He Had a Stroke. Then He Built a Conference. Here's What Accounting Got Wrong | With Randy Crabtree

You're exhausted. You keep telling yourself it's just tax season. But deep down, you know it's been longer than that.

Randy Crabtree pulled over at a phone booth to quit his job and become a CPA. He built a firm, burned out, sold it, co-founded Tri-Merit Specialty Tax and landed on the Inc. 5000 three years running. Then a stroke in 2014 forced him to rethink everything.

In this conversation, Randy gets real about what burnout actually looks like before it takes you down, why niching down accelerated his growth instead of limiting it, and the one client-list exercise that can change how you run your firm starting today.

If you're running on fumes right now, this one's worth your commute.

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Transcript

Meet Randy Crabtree

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to another episode of the Accounting Leads Now podcast. We have an incredible guest joining us today. The introduction is going to be hard not to give away who our guest is, but I'm going to do my best getting through it. So today we have a member of the top 100 most influential in accounting today, host of one of the top 5% most popular podcasts on the planet, and the guy who pulled over to a phone booth before cell phones existed to call his wife and tell her he was quitting his job to become a CPA. He went on to build and sell his own firm, co-found a specialty tax company that landed on the Inc. 5000 two years in a row and then survived a stroke that forced him to rethink everything about how this industry treats its people. Now he's on a mission to prove that burnout isn't a badge of honor and that the firms willing to automate, delegate, and put their people first are the ones that will actually survive what's coming. And he didn't just talk about it, he built an entire conference around it. His name, Randy Crabtree, co-founder of Tri Merit Specialty Tax Professionals, host of the Unique CPA podcast, and creator of Bridging the Gap Conference. Randy, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here today.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Well, James, thank you so much for being here. You're making me blush. Sounds like I've done something when you read it like that, but uh, I just have fun. That's that's the key. Just have fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Okay, just have fun. That's the lesson we're taking away from the episode. Randy, thanks for coming by. So, Randy, um, all jokes aside, here, I do want to really dive into things because you have accomplished a lot in the industry.

The Phone Booth Career Pivot

SPEAKER_01 1:35

You have a ton of knowledge to share, you've done some incredible things. Becoming a CPA was your third career, if I'm not mistaken. You started in computer science, and as the story goes, you became a CPA, which involves pulling over to a phone booth to a very confused wife. Take me back to that moment. What were you doing before that? What caused you to just be like, this is what we're doing. I need to find uh a phone booth. I mean, cell phones didn't exist as the as the story goes.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Yeah, I I I think I think if you boil it down, is I'm a terrible employee, so I figure I had to go start my own business to uh to uh to be able to uh have somebody put up with me. I don't know if that's true, actually true, but I I you know what I I've been an entrepreneur, I guess, my whole life. I started my first business at 16. After college, I was out doing the jobs you said. I was I was a computer programmer for a year, and and honestly, it just sitting at the desk typing on the computer just wasn't my thing. Um honestly, I don't even know if we were typing on computers. That was so long ago. Um and then uh uh I went into sales for a year because that's where all the big money was, um, but it wasn't where my passion was. And and uh I had one undergrad class in accounting. It was a dead end class, but I remember really liking it. And so I just had this aha moment. You know what? I'm I want to have my own business. I I really think I'm gonna like accounting. I need to quit my job, I need to go back to school full-time, I need to become a CPA. I mean, this was like just in an instant, it all came to me. I gotta become a CPA. And honestly, I went further and uh in my mind was like, and I'm gonna go work for somebody for four years, and after that, I'm starting my own firm. And that's why, as you said in the intro, my wife probably thought I was insane. Um, you know, what are you doing? What are you thinking? But man, it was uh it was uh probably other than you know getting married and having our kids, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

SPEAKER_01 3:42

Ah, that's so cool. Still with your wife? That phone call didn't uh derail things, everything's still good there.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

We're good. We are uh in, let's see, in six months and 23 days, we will be celebrating our 40th anniversary. Wow, congratulations. That's incredible.

Why Niching Ends Exhaustion

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

So, Randy, you ran a generalist firm for 16 years before niching down with Tri Merit. For anyone listening who knows they should they uh they should specialize, but or so for anyone listening who knows they should specialize but is terrified of turning away revenue, what actually happened to your business when you narrowed down your focus and you started saying no to more oper well, I want to say more opportunities, but you really just narrowed down the focus.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Yeah, it is so so when I had my just to back up a little, when I had my generalist firm, it was what everybody does when they start their own firm, and I don't blame anybody for this because you want revenue. In fact, my son just started his own firm, and he's just taking on the clients that are are willing to pay him at this time. Uh, but but I never like narrowed it down. I just was helping everybody. I was helping a, you know, a doctor's office and a hair salon and a Burger King and a construction company and uh, you know, just a law firm. Just keep naming it. Every industry I was helping. And looking back, I couldn't be an expert at any of those. I mean, there was some I was more passionate about than others. And and really, if I would have started to analyze that and think, hey, I really like it when I go help this law firm with their accounting and their taxes, and I like the people, I probably would have started to build a niche out of that. But I didn't have that mindset. I didn't even think that that was a possibility. It was more, I just need an another paying client. I just need to, you know, we got a growing family. I just need to support them. Um, what happened then was really what happened was I started getting burnt out. Um, that's one reason I'm so passionate about burnout now and and how we avoid it. I didn't know what it was, I just knew I was exhausted. I just know I couldn't do anything after tax season till you know August, it felt like. Um uh it may have just been me being lazy, I don't know, but that's what it felt like. And uh and then I ended up selling my firm. I thought that was the only way out, which is wrong. So, anybody listening, that is not. There are so many solutions to do things better. And one of those solutions just kind of fell in my lap uh a year and a half after I uh sold my firm, I started Trimerit. I trimerit, we started as a specialty tax firm solely with RD tax credits. Um and we've branched into other credits and incentives, but man, when you do that, when you get to concentrate on you know one, whatever, whatever your niche is, one client base, one portion of the tax code, one you know, niche type client. Hey, I like working with family-owned businesses, I like working with restaurants, I like working with construction companies, I like working with the RD tax credit. When we did that, you could narrow down to your message, you could become the expert in that area of the tax code. Your passion for that shows through. You share your knowledge and people start to gravitate towards that. So, so when we did that, it was a brand new company, you know, year and a half gap between the two. But when we did that, when I did that, when we started Trimerit, it just like that's where everything fell into place for me. That's where I realized what actually we had and what we could do.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Yeah, I love that. How did you go about identifying what made the most sense for you, like what area to focus on? Where how'd you know what that passion was? Because as you mentioned, you start a company and everyone's been there. You're trying to keep the lights on, you're trying to replace your previous income. You got to put food on the table. So, yeah, you take on whatever you can, you you cut your teeth and you move forward. But how did you find yeah, I want to I want to go into RD tax credit, I want to go in this direction. And and I guess just as important, how did you know what to not look at anymore?

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yeah, and and honestly, I was gonna say it's luck, but it's not opportunity is in front of everybody every day. You don't have to, you know, answer that opportunity door. But for me, what I saw is I saw this opportunity. RD tax credits at the time had gone through some major changes with Congress. And so it was opening it up to a lot more businesses. When I had my journalist firm, I didn't even know what an RD tax credit was. I mean, that that meant nothing to me. But all of a sudden, I just, you know, while I was uh uh figuring out I needed to do something else, uh, I just saw this RD kept mentioning, and I'm like, this is interesting. What's going on? I had a couple companies actually reach out to me about RD from a standpoint of me coming to work with them. Um I actually did that for a very short time, which is uh I don't I think I usually skip this part of the story. Um, but it's uh I went to work for another company for a short time doing RD tax credits, and that's where I thought, you know what? Um go back to what we talked about at the beginning. I I'm I'm I have a hard time. I'm a good employee, I have a hard time working for other people because I just see I'm an idea person. I I think if I had to defy I don't like labels like this, like you said, influence or whatever, but I think I would be if you looked at like EOS system or whatever these systems, and I don't know that well, I'm a visionary. I think that's really what I am. I see things and I saw opportunity that they weren't taken advantage of, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna not just keep pounding my head on the door and saying, hey, you should do this. I'm just gonna start my own. And and so it was it was luck, it was seeing an opportunity, it was seeing that the opportunities were not being taken advantage of as well as I thought they should by other people, and and just deciding to do it on my own. The second half of your question is how do you decide what to do and not what not to do? That's a that's a great question because forever after we started Tri Merit, um, we would, after you build a reputation, after trust levels get out there, after people see you deliver good work, after you build, you know, do all these things, people would start coming to us and say, Well, what else can you do for us? And I was a little stubborn with the fact that I'm proud that we are only an RD tax credit firm. This is what we're doing. We this look at how good we are at this. And then it took about a thousand times people asking for me to say, Oh, you know what? We're giving away money here. We should do things that fall within that. You know, what we do is an engineering-based tax incentive for the most part. There's other things out there. There's energy credits, there's cost segregation, there's other things that are kind of similar vein. And so over the years, we just started slowly adding those, not overnight every one. It was slow add, make sure it was successful, make sure we kept the same level of uh work product out there. And so it was intentional at the beginning. We're only doing this. Took people slamming me in the head to finally realize we should do other things. And for the last 10 years now, we have added significant other services that tie into that core of what we do, specialty tax.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Yeah, very cool.

Spotting Opportunity In R And D

SPEAKER_01 11:11

So, Randy, with Tri Merit, no no small feat at all. You guys hit the Inc. 5,000 two years running. For those who are listening, they're doing about 500k a year right now. They want to get to a million. Based on what drove the growth for you, what should they be focusing their energy on? Um, Monday morning, when they're done listening to this, what what would that be? And maybe it's what we just spoke about niching down and finding that focus, but they're they're at 500k, they want to get to a mil. What helped drive trimerit? What what do these what do the listeners need to be doing?

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Yeah, it's so and and honestly, sorry, not to correct you, but three years in a row, we were on the Ink Five three. My bad. Yep, yeah, no, not bad. You know, you did a really good job researching beforehand, so I give you a lot of credit there. So, so what do you want to do? What you want to do is you get to get focused. Like we said, niche is important, but you can't just go out there and just all of a sudden decide you're going to be the uh uh you know fast food restaurant niche, you know, king and queen of the world. I mean, you have to one have the knowledge first. So you have to build that knowledge base, you have to know what their problems are, what what the issues that they're dealing with. Because every single uh taxpayer out there has something that they need your help with. And for a lot of us, and for me when I'm my traditionalist firm, it was I was just compliance based. I was doing the accounting, I was doing the taxes. It wasn't the I really wasn't answering question. I wasn't, you know, probably doing what I could to help them be successful. So find out what their pain points are, find out what they need to get to that next level and become the expert in that. But before you even do

The TRUST Framework For Growth

SPEAKER_00 12:57

that, make sure that niche is something you're passionate about. You can't just go pick a niche because you think that's where the most money is, because you're not going to be successful. It's just you're not gonna have fun. If you're not having fun, you're not gonna be successful. As we said earlier, um uh you know, I just like having fun. I actually have a little saying, I made some t-shirts. It's be nice and have fun. If as long as you're doing those two things, you'll be successful. But there's obviously deeper than that. So, so gain the knowledge, be be passionate about what you're working on. Um share that knowledge. Go out there on social media, on webinars, on writing articles, whatever. Let people, and you're the expert on this, but this is just how I've done it. Um, go out there and just share and let people know that you are passionate about them. You're passionate about their subject, what they're doing. And here's how you can help them. How here's how you can help them be successful. Um, if you do that, and that's not an overnight, Monday morning. They can start doing this after they listen to the podcast, but it's it'll be as uh it can be as fast as you want, but it can't, you're not gonna go tomorrow and you're gonna cut out every client that's not a fast food restaurant. If that's your niche, it's just not gonna happen. So there's this slow transition. As you add new clients, we're gonna add it in this niche. We're going to you know continue to support them with things that they don't even know they need sometimes. And so so it's just that. It's the passion for the the client base, the knowledge that you're gaining and sharing with them, and the solutions that you're you're solving. I'm sure there's more than that. But there's I actually um kind of wrote a little acronym this morning that uh uh it may make sense. I'm gonna go through this if you don't mind.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

It's trust. Because trust is huge for me. I think trust, gaining trust, and it you can't gain trust overnight. But the trust is the T is tell a clear story, and this is important, relationships. And when we started trimerit, relationships, I I actually said at the time, not that I knew anything, it's gonna take us three years to really build the trust and create these relationships with firms in this profession to show that we really do. So relationships come before revenue. Build those relationships. This is my acronym. Again, you're you're you're probably smarter at this than me, but I'll go with this. So build those relationships and the revenue then will come. You know, have this unique value. So that's the you. The unique value is you know, we were we were putting money back into their pockets with RD tax credits, which nobody knew about really. We go to clients and we'd say, hey, you know, you've got a credit out there for designing this new product or developing this new software. People didn't know it. Was that unique on its own? A little bit because it was not well known, but have some unique service that you're doing for them and and and and again share that. Uh and then um service. This is a no-brainer, but everybody says we have the best service out there. And how do you define that? I think relationships are a big part of service, knowing that they're you're there for them. So so the the service part of it. And then for me, and and if anybody's ever, I guess, seen anything I do, community is important. So building the community around what you're doing, I think, is good. So think that was that was the hard one to get the T in. Think community, uh, not transactions. So think, building this community. So so for me, trust levels are uh unbelievably important. I've never written out an acronym before for any podcast. I did it for you, James. Hopefully this works out well. So I'm honored. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Brandy, on on a more serious note, taking taking a pivot here, um, and if you're not if you don't want to talk about it, we can totally brush by it, but I think it's it's pretty big in your story. You had a stroke in 2014. A lot of firm owners listening are grinding 80 hours a week right now. They're in tax season, they're they're up to their eyeballs in work, and they can't see another way. What are the warning signs that you missed? And what should listeners who are in that position right now, what should they be watching for themselves to avoid those ditches?

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Yep. That that's uh believe me, I'm an open book. I'll talk about anything. Um, and maybe too much sometimes. But we'll see. Um, so so warning signs. The the the warning signs that you're deep

Stroke Recovery And Burnout Warnings

SPEAKER_00 17:27

into burnout or starting burnout, and then even going deeper is one, uh, and boy, every accountant's gonna say, oh yeah, I'm I'm there. You're tired, you're just exhausted. Um, especially right now, you and I are recording on April 2nd. It's the tax season in the US at least. Uh I'm not sure the uh the uh Canada tax season rules. Hopefully they're better than the US. Um you're in Canada, right? And I know your listeners are everywhere. Um and uh but you're tired, you're exhausted, and that exhaustion, that tiredness is now turning into cynicism, and and you are just uh, you know, just you have a client call and you're just like, oh, I don't want to deal with them. Um you're you're you're getting an email and it just like you're just negative about everything going on. So you're tired, you're cynical, you're being negative. Um, and then you know, another surefire sign is you're waking up at three in the morning thinking about tax returns or thinking about accounting, uh, which everybody does, but if you tie all those things together, um that's the a good sign, a good sign, that's a good indication that burnout is kicking in. And here's the real negative part with us as accountants is we don't listen to those signs at all. What we do is we say, I've got deadlines, so what do I have to do? I just got to work harder. I mean, you know, I I'm going down this this rolling this snowball down the hill that's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger of burnout. And instead of recognizing that, our first thought is I gotta work harder. I gotta, you know, I gotta put more hours in. I gotta come in on the weekend, I've got to, and at the same time, I want to add new clients, so I keep adding new clients, and that's gonna add to it. And so what we really need to do is is is step back and look at what we're doing. If you've thought any of those things, and there's more signs, if you thought or you felt any of those things, and just take a step back and say, can I be smarter at what I'm doing? And and smarter sounds a little can I be better, but smarter is a good way to say it. Can I, instead of thinking, I'm just gonna work longer and harder, can I work smarter? Can I manage my time better? Can I stop being reactive to texts and phone calls and Teams messages and WhatsApp messages and everything else? And can I shut all that down and just create a time where I'm just gonna concentrate for three straight hours and I'm gonna be more productive? Every time you get, you know, a uh uh interrupted in a project, and you've heard the stats before, you know, it takes you 20 minutes, 30 minutes to get back to where you are. If you do that 10 times in a day, you've just lost half your day. It's crazy. And so be smarter. Um set boundaries with your clients. Don't your let your client dictate what's happening. You dictate when they can talk to you, what they can talk to you about, especially during busy season. You have the no response emails or the auto-response email that says, Hey, I'm not responding to emails until you know 2 to 4 p.m. in the afternoon. I will get to yours. You're important to me, but right now I need to concentrate on this. Shut off at the end of the day. Learn how to shut your mind down. I'm gonna say a bunch of things. I'm gonna stop soon because I know we're probably running out of time. But learn how to shut your mind down at the end of the day. And there's tricks that I that I've learned from other people on how to do that. And that'll stop the 3 a.m. wake ups. It'll it'll clear your mind. You're going to you're gonna tell yourself, you're gonna tell your morning self where your evening self left off. So when you get to the desk, you can just look and say, okay, yeah, I didn't I didn't have to think about this during the night because I know what I'm working on now. Um, you know, have plans that'll keep you from wanting to check your emails all night or or send messages out to your team at eight o'clock, which you know, if you have a team that's setting terrible expectations for them. They're thinking they have to be on nonstop. So there's all these tricks. Take a walk during the day, take 15 minutes, and our mind thinks our mind tricks us into thinking, I can't do that. I got so much work to do. But in reality, we're gonna be a lot more productive if we take this break where we just forget about everything. Leave yourself your note so you know what you were working on, but we forget about everything. And just, you know, for me and my wife, we go out for a walk. At 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., and we just, you know, relax. We just take it easy. And it's just a 15-minute walk, but it's just refreshing. There's all these little things you can do. You could start with something as simple as you know, get up from your desk, go into a separate room, take five deep breaths and just listen to yourself breathe. Just feel yourself relax and go back to your desk. That just took you three minutes, but it's gonna make a big difference. So, so we can go on and on with all the things, but the biggest, the biggest piece of advice is don't ignore it. Do one thing, make a change. If it's a subtle small change, you can build on that, but don't just keep going down this road of I have to put in more hours, I have to work weekends, I have to work till midnight. That's just not sustainable.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

I really appreciate you sharing that. And and the whole time you were saying that, I was like, I know well, we're like speaking to each other right now, but I really felt like this is everything I needed to hear. I'm so guilty of doing the the one thing a phone goes off, email comes in, Slack message, and I'm like, I've been working on this thing that should have taken 20 minutes for four hours, and I find the weekends I jump on and work, what I get done in two hours is like two full days between Monday to Friday because I'm not distracted. So I really resonated with what you just shared. To add on to that, I I've been pretty vocal on social media and other episodes of myself coming out of now what you described, I would definitely say was burnout this winter and just really not enjoying what I was doing. And I was like, this is a company I've built. Why is this so why am I so miserable every day getting up? And the the quote I have on my phone is nothing changes if nothing changes. And I feel like that's what more or less you were saying there at the end is like make that change because if you're not intentional about it, if you don't get up to go for the walk, the business isn't gonna burn down in 15 minutes. Go get fresh air, take a walk. So I I really like that advice you shared, and and from someone who who's gone through it um like you have. I think it carries a lot of weight. So I appreciate you sharing that, Randy.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

I appreciate you sharing that uh you're making changes, so that's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

Yeah, yeah. Well, it it needed to happen. Um, it just it's I was like, I'm I'm tired of living groundhog day, so we we gotta make some serious changes, and it was scary, but um sometimes the unknown is very exciting, and it also was it was for the best. So um with that, Randy, you didn't just talk about these problems, you built a conference around solving them. What made you say a podcast isn't enough? I need to get people in a room, and and what's the one thing attendees typically walk away with that they can't get anywhere else when they attend bridging the gap?

SPEAKER_00 24:54

Yeah, it's it's a uh it was this okay, we go back to that visionary thing. Not that I define myself as that. I've been more people have been saying it lately, but I just I just have ideas. I'm very lucky I have people around to can implement ideas. And I had this idea that uh it actually started with uh this idea that you know I'm part of a lot of CPA associations, and and most of these

Boundaries That Save Tax Season

SPEAKER_00 25:20

associations are are larger firms, and I didn't see a lot of space for smaller firms. Now, BTG is for both bridging the gap,

Why Bridging The Gap Exists

SPEAKER_00 25:29

that's the conference. BTG is for both large and small firms, but I thought I should build an association, and then I thought, that's crazy, I don't have time to do that. Uh I could host a conference and we could talk about really it came like you said, it came down to my passion for everything we can do to avoid burnout and live the best life possible, you know, uh be nice and have fun, and uh um and create the the firm, like you're just saying, you know, the firm was kind of running you. Now you're gonna run the firm. Create a firm that you are managing, running, and it's it's leaning into who you want to be, not necessarily um it running your life. And so it it all came originally around mental health awareness. Um, you know, as a backstory, you know, after my stroke, I I recovered physically fast, but mentally I struggled for about four and a half, five years. P you know, PTSD, panic attacks, depression. And when I came out of that, I realized, you know what, we do this with burnout and everything else as accountants. We create this for ourselves. So let's create a conference now where we help people not get to that level. Um, if we had to define the conference in more of a generic term, it's probably more like practice management, things we can do as uh as firm owners. It's not a technical conference. We're not really talking tax or accounting, we're talking business, running your business and running your life as well. And so what people take out of that is what we just kind of talked about. I can do things better, I can do things different. I don't have to, just because accountants have been doing it this way for the last hundred years, doesn't mean I have to continue to do it this way. I can make change, I can be innovative, I can, you know, consistency is important with accounting. Consistency doesn't have to be important with running our practices. And so finding a new way to do things, you know, especially today with you know AI coming in, with all the MA activity that's happening, you know, with the fact that we don't have enough people coming to the profession, finding ways to run a more efficient firm and the firm that you love being part of is really probably the uh the that in the mental health awareness is the overriding themes of the conference.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

I love it. That's so cool. It it sounds very refreshing, and it's not just get in a room and and learn, like you said, more more tactical things. I mean, ever everyone knows what to do at this point, right? There's enough information out there on the tactical piece, but it's like you said, build a firm that you want to show up to each day that facilitates your life, not the other way around.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Yeah, can I expand on that for a second? Really quick. Yeah, and because from a technical standpoint, technical knowledge is so important. But I'll guarantee you, you're not gonna be the best technical accountant in the world. It's just there's there's it's not gonna happen. You're gonna know a lot, but what you can do is you can have the most empathy, you can be the most uh vulnerable, you can be the you can you can lean into these at least the most in the organization or how you want to be, you can lean into these other, you know, you can be a better communicator, all these things that that are gonna differentiate you because being the even though we are the best RD tax credit firm in the world, that's not gonna differentiate us because what's gonna differentiate us is all these other things. And so that's what we try to do with this is differentiate you, but also just make you a better firm, a better person. I love it. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 29:07

So for anyone, Randy, who's listening, who's thinking about building community or events around their firm, whether that's client events, local meetups, whatever it is, what did you learn from building bridging the gap that you wished that you knew when you started?

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Yeah, it's um it's it's tough, um, especially if you're looking at a conference. Um, you need other people around you. That's part of community, is just within your firm too. You need others around you to help support you. But you can do this simply, and and you've heard I've heard people in the profession do this. Just set up a dinner and invite people that you enjoy being part with, whether it's your clients or whether it's potential clients, set up a you know, a uh a meetup at your local craft beer bar to people that you know have a passion for craft beer as well, and you're gonna get them in there. Just start doing things that you enjoy doing, that you find like-minded people that are gonna be part of doing, and turn that into some kind of event. It's

How To Build Community Simply

SPEAKER_00 30:10

pretty simple to start with. You know, a friend of mine just texted me uh yesterday. He's gonna be in Chicago next week. He said, Hey, you know, let's get together for dinner and yeah, invite some people. And I said, Hey, you you want me to invite, you know, people we both know or what? He goes, Yeah, anybody. You just pick. So I'm like, I'm inviting people that I think he knows some, he doesn't know some, people in the community, and we're just gonna get together and and there are people in the profession, and now we're gonna create our own little new community of five or six people that probably all haven't sat at a table together, and and we're gonna do it. So just just as as like I said, with go for your walks, just start, make a change with this. Just start, set up a dinner, set up a meetup somewhere, even if it's just a zoom call to start to get a comfort level, but just do it and find people that you enjoy hanging out with and and it'll grow from there.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

I love that. It's it's I guess it's so easy to tell yourself all the reasons not to do something. Like we're you don't need to start a Tony Robbins event tomorrow with thousands of people in a massive team. It it could be as easy as you said, just go to go to the local brewery, go to a local restaurant, couple people, and then each each time it can get a little bit bigger. I that um that resonates a lot. So, two two final questions for you, Randy. You've been very generous with your time. If if the reputation and network you've built over the last 30 years disappeared tomorrow and you had to generate new business from scratch, no warm intros, no brand recognition, what would you do in the first 30 days?

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Wow, that's a stumper. I'm old. I'm not looking to do I actually am probably looking to do something new, but uh if if I had if nobody knew me, if I'm just going out there, um, I think what I I would do, well, one, am I gonna be in the accounting profession or what am I doing? I get to pick what I'm doing. You you pick you pick the uh the destination here. Oh wow, this is amazing because I've done this before. Um uh I I uh I I built a uh well with someone else, a craft beer bar when I knew

Rebuilding From Zero With Passion

SPEAKER_00 32:09

nothing about uh uh building the craft beer bar. Uh awesome. And so so but but what it is is just finding that going back. I said this before, but finding that passion. Like right now, I have a passion for hiking. Could I start a business around hiking? Maybe, maybe I can combine that with community. I can find other people. So I'm gonna go out there and say, hey, I'm gonna go for a hike tomorrow, and here's where I'm going, and this is who I am, and this is what I like to do. If anybody wants to join me, come and join me and just start getting that passionate thing out. Uh I I love working out. Am I gonna build a business around that? I'm not gonna build a gym, but I can build a community around that. Hey, you know, uh, I have a gym in my basement. Maybe I put something out there that says, hey, you know, if anybody wants to come and work out in my basement. That sounds a little weird, doesn't it? Um, I could do that. I would just get that thing, find that thing that that lights me up, start communicating that I'm doing this and this is it. And then we can go deeper into it. You know, it could be, hey, I'm gonna be a uh, you know, well, one thing I am leaning into more is keynote speaking. You said I can't have that because that's something I'm already known for. But um, we could build up to that. Maybe my keynotes now are about um family or something like that. That's not something I do, and now I'm going out to a new community to do that. I'd find the people in that community, I find people that are passionate about that, I'd find ways to get connected with them, I'd share my knowledge on you know why family is so important, and and then just see if there's something that I can build a business around with that.

SPEAKER_01 33:43

Yeah, fantastic advice. What I'm hearing is just put yourself out there, just make it known of what you're doing and and find find the community who wants to grow with you. So, last question for you, Randy. Someone's driving to their firm right now, tax season just wrecks them. Maybe they're still in it, depending on when this episode drops. They're running on fumes, they know something has to change, they've got an hour today to start fixing it. What do they do?

SPEAKER_00 34:11

Look at the clients you're currently working with and and make a list of all of them. And when you're going down that list, uh you you can make a check mark. Um, I enjoy this industry, I enjoy this person, I don't enjoy this industry, I don't enjoy this person, and start to find the things that start lumping together. Well, I kept checking, I like this industry client I work with, and I like this person, and then maybe define what you like about this person. That's their their ethics, their integrity, their vulnerability, their passion. And just look at that. When you see the clients on that list that when you look at that, you get a big smile. Those are the type of clients you need to start building around. When you look at that client list

The One Hour Client List Reset

SPEAKER_00 34:58

and you and you go, oh, right there, that's the client that you got to get rid of. And you got to start replacing that client with the ones that make you smile. It's a really simple exercise. Look at the clients, who makes you happy, who doesn't, start eliminate the ones that don't, start adding the type that do.

SPEAKER_01 35:14

I love it. So simple, but so impactful and carries so much weight behind it. Randy, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story, sharing more insight just about your journey. I'm so excited to see you in a few weeks in Scottsdale and on the golf course. I mean, at least from my end, there'll be a lot of golf balls launched into the desert or in the woods. I don't I don't know if there's woods in Scottsdale, but that's the best thing. Um, so anyways, I'm really looking forward to catching up with you again in person. Thank you so much for stopping by on the show. I I really appreciate it. I know our listeners are gonna get a ton of knowledge from this episode. Well, James, thanks for having me.