Stability Over Scale: A Smarter Way to Build a Business That Lasts with Chad Davis

Running a business is more than putting out fires and checking boxes. Thinking like an owner changes how you make decisions and lead your team.

Chad Davis, co-founder at LiveCA LLP & AutomationTown.io, joins the conversation to explore what it truly means to behave like a business owner. You'll hear real talk on financial ownership, setting priorities, letting go of control, and why emotional detachment can lead to better decisions. Chad breaks down how to step into a leadership mindset, even when the day-to-day feels overwhelming. Chad also explains why stepping back emotionally helps you decide with clarity. And above all, it’s okay to slow down—because sustainable businesses are never built on burnout. Tune in to the full episode here: ▶️ Stability Over Scale: A Smarter Way to Build a Business That Lasts.

Episode resources:

● Website: https://anderscpa.com/ 

● If you have questions or would like to be a guest on the show, email us at mcpasuccessshow@anderscpa.com 

● Check out the Virtual CFO Playbook Course:  

https://anderscpa.com/virtual-cfo-services/vcfo-playbook/   

Quotes

• Chad Davis: "When you sell something to somebody, that time is budgeted to them. No one else should infringe on it. That's how you protect stability."
• Jody Grunden: "A well‑built team gives leaders confidence they can leave for weeks without the business falling apart, and often the team performs better without constant oversight."
• Adam Hale: "When planning an exit, owners must clarify their future involvement, whether they want to keep working as a CFO or simply reduce their role after taking some chips off the table."

Chad Davis is the Co-founder of LiveCA LLP and AutomationTown.io, where he champions a smarter, more stable approach to business. At LiveCA, he helps Canadian businesses streamline controllership services with scalable tech and a focus on reliability over rapid growth. Chad also leads AutomationTown, a vibrant community for accounting pros exploring the practical side of AI and automation. His philosophy? Build intentionally, stay curious, and focus on what truly matters. In both ventures, Chad is setting the standard for how to grow a business that lasts.

Website: https://www.liveca.ca/  

FB: https://www.facebook.com/myliveca/ 

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chaddavis1/?originalSubdomain=ca  

https://www.linkedin.com/company/liveca-chartered-accountant/?originalSubdomain=ca   

The Modern CPA Success Show is the go-to podcast for accounting firm owners eager to enhance profitability and master Virtual CFO services. This podcast leverages combined expertise in delivering top-tier Virtual CFO services across North America.

Website: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2458888  

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AndersCPA 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/anders-cpa/ 

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Transcript

Jody Grunden: Hey everyone. Welcome to the show. This is Jody Grunden. I'm guest hosting today for Tom Waddleton. My co partner in crime, Adam Hale, is over here on the left. Adam, say hello.  

Adam Hale: Hey everybody? 

Jody Grunden: That was not hello. That was hey everybody. Then I've got a special guest, Chad Davis. Chad is a long-term friend of mine and Adam. We've known each other for a long time. He runs two different organizations. One, a really solid accounting firm in Canada, in which he is one of the very first pioneers of the virtual CFO space. Super excited about that. Then Chad's newest adventure, Automation Town, and we're gonna hear a little bit about that as well today. Welcome to the show, Chad. Can you introduce yourself and tell everybody a little bit about yourself?  

Chad Davis: Am I allowed to say hey everybody or hello? 

Jody Grunden: You can say whatever you would like, Chad. 

Adam Hale: Apparently you have to say hello.  

Chad Davis: Hello hello, hey everybody. It's nice to see everybody. The first correction, of course, you have to insult the host within the first 30 seconds. Otherwise it's not a great interview. We never really got into the VCFO stuff very much. In fact, the thing that hurt us the most, I think, over the course of the last thirteen years was the exact opposite of what made you two really special. Which was VCFO space. What we were finding is we would not have such an amazing system like you two pioneered that the CPAs would just grab so much experience and then go start their own firms. 

Chad Davis: We weren't great at keeping people very much. What happened was we ended up cutting the CFO service from the firm. When we did that, it was incredible because now all the CPAs that are working there know exactly what the role is. It's not as bespoke as what you've created and like to have those super deep relationships on the CFO level. We got to create those on the recurring repeatable controllership level work. That was what we got our reputation around, was just being reliable, getting stuff done on time and using a tech stack that while it evolves over time. There was always an appetite for improvement. We limited it there. That's where we put a lot of the effort in those repeatable processes, which you did so well by making CFO repeatable. I've always looked up to both of you for that  weekly cadence schedule that you guys created so many years ago. I think it really set the standard and the stage for what a good VCFO firm is. Congrats on that.   

Adam Hale: I thought something else that was really cool about what you did, your journey, and how you learned is don't you have like a magic number in terms of headcount that you work off of? Can you tell us a little bit about that.   

Chad Davis: Yeah, the magic number is not like, it's sixty people. We were a hundred and twenty people plus in 2022. It's easy to grow when you don't focus on the right things. What we thought we were focusing on was our employee experience and our customer experience. We neglected the thing that keeps the whole engine running, which is profit. 

Chad Davis: I remember my business partner Josh and I, who is, Jody, you've met Josh. When we were together in 2022, it was actually coming off of that Expensify event over in Italy. 

Jody Grunden: Yeah. 

Chad Davis: We were going through some really rough stuff. When we did, we realized we had to change something. In the car ride from the Expensify event back to Rome, we ended up coming up with this idea of the right size of the firm. The concept of a new pricing model called budgeted hours, kind of getting away from value pricing, getting away from fixed fees, stuff like that. We still do fixed fees. I'll put it there. But the way we were framing it is through this lens of budgeted hours. We're like, “Geez, it's crazy what happens when you go through really hard stuff. You find out what's really important to you.” For us, stability was the most important thing. At 60 people, we were able to have enough middle management for there to be opportunities. We had enough people to help people take a lot of vacation and a lot of time off. Whatever they needed to do to get their lives in order. We could focus on that split between people really enjoying their life outside of work and also enjoying it at work. We modeled like you would do, every five or 10 people down and every five or 10 people up. We realized that over 60, between 60 and 80 people, our sales engine would just have to be crazy to deal with the amount of churn that's happening in the industry right now. Keeping the lights on as costs get higher. But 10 to 20 people less than 60, which is still a great number. Don't get me wrong, if you're a 40 person firm. But there's a little stress there in the middle management area. Maybe you want to do more, but you can't because everybody's tied up doing things. We found that 60 was that perfect number for us. We have no plans of going higher or lower because when we sell something to somebody, that time is now budgeted to them and no one else is going to infringe on it. They don't have to pay for any inefficiencies of us hiring new people and going through that treadmill of growth. 

Speaker 4: Good. 

Chad Davis: It's just stable. We've had a couple of years of some really stable operations and it's been really enjoyable. 

Adam Hale: How's that been on the turnover side both on the customer side, I guess.? Have you noticed higher retention there and then the same way with the team or what's been there?

Chad Davis: Probably what you can imagine. It's the team. We're going through a really interesting time. It's not 2020 anymore where you could leave a job and get fifty grand at the next person down the road.  

Speaker 4: Right. 

Chad Davis: I think the economy's taking a pretty hard time both in Canada and the US around job security now. That has to play into why there's such a low churn for that. We can't be that naive. But at the same time, churn's a weird number, but like 60 people, I bet you there's been two to three people that leave voluntarily a year. That's way lower than it ever has been before. On the customer side, it's high. It feels like it's an industry issue right now.   

Jody Grunden: Really. With ours, we've noticed a lot of what a lot of the employee churn is is really limited as well. I think we've probably and I could probably say the same thing from the 60 people we have on the team, I'd say maybe two or three. I can't even think of really two or three. I can think of one. I don't know if I can think of two or three. A real low turn there. Client wise, we're seeing it's kinda up and down. Because we've seen, I think last year, our churn was about six or seven percent, which to us was where we really wanted to be. This year we're seeing a little bit more. I'd say last year, meaning the last twelve months. I'd say right now, currently based on what we know is gonna happen over the next three or four months, we've seen a little bit uptick in there. A lot of it's due to basically clients selling, merging in with a bigger company, that type of thing, versus churn due to anything really that we've done on our end. Are you seeing the same thing, same type of churn where they're  consolidating and moving away. Are you seeing your churn based on cash flow and that sort of thing? 

Chad Davis: We recently started tracking this in way more detail to be able to answer that, but anecdotally about eighty percent of the people that have left is due to them selling or going out of business. 

Chad Davis: It's the reality right now. There's no unlimited money. It's coming back, but it's really put a lot of stress on a lot of companies. Even helping them through that whole process on the tax side is still money, but it eventually goes away. You just want to be sympathetic to what they're going through. In terms of percentages, I would love six or seven percent churn. For the last two years, I think we've budgeted right around eighteen to twenty percent which is detrimental. It is horrible. But there's a lot of opportunity to take from the things that aren't working where people have full-time employees and then turn those into working with us. Because for Canadians, we want to be full-time. We want to be a full finance team for less than the price of a full-time hire. That's not the CFO, but it's everything up to the controller. On that front though, it's really cool because it has opened up more opportunities for us to say no to the CFO. Because now we have all of the CFOs in Canada who are anxious about giving work to firms like us because everybody's moving into advisory and CFO work and that's their goal. We're like, “Nope. We wanna be that team underneath you so you can have those hard conversations like Adam, Jody and his team do.” 

Adam Hale: That's crazy the amount of turnover there, but I think that you probably discovered something. Picking up new clients is by far the hardest thing to do, not just from a sales perspective, but onboarding, getting to know the client. You've probably been able to offset a little bit of that pain by at least keeping the team constant. You're refilling that little bit of a bucket as opposed to trying to manage that turnover while you're doing the growth. I can imagine that would have been pretty volatile at 120 people just constantly chasing that going uphill like that would have been tough. 

Chad Davis: I'll tell you the one thing that has been stable is not having to chase so many new customers is making sure that we have the renewals going through every month and not just doing it once a year. Every month there's new renewals going through and there's always increases. For years we didn't do that. Then after 2022, we realized like that is the engine that keeps 

Jody Grunden: What do you mean by that? 

Chad Davis: existing clients who are on your plans after twelve months. What we do is two months before the renewal date.   

Jody Grunden: Renewing their current existing plan. 

Chad Davis: Exactly. If I sounded ridiculous there, explaining it to you. 

Jody Grunden: That's okay. I get it. 

Adam Hale: For context, what is about your average size client? Because ours actually is reduced. We were going up to about seventy five, eighty thousand dollars a year and I think we're right around sixty five thousand just 'cause we're getting some smaller ones, it averages out. It's not that we still don't get the bigger ones.

Chad Davis: I think with the CFO work too, I would expect it to be that high. That's really good for you. Our dashboard says that on average, we're about thirty five thousand a year for the controllership and under, which is, bill pay, bookkeeping, controllership, some tax.

Jody Grunden: Is that Canadian or US? 

Chad Davis: Yeah, Canadian. 

Jody Grunden:  Okay, gotcha. 

Chad Davis: Canadian quality, US quality. What are we talking about like Angus beef here? Are we talking about futures marketing? 

Jody Grunden: It sounds like it's very similar in pricing structure that we've got because if you're looking at a CFO package, paying sixty five thousand, most I'd say probably fifty percent of it now includes some sort of controller work inside of it. You're probably looking really close to the same fee structure, for sure. With that you're seeing a lot of turnover even with that then. What was your client based on consistent revenue size? What kind of business are you looking for?

Chad Davis: It's not like you where it's a little larger, but we're in American dollars. 

Jody Grunden: Well you can go Canadian. I'm cool with that. 

Chad Davis: You're making me do this. 

Jody Grunden: The audience can do the math. 

Chad Davis: No. About one point one to one point two million US is the minimum customer we'd work with. 

Adam Hale: Okay. That's really similar. That's kinda where we're at. That's kind of the minimum. We always say one to fifty million, but the reality is the majority of our clients are between three and or five and fifteen is kinda what we're pushing towards nowadays. 

Chad Davis: There'll be some that are just cost centers. Revenue means nothing to them. We have one client who's building a hybrid electric jet fuel like jet with like bombardier and all these other things. We're like, “That's a cool client to have. They're not gonna be making money for ten years.” 

Chad Davis: Those are great. But it's great where they can just have a nice solid controllership bookkeeping thing in order to make it work. We have a lot of similarities between us for sure. How are things going over with Anders? What's working really well for you? 

Jody Grunden: A lot of things are working well. We'll tell you that the merger itself was super tough initially. We got through that. I think with any merger, you're gonna have the bumps and bruises along the way. A lot of ghost stories out there and reasons why clients may have left at that point, thinking, “Hey, we're now a bigger company, so we're not gonna take advantage.” I don't know what the reasons were. But we got through all of that and now things are going extremely well. We've gotten through the employees buying into our system. We've gotten the partner group buying into our program and how we do things. I'm feeling really solid with the way that everything is now. With our client base, I think Adam's done a phenomenal job making sure that everybody is getting the service level they need to have. We've got a great leadership team that's all doing their job and doing it really well. It's one of those deals that I'm sure Chad, you can recognize this when you can leave for a month, a week, two weeks, and know that the house isn't gonna burn down. Know that everybody's doing their job really well and that they're probably doing their job better without you than they are with you in a lot of cases. I think Adam's really done a phenomenal job with the team with that. 

Adam Hale: Yeah, I would say people have been terrific for sure.   

Chad Davis: We have a bunch of friends in the industry too, Jerry, who we know are thinking of selling. If you guess where to talk directly to them, like the CFOs that have a team of six to ten people. They're just in that, like, “Okay, now's the time. I know when I should sell. I guess based on what you went through, what would be the biggest piece of advice you'd give to them today in twenty twenty five? 

Jody Grunden: I would say, always looking for what you want to do? Do you wanna hand the book of business off and then leave in the sunset right away? Is it something that you want to be part of a bigger team and grow with that team? Really deciding what your motivation is as a business. What do you want to do with your life? Is this the end or is this the beginning of the next chapter type of a thing? Once you've made up your mind with that, then you've got to look at everything in those lenses. I'm gonna end, then let's build this thing, get this thing so profitable and then sell it and then walk away and be happy with that. Know that they may take that thing and change it completely and destroy everything that you did. That's okay. Or, “Hey, I want to be with a bigger group because there's a lot more availability, a lot more opportunity for my team and for me as an individual. If that's the case, then you need to look at that as the motivation, “Hey, I need to build this, but I also need to figure out how I can get the team involved and really scale up the team and really scale up the clients and that sort of thing.” I guess it's really the end of mine. I would like to hear your opinion on that one.  

Adam Hale: I think that's important for anybody. That's the same advice that I give all small business owners whenever they're ready to walk. What is going to be your level of involvement going forward. Are you gonna be a CFO? Do you just want to take all the admin practice management stuff, take some chips off the table kind of a thing? That's gonna really depend on where you land as well. Whether you want to go to a small firm or a large firm, you know, it's gonna be pretty important. For us, probably one of the biggest things that I didn't really see coming was the firm that we merged in with Anders, already had a small accounting team already. I think that whenever you look at the surface level, it's like, “Well, you're working with the same clients, you're working with the same technology, you're kind of doing the same thing.” But the way we approach the work was a little bit different, and that ended up becoming probably our most difficult thing. So really just lean into how you serve your client as well. Everybody treats their team well or feels like they treat their team well and their clients well, those kinds of things. But I would probably coast alongside somebody if I was going to join an existing practice for a little bit, just to make sure that it blends in well. We jumped right in at the very beginning, went full bore at it thinking that it was gonna be easier than what it was. It was a little more difficult. At some point you gotta rip the band aid off anyway. I don't know that it would have been any better had we sat side by side with them for six months. But if I was to do it again, I probably would have at least coasted for three to six months, a little bit longer than what we did. 

Chad Davis: I think it's really good advice because I asked our buddy Matthew May, like what he would do too. He said the same thing as both of you, which is be very clear and upfront with your intentions. Jody, that's exactly what you said. He's like, “Even though they're going through a buying spur, are you guys buying right now too? 

Jody Grunden: We're always looking to buy.  

Adam Hale: Not like him, not part of the business plan. 

Chad Davis: But it was like the best people that we talk to are the ones that can say, “I want out or I want in.” It's when you straddle it makes it really tough to understand what you're gonna do. 

Jody Grunden: Yeah, for sure. 'Cause you went through that initially too, didn't you? When you were kinda going through, “Hey, what do we want to do with this?” I know when we talked about it was like you were.

Chad Davis: We're like this is going because it's not going so well. It's a blessing in disguise because now we've got this thing that is working and really enjoy working with the team. The stress levels are just so much lower versus way back then. It's off the table. We have zero interest in selling. If there's negative interest, that would be us. We just really like what we have going on right now. 

Adam Hale: It sounds like it's feeding the new project that you have going on as well. Are you able to do that almost in like maintenance mode for the most part and you're able to kind of shift your focus and build in a different direction?   

Chad Davis: I'm still in charge. I won't say in charge, but I'm responsible for all the new sales that come into live CA. That's what I spend all my day doing. Outside of that, Automation Town is this side project where a bunch of accountants just get together and geek out on what's happening in the industry in a little bit of a safe space.  

Chad Davis: 'Cause it is nice to talk on LinkedIn and to do that stuff as well. But when you know you can do it privately away from your team, maybe and really have those conversations and see what other people are doing without like the whole internet watching you, it is nice. I enjoy that. If I could spend more time on it, I absolutely would. But I think bringing in other people that are just as passionate about the new stuff that's happening in the industry, like giving them a place to run with is pretty cool. We have a memory session on how to make your AI not be so forgetful coming up in like a week with another guy who's really into this kind of stuff. That's the stuff that we're doing there. But at the same time, like I think every single firm owner feels a little bit of FOMO with this stuff. They probably should be doing five or six other things before investing in a whole bunch of tech and like AI hype and all this kind of stuff. I don't recommend starting with this, but if you've created a priority for this in your list of things to do, then it's a cool place to go. But I wouldn't start there and think that's the silver bullet. Because there's pricing issues, there's staffing issues, comp issues, service delivery issues, sales issues, marketing issues, client list issues, those things all really should be looked at first before you do anything with this kind of fringe AI automation stuff. 

Adam Hale: You mean you haven't built an agent to solve all those problems for us yet? What have you been doing with Automation Town? 

Chad Davis: Yeah. Being real with it. I don't know but it feels like every week there's a new company coming out saying they're automating the month end close. There will be a time when that's super great. But then you read the fine print like, “We hope to automate 20%. We hope to automate 50%.” You're like, “Cool, like that's good.” But I think that's where the sensational is coming in, which is it's trying to set unrealistic expectations for accountants that it really is just a push button. I don't know about the US, but in Canada it's really hard to deal with disparate data and with conflicting priorities of leadership. What they really should be focusing on is just getting the data and doing a really great job of having stuff in a timely manner is still like the raw world we live in. 

Adam Hale: I was expecting blockchain to come and solve all our problems years ago where we didn't have to worry about organization and all that kind of stuff, real time closes and that kind of disappeared. 

Chad Davis: I'll give you a good example. We're recording this on a Tuesday. On Friday, I just had enough with my current sales process. I was like,”I'm always going back into carbon. I'm always talking to my business partner about who to follow up on. I'm always trying to figure this out. Why don't we just build a tool?” Fast forward, I spent some time on the weekend. Now we have a fully functioning web app that goes into carbon, grabs all of the sales data, allows me and him to prioritize follow-ups and get leads like create notes and do all that kind of stuff. It's almost like a HubSpot or a pipe drive for carbon data. We get all the to-dos, schedules, audit logs. We can see who's doing what between each other. In total, I don't know, 10 hours of development. I moved my entire to-do list over there. I put all my ideas for LinkedIn videos and for things to do inside automation town. My whole brain is in there now. It's only been four or five days. I think that's the unlock that I'm hoping to help with Automation Town is like there actually are some pretty cool use cases you can do today that aren't like agents taking over the world, but just taking over the crap you don't want to do anymore.  

Jody Grunden: How do you get into that? For somebody that doesn't have a ton of experience with the AI world, how do you jump in and and figure out, “Hey, how do I create something that's gonna solve my sales process or processes issue that I might have.?”

Chad Davis: Give you a good example. My business partner, like Josh, keeps saying his name, Josh Lag. He loves coaching. I think in 2022, I don't know if you brought this up when we met over in Italy there. That was the start of an introspective change in his life where he could divert almost all of his attention to internal coaching inside of the company. Fast forward to today, and last time we met up, I sat with him for five hours, maybe six hours. I taught him how to use lovable, which is a vibe coding tool. He then turned into his check-ins for his coaching. Now people will do their check-ins on his app. Then it's all organized just in a way that used to be done through emails. Now the next part of the build, which is cool, is before submitting the check-in, he'll have an AI model with a lot of his feedback and the way that he thinks, look at that check-in and challenge people before they press the submit button. All it took was five hours of intense questions, answers, experimentation and a lot of curiosity on his end to get it going. I don't want to discount the buddy system. Because it really does do a lot better when you're with somebody that has a little bit of experience. It just accelerates it. That's what I'm hoping to do with automation channels, just accelerate that because information is free. You can go grab it on any AI chatbot, any LLM, any YouTube video, any post on LinkedIn. There's free information everywhere. But it's really hard to just find accountants doing stuff for accountants. There's a couple of communities out there doing great jobs in that. But I wanted this one to be the AI and automation stuff. It was super focused. 

Jody Grunden: Chad, if you weren't part of the organization, you're stepping aside, you won the lottery, no longer part of it, would your company dive into this? Do you have individuals in your company that are super curious that would be, “Hey, definitely I can do what you're doing, or would it just revolt back to where it was prior to the AI movement that you pushed through?   

Chad Davis: Not a hundred percent sure I get the question, but are you saying like if I wasn't in live CA.

Jody Grunden: Yep. 

Chad Davis: Would the team members still feel as interested in tech?  

Jody Grunden: Yeah. Would they jump in and be you? How do you get people to jump in to be you or are you just you? 

Chad Davis: No, I think that's the problem a lot of early companies have is that the whole company revolves around the interests of the owners. That's great for a while. 

Chad Davis: I'm not saying you shouldn't have influence over your company as you get bigger. I'm saying, “We've adapted.” We have this thing called the strategic projects and operations team. That's the new version of the tech team. That's the new version of the innovation team. That has happened all  throughout our time. They have very clear mandates. They have schedules. They have documentation and all the stuff that like Jody, you and I probably s*** at. 

Chad Davis: Adam's probably really good at it. The evolution of a good company. I wouldn't want them to be like me, like all over the place and disorganized. Since Friday I'm now organized. You want it to evolve into what it should be. I think that the answer to your question is, “No, they won't be me. They'll be the version of the company that they are now.” Because it's an important position, if anything happened and those people didn't want to do that work, then we would evaluate if that was the right direction for the company. I'm excited of where it is now. Because we do have three full time people that are thinking about this for the team. I just get to filter crazy stuff through Josh. 

Adam Hale:  It's a great place to be. Is there anything that you're super excited about on the tech side? It sounds like for the most part you're leveraging the practice management side of things. And frankly, that's probably where I've seen the most value too. Every time I get into the delivery side, I'm usually quickly disappointed. You said, “It's a lot of marketing hype.” Then you start looking at it. My team, frankly, has come back and said, “You know, on our side, it's taking me more time than less time to implement these tools.” Is there anything you're super stoked about or anything you're watching closely? 

Chad Davis: Every company is at a different stage. I think most people want to buy a really good tool. The tools that are getting some traction now are the document request and organizing tools and some extraction tools, but those are still a little bit not as great as they could be right now. It'll be a matter of time. 

Chad Davis: For me personally, looking internally and like fixing your own house is the opportunity for a lot of firms. For me, we ended up never using a proposal tool, but we've built our own. Right now we have a sales intake perspective, like hundreds of data points per entity. Then that will craft pricing. Then that will craft the presentation for the client on the call. Then that will craft the proposal. Then that will craft the billing and the automatic invoicing. A lot of people use anchor, ignition, NULA, socket, you name it, all these tools, which are great and people should use them. But I needed an incredibly custom tool for years. A lot of them didn't have APIs. Now Anchor does have an API, which is really cool. They're marketing it to the public. If we had our crazy hundreds of data points per entity and we needed that to somehow go somewhere or make it into a proposal. We could do it through Anchor. But for us, it was just super easy to use our Google environment and then use Google App Script to generate all the documents, all the proposals, all the scripts to go in and create things inside of Xero and inside of our own databases. I'm just excited that for us, we've been able to take all these things that just were disparate and had different clunkiness to them. In the Google environment, we've been able to kind of stitch them all together into something that works. On the flip side, that also empowers a lot of the team members to do really cool stuff inside of Google Sheets, connecting systems, doing automatic Stripe reconciliations without needing to charge beer or recharge or something like that, or a Zwarra. It just empowers payroll reconciliations. They can do this themselves using scripts, and our team is able to help and support that. That's what I'm really hyped up on.   

Adam Hale: Like I said, I think that that's probably where we're seeing most of our gains. Jody, I think you were on an email the other day as well. We saw one. I know you're not really doing the CFO side of things. But we saw one where there's an agent that basically can be your CFO. He can ask it any question. It can pull up any report, connect to all your CRMs and stuff like that. Do you have any concerns with where your value proposition is in the space? Like right now, I know you're saying you've got a little bit of a competitive advantage because those CFOs are outsourcing to you right now. But with this emerging tech, it does seem like it's going direct to consumer kind of a thing. Any concerns there in the immediate future or anything that you're doing to prepare the team for  embracing that or leveraging it? 

Chad Davis: Do you see what ENY did? They have this thing called now two points oh or something. You essentially can put in your job description, the work you're doing now, the role you have, what you're working on, that kind of stuff. Then it'll tell you how it's impacting your job down the road with the flag disruption. 

Chad Davis: That's like the super transparent being like, “Okay, your job's at risk if things happen.”

Chad Davis: I don't know exactly how to feel. I don't know if there's a rule. But I know as humans we tend to underestimate the short term and overestimate the long term. We always focus too much down the road of like this crazy world where we have nothing and the jobs change. I don't know, but my job's changed in ten years. I like what I'm doing now. I hope that there's change. I thrive on it. I don't want the same thing for ten years. I really hope that the crap that we deal with is solved so we can have more enjoyable work lives. We're not typewriting anymore, we're not like floppy disking it anymore. That's okay. If you ask those people, “What happens if you can't use your floppy disks?”I don't know. They'd probably be pretty mad. I think perspective's really important. I'm not like running towards the hills, like screaming that we're all screwed. It's more like, “Okay, let's breathe.” I think before we had a framework for dealing with change, it was a lot of fear. But when we put in EOS, that entrepreneurial operating system stuff, that was what helped us frame what the next three months are gonna be dealing with. Because we know what's coming up these three months, we'll have that discussion in January again about the next three months and we'll just keep going that way. We understand the pressures that are happening to us now. If it's a priority or not. If we can be punted down for something halfway through the year. But we're definitely not living two or three years in the future. We're living one year at a time, hitting that goal and being as best as we can, showing up as best as we can for our clients and for our team members. If some magical thing happens where it does work and there's a lot of stuff automated, all it means is we're going to figure out a way to help customers navigate to that. Remember  in Canada, we have a little bit of a weird situation where coding through the bank is also requiring sales tax inputs. You need a lot of receipts for transactions. You need contacts. You need to make sure you've got your foreign currency dealt with right. It's a little harder of a lift than for just the American like to throw it through the bank statement and go through it.   

Chad Davis: It's a long winded answer to say I'm excited for the future and if I was an accountant and I knew this was coming, I probably would skill up in terms of understanding how this stuff works and not ignoring it. Because it will affect your job somehow. I just don't know exactly how.  

Jody Grunden: 100% agree with you. People ask that question a lot and you hear people answering the question many different ways. I'm the same way. Change is great. I embrace change. Not all accountants would agree with me. A lot of accountants think change is horrible, in any way, shape, or form. They're grudgingly moving forward with it. But I think for those that are gonna really succeed at what they're doing now, what the professions are looking toward, I think the more you've gotta be able to accept that. I agree with you the fact that jumping ahead too far is probably. I don't think anybody's mind can really take it. What's the earth gonna look like a hundred years from now? I have no idea. Why do I care? I might still be alive, who knows with technology. There may be a way that now people can live forever. Who knows? That could be something. Who really knows? Can we fly in five, ten, fifteen years without the use of an airplane? I don't know. Not gonna worry about it. Same thing with this. It's one of those things you've got to keep in mind. Keep yourself grounded. The change is gonna happen. It's going to impact everybody as it did when everybody used to do everything by hand when it comes to and where before the calculator was invented. There were a lot of people employed at banks that just simply did all the shorthand. That's what they did. They did formulas all day long. That's obviously not the case with a simple computer. What's tomorrow gonna look like, who knows? But I like your attitude, “Hey, let's take it three months at a time. Let's keep the one year, 12 month running always on the horizon to make changes and as they come, just be on the forefront of it and embrace those and not discount them.” I think if you discount change too much, you're setting yourself up for failure. I think you really need to embrace it, look forward to it, and “Hey, how can we make the most of it? How can we help our clients with the new change?” Is it going to be that? Accounting is a thing of the past, and it's all advisory going forward. Who knows? Maybe that's the new change, or maybe it's not that simple. Maybe it's something completely different. Maybe it's a completely different way of looking at it altogether whereas right now we're closing books and doing that. Maybe that's not even part of the future going forward. Who knows? I think that you have to embrace whatever does happen and really figure out how you can make the most of it and better everybody in the process, your team, clients, everyone. 

Adam Hale: We're all screwed. I'm just kidding.  

Adam Hale: From my perspective, same thing. I'm hoping there's a lot of change 'cause I don't want to do a lot of the stuff that we're currently doing. I think that's not where my stressor is less about whether we're going to exist or what we're gonna look like in five or ten years. It really doesn't bother me at all. I feel like we're almost at this beta-v. I'm gonna date myself here a little bit, beta VHS moment. I don't know, Chad, if you had that in Canada where it's like, “Hey, here's the emerging technology, do you go left or you go.” My neighbor, I remember growing up, was like all in on beta, bought like a bun. They were like these like 40 pound tapes back in the day. Now, of course we're like five technologies beyond that now, so it's probably even just a bad analogy all on its own. But it does feel like there's this race to hurry up and implement more than there has been in the past. You gotta try to pick something and jump on it, especially since it's competing against offshoring. Are you currently doing any offshore work, Chad, like on your team or is everybody?

Chad Davis: Now, if you go to the front of our website, it says in as clear words as it can right below the fold, it says, “A hundred percent Canadian, like zero percent outsourcing.” That's been our stance for a while now. We tried it, really screwed things up, and lots of regrets there. But we are now very clear. Every single person with us is full-time, they're working in Canada. There's a few part-time people. That's worked out really well for messaging. It's interesting because I'm not against outsourcing for other people, but it's just like at your own house, like you wouldn't eat certain food, so you wouldn't drive a certain car or you wouldn't go to a certain grocery store or something. You don't judge other people for doing something that you wouldn't do. It's the way they live. I think a firm can operate in a hundred different permutations. It's totally fine. But for us, when we made this decision, the conversations really started to change with our customers because they're like, "Oh, we've been to these firms and they outsourced everything and it didn't work, and like I just want to talk to somebody.” You probably can find a great outsourcing firm where you can talk to somebody. It's not the outsourcing that's the problem. But then in their mind, they think it is. Framing is a real issue. But I think with this technology, with AI, it's giving the outsource team a little bit of a superpower now and letting them do better work. We're probably gonna see like all ships rise with the tide. I don't think one model's better or worse than the other, but you should be able to talk about why you operate in a certain way and give clients the feeling of confidence that you've got your stuff in a row and like you can deliver on time and with great quality. As long as you can do that, great. There's no right or wrong. 

Jody Grunden: I know we're kind of wrapping up. We're getting close to time here, Adam. I know what we've always done in the past is kind of throw a fun fact out there. Just kind of curious. With the holidays coming up here, let's kind of gear it towards there. Sporting events and the holidays. I'll start with you, Adam. What's your big sporting event for the holidays for your family, it's a tradition. If you've got one that you've always watched on TV or went in person or did anything like that.  

Adam Hale: I think the easy answer is always football. But for me, it got terrible there for a long time. As a kid, I just always and I don't like the Detroit Lions at all, but it was always like Barry Sanders was Thursdays. That was the only thing you really wanted to watch on. You watched him run for years. That was probably. Yeah, a little bit of football, but I'll take it back into not just like a sporting event. It's a sporting event in my house, but we play a couple board games on Thanksgiving. They can become contact sports for sure. It depends on who's playing and how it's going. We've got a few board games that get everybody riled up, get the blood pressure going, get the competitive spirit going. 

Jody Grunden: Tell me one board game that's exciting for your feeling.   

Adam Hale: Well the one that that i any age could play, which would still kind of irritate people at whether you were eighty or eight is aggravation. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of that game before. It's like a Marvel game and you just kind of roll dice and you knock each other out. It's kinda like croquet on a board game, but we'd played it in our family since I was a little kid. Like I said, “It doesn't matter, you could teach a six year old to do it or an eighty year old, and everybody gets equally ticked off as they play.” It's fun.   

Jody Grunden: How about you, Chad? 

Chad Davis: We've lived in the RV ever since twenty eighteen.

Jody Grunden: You're not making any money. Profits, is that we're talking about? 

Chad Davis: That's right. Yeah, that's exactly it. This is the very first year that we have not spent it in the US. We parked the RV in our driveway in Nova Scotia and just pieced out to Spain for a little bit. This background is in an apartment in southern Spain and it's six o'clock here now. I don't know what time it was there.

Chad Davis: We'll be spending Christmas here and it'll be our first time learning the new traditions and seeing what everything's there. If anybody is from Spain or knows some cool stuff to do during the Christmas holidays here, let me know.  

Jody Grunden: So Spain. You went from traveling the United States with the RV to now we're on a plane. I assume you didn't take the RV to Spain?

Chad Davis: Did not but we did take the dogs. 

Jody Grunden: Kids are here. Come here, Charlie. 

Speaker 4: Hi.  

Chad Davis: Wow. Charlie. Bring the dogs over. The dogs are sleeping. It's really weird. We grew up the last eight years. We've been in three hundred and thirty square feet, for all of us. Every Christmas has been on a beach somewhere in the US. It's just been fun. But this will be our first time with a real tree.

Jody Grunden: You're still married. That's impressive. 

Chad Davis: Dude, I think if you ever are wondering if your partner is the right partner for you, go on a road trip, do RVing. If you can make it through that, you are soulmates. 

Jody Grunden: You're awesome, Chad. That's pretty cool. With me wrapping things up with me. A lot of mine have always dealt with the kids, as the kids are growing up and Adam's experiencing this full boar. Seems like they're in every sport in the world and every sport for some reason travels and for every sport they want to play on all the holidays. Seems that's been the tradition forever. I can remember going to Chicago three years in a row and that's where we had Thanksgiving at an ESPN zone way back when they used to have those. That's where our Thanksgiving meals were. The funny thing is then you go to Christmas and you'd find that one kid in Ohio is playing whatever sport, and the other kids in California are playing the same sport. A lot of times we're divided amongst each other and with all the different activities. Now with the kids, I've got one in Florida with me, that's where I live. Then I've got one in California right now going to med school. We're gonna be apart for the most part. It's gonna be a bummer in that regard. But in the same aspect, we always go back to watching sports now the kids aren't actually participating in it. I'd say with Adam, the same thing, it's basketball and football, really whatever the game is going on. I think with Adam and I both it's fun this year. It's really fun because both Hoosier graduates, you know, our Indiana Hoosiers are doing extremely well in college football. Both of us have opposite ends on the field in the NFL. Adams Chicago Bears are doing extremely well, Colts are doing extremely well. The Pacers last year made it to the finals, you know, they did really well. The fever is the same thing. Now I live here in Florida, the Florida Panthers, they've won the Stanley Cup the last couple of years in a row. It's been a really fun time just being involved in all the different sports, but more so with the kids, even though they can't make it to the games, you know, with the kids kind of in spirit in regard to, “Hey, we all know we're gonna be watching the same day and all doing the same type of thing, whether we're in person or afar.” That's been a great thing for us. Chad, it's been great talking with you, man. Getting to know you over the last man several years has been great. Going to all the different events, the accounting events and listening to you talk about AI and watching your computer crash in the middle of the event all the time. Phenomenally great and exciting. But on a serious note there, I really appreciate what you've done for the industry and just being a role model has been great. Over the years, being one of the first firms to dive into virtual space way back when 10, 15 years ago. Again being a leader there and deciding to the point where, “Hey, growth is great, but we don't want growth anymore.” We want stability and we want to make sure that we enjoy what we're doing and we found the perfect spot to do that. My hats are off to you for that for sure. Adam any closing comments?

Chad Davis: I'll jump in first and just say, “I know we touched on it really quickly in the beginning.” But I think what you and Adam and the team have done both with your prior company and with Anders, you can't ignore the impact that that has had on probably hundreds or thousands of CFOs that didn't know how to operate a virtual CFO practice. You were always so open with your playbook, with these podcasts. At one time you had like what, four podcasts going? 

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.  

Chad Davis: More, I don't know. It was always in the spirit of helping people. I never told you this, but like I listened to a lot of those early episodes and I would try to steal all the little nuggets. Remember when you used to talk about okay, “Week one we talk about this. Week two, we talk about this. Then you'd like to leave us on a cliffhanger and have to come back to another episode.” It's like, “D*** you.” But I really appreciated it and it gave us a lot to think about and it probably gave a ton of other accountants to think about. Again, thank you for what you did to the industry because it's definitely made an impact.  [00:51:20][33.7]

Jody Grunden: Thanks, Chad. I appreciate that.  

Adam Hale: You guys nailed it. Looking forward to you doing the same in Automation Town. It's really exciting what you're doing and would just love to see more content and see what you're kind of doing with that stuff as well. Cause I think that's gonna be huge for the next step for all of us. Thanks again for that.

Chad Davis: I should put up more LinkedIn videos. That's definitely what people are asking for. 

Jody Grunden: Linked in videos, that's a great idea.  

Chad Davis: Ha ha. I wonder if I should do some of those. 

Jody Grunden: Hey Chad, how can people get a hold of you if they want to reach out and tap your brain for any reason at all? 

Chad Davis: They might want to take it. Honestly, LinkedIn is the best way. If you do get annoyed at all the daily videos, just say not interested. It never shows them up again. I've got great friends that say things like, “It's too much, dude. I have to say no.” I've done geez, I don't know, 200 of these daily videos now, maybe more. That's the best way to get in touch. I've met so many cool people from that video. Feel free to reach out to Chad Davis. It's the guy in Canada with the beard. 

Jody Grunden: Thanks guys. Thanks everyone.