Ryan Lazanis: Building a Future-Ready Accounting Firm

In this episode, KC Brothers interviews Ryan Lazanis, founder of FutureFirm, discussing the challenges accountants face in building scalable practices. Ryan shares his journey from running an online accounting firm to coaching others on achieving freedom and growth in their businesses. The conversation covers the importance of lifestyle, the role of systems and technology, optimizing client lists, structuring teams for efficiency, and the significance of marketing and networking in the accounting industry.

Takeaways

- Ryan Lazanis emphasizes the importance of lifestyle and freedom in business.
- Having the right systems in place allows for business continuity during personal challenges.
- Many firm owners overemphasize technology as the sole solution to their problems.
- The business model should start with how to package and price services effectively.
- Optimizing client lists can lead to better work-life balance for accountants.
- Structuring teams to delegate tasks can eliminate bottlenecks in firms.
- Networking is a crucial strategy for acquiring new clients in accounting.
- High-quality clients often lead to more high-quality referrals.
- Hiring operations experts can free up partners to focus on growth.
- Building a marketing engine is essential for sustainable client acquisition.


You can connect with Ryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlazanis/

Subscribe to Canopy Practice Success

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and follow Canopy Practice Success wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

KC Brothers (00:01)
Welcome back to another episode of Canopy Practice Success. I am your host, KC Brothers, and I am here with Ryan Lazanis, who is the founder of FutureFirm, where he helps accountants build scalable, tech savvy practices. Ryan, I mean, that was brief. There's way more to you beyond that. What else would you like our audience to know about you? ⁓

Ryan (00:23)
Sure, so a little bit of background.

First off, thanks for having me on KC and to the Canopy team really do appreciate it. I guess my background is I'm a CPA born and raised in Montreal, Canada. I had one of the earlier online accounting firms in North America back in 2013. It was my first business that I started and had a lot of great ideas about what I wanted this business to look like. Unfortunately, I was extremely inexperienced and

KC Brothers (00:53)
Whatever! That just means your dreams can be big and you're not limited!

Ryan (00:56)
I guess so.

guess so. also met my life was a little difficult the first few years trying to string it all together. But, but yeah, so like struggled with pricing and selling and marketing and building a team and ultimately figured out the piece of the puzzle, scaled the business from scratch to acquisition in just five years. And then I launched future firm to help others avoid the fate that I had to go through in the early trial and error year. So

KC Brothers (01:01)
All fair. Yeah.

Yeah.

Ryan (01:22)
Future firm provides coaching and community to accountants across the globe that want help to unlocking freedom and growth in their business.

KC Brothers (01:32)
And I love that because you've hit on some themes that, I mean, I'm not a CPA. I have not been in the accounting industry nearly as long as you have, but I have seen those same symptoms of overworked, maybe underappreciated, whether it be internally in the firm or by the client, and just some of these ⁓ not so desirable life.

characteristics that come with the industry, that come with the work, that come with the seasonality. And in fact, that leads me to my first question, because I know you've mentioned in one of your webinars recently, maybe even more, I was only on one recently, and then a newsletter or two, a concussion that you've had recently and how that's affected you. And things that life happens, you're a business owner and you have employees, like walk us through.

what this has meant to you and your takeaways from this because I know it can be a metaphor for all sorts of other things too.

Ryan (02:35)
Yeah, so I mean, the lifestyle and freedom component has always been very important to me in business. And, you know, when I had my firm, things weren't easy, but I also wasn't working 80 hour weeks. And I was like, didn't have the crazy busy seasons. And I designed the business in a certain kind of way that allowed me to, you know, enjoy my lifestyle.

When I started Futurefirm, it was really designed at the outset, intentionally, to give me lots of freedom and flexibility. And I had learned a lot of things in my first business. One thing I had an experience, so I was able to voluntarily step away from the business several times a year, unplug, go on vacation, that kind of thing. But one thing I never really planned for, one thing that I never really had issues with in the 10 plus years of running a business is a health issue. And, you know,

Over three months ago, I suffered a ⁓ significant concussion and I'm still dealing with it right now actually. It's a lot better than before, but it's something that I still have to, I'm still in recovery. But I had to basically scale back.

almost all activities for a good two months. And you might know that KC , because we had an episode scheduled and we had to reschedule it because I just was not capable of having calls, you know, looking at screens. And I'm very fortunate that I had put the right systems and people in place to actually allow me to step away from the business. I didn't have a choice. I needed to. The business still continued to operate. So that's something that was really eye opening to me is.

KC Brothers (03:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ryan (04:12)
We want to have something in place, I think, that doesn't necessarily rely on us. in the eventuality that ⁓ hopefully this doesn't become the case, but if we need to step away from the business, we want to make sure we have things in place that keep on moving.

KC Brothers (04:29)
Yes, because life, if anything, is unpredictable.

And ⁓ I'm a big fan and as I've read your newsletters throughout the years and gotten to know what matters to you, especially when it comes to future firm and the things that you're bringing to firms and trying to educate them on. I'm like, man, this is a guy after like we are kindred spirits because I'm such a big believer too in what can I, can I templatize this and if finding ways to do that and building

Ryan (04:55)
you ⁓

KC Brothers (05:05)
processes or automation where possible ⁓ and reliable systems ⁓ because our brains just aren't meant to hold on to systems and deep work. And there's so much opportunity, especially now with AI, for accountants to find ways to get to that deep work faster. ⁓

I'd love your take on all the things going on with AI and systems and processes and all of that. I feel like they're all related. I know they're different, but.

Ryan (05:36)
They're

all related. The one thing that I say on this at all times though is I feel that there's an overemphasis on systems, tech, ⁓ processes, ⁓ or specifically tech and process. I feel there's an overemphasis on this. Don't get me wrong, it's very important. But.

KC Brothers (05:43)
Mm.

Okay.

Ryan (05:58)
most firm owners I run into, they feel that that's the only thing they need to streamline their business and step away from their business.

KC Brothers (06:04)
Interesting.

Okay, see, and I haven't picked up on that sentiment. So that's interesting.

Ryan (06:10)
That is a big theme because that's the first thing people come to me for is like they say, I'm burnt out. need processes and technology, help me. And actually when I started a future firm, I was a technology and process improvement consultant. That's how I started. That was my first few engagements. And the firms that were coming to me were burnt out. didn't have time for their family, didn't have time for vacation. They said, please analyze my processes and my technology and help me improve that area.

KC Brothers (06:24)
Okay.

Ryan (06:38)
And most of them that were coming to me actually had decent enough processes, decent enough tech. What was broken was the business model. So the process and tech side of things is part of the equation, but it's not the solution. And it's often not actually the starting point for how I help other firms unlock freedom and growth in their business.

KC Brothers (06:44)
Okay.

Mmm.

So would you say like vision or their definition of success for the firm is baked into their understanding of the business model or what would you define as the business model?

Ryan (07:14)
The business model starts for me with how do you package and price your work? How do you, that's the starting point. And often what I see is we're not packaging the work well, meaning, and we're not pricing it well. So we're giving away too much for too little.

KC Brothers (07:19)
Okay.

Ryan (07:32)
and that's naturally gonna bog us down. So as a very simple example, if you do tax returns for $250 or $300 and you have hundreds or thousands of them, and for each tax return at that dollar amount, you're giving them a meeting, you're answering questions throughout the year, that's a lot of time dedicated for that amount of money. So how can we package and bundle up that service better?

KC Brothers (07:32)
Mm.

Ryan (08:00)
in a way that protects your time, but also increases the price that you're charging. And that's going to allow you to...

KC Brothers (08:07)
Yeah.

Ryan (08:12)
that's gonna allow you to earn the same amount of money or more with less clients required. So that's usually why I start at is I look at how you pricing, how you packaging, how many clients you have on board at the moment. Usually we're not optimizing that so we can get rid of clients, charge more to the other clients that remain, make the same amount of money and for less workload. So that's usually what I'm looking at is that's the starting point for me.

KC Brothers (08:41)
Okay, is client count roughly something the same across firms or does it vary based on the type of services or packages that are being offered?

Ryan (08:51)
It's gonna vary. mean, if you're tax ⁓ firm, tax heavy firm, you're gonna have a lot of clients typically.

Whereas if you're like more advisory firm, ⁓ you're probably gonna have fewer clients. So it really varies depending on the type of firm out there. But ultimately what I'm looking at is how much capacity do we have available across our team, across our resources? How many clients do we have available? And how can we then optimize that? Because usually what we're just trying to solve is a capacity problem. That's ultimately what we're trying to solve.

KC Brothers (09:24)
Okay, so if we're looking at pricing and packaging, allocation of the work before we're really, well, not necessarily before, but like as when you're talking about diagnosing areas of opportunity for a firm, those tend to be, feel like the clearest opportunity before even process. How do these work together to accomplish

Ryan (09:41)
Thank

KC Brothers (09:54)
your goal for all of your firms that you consult of finding freedom, better work-life balance.

Ryan (10:00)
Yeah, so the first thing is optimizing the current clients we have available. Do we need to let go of certain clients because they're C and D clients and they're just dragging us down? Perhaps they're bolstering our top line, our revenues, but they're hurting our bottom line and they're eating up our capacity. So look at our current client list, get rid of the C and D clients, optimize the A and B clients so that they're on better packages, better pricing model. So now we have less clients for the same or more money.

And then I'm going to look at what is our team. Pardon me. Yep.

KC Brothers (10:31)
Really quick on that.

Do you feel like firms typically have the information available for them to look at a client list to effectively make those decisions? They just aren't doing it? So it's not, I guess my question is how often do they need to start collecting data before they can make this decision or do they already have the data?

Ryan (10:53)
I have a very simple rule. Okay, so I make a generalization because accountants like to get very granular and I'm looking at big picture. So big picture, are you charging at least $500 for a tax return, an individual tax return? If not, on average, if not, we probably have a pricing problem. Are you charging at least $500 a month for recurring business services, which is honestly on the low end?

KC Brothers (10:57)
Okay. Okay.

Ryan (11:19)
but I do see a lot of firms that are below that, especially bookkeeping firms. So that's the general rule. Then I ask, are you utilizing a three tiered pricing and packaging methodology, gold, silver, bronze? If not, we can probably make huge optimizations there because we're not giving ourselves the ability to move our prices upstream because most of our clients are on what I would consider a bronze level package. We want to give opportunity to move upstream.

So those are really the two questions I look at and I look at it on a big picture. And then that tells me if there's opportunity to optimize things.

KC Brothers (11:56)
Okay, so it's simple, clear cut. This dollar amount threshold helps you evaluate are they an A or B, C or D client. If it's below that $500 threshold, either get them out or build in these new packages, say we're moving over or do you just say, no, don't even propose the new packaging to those Cs and Ds. Okay.

Ryan (12:15)
We want to try to convert if we can.

We want to try to convert unless we're dealing with personality issues where the client is just driving us nuts and it's not worth any amount of money.

KC Brothers (12:27)
Okay, okay. So I interrupted you. You started off by, okay, first step, evaluate your client list.

Ryan (12:35)
Yeah, so, and then the next thing we wanna do is with the clients we have available, let's look at our team. And do we have the capacity to be able to serve these clients? Typically, we do have the capacity on a team level. The capacity is usually lacking on the owner or partner level. And that's what I'm looking to optimize as a next step. So do we need to hire someone? What does that next hire need to look like? Are we able to push work down and delegate better?

So how could we optimize our capacity or increase our team capacity so that we're not always feeling like we're chasing our tail?

KC Brothers (13:14)
I love that.

You recently put out a really awesome resource highlighting top 50 firms. ⁓ And I joined the webinar you had where you interviewed, I think there were four of them. And one of them, his name is Dave, ⁓ stood out to me because he had an interesting background in terms of...

Ryan (13:26)
Yep. ⁓

KC Brothers (13:38)
why he was starting an accounting firm and how he then looked at the structure of his accounting firm. And he talked about, ⁓ did he call it a corporate structure, I want to say?

Ryan (13:51)
He looked at it as a corporation rather than a practice, which I fully agree with.

KC Brothers (13:54)
Yeah. Yes.

Yeah. Talk to us about how you feel like that view of just alignment of team roles designation helps solve these issues with the partner, the delegation, the getting, yeah, all of that.

Ryan (14:14)
So that is a big theme even across our coaching is how you structure the team. And we did run this webinar on the top 50 modern firms. We took a couple of months, we looked at some of the leading firms out there, not firms that are necessarily the largest in terms of revenue, but the ones that we just kind of admire. They have a great marketing profile.

⁓ They're doing cool things with the technology side of things. They're innovating. ⁓ They're not driving themselves into the ground, so they have a good lifestyle. again, we weren't looking at the biggest firms. Dave's firm, I think, is over 100 people, but we had some people in the top 50 that run solo firms. And what we asked when we surveyed these firms is, what's the best strategic decision you've made?

since you've run your firm. We ran all those responses through chat gbt and the number one thing that they said was better boundaries, protecting time and team building the team. So that was all grouped under one category.

KC Brothers (15:20)
Yeah,

I heard delegating a lot. Which I think is a typical entrepreneur problem in general.

Ryan (15:22)
Yes.

Correct, it certainly is. ⁓ But protecting boundaries is a big part of it. And solo firms don't need a team. As long as you package properly, you could protect your boundaries. Going back to your question, though, with Dave, one way that you can protect ⁓ boundaries and delegate better and build a great team is how you structure the team. Because most firms, the way that the team is being structured is you have the owner at the top.

And then pretty much everyone is reporting into this person. And this person is reviewing all the files, dealing with all the clients, ⁓ doing all the sales, doing all the marketing, literally involved in every business function and everything bottlenecks up to that owner. But if you start looking at the firm as a company or a corporation where you can eventually install

a director of operations to handle the team, to handle the processes, to handle the tech, a head of client service ⁓ who would oversee the clients, ⁓ which is another issue that maybe a lot of firms might, this is another thing that firms might question is why should I have someone else looking after my clients? That's a different discussion. But.

KC Brothers (16:47)
Hahaha

Ryan (16:48)
That's how we eliminate bottlenecks is by installing people to handle certain functions so that you can focus on what you really are good at and what you want to be doing.

KC Brothers (16:58)
Yes, I love that. ⁓ I'm a big fan of a methodology called Strengths Finder. Have you heard of that? It's in the realm of personality tests, their big mantra, I guess, is we want you to focus on developing your strengths and not focus on shoring up your weaknesses.

Ryan (17:07)
Okay, no I have not.

KC Brothers (17:26)
sure be aware of your weaknesses, but what are your strengths and lean into those. And I've loved that for all aspects of my life, but in this regard and what you're saying with the firm, I love that because it's encouraging them to think about what is it that they enjoy most? Because when you enjoy something, you can get to deep work faster and therefore ⁓ become more productive. And we're getting out of that.

the tasks that take longer because they're just hard to do. Time sucks. They're emotionally, they're barriers to entry for us for whatever reason. And all of us have different strengths, so why not allow someone to enter into a role for the strengths that we don't have? And I just love that concept.

Ryan (18:13)
I agree. And I feel you're segueing into another topic here. Marketing, perhaps?

KC Brothers (18:18)
Go for it.

Yes. So,

and you already kind of teased this a little bit with them owner or sorry, partners delving into all these different things and being the bottleneck. like, and I, years ago, I saw, I think a blog post from you talking about the importance of hiring a director of operations. And as my role within Canopy and helping, you know, we're going to get into some marketing terms here.

Ryan (18:43)
Yes.

KC Brothers (18:50)
for our listeners, helping our demand gen team understand, okay, well, who do we target? I'm like, well, Ryan is talking about these directors of operations and I couldn't agree more. And I loved that you were encouraging firms to think about hiring non-CPA talent even for this role. Because again, like you wanna look at someone whose brain works the way...

It does and gets excited about these things and can really work through the refinement and frees up the space for you to do what you want to do.

Ryan (19:24)
And I think that's a very important role. Sorry to cut you off, because I know we're going

to talk about marketing, but the operations is something that most firm owners really don't like dealing with. I'm going to say 90%, nine out of 10 really don't like. Like they always have process improvement at the top of their list and it never gets done because they're not good at it. They don't like it. They have other better things to do. So why aren't we hiring someone that could do that? So that's what I did when I ran my firm.

you know, ⁓ a team of five, had hired a full-time operations person, you know, a senior level resource. I thought I needed, sorry, go ahead.

KC Brothers (20:02)
Wow, that's interesting

even for just that amount of wow, I love that, okay.

Ryan (20:06)
Correct. Correct.

So I was really top heavy for the first few years. My first two hires were CPAs and I hired one or two juniors and then I hired a director of operations or a COO. And, ⁓ you know, I was really top heavy because I wanted to just build the foundation and the structure. I think what I would have done differently though is I thought I needed someone to be an accountant and have the accountant background and handle the operations. I would not have done it.

If I had to do it again, I would just get an operations expert as you were kind of referring to. So I think it's a very important role to pull yourself out of that. If you don't like it, you're not good at it, you know, sometimes it will hurt the bottom line in the short term. So that's a decision you need to make, but it could pull yourself out and then you can focus elsewhere to grow the business.

KC Brothers (20:38)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, I love that. because I feel like your content, you talk a lot about these two things, operations and processes and marketing. And maybe because there's so much immediate opportunity to take those areas off of a partner's load because it's not their area of expertise. It's not why they went into business. It's they're probably getting bogged down with simple operational or marketing tasks that an operations or marketing expert could do way faster.

Um, and so yes, I, we can talk about marketing as well. There are so many opportunities, uh, for accountants when it comes to marketing. And I'm curious what you see because there is this interesting element, big econ 101. There's more supply or sorry, more demand than there is supply of accountants. Um, and if that's the case, some accountants might be thinking, well, I don't need to market. I've got plenty and I get referrals all the time.

Well, what are you seeing and how would you respond to that or if you're seeing something different?

Ryan (22:03)
I'd say it's pretty evenly split. There's some firms that are just able to easily pick up clients. They just have a tendency to, for whatever reason, they have a never-ending supply of clients and they just deal with referrals and the business just flows in. There's another 50 % of firms I see that just struggle to find anything and they're just accepting anything that walks through the door and they don't know

anything about how to pick up more clients and they've bounced around between different marketing strategies and marketing tactics. And they're really struggling in that area. So I kind of see both camps.

KC Brothers (22:45)
Do you see any identifying characteristics of like, okay, these are the things that are going on with this half and these are the things that are going on with this half? What's going on there?

Ryan (22:54)
I think the ones on the former half side of things is they've had some kind of network initially that they've been able to tap into. And they initially picked up some very ⁓ high quality clients and have been able to get other referrals from those high quality clients. you know, like it kind of, ⁓ they've been able to just feed themselves off of referrals. Like high quality clients are going to refer other high quality clients.

So they had an initial good foundation and they would have been able to ⁓ generate high quality referrals based on that. Whereas the opposite is they might have, the firm struggling to pick up clients, they have generally low quality clients that don't value them, that don't pay them very well, and the types of referrals they get are more of those. So the accounting firm marketing...

channel for the most part has been referrals. A lot of the vast majority of firms have struggled to actually make digital marketing work for them.

KC Brothers (24:04)
So I hate to say it, but tell me if you think this phrase applies here, but it's not what you know, it's who you know.

Ryan (24:11)
Yeah, that's probably true. ⁓

KC Brothers (24:13)
And

that's how, mean, as you were saying that, was like, that hurts my little KC heart. Because I'm like, but that it shouldn't be that way. And yeah, life is full of unfairnesses. But how do we conquer that then? You know, it just sounds like one half just got off on the wrong foot for who knows whatever reason. How do we overcome that barrier that they inherited somehow?

Ryan (24:34)
Okay.

There's a billion different marketing strategies out there and tons of Chinese objects. And honestly, the one thing that I keep reverting back to is if you are struggling with marketing, go out once a week to a networking event. I know it's not what many want to hear, but you have to build an audience. have to, you have to develop a network. So

KC Brothers (24:45)
Fair.

Ryan (25:05)
It's not easy to develop that audience online these days if you aren't sophisticated and don't know what you're doing and don't already have an audience to tap into. yes, you have to go out and meet people. And I know like my wife, like for instance, she's actually a marketing consultant and she loves doing the marketing but she doesn't like the sales aspect of finding clients.

KC Brothers (25:15)
Yes, I think that last piece is key. Yeah.

Ryan (25:34)
For years I've been telling her, if times are a little bit slower, you have to go out and find people. And she finally started doing more networking and the leads and connections are just coming through the door. So it's a time-tested strategy that unfortunately is not the most efficient, but it is very effective.

KC Brothers (25:55)
Yeah, yeah, I would agree. Something I'm really big on, I would say it's marketing 101, is just your ICP, an ideal client profile. But I hesitated to say that because, if they already have this client list that isn't really working well, how would they know from that list who their ideal client profile is? Maybe they haven't found their ICP yet. So I'm glad you mentioned networking.

Ryan (26:05)
Thank

Yeah.

And even, you know, every firm out there is going to have a couple of clients that are like our good quality clients. And that's what you would analyze is what are these clients have in common? The best ones, the ones that like me, the ones that, you know, I like working with, who I do good work for, you know, things jive well, they pay me well, like, let's analyze what they have in common and then try to find different areas where we can find more of them.

KC Brothers (26:50)
Do you ever recommend doing ⁓ referral discounts for, especially in those situations where maybe they have a smaller share of their client list of people that they really like working for and say, okay, well, can I drive word of mouth specifically from these clients?

Ryan (27:08)
It's not like a go-to strategy. I'm not saying it can't work, but I don't think the discount is the motivator. It's like, get $300 off your next bill. Like, that going to say, OK, I know the perfect person for you? As opposed to if you just ask regularly, I think you'd see similar results.

KC Brothers (27:15)
Okay, fair.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, I love it. Okay, in our last few minutes, anything else you'd like to offer, especially in regards to helping these people learn to step away or be able to take a vacation, albeit maybe even in April?

Ryan (27:48)
That's a loaded question there. It's a multi-pronged answer, I think. But the big thing is getting the business model right is not going to happen overnight. There's a couple pieces of puzzle, starting with optimizing your current client list, as we discussed earlier, starting by then looking at your available capacity and seeing, do we need other people on the team? Can I delegate work over?

That's a whole topic in and of itself. So those are the two big things. And then beyond that, it's, okay, how do we ⁓ stick to a strategy that our decisions are intentional and we're...

not distracted by all kinds of shiny objects. How do we put a marketing engine in place that gives us good leads on an ongoing basis so we don't have to feel compelled to accept C &D clients? know, things of that nature. It's really putting the entire business model together.

KC Brothers (28:49)
Yeah, I love it. Well, if you are not following Ryan, please go to futurefirm.com and at least sign up for the newsletter. It's a great read. Dot co, thank you, apologies. Futurefirm.co. And Ryan has a lot of great resources. You've also got the consulting and community, correct?

Ryan (29:00)
dot com.

Yeah, so we have our future firm Accelerate program that was started around three and a half years ago. We have over 700 firms from around the world inside the program and community that want proven systems, expert coaching, and a like-minded community that they can tap into to help them unlock freedom and growth in their business. So that's where my full-time efforts are.

KC Brothers (29:36)
I love it. Well, thank you again, Ryan.

Ryan (29:39)
Appreciate you having me, KC .