The value of disruption | Accounting Today

With so much disruption being thrust upon them, you’d think the last thing accounting firms would want to do is to disrupt themselves — yet that may be exactly what they need to do, says Bob Lewis of The Visionary Group.

Transcription:

Dan Hood (00:03):

Welcome to On the Air With Accounting Today, I’m editor-in-chief Dan Hood. You know, you very rarely hear people say, “Hey, this disruption is great! I love it!” In fact, when the word disruption gets thrown around — and it gets thrown around a lot these days — it’s usually in a negative context and that’s usually because someone else is doing the disrupting. But what if you were to disrupt yourself and your firm? Here to talk about why you might want to consider doing just that is Bob Lewis of the Visionary Group. Bob, thanks for joining us. 

Bob Lewis (00:26):

Appreciate being here. Dan, it’s always fun talking to you. 

Dan Hood (00:29):

Yeah, and this is a fun topic. Fun also/slash terrifying. Let’s dive in. Why might someone want to consider disrupting their own firm, their own traditional CPA firm? 

Bob Lewis (00:40):

Well, let’s see if I’m making the most money that I’ve ever made in my life, start with that. And I’m also faced with probably the largest capacity challenge I’ve ever had in my life and that capacity’s going to get worse. We’re really in a bit of an adapt or die  situation, so it’s great. It’s hard to stop when people are making a lot of money and I’m already behind that hours and I’m putting in too much time and I’m, I’m churning staff through. But the reality is it’s going to get worse. We’ve seen the numbers from that have come off from the number of people that sit the CPA a exam. It’s been dropping from like 127,000 in 1995 down to under 90,000 today. We got 75,000 accounting grads coming out of school. So the numbers are going to go even worse cause all those people are not going to sit for the exam. 

(01:26)

So the problem we got is if I don’t adapt, I don’t know how many get this work done. Now we also look at adaptation a little bit differently. I look at capacity, so look at the capacity inside of these firms state. There’s really a couple drivers. We got the labor issue. We know about that, the shortage of our workforce. Add to that, the aging baby boomers that are exiting, which is really kind of an unknown variable. People can go, oh yeah, there’s 75,000 accounting grad coming out of college, and we get a number on that. By the way, the demand for jobs is 150,000, so we already have a two for one shortage, but nobody seems to have a good handle on how long those aging baby boomers are going to be exiting and how big that number’s going to be. That’s a huge variable. 

(02:05)

Then we look at outsourcing offshoring, which is the cooler way of saying offshoring outsourcing now is offshoring. Okay. So if you look back 20 some years ago there was outsource partners, international, O P I, they were like the first ones out there and basically the job was to take tax returns and send it to ’em for a lower cost. It was very interesting model. Look at how many outsourcing companies we have today. There are an endless supply of outsourcing companies just emerging, and they’re beginning to have the same capacity issues that weren’t ary in in the US already. Then add that crazy variable in of what’s going to happen with artificial intelligence and technology. So if you want to look at disruption, when we look at things like revenue per professional head inside of firm, we look at a minimum of like 200,000. That’s kind of like our benchmark. 

(02:53)

We got to have at least thousand. We see firms at four or 500,000. I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to see the average revenue per professional head go from two or two 50 to three 50 to 400 cause of technology. So I can do more with my existing people. I can also use the outsourcing is to augment so I can turn my people more into reviewers and not preparers. But I think if we’re not heading that direction and we’re not adding advisory into that existing compliant base, firms are just going to die. It’s just there. There’s no way for them to survive in their current compliance model. 

Dan Hood (03:28):

Gotcha. Well, so I mean a lot of this sounds like the underlying problem is too much work, too few people, right? I mean is that a fair? 

Bob Lewis (03:34):

Well, that’s the driver. The problem is if we had all the people, a lot of these issues wouldn’t go away if we had an endless supplied people. To be blunt, I don’t think anybody would be looking at changing anything. They would just add more people. But that is a major variable in the equation that is not going to go away. Even though we know they’re going into the high schools to teach kids about accounting. 

Dan Hood (03:57):

Oh, they’re going, yeah. So he said soon it will be nursery schools, the KPMG nursery school and the PWC daycare center sort of thing as they try to grab lower and lower. I 

Bob Lewis (04:06):

Like that concept, especially accounting from daycare center where we take them and get ’em when they’re two and training into accountants. That would be a tremendous way to fix this problem. 

Dan Hood (04:15):

What small child would love to play with a brightly colored abacus? Well, I mean that is the next answer. That is the next solution for this. But in the meantime, this disruption we’re thinking about or talking about, what does it look like? How should people be thinking about disrupting their firms? They’re already, as you say, they’re looking at offshoring, they’re looking at ai, they’re looking at technology. What other kinds of disruptions should they be thinking about 

Bob Lewis (04:39):

First, right out of the box pricing firms are not really great at pricing, and I’m stereotyping here. There’s some firms that are excellent in pricing. They know how to do this. They’ve got it down to a T, and those are the firms that are doing revenue per professional head at the 3 50, 400, 500 because they’re servicing the right kind of clients and they’re pricing ’em, and I’m going to use the word value, pricing ’em properly, whether that’s hourly or in a fixed fee structure or subscription model. They’ve got it down. The firms that are hanging onto, I need to do a 10 40 for four $50, those days are gone. And unfortunately that market is passing us. But some firms are holding onto items like that that are just dragging their firm down. And when you look at the younger generation’s coming in and they’re licking at their options, and I’m like, Hmm, I could go into that firm that’s doing all compliance, which I think is going to go away. 

(05:33)

I don’t actually think it’s going to go away, but the younger professionals think it’s going to go away. Compliance is just going to transform into a different version of how it’s been done to where it’s going to, how it’s going to be done, but it’s still going to be a big part of revenue. Then I look at services, so that’s a second disruptive factor. I’ve got clients all through the different span of their life cycle, but I’m focusing on their financial inspirationally, their tax return, their audit and their cs. And these people need help with cyber, they need help with hr, they need help with exit planning succession, whole suite of other services out there that if I have thousands of business clients in my portfolio, if I’m a larger firm, why am I not bringing those services to them? So we’ve seen some very successful firms going to more of a 50 50 model where they’re 50% of the traditional accounting firm services and 50% advisory now, and we see so many that are under 10 or under 5%. They just can’t get the advisory number up because they’re now focused on last thing besides offshoring, which firms are now beginning to embrace more. Also throw in wealth management. That’s been a new revisiting factor, bringing wealth management back into my firm or being more active with it. I think it’s mostly because Dan people figured out, let’s see if I could get all those assets under management. I had a lot of aging clients that want to sell. 

(06:54)

Wow, I could continue to do that while I’m 90 and manage that a little differently. And I think the last disruption, the look at here is structure. That’s a big one. We’ve seen tradit, normally the m and a transactions have been traditional like CPA firm to CPA firm. Okay. They’ve added in non accounting businesses now that we’ll acquire or merge in. Now we’ve got the whole PE wave that has hit hard for the last couple years, but as what just happened with that Bergen KD B deal out there now we’ve got all these registered investment advisors and we have done registered investment advisory deals before, just not anywhere near to that magnitude where they’ve acquired an accounting firm. There is a difference between those two models in the middle of several PE models and it had been through the r a model entering discussions now with another R I A to really do more of this work. There’s very big differences on how these acquisitions are made between the two. I don’t think firms understand it yet. That’s coming. The other thing is what’s next is Best Buy going to buy a time firm? Well, I have no idea why not. I’m beginning to think that maybe somewhere that may happen. So somewhere 

Dan Hood (08:07):

In their, it’s not their genius bar, but Apple and them will have it, and as part of your services, you come in, you get a technology genius and then a tax genius sitting it right next to ’em at this point, 

Bob Lewis (08:18):

To be clear, by the way, those are not plugs for Apple or Best Buy unless Apple or Best Buy Care Sinus commission on that Best Buy too. Exactly. 

Dan Hood (08:24):

Small fee would be nice. No, but to your point, yeah, I mean there’s suddenly all of these different models. There used to be one and now there’s 5, 6, 7, and there’s no reason there couldn’t be more. So the options are tremendous there. I guess the question is what’s the end goal of the disruption? I mean, we know there are some issues and I think a lot of people will listen to this to say, well, what I really need is a solution, as we say for the staffing problem. If I could just have the staff, they’ll think all the issues will go away. You’ve laid out a lot of reasons why that isn’t true. What’s the end goal? I what? What problem are we trying to solve or what end state are we looking to achieve after we do our disruption? Whatever our disrupt form it takes, what do we want our firm to look like? 

Bob Lewis (09:06):

So I’m going to answer that in a second, but I want to kind of jump on your staff point. People are spending way too much energy trying to figure out how to acquire staff when there just isn’t enough staff there to acquire how to do a balanced life cycle. How do we get staff working 40 hours a week? How do we get balanced and everything calm and peaceful? We want to have that, but the problem we’ve got right now is we have a regulatory driven profession which compresses a ton of work into a small period of time. So until we find a way to do that, to get rid of that or decrease that, we’re not going to get people into a balanced lifecycle into this profession, which may be one of the drivers knocking people out. But if you keep trying to figure out how to appease the staff and not address the other pieces of the model, which is how do we diversify? 

(09:57)

So the end goal is we need to be a diverse firm, not with the services and the type of people we have. We do not have to have accountants delivering all these services so we can tap into another pool. We need to be looking at the advisory side so I can cross sell other services in that are not needing the accountants to sell them. Also, I’m not compressed in that same time period. The conversion were to cas client accounting services. I’ve got a 12 month revenue spread and I’ve been doing that for the client, the tax return bills itself. So I’m now taking more pressure off the tax return preparers because I’ve done a lot of late work by doing the c a s, it’s easier for me to do the return because I’m also working with Applied throughout the year. The other part is balance. Go ahead Dan. You got something? 

Dan Hood (10:39):

Yeah, I just wanted to grab on that because it sounds, and that’s glad you brought that up because one of the things that as you were talking about, well we should be adding wealth management, we should be wing more towards advisory services, et cetera, et cetera. The solution to having not enough people to do the work sounded a lot, do more work, just different work, 

Bob Lewis (10:55):

Right? It’s great if you could find people to do that well, 

Dan Hood (10:57):

But that’s the thing. If you’re adding cash services and you’re adding wealth management and you’re adding advisory services, because all of those only work if you’re also doing the compliance work. But your point about finding ways to decrease the amount of time and effort that goes into the compliance work makes a lot of sense. So I just wanted to highlight that 

Bob Lewis (11:14):

On that point, Dan, partnering, people are trying to bring it in-house when they can partner with professional groups that do this work already and take a percentage of the revenue share ease into it. Don’t think you have to hire a director in-house who has no real foundation to work with or maybe not the right fit for your client base. Partner with other organizations, test the market, then bring somebody in-house. Other partner list will angola’s balance. I need not to be as dependent on deadlines. I mean, if we have a deadline driven business, then you need to hit it the deadline. And if you have a large compression of real crammed into one period of time, there’s really no way to get around that because I’m going to have power police or clients. So until that model gets disturbed, or in this case disrupted, 

Dan Hood (12:04):

There’s the 

Bob Lewis (12:04):

Word laid right into that one, yeah, you’re not going to see change happening. The other thing is sustainability. So how can we sustain the workforce? We have the hours that we’re putting in place and do we actually work more like a corporation now or do we more like a partnership model that has been historically in the past? So part of this is if I don’t want to be a partner at a firm, but I do want to work for an entity and be an active part of it and maybe a partial owner, we get into issues like stock options and all kinds of things that are very different models than we currently have in play with the partnership model. By the way, I don’t think the partnership model’s a bad model. I think it’s extremely lucrative. So if I was a younger professional coming into this accounting world, there is so much money that they can make in these firms. I don’t think the younger professionals see that. Some cases, they don’t want to put the time or effort into it, but there’s others that would, if they could see the financial outcome more clearly, 

Dan Hood (12:59):

They would hold onto some of those people. As you say, some of the, it’s a real value of the partnership model really is at the end or towards the end. So yeah, if people could see that, they might be more willing to stick around for it, but it does require sort of sitting for a bit. 

Bob Lewis (13:16):

We’re going next, Daniel, 

Dan Hood (13:18):

Where 

Bob Lewis (13:18):

Are we going now? 

Dan Hood (13:20):

Next up we’re talk a little bit about how these kind of disruptions get done, but first we have take a quick break. Alright, and we’re back with Bob Lewis of the Visionary Group. We’re talking about why it might make sense for you to disrupt yourself and change up your firm. It sounds, when we first introduced it, it sounded crazy, but the more we talked about it, the more Bob’s elucidated on it. It makes a lot of sense given the issues that are facing firms and the solutions that won’t work or that aren’t available. The great point of, you know, can try to recruit and retain as many people as you want. There’s just not that many people out there. But given all that, we’ve made a good case for disrupting your firm and for different forms of disruption. Disruption. I mean, let’s talk about where does this come from? Is this the kind of thing that can be, that has to be driven from the top is can we have disruptive interactions from below or from within the partner group or is this really a leadership issue? 

Bob Lewis (14:14):

Let’s focus on disruption for just a second. I’m going to get a little personal story in on this one. All right. We’ve been doing this for 27 years now for accounting firms. When we started this business off, our model is completely different than our we are today. In fact, our model is completely different than we were five years ago. We used to focus on business development and helping firms, marketing and focusing in that area. That market is completely almost dead because business development falls off a tree for accounting firms today. They’ve got more capacity issues than they can handle. It’s a matter of how they select. So over the years, going back to what we’ve talked about as the adapt or die, we continually look how to adapt our market because what we’re doing now is where we should be based on this market. Helping people figure out what their next direction is. 

(14:59)

We have this thing we used Dan called an inflection point, and we think every firm is at an inflection point. And it’s not just every firm, it’s their clients too. Can I pull off the succession? Do I need to merge up or to sell? Do I take outside money? Do I look to be the acquirer in this marketplace? And if I decide to do nothing, all those other ratios we talked about is, am I able to put the technology in place? Can I offshore? How do I attract the people? Do I have the services? Those are all points that not just are hitting CPA firms, but they’re hitting the CPA firms clients. For me, the disruption, if you need to have innovators in your company, you need to have people that come up with just crazy ideas. And to be blunt, most ideas are going to end up being kind of crazy and not feasible and practical. 

(15:46)

One place I, I’m sure when I don’t know the whole story of how the 3M sticky note, which I’ve got all over my desk right now because I’m a junkie with that. Sorry, everybody. It’s not a, it’s nothing and bad with technology. It’s I’ve got a mental system with the sticky notes that kind of works for me. Somebody in a lab currently tried and tried and tried to get that thing fully, finally got it right. And that’s not exactly cutting edge technology, the sticky note world anymore. But at one point it was cutting edge technology. And 

Dan Hood (16:19):

I give, just real quick, I’ll give you this story. They were trying to come up with a very strong glue and they tried a bunch of things and they came up with this weak glue and they were like, well, this is useless. But some woman, the woman who came up with it was like, it noticed that it worked really well for holding all these pieces of paper together. And she’s like, wait a minute. It was just, they were going for the exact opposite, a much stronger glue. And it turned out they had this one option that was just super weak and it was recognized. And that was really a question of recognizing the opportunity of seeing like, wait a minute, we’ve already got this here, let’s use it for something else. And there’s probably, there’s a million opportunities like that in accounting firms. We could dive into ’em, but 

Bob Lewis (16:52):

That’s the perfect example. That’s how innovation occurs. They were trying to do one thing and it evolved to another completely different outcome that wasn’t even on the slate. But if you’re not doing the innovation, those other breakthrough ideas do not come through. 

Dan Hood (17:07):

If you’re not constantly trying to do new things, you won’t be able to. 

Bob Lewis (17:10):

Yeah. So you need innovators throughout the firm, but the bottom line is if you cannot get management at the top to support, it will eventually fail. And what’ll happen is if I’m one of the innovators and I keep drawing these different ideas and that keeps getting shut down over and over again because that’s not the way we do it here. We’ve done it this way forever or this idea is not practical or feasible. You eventually find you shut down, shut down all the innovation in your firm, and then you start to lose to performance that you don’t want to lose because they’re going to go to other places that appreciate the type of effort, effort they can put in play. And then you end up with a cast of c and B players and then you wonder where you’re struggling. So 

Dan Hood (17:49):

It’s a culture thing. I mean it’s got to be led from the top, but you want that kind of disruption and potential innovation to come from all over the firm then. 

Bob Lewis (17:56):

Yeah. And we, look, if I know you’re part of a large entity entity, Dan, if you decide, hey, I think we should do a completely different publication and here’s my idea, and they’re going to go, well sure, here’s 5 million, Dan to make that work. My guess is going to have to be buying from the top to support that new idea you have. 

Dan Hood (18:17):

It’s unlikely, but yes, there would have to be. But whether I would get it is a whole other question. Yeah, yeah. Well your 

Bob Lewis (18:22):

Organization’s, they’re free with money. You like to spend money like crazy, right? I mean just don’t 

Dan Hood (18:26):

Just pour it out with a hose with a fire 

Bob Lewis (18:28):

Hose. Oh yeah. It’s just flowing all over the place. Every entity, 

Dan Hood (18:31):

Every business in America at the moment just throwing buckets of cash at people. Yeah, 

Bob Lewis (18:36):

It’s the American way. That’s my feeling. And I believe firms should constantly doing innovation just should not stop is a bad idea, can be a bad idea now and a good idea later or a different version pops from it. 

Dan Hood (18:50):

Well, and as you say, you, you’ve got to want to encourage people to be thinking that way. If they feel like every time I come up with an idea, they poo it or say to Yeah, then they’re going to stop You say you’re going to stop, they’re going to go somewhere else. They’re going to take that idea somewhere else and someone else will make a million dollars with it and you’ll be stuck with a bunch of people who don’t come up with anything. 

Bob Lewis (19:09):

You know what my office hates, by the way, they hate it when I go to a conference, 

(19:14)

Right? Absolutely hate it. Cause I come back with, we should think about doing this a little different because if somebody’s talking and listening to somebody talk and sometimes you don’t really care for what they’re talking about, but you’re LA passive listening and they say that one thing and you’re like, that’s an interesting point. What if I did this with it instead of what they’re talking about? That’s what you should be getting over from the most conference you it’s had and networking meetings. That is, that’s the goal. That’s where you pick up the one little one or two little pieces and then start running with it. 

Dan Hood (19:42):

Well, yeah, and I think a lot of firms have had that issue of, oh, this is a partner who comes back with all these new ideas, but you really need to be open to that. And if you’re constantly doing it, if you’re constantly disrupting, then you become comfortable at that and you build up a sort of muscle around it and then allows you to be almost routinely disruptive because you’re comfortable doing it. But I want to, this all sounds great and make some things, let’s just take a step back and say, well, is there any problems here? Are there any dangers involved in this kind of disruption? Are there things that firm leaders should be bearing in mind as they go about it? Not on the positive side, but on the, Hey, be careful about this 

Bob Lewis (20:16):

Because, well, you got to do it carefully. You can’t just grab every idea and go, well that’s a great idea. I’ll go back to my 5 million investment. You’re going to ask your company to make to open up that new Dan put investment sanction second company. 

Dan Hood (20:29):

Careful, that’s daycare center for Young Accountants. That’s what I’m 

Bob Lewis (20:31):

Saying. Yeah. The daycare center for young accounts. It sounds like a spectacular idea, Dan. It’s only got a 20 some year gestation period before they become a cpa, but that’s okay. 

Dan Hood (20:41):

It’s a long-term play. I’ll admit. Long, 

Bob Lewis (20:43):

Long-term play. There’s a lot of liability involved in other things, but that’s okay. But the thing is, you got to do it carefully. So it’s like, here I’ll go, I’ll use this story in what I see. If firms do outsourcing, they take an outsourcing contract or, and they’ll go, okay, we’re going to do this firm. Why take two or three partners, test it with them. If it’s any idea, whether it’s outsourced day, test it with them first. Get two or three people to want to support it. Get that in place, work out the bugs, see if it’s feasible to implement in your most situations. I was facilitating the tax outsourcing session for medias lights this year at their main conference, and we had five firms up there and five outsourcing firms up there. It was a very large stage, by the way, I thought the weight would crush under 11 people, but it didn’t. 

(21:37)

One lead, one lead firms stood up and said, we did this four years ago outsourcing absolute smashing failure. We screwed it up completely. It did not work at all. When we sat back two years later, sat back and looked at what the situation said, look, we are not going to be able to survive unless we do this. And they were up on the stage going how it’s thriving right now and how it’s working so well because our second cut at it was done differently. I don’t know if they picked a different vendor or not, but they had a different mindset internally in how they did it and then they rolled it out firm wide. So you got to test the ideas out and not all the deals are always great by the way. It just happens sometimes. You have this great idea and it’s like, wow, it’s really complicated to implement and it’s not going to work because it’s not going to get support. 

(22:27)

The other thing to keep in mind is I’m not going to get everybody to agree If I have 10 partners in a room or just 10 people in a room, I’ve got 10 different sets of opinions. I may only get 60% of those people to agree to do it, but I need the other 40% to agree not to block it. Okay. Because they don’t have a better idea. And an ABS absence is a better idea. That doesn’t mean to continue to do the same thing you’re doing. You should be looking at, if I have a problem, how do I adapt and fix it? The other thing, Dan, is how do I look forward to go, you know what? I’m pretty good today, but three years down the road I’m thinking I’m going to have a huge problem. I need to begin to address that now. And that is what happens all the time in succession in firms. They wait too long, they can’t fix it. They should have been fixing it five years earlier, but that’s a conversation for a whole different podcast. 

Dan Hood (23:15):

But I love a lot of the points you brought up. And one of the things that seems to be emerging pretty clearly is that this is not something you do once, as you say, you don’t do a giant disruption where you roll out offshoring for your entire firm. You test it in a small level and more importantly, you do a lot of small innovations, a lot of small disruptions to get people comfortable with and also to build up a track record. It sounds like a track record of successful small innovations will cover up for the one or two that happen that go south every once in a while. It’s so sort of a PE model, yet 10 companies, nine of them fail, but one of them hits big. It’d be probably a little, would feel like a different ratio for disruption. But if eight of them hit eight of your disruptions work fine and go and head smoothly, and two of them don’t. Okay, that’s due out of eight. No big deal. 

Bob Lewis (23:58):

So when we looked at this stuff about this disruption, I think you’re pointing us, I think you’re asking, do you continually disrupt or do you 

Dan Hood (24:05):

Yeah, well I 

Bob Lewis (24:07):

I believe you need to continually disrupt and you need to continually modify what you’re doing. So really, really simple example is firms went crazy with, well, we’re going to give price increases. Okay? Some I’ve had firms say, oh, we were going to about 4% this year. I’m 4%. Okay, why 4%? Well, we have historically held our prices at the same for the last three years. So we think four percent’s a pretty aggressive move. Okay? Not in the read the room a little better. Okay? Right. Read the environment a little better. But point of the matter is when you’re doing, when you’re looking at culling out or reducing clients or determining which clients to move forward with, people went through the exercise and they’re like, that’s done. We’re ready. Thank God. That’s over with. No, that should be every quarter. You should be bringing 10, 15 clients to the table every quarter going, do we want to do this? 

(24:59)

And by partner, do we want to continue with them? Are they the right kind of client? Are they building our enterprise value? Are we charging them enough? It should be a continual process. And the one thing I don’t understand when people get into pricing, Dan, I know this is, maybe this is a really kind of a disruptive point, so I’m going to kind of add this in. Why would you increase fees 20% across the board? Why wouldn’t you break it down by an A, B, C, D client and then go, my eight clients don’t need to see a 20% fee increase. My D clients may need to see a 60% fee increase or shouldn’t even be here anymore. You need to look at that a little more logically and you should be looking at systematically throughout the year with actual formal sit downs because it, look, at the end of the day, I need staff to do the work and if I don’t have staff there because they’re burnt out and they don’t feel valued and working in a long kind of clients, I will lose that staffing. And once you start losing key people, it it’s a downward spiral to try to survive. 

Dan Hood (25:57):

Just, sorry, just to go on, you would also hope that in terms of that pricing, you might also be looking at what services are we talking about and what are the pricing from other people who provide this? And it would be a lot more would intensive exercise than just bang 20% for everybody. It would be not just looking at the type of clients, but the type of service area. What are you doing for, what are other people charging in this thing? There’s a lot more thinking that you go on doing to that. 

Bob Lewis (26:20):

And then again, topic for a different damn pricing. But they get into realization and all it really counts is the realized dollar. And when you get down to it, what is the realized dollar? Dan, how come you charge $600 an hour and our charge 300? Well, mostly because you’re so much better looking, but beyond that, people like 

Dan Hood (26:37):

Me, Bob, I don’t know what to tell you 

Bob Lewis (26:39):

Beyond that. You have to look at why is pricing set the way it is? It often is said historically and there’s really no sense of answer on how that’s done. And they’ll go, well, I paid Dan Moore, so his rate has to be higher. I’m like, is that the logic or is it, what will the client pay? Right. That’s why going to a fixed pricing model, I like because I could do an engagement for $10,000 to take me three hours. Does the client care? They just want the problem solved for $10,000. Fortunately, if I price it right, I’m not taking 150 hours to do that engagement, but that’s a matter of how I would control it. That’s pharmacy. You just start looking to the clients differently. Yeah. At least my view on it. What else we got today, Dan? 

Dan Hood (27:18):

I think we’re at the end. Otherwise we’re going to be having, we’ll be here for another three, four hours solving all the problems of the world. Because I mean, think the, let’s maybe take it back a little to step and say, well, the things we’re TA you’re talking about is you got to be thinking a lot more about what you’re doing and you’ve got to be ready to change it when good new ideas come along and they will come along on a regular basis if you’re open to them. Is that a safe, short version of what we’ve been talking about? 

Bob Lewis (27:41):

Yeah. And you know what a great idea, picking somebody else’s idea, like that daycare center you came up with. I’m going to run with 

Dan Hood (27:47):

That. I just gave that away to a million people. What was, I 

Bob Lewis (27:49):

Think a million people are going to go think a million people are going to read watch this podcast. That’s interesting. 

Dan Hood (27:54):

Oh, you don’t. We got a whole new model marketing this to small children everywhere. I want to get into accounting so 

Bob Lewis (28:01):

Well it may work free daycare center for will probably pull ’em right in. But appreciate the time. It’s interesting. There’s so much going on right now in this industry after looking at just for 27 plus years, amazing at the changes that I Look, I never would’ve predicted this, even though we’re the visionary group. I would’ve never have predicted this 20 something years ago on where we were evolved to. And I’m really looking at where this is going too. And I think we’re, we’ve got a really good better insight into where this industry’s going to help firms. But if I knew what number was going to come up on the blackjack table every time too, I would playing blackjack all day. 

Dan Hood (28:41):

But that’s the thing, what you should say, we know there’s going to be more change coming and that’s only the only way to handle that. The only way to adapt to that is to be ready to change yourself. So yeah, a lot of great things to talk about. Talk and think about. Bob Lewis of the Visionary Group. Thank you for joining us. 

Bob Lewis (28:53):

Thank you very much. Appreciate being here. 

Dan Hood (28:55):

Cheers. And thank you all for listening. This episode of On the Air was produced by Accounting Today with audio production by Kevin Parise. Rate or review us on your favorite podcast platform and see the rest of our content on accountingtoday.com. Thanks again to our guest and thank you for listening.