid of that answer. So then we look at that and say, well, how do we achieve

KC Brothers:

a martyr to the cause either?

Will Hill:

No, no, that's right. So how do I. How do we earn enough revenue to meet those goals? Well, I don't have enough time and I don't like doing all this data entry work. So I've got to outsource that to either technology or people. Okay, fantastic. Now we're going to bring those in and put it into play. Well, now my question is this, how are we going to measure that? And if it's just all about the hours, then I'm, I'm in a no win situation. Whether I'm about, I want to work as few hours as possible, or I want to work as many hours as I can because I think that's what we should do because we're responsible accountants.

KC Brothers:

Hours aren't the

Will Hill:

answer.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. And especially with the billable hour, because then it's like, well, if all of my goals come down to money, how do I get more money? I build more hours and it's like, but especially with AI now, like even myself, I hit a point in the last month and a half, maybe where I finally was like, I'm all, I'm all in, I'm in chat GPT every day. I finally found a way to help optimize. Some of the things I do, not everything yet, but I finished a project on Monday in a matter of hours that would've taken me a week or more. Mm-hmm And, and it's about that of like, okay, to your point of like measuring output and say if it gets you there faster, that does not mean you charge the billable hours that no, you've delivered the thing.

Will Hill:

When we focus on, when we focus on. especially in line with certain goals. That's when there's more intrinsic opportunity that's there from technology or from learning new things or from sharing and connecting with teammates, right? Because now all of a sudden I'm getting things done faster. We're together, we're getting more things done. Now we can sit down and say, if we're meeting our goals, great. I just had a conversation with firm owner about Fridays in the summer. Do I give them off? Do I not? How do we feel about that? What if they worked X amount of hours? And this is the conversation I had is don't worry about the hours. This is about production. What needs to get done for you to achieve your goals? If we're getting it done, great. Take the time off.

KC Brothers:

That's in line with your values as a firm, too. And, and even retaining talent in this type of market. Friday's off in the summer? Heck yeah! You know, if you can balance both, achieve both, why not?

Will Hill:

Right. Right, right. But I think we get there by having a production focus that's in line with what are the goals we're trying to achieve. And if we don't think about the goals we're trying to achieve as a firm, then anything that helps us get more efficient, we're just going to try to keep cramming more stuff in the bag. And then you sit and wonder, why aren't my staff happy? Because I've given them more tools. Yeah, but we're not connecting things to what we're trying to achieve. And they feel like it's just. You know, the never ending story. Um, so.

KC Brothers:

I think that's, that's a great note to end on and maybe it can be summarized, maybe our entire conversation can be summarized by, um, the impact good healthy, you said that and I was like, Ooh, I'm glad he qualified that good healthy goals have on a firm's production.

Will Hill:

Right.

KC Brothers:

Yeah.

Will Hill:

Right.

KC Brothers:

Awesome. Thanks again, Will.

Will Hill:

Yeah. You're welcome, KC. It's been a pleasure chatting with you today.