Episode 146: Innovate And Automate By Nurturing One Person Simultaneously With Michael Mazza
Before you innovate and automate your business, you should start nurturing people to unlock their potential. During this interview with Michael Mazza, a shareholder at Detweiler, Hershey & Associates, we discussed his career and path to the accounting profession. We focused on his journey to bring his vision to reality by sharing it with his Partners and Team. Learn how he has navigated change and what his insights have been to keep growing as a practice and a Partner. Today’s episode brings invaluable insights for individuals looking to navigate change and implement new visions within their organization. Join us today to see the power of nurturing people in achieving innovation and growth.
We are honored that Jirav sponsored this episode. Drive efficient growth in your accounting and finance practice with Jirav’s all-in-one forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and dashboarding solution. Jirav automates financial planning and analysis and empowers firms to triple their advisory revenue by integrating general ledger, workforce and non-financial data, . As the preferred solution provider of CPA.com, Jirav is trusted by over 4,000 businesses and firms, thanks to our exceptional platform, training, and support. To learn more about Jirav and their accounting firm partner program, visit jirav.com
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Episode 146: Innovate And Automate By Nurturing One Person Simultaneously With Michael Mazza
Welcome to this episode, where I interview Michael Mazza. He's currently a shareholder at Detweiler Hershey and Associates PC and serves as the Partner in charge of the CAS area and the firm's payroll company. Previously, he was the firm's tax manager. Along with helping clients navigate through complex tax issues, he spends time serving as a fractional CFO to clients. In that role, he helps clients understand and learn how financial information impacts their businesses. In his spare time, he enjoys running, biking, and golfing. He is married and has two children.
During this interview, we discussed Michael's career and his path in the accounting profession. We focused on his journey to bring his vision to reality by sharing it with his partners and team, learning how he's navigated change and what his insights have been to keep growing as a practice and as a partner. The journey is never over. Each new milestone he hits creates the next goal.
This episode was live at Scaling New Heights and sponsored by Jirav. Jirav drives efficient growth in your accounting and finance practice with its all-in-one forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and dashboard solution. Jirav automates financial planning and analysis and empowers firms to triple their advisory revenue by integrating general ledger, workforce and non-financial data.
As the preferred solution provider of CPA.com, Jirav is trusted by over 4,000 businesses and firms thanks to their exceptional platform training and support. I think you were going to learn so much from Michael during this episode. He was so vulnerable and transparent and I can tell you it was great to record this live and be able to have the audience ask him questions and even the discussion that later followed. I hope that you'll share this episode with maybe your colleagues or fellow partners or other people that you are working with to drive change and realize that you are not alone. Everybody goes through this process and the more we can share with each other, the better it will be for everyone.
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Michael has a practice that has gone through transformation and we are going to talk about his story. Thank you, Michael, for coming. I want to first thank Jirav for sponsoring this session and wanting to elevate these stories of transformation that we go through. A lot of us talk about what it means to do innovation. We learn about all these new tools, but we don't necessarily understand the pain that we have to go through to get the wins. We're going to have a very vulnerable conversation about that.
The purpose of this show is to understand when we go through, when we go through change, what are those belief systems we carry throughout our lives that might be for ourselves as leaders but also in the way of others who are trying to help us with that transformation, too. Michael, before we get started, can you give a little background on yourself and your firm and where you came from as far as getting started and trying to do your firm transformation?
Sure. Thank you for having me, Amy. I appreciate it. I appreciate the opportunity. I'm a Partner at Detweiler Hershey. We are a firm of about twenty people. We're located about 40 minutes North of Philadelphia. My main area is leading up our CAS practice as well as our tax practice. Our firm has been in existence for 75 years, so we're on the third generation of a partner group. Definitely, a firm that's been in place for quite a while and what I would call your traditional accounting firm. We do a little bit of everything, your financial statements, tax, the CAS area is a new area for us, and business valuations. Your traditional accounting firm in the sense of services offered to clients.
Thanks so much for joining us. One of the things that I would like to talk about first is your background and where you grew up. What did your parents do for a living? Take us back to the beginning.
I grew up in a small town, Northeastern Pennsylvania, not too big. The graduating high school class was 80 people, so it was a pretty small town. I went to college at Penn State. My parents were both in the financial industry. My mom worked as a contract analyst at the Navy Depot for the last fifteen years before she retired. My dad was a CPA on the internal audit side. He worked for the state of Pennsylvania for many years on the public utility side, auditing public utilities. Both parents had a background in the finance area, and obviously on the CPA.
When you were growing up, were you involved at all, like going to their workplace?
Not much, no. I would hear a little bit about my dad. He would travel all over the state to audit the Public Utilities Commission. It never interested me. I was that quintessential kid who was going to do something completely different than their parents. My dad also went to Penn State. I always told myself I wouldn't go to Penn State and I ended up at Penn State. I didn't know exactly what he did. I tried to steer myself in a different direction but ultimately ended up here.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I originally went to college to be a chemical engineer, but that faded very quickly. It didn't seem to interest me. I switched to Economics and Accounting, which did start to drive me in that accounting way. It wasn't until the end of college that I realized that I was probably going to go into that field. It was more of a necessity to get a job than to actually find a long-term career.
As far as mechanical engineering, was it because you were good at math? Why did you go down the path of mechanical engineering?
Growing up, I was always good at math. It was always one of those subjects that didn't seem to challenge me too much. People would tell you, “You're good at math, you should be an accountant.” What I found is that it wasn't the math part that interested me. It was more of the critical thinking, which is where this journey to CAS has led me a little bit outside of the traditional accounting style.
Who told you that you should go into accounting? Who gave you that suggestion?
Into The Accounting Firm
I had some professors in college. When I did my internship during college, I worked at a very small accounting firm. The environment was great to work at, and those people at that firm led me down that path to say, “This might be something you want to do going forward.” At that time, I was still quite undecided on what I was going to do, but it was probably the people that I worked with on my internship that showed me what I could do, what accounting is and how it intertwines with not only the math side of things, but also the people side of things.
Yeah, I think that's so important. Also, us educating the world about our profession. I love that you said about solving problems because so many people will say, “Because you're good at math, that's why you become an accountant,” but there's this belief system out there that what we do is turn numbers instead of this problem-solving. You went down this path of engineering, realizing later that you could be doing that problem solving in accounting. What opened your eyes to that?
I think it was some of the situations that I had early on in my career. You go to college and I think you take this major of Accounting, but I don't know that you're ever actually practically trained in what you're going to encounter in the accounting field. You can go into both public and private. There are many different avenues to go into. I think it was finally sitting down and realizing what do we actually do as accountants.
Early on in your career, you're trying to do as much work as you possibly can because the model of our traditional accounting firm is the harder you work, the more you succeed. Your eyes are opening to all these different situations. It was interacting with clients that got my eyes open to say, “Yeah, we have to use math, but most of our day is not spent using math.” If we are using math, it's basic math. It's the psychology of working with clients. It's the understanding what each client needs and how you transform the way you deliver that service.
Nurturing People: The harder you work, the more you succeed. That is the model of our traditional accounting firm.
Building A Client Advisory Service Practice
I love that you called it psychology of what each client needs. Who teaches us psychology when we're going to school, and how many issues are we actually dealing with and doing accounting therapy with so many of our clients? You bring up another belief system of how many hours you work means how successful that you are in a traditional firm. What in your head decided like, “We need to break that or we need to change that perspective?”
I think it was as I started to continue to progress in this profession. Our profession to me is a very interesting one. We graduate college and we get a job and the goal is to work hard and work a lot of hours. Especially in public accounting, we have busy season and often it's a badge of honor to work as many hours as you can or service as many clients and that's the way you progress. You move to the next level and then you become somewhat of a salesperson, which you're never trained for. To get more business, you have to sell. To progress in this career, you have to get more business and develop it. Ultimately, when you make it to the partner level, you now have to be a leader.
Not a whole lot is taught to you throughout on those skills, being a salesperson, being a leader. As I was progressing through those steps, I realized that some of our old models in the accounting industry, they still have validity, but they're not relevant to every area of our firm. I think our industry and even our firm, our firm being 75 years old, has had a hard time breaking through some of the quintessential hours goal and the take on any client and more revenue is better revenue.
I started to look at it from an outside view looking in. If I were a customer, what would I want from accounting firm and also, what are my next generation of leaders looking for? When I started accounting, my mindset was probably very different than what the younger generation is looking for now. We have to transform the way we offer those services in the way we build our firms to let those people thrive.
Nurturing People: We should transform how we offer services and build our firms to let people thrive.
You said your firm is 75 years old. What services were you traditionally doing in your firm when you were starting there and as you were progressing in your own career?
We do what I would call traditional. We were doing audits and financial statements, tax and tax planning, some business valuation. We have a payroll company, so we tried to be quite wide in our service offering. We tried to find the right clients, but at the end of the day, I think growth was always a main factor. Those services lent themselves to growth. Rather than trying to identify the best clients that we could bring on, we oftentimes brought on clients that fit at the time.
What made you decide that you wanted to change from those traditional services and start transforming and building a client advisory services practice?
It was the learning what the client advisory services practice did. We realized that we were already doing a lot of those services, but we were doing them in a way that wasn't standardized. A client would call and they would be in need of something and we would find out a way to do it. For me, personally, I had a fairly large client whose controller decided to leave without giving any notice. They called us up and they said, “We need somebody to fill in. Can you come fill in for three days a week?” I went in and did that service.
Seeing how you can be impactful to a client started making me think this is a service that we can offer regularly and the way that our accounting industry is looking, tax returns are always going to be there. I look at those as a transactional service, though. We're not bringing a whole lot of value to a client long-term if we're doing those transactional services. Looking back and saying to ourselves, “What services can we provide to clients that are value add?” the client advisory services stood out. It was something that I was passionate about from doing with other clients and realizing that that was giving me purpose and joy when I was working rather than doing another tax return.
It's giving you purpose and joy. You're finding your way through what kind of work you want to do and be leading up for the practice. How do you convince your partners that this is work that you should start offering?
That's been a tough one. I'm the youngest partner here at the office. We have three partners and we're all in ten-year generational differences. I think at the end of the day, as a partner group, we want what's best for the firm, we want what's best for our employees, but it's not easy to transition to a new way of thinking, especially when most of our employees at this office have been here for more than ten years. We don't have a continuous amount of turnover.
The partners have been here for quite some time, so trying to get them to understand has been more proof of concept than anything. What we've done is we've started to roll it out with what we would call friendly clients. Clients that we're already looking for those services or may not know that they were looking for them but fit the service line very well.
We've rolled it out slowly to them to show the partner group and then the rest of the firm that this is a service that can be offered if we do it in the right way with the right tools and the right partners, that it will work for clients. It won't work for all clients, though. That's one of the things that's been hard to adjust with people. These are services and these are clients that fit a certain mold and they can't be done on every client.
We've had a couple of instances since we've started this service line where people have tried to bring and clients in and try to put them into the service line. We've had to say, “That doesn't fit the client that we're looking for this service.” Those conversations have been difficult, but I think the way that we've done it is to continue to show that it will work. Obviously, there are bumps in the road. We hit walls all the time in this service line, but we tried to keep moving forward with it to show that it will work.
What are those things that you've bumped into? This can be staff, this can be partners, like, “We're trying to convince everyone that this is the right way to go.” How did you first approach it and what things worked and what things didn't work?
At every turn, we probably hit a bump in the road. One of the mindsets that we had when we walked into this was realizing that we were going to fail. Along the lines, there was going to be failure, but it wasn't going to be complete failure. It was going to be somewhat experimentation. If it didn't work in one way, we would transition and try to retool it to work in a different way. We've had staffing issues. As I mentioned, we've been doing these services in our office for the last couple of years in very different ways. Each person who was performing those services had a different way of doing it. What we had to do was try to standardize the service line, the way that we interacted with clients, the onboarding experience, and the client experience.
We run into some hiccups there because people tend to fall into their normal patterns. One of the issues we had was during busy season. We set out on this journey about six months before busy season started. We knew that busy season was going to be a tough point because people would fall back into their normal habits. We had to work through that to make sure that we were continuing to service the way that we were wanting to, while other things were going on in the office.
The other thing that we run into is that we worked with a lot of what I call friendly clients. Clients that were ready for these services, clients that we're accepting of or looking for them, the next step that we've got to get over is how do we message this to other customers that might not be in our firm. We grow very organically in our firm. That's perfectly wonderful except there's a point where this service line needs to be brought out further. We're trying to figure out the messaging and work with our partners to figure out how do we message this the right way? How do we go to market and how do we make this more of a product line and service line that we offer rather than a service that gets offered to clients when they ask for it.
There are a couple of things that you said that I want to go back to for a second. One thing is you said, “No one teaches us leadership.” We get taught the technical skills, and we're moving through our career, but we're not necessarily taught the leadership skills to nurture people through this process. A lot of things that are important as far as leadership is we're nurturing people one by one because not everybody is the same.
A lot of times, we try to push this change one too many, which we're telling everybody this is the path we're going, but we aren't necessarily thinking about what is each individual's person healing the sand that's causing them to be like, “This is fear.” There can be that, “I'm not going to be good enough. I was good at what I did before or how am I going to get to the next stage or will I be left behind?” All of those things. Also, even from the partner side, them feeling like, “This isn't a service that I have done before.” How did you nurture these people when you said, “I expected them to go back to their old habits?” What did you do to help nurture them to get them back on the path?
Nurturing People
We have been using employees who are doing traditional services and CAS services. One of the things that we've tried to do is make sure that we meet monthly, the group, to go over where they are with their other schedules and where they are with their CAS schedules, as well as having an overall understanding of what is it that they want this service line to look like. We always need an architect. What I’ve tried to do is serve as that architect for this group, but at the end of the day, the group is only as good as the people who are working in it. If it's something that I want to do, doesn't mean it's something that they want to do. If they're not involved in it and they're not enjoying it and they're not feeling the purpose of doing it, then it's not going to succeed.
We've tried to give each individual in the group a say in what they want to do. For instance, we have one person in our group who does some work with clients but loves to get involved in the technology side of things. I tasked that person with finding us an FP&A software that would work for this service line to do a service and do a product that was very different or unique from what we could offer using the normal tools that you would offer in this service. Another employee likes working with our staff, so we put her in charge of operations. She's basically making sure that everybody's schedule is coordinated the right way and that the people are getting the right experiences. We've tried to make each individual find their purpose in this group.
I love that so much that you went to each person and said, “What makes you most excited?” I think this is a belief system that we have to break in the profession because we name each role the same role. We'll say, “You're a bookkeeper, you're associate, you're a manager, you're a senior manager,” and we give the same job responsibilities to every single person, but that's not necessarily where they're best suited. That's not necessarily where they're fine.
When we actually talk to each person and say, “What makes you most excited about the work you do?” What you heard was some people like people and some people want to be in the technology. They do not to actually have an opinion one way or the other that one is worse or one is better, that you bring the best skills out of each person so that you can achieve what you want in the end. That is a different way of thinking.
Actually, I interviewed Martin from Jirav on a different episode and that was something that they did at Jirav as well, asking people, “What is it that you're most excited about,” as well, so that their career is aligned with those things that you love. What have you seen happen since you've shifted things with the people in your group?
Some people have taken to it well, and I think some people are still trying to break out of that mold, so to speak. We've had some who've embraced it. The individual who we tasked with the technology side of things, he was very excited. He went out and found a product that we use and that it is Jirav that we use. That was something that he was passionate about. I took that completely off my plate and let him run with that.
Some people had trouble breaking out of that traditional mold. We've had the instance where this service has fallen to the bottom of their list because they have to get done the other things that they're doing. It's not easy to break out of this. It's sometimes easier for maybe somebody like myself who's in a leadership position to transformatively change my thinking, but to have employees or staff or people who have been here for many years change their thinking, it's not easy.
We have a partner group. If everybody is not changing their thinking at the same time, the staff then have to understand which partner I need to change for or which partner I have to have certain behaviors for when I'm doing their work? That's difficult. I think that's difficult on the staff to try to figure out, “What person do I have to be when I'm working for a different partner.” That's one of the things we've tried to change in our firm is to have a uniform message, a uniform set of core values, a uniform purpose so that we don't all have to do the same thing, but we all have to be effectively moving in the same direction.
One thing that reminded me of, I was listening to a podcast. They were basically saying, “Think of how hard it is to change yourself when you're trying to change other people.” We have to have that same patience when we're trying to change a habit in ourselves and, over time, to be able to shift that habit and to be able to help others in order to change their habits as well or be able to achieve the vision that they have.
Maybe you can give me some examples of some clients that you now are doing very different services for and you've moved into not only client advisory services but CFO and controllership services. Michael's been in a number of my courses with me and a lot of times we say, “We're going to do CFO services or controllership services,” but CFO and controllership services are two very different services and sometimes we're saying we're doing CFO services when it's actually controllership services. Do you want to talk about some examples of what you've been able to do now?
We started in earnest working on this a while ago. At the time, like I said, we had some friendly clients. I had one client who was ready for a fractional CFO and that's what they were looking for. We've been working with them and what we found in this process is that while they may call it fractional CFO services, we identify it more as controller services.
What I mean by that is we're doing a lot more of the in the weeds work with them that we shouldn't be doing. I realized that we have to make a dissemination between what controller services are and what fractional CFO services are because typically, we have a lot of scope creep where we get into an engagement and do some of those things. I think what happens with a client is just because we can do it doesn't mean we should do it.
We need to find better ways to communicate that to the client or scope the project better. We have other clients that we're working with, and we start at the controller level. What I realized is that whatever level I think we're starting at, we're probably starting one level below that. While the client is identifying it or why what we are identifying it as that, I think that to get in there and start working, we always go one level below. The challenge for us is not getting stuck at that level. It's been a big challenge.
Nurturing People: We should find better ways to communicate with the client or scope the project better.
A lot of times, we have to come in at a different phase to get it under control but then take it to the next level. When we talk about we can do it versus do we have to do it, this has been coming up a lot when I’ve been going around to conferences. It’s the spreadsheet versus automation. What we can do is calculate everything manually on a spreadsheet. When we talk about belief systems, this is a hard belief system to break because, as accountants, we've always measured our value on time and how long it's taken us on a spreadsheet and so forth.
We have tools that can actually get us the answer within minutes, hours, days, which would've taken us weeks or months and then we've got to break the belief system that this is an hourly charge versus a value of our time. I want to talk a little bit about this automation of transforming this process from spreadsheets into automated tool like Jirav be able to offer CFO services.
Automation
When we set out on this, one of the main goals that I had was not pricing by the hour and trying to do away with the hourly pricing model, even from a measuring standpoint of how I price this. We came up with packages, so price ranges for these packages. What we were trying to do there was try to get away from the thought process of the more hours we put in, the better the work is. That lent itself to finding us a product that would do all the reporting, the dashboarding, and the FP&A services. What we weren't having in our practice was FP&A services. It’s the concept of getting clients data in a more foresight looking, forward-looking progress rather than backwards.
When we were doing these services, we were doing a lot of reporting back then, “Here's your previous month.” It was great. They need that information, but for us to be unique and different and do a service that would be valuable to the client, we realized that we had to be able to give them information and connect information together in a way that they couldn't do with the systems they had.
We've partnered with Jirav to use their product and it has been nothing short of amazing for us from the learning standpoint, the value that's delivered to the client for them to see forecasts and budgets and understand things in a way that isn't black and white on paid numbers. I think too often, what a client is looking for when they look for these services is how can you deliver information to me in a way that I can't deliver to myself already? If they have their accounting package, they can print out their profit and loss statement. They can print out their cashflow statement. It's the story that we tell and the usage of tools that we have to tell those stories.
What I found with Jirav is that we can use all of those things, and the support they provided us from a practice standpoint has been unbelievable. We have worked with them on our go-to-market strategy. Never in my wildest dreams that I think that our FP&A software platform was going to help us figure out how to go to market and market this product and service line in that way. It's been fantastic.
That was one of the main goals was trying to do this with partners, yourself, Jirav, everybody that we work with because there was no reason for us to try to reinvent the wheel that was already there. It was making the service line unique to us. We used tools but used them in a way that allowed us to deliver the product in our way.
We have some questions.
Michael, I have a question. When you have these partners that have been in there for many years and you start implementing this new software, how do you make sure they actually implement it correctly or are utilizing it correctly? If they don't, how do you handle that if they're not even utilizing it to the point that you want your staff to utilize it?
We have been very diligent about who gets to use the software. We've created a team of users, and Jirav was great at giving us the roadmap of what people should be involved in these service lines and what people should be using the software. One of the things we wanted to make sure was that we weren't setting it free for everybody to be users of because it's a type of software that you have to understand how to use and learn.
We didn't want to task everybody with learning. We've too often put softwares in place in our firm where everybody gets the training and it's a very shallow training. They learn a little bit about it and maybe they use the product, maybe they don't. I'm sure in many firms out there, it's the same situation where we have all these different types of technology and some get used and some don't.
We've been very diligent about who gets to use it, when they use it, how it's getting used, how it fits into the service line. For those partners who are on the outside looking in, we've tried to educate them and show them at every turn what capabilities it has how we're using it with clients and at our monthly staff meetings give a general overview of the things that it can do so that if they find an instance where they may have the opportunity to sell the service to a client, they're aware of how it's being used and what capabilities it has and also what services we are not trying to offer in the service line as well.
I think what's important too about tech stack is that sometimes we think everybody needs to be using all the software and it goes back to what he said in the beginning. It’s finding what each person's excited about and letting them be the subject matter expert on that. That was a great answer.
Michael, I have a question around spreadsheets versus automation. Now, my folks are spreadsheet or Excel ninjas and telling them that, “You need to let go of Excel and Power BI to move to something different,” is going to be a lot of trouble for me. How do I deal with that?
I don't think it has to be an either/or. I think it can be a both. I think there's usage for both products. I took a CFO mastermind class with Amy and another gentleman and he was very into using spreadsheets and creating a package that can be used for multiple clients. I see uses for both of them. What I found with Jirav is that it provides us the ability to do things that, in a spreadsheet, for me, personally, they can be done but they take much longer to do. One of the things that was amazing to me was in their software, when you do a forecast, we can all do a forecast in Excel. It can get pretty sophisticated with formulas, linkage and everything and it's only as good as the formulas.
What I found to be amazing in Jirav was that it not only forecasts the P&L for you, but it also forecasts the balance sheet and the cashflow statement. Now I'm delivering to my customers not only a P&L forecast that says, “If you do these things, you'll end up with this profit at the end of the year,” but I can also show them where their cash gaps are. Just because there's profit at the end of the year, it doesn't mean that there won't be some cash problems in the middle of the year. I would tell you that you don't have to make a switch from one to the other. I would use both and find the best way to use both tools to service those clients and deliver that product that you're looking to deliver.
Who remembers Lotus 123? That was hard to get off of to go to Excel. There can be a plan, but I love that of telling them what you can use Excel for what you can, and eventually, people start seeing the power of that as well. Who else has a question?
I have a question, Michael. This is not a software question, but you mentioned earlier when you're making a switch, you went around to each employee and talked about and asked them what they enjoy the most, what gets them up in the morning. Did you come across any employees that when they stated what gets them excited, there was no place for them or there was no open place for them in your company? Maybe that spot was already filled or whatever the case may be. What if there was like two people that love tech, for example? What do you do? Did you run across that at all? What did you do to work through that?
We didn't necessarily find anybody who didn't fit completely. We did find some people. Actually, some of the answers were eye-opening. There were some people that we thought liked to do certain things and then when we actually asked them the question and communicated with them, we realized that they did it as a form of necessity because that's the way that they started at the firm and nobody had given them the opportunity to do something else because they thought that's what they liked doing. We are at the size firm, and the employees that we have are long-term employees. In instances where we found overlap, we've tried to figure out the best way to find positions for those employees where they want to be. Obviously, there are going to be instances where we can't fill everybody's desires.
If somebody wants to do audits, we may not do audits. What we've tried to do is be open and honest with the communication to those employees and find out what they want. One of the main things that's been helpful for us is communicating the firm's vision to those employees so that they understand where the firm is going, what our thoughts are for leadership of the firm and the employees and the staff.
When they understood that, I think they found their fit a little bit better because now they understood what we were thinking as a partner group and how they might fit into that overall plan and understanding that they still had say in the matter to communicate to us that maybe that's our vision, but maybe they see themselves fitting in a different way than we thought they were fitting in. One of the things I’ve tried to do, and it's not always easy, no matter where you are, whether it's at work or at home, is communication. I think it goes so much further than oftentimes we even think it does to make sure people understand what our vision is, but also to understand what their vision is and what they want to do.
There were so many important things that he said in that. I want to break a few things down. One is that the partner group came to a combined vision. If you are in a firm, it cannot be that the partners are each saying different things. You walk out of that room, you all have that agreed vision and then there's heels in the sand with some partners and they're like, “Yeah, we're not doing that.” We've got to make sure there's a combined vision there.
The other thing was actually asking everybody what they like to do and not making the assumption. The biggest problem I see in firms over and over again when I go in to consult is the sentence of, “I would assume they would know, or I assume they like that.” It's always this assumption and never communication. What Michael said, communication is the key to all innovation and all employee happiness and culture.
Nurturing People: Communication is the key to innovation, employee happiness, and culture.
We don't need to be scared of communication and what that answer may be. The fact that they opened their culture up enough where people could say they wanted to do something that maybe is not their job. Now I'm going to say that from two sides, that they open it up enough that the employee felt comfortable to say that and that the partner group didn't say, “No, you can't do that. This is what you've always been trained in.” That is what I see all the time of not this letting people do these cross trainings and finding new skills and be able to move through the organization as a matrix instead of a straight line through one department. Those things are hard. What I want you to be honest about, Michael, is that combined vision of the partner group, is that hard?
Very.
How do you go about that?
Combining Vision With The Partner Group
We already did that. It was something that had to be put out on the table to start. We all came to a unified agreement and vision, and we've hit a roadblock in implementation. Now we're going out and using a third party to help us reassess. Take that vision concept, take those core values and that purpose, and help us implement it throughout the firm the way that it should be. It's definitely not an overnight thing. It's definitely a lot harder than it seems. I think that's probably why a lot of it gets stalled when we try to do these things and trying to find agreement.
We only have three partners, so it shouldn't be too difficult to find agreement in three partners. With 100 partners, it gets exponentially harder. What I'm trying to say is that even at a level that we're at, it's not easy, but the work is worth it. Find the right people to help you do it. What I realized is that this is not our strong suit as accountants. We do not implement things like this well. The fact that we even came to a combined vision was amazing to me, but the next steps are still in process and it's not an easy process, but it's worth it.
Yeah, it's little steps over time. Going back to celebrate the wins, too, because I think we focus on the negatives as we're trying to go through innovation and implementation and what's hard, instead of remembering to go back and saying, “Look at the wins that we've had along the way,” and boosting it up as well. What other questions do we have?
Michael, a couple of questions. Did you actually survey your clients before you rolled out the CAS practice? The second, does this model works better with the industry focus versus being a generalist?
The first question is, yes, we did service clients before what I would call created a service line. We did it in a way that each partner probably created the engagement process on their own. There wasn't a whole lot of standardization, which was a downfall of the process. We did it mostly when clients were in panic mode or crisis mode and needed it. We weren't identifying them proactively to say, “Maybe you're at the point where you could use this service.” We did service them before and so we've drawn on some of those experiences, both good and bad, to help us guide this new service line.
We have started to put some thought process to industry focus. I was of the opinion that, probably when we started this, being a generalist was more practical because that's the way our firm is. We have clients in many different industries. We don't have industry niches in our firm. We don't service only a handful of industries. What I’ve come to the conclusion by working with Amy and some other folks is that if we want to be good at this and we want to dive into it and make this something that is scalable and repeatable, we are looking into trying to focus in on 3 or 4 industries that we know a lot about or we care about servicing or have experience in.
That's the process our firm is going through right now with the group. We are trying to identify what are those industries. It's the same conversations we have when we brought the people on. My question to them is, “What industries do you enjoy servicing? What industries do you find to be the most useful of this service?” Rather than picking 3 or 4 industries randomly, or picking 3 or 4 that we say, “We do that a lot,” understanding that where this service line fits as well as what is going to make people want to do it.
Where this becomes important is, especially when you're doing CFO services is understanding the KPIs of that industry. One of the things that is so powerful about using automation tools like Jirav and others in this category is bringing the operational and the financial data together. That's when the conversations shift with clients because you're understanding what keeps them up at night, what the metrics are for their business. You're talking to operations people, not financial people. When you're talking true KPIs and you talk to other clients that are in that same industry, you're showing this shared knowledge.
One thing too that I think is important, Michael, is about understanding that client persona and who you're going after that client persona is so important because when you start going down that industry focus, you want them to bring more people like them to you. You want to have clients you enjoy working with. You don't want that ick factor when you see their email come across or their phone number come across your screen, you're like, “I don't want to pick that up.” This client persona is very important, and the industry niche has become an even more important factor in being successful in this type of service line. How did you go about picking that niche?
Nurturing People: Developing a client persona empowers you to leverage your industry focus. By understanding your ideal client, you can create targeted campaigns that resonate and attract more similar businesses.
At this point, we still haven't drilled down into what that niche is going to be, but what we have done is identified the clients that we feel like we're working the best with. At the end of the day, I look at this service as you're telling a story. You're helping a client understand financial data and tell them the story of how that financial data interacts with sales, marketing, operations, how it ties their entire business together. It's one piece of the puzzle, and it is important to understand how they use that data and how they can use it in a way that maybe they didn't before. That's what they're looking for us to do.
I want to thank you so much for your time. This has been awesome. Breaking Beliefs is all about our journey as humans, and there is never a point in our life that we get there. It's awareness of understanding where we're at right now, where work is going forward, and to keep going on that journey and enjoying it. I want to thank Jirav for sponsoring this session. Thank you very much, Michael.
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Now, for my Mindful Moments of this episode with Michael Mazza, I hope that you read how engaged the audience was in this conversation and also the great insights that Michael shared. Michael talked about how hard the journey is to have a vision and have it be actualized and convince the people around you and convince the people that you need to help you in that journey that this is a good thing for them and for the practice.
All of us have things that we would like to change, but there's a difference between when we want to change and when we actually change because that takes work and commitment, as well as commitment to a longer-term vision. When we set in front of ourselves a vision and we remind ourselves what that vision is every day, and maybe we put reminders around our workspace, maybe it's a picture, maybe it's a mantra or an intention word, whatever we need to do to remind ourselves to stay on the path each day can help us in the times where we're banging our heads against the wall that we can't get where we want to go.
Maybe we've got either friction or people putting their heels in the sand or getting in the way of change or not wanting to change themselves. We might make that decision to change ourselves and how we work, but we have to allow everyone that space to go through that process to want to change themselves.
Honestly, the hard part about change is not everyone is fit for change. You can try to give them as many resources as you can, as much support as you can, and if they're still not willing to make that change with you, then there are hard decisions that sometimes we have to make. If we go about this in the right way and we bring the team together, we innovate together, we brainstorm what we could be doing, then we have a shared vision versus our own vision. When we create that shared vision and we keep reminding everyone of that shared vision when things are hard, it sure helps when we are going through change and innovation.
The other thing that was important about this interview is Michael talked about how when we go through change, people have fear because it's something they've never done before or it's foreign to them, they don't know if they're going to be good at it. He went through the exercise with them that he went through himself of defining what his purpose is and understanding that that purpose drives us each day.
If our jobs that we do aren't aligned with that purpose, it's very hard to buy into any vision. That individual work with each person is important. Understanding what drives them, understanding what makes them excited to come to work each day, what the value that they are trying to create is, and who are they trying to create that for? Design the roles so that you match them up with the right purpose, not necessarily making every job description exactly the same. They might be called the same thing, but their actual responsibilities may be different based on what drives them to change.
The other thing is we read lots of habits in the room that people struggle with in their own practices as well as Michael's. One of them was automation and getting people to allow themselves to trust technology and not spend hours and hours calculating things themselves. We talked about the difference of calculating on Excel or using a tool like Jirav or others in this space to be able to bring operational and financial data together to unlock insights and forecasting and budgeting that might've taken us hours and hours and possibly never be able to bring everything together manually. Now we have these tools to allow us to do that and be able to get to these answers quicker.
We rely on our ways of doing things, but sometimes those ways take too long and this day and age and our clients want answers. If we're able to get those answers quicker through automation and be able to spend that time with our clients explaining what we're seeing versus throwing numbers over the fence that they probably don't understand and aren't going to speak up that they don't understand. The true advisor, the true CFO, the true advisor to a business, spends that human time with clients, lets the technology speed up the work so that you can be there to answer their question. You can be there to brainstorm different ideas and that is never going to go away. That relationship piece that humans need and have is so important.
Hopefully, you got that out of 's session, whether it's that human connection we need to create between our teams, between our colleagues, between our vision and what drives everyone's motivation and the human connection we create when we automate and be able to unlock insights so that we can actually drive the kinds of results that then align back to our purpose.
I hope you enjoyed the session. I know I loved doing it. That was a great new experience and to see what was resonating with all of you. I want to thank Jirav for sponsoring this episode and this session in Orlando. If you want to learn more about them or their accounting firm partner program, you can go to Jirav.com. Thank you so much for reading this episode, for supporting this episode. We'd love to hear your feedback and guests that you might want to read on topics that you want to read.
Also, it helps us when you subscribe to this episode, when you leave testimonials as well, so other people understand the learning that they will get out of this as well. Remember that the energy that you create for yourself is contagious. When we decide to make these changes ourselves, we benefit the people around us.
Important Links:
Michael Mazza – LinkedIn
Martin Zych – Past Episode
About Michael Mazza
Michael currently is a shareholder at Detweiler, Hershey & Associates, P.C. and serves as the partner in charge of the CAS area as well as the firm's payroll company. Previously he was the firms tax manager. Along with helping clients navigate through complex tax issues he spends time serving as a fractional CFO to clients. In that role he helps clients understand and learn how the financial information impacts their business.
ln his spare time Michael enjoys running, biking and golfing. He is married with two children.