Thanks for tuning in to CPA Life, where we talk culture and growth with folks that are going against the grain in an industry that has been stuck with a we've always done it that way mindset for far too long. Join host John Randolph and learn how a sustainable family friendly career in public accounting doesn't have to be the exception to the rule. Welcome to CPA Life. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the CPA Life Podcast, where we spend time talking to.
To firm leaders and industry insiders all over the country who are going against the grain and building more modern firm firms that are growing, thriving, and giving people amazing career options, while not demanding that they sacrifice their family or their lives at the altar of their jobs.
And today we are joined by Dominic Piscopo, who is the founder and creator of Big 4 Transparency, and tell me if I get this right Dom, whose mission is to bring transparency to the accounting industry, to facilitate conversations that move the overall industry forward. Is that pretty much spot on?
Yeah, yeah, I would add maybe there's a part in there for helping people kind of advocate for themselves, but overall yeah, like the idea is kind of help have these conversations that are going to help drive the whole industry forward, so yeah. Well you, you've done a pretty interesting Move with Big 4 Transparency, what the plan for does, the information that's there, the whole package that people can get a ton of value from it.
But let's, before we kind of jump into that and talk about the journey you've been on over really the last year that you've invested more of your time, energy and effort into it, talk about kind of how you ended up where you are, where'd you start your career and how did Big 4 Transparency come about and where are we today in the growth of that? Yeah, absolutely. I'm learning to tell this in a shorter format. I just like went way over telling it somewhere else.
I'm going to try to keep this short. Yeah. So like prior to university and all the way through university for myself, I'm based in Canada. I always had these kind of like side hustles or whatever type jobs where like, I was actually like extremely well paid. So like, instead of like working at like a grocery store or whatever, I was like doing credit card sales. Like I would always, always kind of like. Follow the money. And, you know, I was working at bars and things like that.
And so when I joined a Big 4 firm in tax, in my head, I was like, Oh my God, I'm set. This is the career for me. This is going to be incredible. I'm going to set myself up beautifully. And it can do that. Don't get me wrong. But I was shell shocked when I walked through the door to find out that like, I was getting paid. I was working at the bar at the same time as I was working at the Big 4 and I was making half my week's pay from the Big 4 Friday night at the bar.
And, and yeah, and salaries are a little bit different in Canada versus in the U S like in Canada, they're quite a bit less competitive in the accounting space, but that was like a major sticking point for me. And I felt just astonished at where things were at. And otherwise I had a really good situation. Like I had the best partner, like. Really great person. My coach at Deloitte was like the prodigy child. Like I got placed in the best situation possible.
And after a while, the kind of compensation essentially became a bit of a deal breaker for me. There was a little bit more to it than that. There's some like of like, you know, the rigidity and structure of the role, but the compensation became a bit of a deal breaker for me. So I kind of set out to be like, Hey, does this journey pay off at any point? And like, I was trying to figure out. Salary information. And it was really hard to understand.
Like if you go on Glassdoor and you like, look for salary data, it'd be like, Oh yeah, the average accountant makes 80, 000. And you're like, Oh, because is that what I have to look forward to? And so there, there was that lack of transparency. And then at the same time at the firm, I was out when I got my full time offer after my co op or internships and all that, I, from speaking with other people found out we were the lowest paid firm in the city, basically, yeah, which.
Not a great feeling, you know, and especially because you're like, oh, the Big 4, that's the, you know, that's the pinnacle. Yep. And I'm not saying that's the fact necessarily, but anyways, that's how it was perceived. That's the mindset. Yeah. And so I was like, this is crazy. And so probably kind of naively, I walked into the partner's office and I was like, hey, dude, this is a problem. And he actually didn't know.
And he was like, tell you what, if you can get the data for me, I will do some, I will try to do something about it. I don't know if I can, but I'll try. So I canvassed all the other firms. I got all the other people from kind of my level to share what they were making, brought the information forward to the partner. And we got just under a 10 percent pay bump for my entire cohort, which I was like, wow, like. Deloitte didn't know what other firms were paying, which was crazy to me.
So that was always kind of in the back of my mind. I didn't build Big 4 Transparency then and there. I kind of went off, did another job where I was quite unhappy and I was trying to figure out sort of entrepreneurship and, and things at the time. And so I was just messing around with no code tools. I launched this on Reddit one day. And then I log into the spreadsheet where all the salary data is, and there was like hundreds of people in the spreadsheet concurrently at the same time.
And I was like, okay, we've got something here. And so that was just over three years ago. For the first roughly two years, it was really simply just a community project. There was no business involved. I was just, you know, Kept building this because I knew there was something cool to be done and I thought it was really important for the industry. So I just kept building it up, like cleaning the data and the spreadsheet at the beginning.
I had like no input restrictions, so it was just like a complete dumpster fire in there. So I had to purge it a lot. I had to clean it a lot. And then, yeah, so that it. The, the birth of Big 4 Transparency, so. So where you are today, and, and you and I have talked about this, you know, we met at Bridging the Gap a few weeks back, and even kind of chatted a little bit before that. Yeah. But kind of where you are today, it's an all in for you right now, isn't it?
Yeah, so around, December, I started having some conversations around, there were actually some customers and I'm not going to kind of name names right away because it's not like all closed up and whatever, but there was actually a customer of Big 4 Transparency who I was helping set salaries for their firm based off the data I collect, express some interest to invest in Big 4 Transparency.
And I thought that this was potentially years away from me actually like being able to do this as a full time thing. But That really sparked something in me and in the interim, like I got offered some like incredible jobs. I was kind of like looking to move on from my current role at that time. And I got offered some incredible jobs and I was like looking at them and I was like, this isn't what I want to do. And then, you know, no things are ever that straightforward.
So obviously there were hiccups. In the fundraising and whatever, and I had to start over and then, you know, and here we are today. So yeah, a couple months ago I gave a notice at my job. The fundraising wasn't even totally fully closed yet, but I was like, ah, I'll figure it out, which, has led to a little bit of stress the last couple of weeks, but it's finally figured out now. And so, yeah, I transitioned to working on Big 4 Transparency full time now.
So, we're going to put the cart before the horse a little bit. Well, I guess, let's put some bookends together and then we'll kind of fill in the middle. Yeah. What's the ultimate goal? And obviously that may change, but as we sit here today in September of 2024, what do you see as the goal for Big 4 Transparency over the next 12, 24, 36 months?
Yeah, I would say like over like 36 ish months, I would say there's no reason that we can't be serving a very large number of firms where basically we're using kind of the same data that we're serving to the community for free, but we're packaging it in a slightly more premium manner, so we're putting it in a dashboard where you get like all the percentiles, all the averages and all that, and I actually just rolled out this new version of the dashboard.
And there's some refinements I'm going to do and whatever, but there's no reason to me why a very large percentage of like the top 500 firms wouldn't be using this. And then I want to use it as a tool as well to kind of access some of the smaller firms. And right now in its iteration, it's not super user friendly for like the very small firms or like the subscription pricing and all that doesn't make a ton of sense. So that's going to be something for me to figure out.
I want to be helping some of these firms. With some of the recruitment and a lot of what that looks like is kind of working with people like yourself. So I've kind of handpicked a number of recruiters that I really respect and think are offering a great experience to the CPA themselves. Cause I remember my recruiting days. I had a lot of really bad experiences and I had a couple of recruiters who were just like, Diamonds in the rough and I was like, wow, you guys are incredible.
You've like, you've renewed my faith in kind of recruiting and that it works and that you have the best interest of people at heart. So I want to be kind of partnering with more recruiters like this, have a talent pool where I can kind of have a bit of a different spin on recruiting CPAs, where I just say like, you tell me what you want to hear about, and if I've got a recruiter who wants to kind of, Work with you, or even a firm who wants to work with you directly based off of those criteria.
And I know that their job that they're offering matches up with what you're interested in. I will make that connection and we'll kind of go on from there. Right? So those are kind of the two biggest things in terms of like the business side that I would see really working out. And then from the individual side, they're like, it's crazy to say like I'm sitting at over 17,000 rows of data. In this record, but like, we need more data.
Like a lot of people in sort of rural cities are having trouble, like understanding, like we're at a point now where any kind of like tier one and tier two cities, there's enough data in this database for very high fidelity use where that you're going to be like, okay, there's like 800 samples. I can find what I'm looking for and I can feel confident in it.
But there's a lot of these smaller cities where people are like, ah, you know, I live three hours out of Dallas and what it like, what does that look like? Like, should I be truly okay with making 20, 000 less? And until there's kind of more samples and more saturation in those areas. That's where this kind of is a little bit difficult for the individual user to find exactly what they're looking for.
So I want to, on both sides, like, I think this can serve a lot more firms, but it can level the playing field where like, I've pretty much like committed to having a free offering. For the CPA going forward, to me, that's like a social contract.
That's very important to me where it's like, if you're sharing your data and this whole thing is based off of you sharing, I owe it to you and I owe it to the accounting community to have some free offering that can level the playing field where individuals can also understand what they should be earning. Right. So the ambitions are very much on both sides. Like I want to serve more firms, but I also, to me, it's important that I can kind of continue reaching out and like.
You know, impacting more CPAs, and there's been a quarter million CPAs come to the website, or whatever, accounting professionals primarily in North America already, but like, there's a lot more than that. Like, there's a long way to go for me still, so. Yeah, it's a pool that is very large and very deep.
Why do you think that there is such a vacuum, if you will, In the world that we live in today, with data at your fingertips, as you mentioned, whether it's Glassdoor, or it's Dindy, or ZipRecruiter, or LinkedIn, or Reddit, Going Concerned, whatever it is, why do you think there's such a vacuum around compensation still in the world that we live in today, and such a huge, Gap, if you will, between what somebody says they're getting paid in market X versus
what someone says they're getting paid for the exact same job in market Y. And I'm not necessarily talking about, you know, Podunk, Texas versus New York City. I'm, I'm talking New York City, Dallas, Texas, Miami versus Seattle, Minneapolis versus Tucson. There is still a huge. Disparity, Same Role, Similar Size Firm, Market A vs. Market B. Why do you think that's still such a prevalent issue in the marketplace in 2024?
One of the things is I think a lot of accountants aren't like standing up for the value that they provide and what they should be paid. And that's started to change and we have seen salaries increase. Actually pretty substantially over the last like three ish years, but I think that like, I hate to kind of put these firms under the gun, but some of them, like, they're catching suckers.
Like, some of the firms are just way behind on the times and are putting together an employment package, which honestly is Not competitive is not attractive and people should not be taking. And that's not to say if you're like paying at the 50th percentile or whatever, I'm saying like there's firms out there who are really just low balling and people don't know any better. Right. So. If the person's uninformed and they go, wow, I guess this is what the market is.
And it is hard as like a candidate to know where to go. Like I said, like I looked up like Glassdoor and stuff like that. And it was like, oh yeah, here's what you should expect. And it's way off. And for accounting, I think that gets conflated a little bit with like H& R Block accountants or like bookkeepers and like stuff like that. And it's like, That's not like their accounts. Yeah, but there's a level of nuance that's missing when you're looking up the salary data.
I continually see articles from like quote unquote credible publications. You know, I forget where the last one was at, but it was like something like the New York Times and they're like, yeah, accounts making, yeah, like 90, 000 after five years. And I'm like, I don't know where you pulled your data from, but like, please come talk to me because like, this is a career where you can make significant money at like a ton of firms, right?
And if you're like at a firm that's functioning at all properly, like they can afford to pay you properly. And there's some firms that can't afford to pay you properly. And I would say those firms need to look at their internal processes. Yep. To become more efficient. Yep. Completely agree with you. And from our experience, what we've seen is firm size. Nobody's immune from not having the data and making bad decisions when it comes to compensation.
We just placed a guy earlier this year who was out of, we'll just call it a top 25 firm, who had a degree in accounting, CPA, 9 years experience in a Client Advisory Services capacity. So, Degreeed Accountant, CPA, 9 years experience with the same firm. It's making 81, 000 at a top 25 firm. Oh, yeah. That reaction, you know, stereotypically when we talk to candidates, I think there's 14 states in the country that you can't come right out and ask people, Hey, what are you making?
Yeah. And at the end of the day, I don't really care what somebody's making or not making. What I need to know from a recruiter standpoint is where do you feel like you need to be? To make something work for you. So the question that we ask candidates is from a financial perspective, where do you need to be at this stage of your career to make you feel like you're valued in the role that you're in? We're not asking people, what's your minimum?
We're not asking people, Hey, what's your bottom line? I want to know where do you need to be? And so when I asked this candidate that and his response was, well, I'm currently making. My reaction was almost probably a little bit more over exaggerated than what yours just was. And I told him, I said, look, I don't know any other way to tell you this. I can't think of any better way to say this. You were being seriously taken advantage of. Yeah. You just are.
Yeah. And we ended up placing him at 115, 000 plus a 5, 000 sign on bonus, which is where he needed to be in the marketplace. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like, yeah. There's all these taboos around discussing money and like the newer generations are a little bit better at it, but like it's almost perceived by some people as like virtuous to not be asking for more.
I think like some people think like I'm a good person because I will take what I can get, like what I am given and be happy with it and I'm not going to be a spoiled brat about this. And I think that's like a very dangerous mentality where like asking for what you're worth Is not being spoiled. And in fact, like I think an employer who will let you kind of coast and where you have to even like have those conversations. And it's one thing being like, Hey, I'm getting paid 115.
Everyone else is getting paid 122. You know, that's tolerable, but if you're getting paid 80 and someone's getting paid 115 and you're competent and you're actually, like, good enough that you should be in that role, like, that's a huge red flag on that employer, like, where they are willing to take advantage of you. And I think they're maybe not playing the long game. And, like, for people who are doing that, like, the people managers, like, The extra money is not going in your pocket.
Like, what are you doing? You're like, you're losing good people all the time. Yeah. It's not like it's a small local firm where, you know, Bill or Sally is making the decision to short that comp from where they know it should be in the market. And they're pocketing more of that money, you know, in net income. This is a top 25 firm. And what I've seen in my experience is. When I start to see that in larger firms, it's not siloed. It is prevalent across the organization. Yeah, yeah.
And I, again, like, yeah, there need to be measures in place. And salary bans, I think, are, like, a little bit of a tricky thing. Because you do have, like, the outlier employees.
Like, when I worked at Deloitte, like, again, The prodigy manager I worked with, like he was like tapped out on the salary band and like he was probably worth twice that, like he was getting tapped on the shoulder by like national tax office being like, Hey, can we get your eyes on this, make sure it works and making, you know, whatever, a hundred grand, like, that's not okay.
But the good thing about salary bands is like, there's a minimum and it's like, if we are not going to bring you into band, then basically that prompts a discussion around. Why you're not leveling up, right? Like if someone's a manager and their salary is below what the minimum band is, a lot of places have a structure where, well, that person can't become manager. And so they at least have to know that they're being held back, right?
There has to be a conversation there where they pull them aside and say like, Hey, we're not going to be able to promote you to manager. We don't think you're bringing enough value to be in this band. And that's a hard conversation to have, but it's way better than just like radio silence. And then just finding out that you've been absolutely taken advantage of, right? So, you know, everything has a little give and take to it, but that's disappointing to hear for sure.
So with, with the data that you guys are pulling together with Bit4 Transparency, one of the questions that, that I'm sure you've probably encountered is, hey, what's the validity of this data? We're relying on, you know, Bill, Tom, Sally, Sue to come onto the platform and. Give us their information. So, you know, if somebody has questions around the validity of the data, how, how do you address that? Yeah, I would say if I had a thousand data samples, absolutely. Like that's a valid concern.
Once you get to like 18 or whatever, like 17, 000. Entries from, and this is post cleaning, this is probably more like 20, 000 entries collected over the course of three years from a ton of different samples. That's where like you get this mass of data that's large enough where it is extremely easy to kind of like eliminate outlier data that's not going to be useful. And you know, some of this outlier data is real and it has a story like, you know, this person.
Is just an incredible employee and we hired them externally and they came with a book of business, even though they were a senior or something crazy, right? Like a lot of these do have some validity to them. At the end of the day, they're not going to be decision useful for people who are looking at this data. So a lot of that does end up kind of getting filtered out. So I do a lot of cleaning of the data on a pretty regular basis.
And so ultimately like you can kind of look at these kind of large figures and then like. So I work with one of the Big 4. They did like an internal review. They were like, hey, there's like thousands of submissions for our firm. We like cross check them against our own payroll and like we're happy with this, like with the ranges. So for what it's worth, like that has occurred.
You know, there are things, like they're saying like, you know, if co op students in Canada are getting paid 63, 500, some people put it as 63, 000, a lot of people put it as 64, 000. Yeah, that happens, right? There's that like little margin and that's fine. But then that's the trade off between timeliness of data and like having it be first party data because what everyone else is doing is they're just collecting it from employers.
They're like doing this huge pool, which to me, first of all, from like a competition law, standpoint is dodgy, but anyways, but at the same time, like how forthcoming are you going to be? Are you going to talk about the fringes of your ranges? Are you going to talk about like what you're paying up to be able to like poach an employee from another firm? Are you going to talk about that? Probably not. You're probably just giving like your core ranges.
And so there like, there's all these trade offs, right? And for the huge firms who can afford it, I will say like most like top 50 firms that I talk with, the conversation is not around ditching all other suppliers for Big 4 Transparency is that they have like three different suppliers already. They're all kind of the same and they're going to scrap one of those three, add Big 4 Transparency. And then now they have like the super, super timely option.
They have the thing that's a little bit different and then they have the other two resources, right? Because. It's a little bit of like CYA insurance there where like, nobody wants to be the person who goes out on a limb and moves from the big established provider if you're this mega huge firm for something that like, to be fair, like has its own attributes and might be better in some circumstances. And so a lot of those very large firms will keep that, right?
And again, I think there's validity to that too, like it's nice having something that's prepared by actuaries, even if the data is all stale, like it's nice having something that's been verified too. Well, I think the other valuable piece in this, and it's something that we talk to clients about a lot, is there are firms out there, some in the recruiting industry, some not in the recruiting industry, that provide salary surveys, and as you said, those are bans.
That typically people are pulling data from. Yeah. But the other thing is there is a shelf life, especially in public accounting today, there's a shelf life to that data. In our firm, we're dealing with small to mid sized locally owned CPA firms. And. A lot of those firms, you know, a 15 person firm or even a 50 person firm, they may not have, you know, hey, this tax manager job is a grade 7 job and the range is, you know, 96, 352 to 154, 12. Yeah. They may not have that.
They just may have, you know, hey, we've got two tax managers in our firm right now and they're making 140 to 150. Yeah. So, that's kind of where we want to be. One of the things that we constantly talk to people about in the, in the space that we're in today is the necessity to understand that in 2024 and beyond, because of the fight for talent, that number could be moving. Oh, yeah.
What we'll probably more times than not talk to clients about, unless they've got specific bookends they've got to work with, and we believe they're realistic, unless that's the case, which isn't the case a lot with small to midsize firms, what we'll do is say, Hey, look, Would you be flexible if we talk to a candidate that checks all the right boxes, but their comp for whatever reason we believe is on the high end, but it's in the realm of reality of what we're seeing in the marketplace.
So it's real time data. It's somebody that in September of 24 is looking for X versus In March, we would have maybe looked at it and said, Hey, this person is probably outside of reality of compensation. Yeah. We've got more and more clients, more and more firms that we talk to that understand, Hey, that's salary survey. That's salary guide that I got in December of 23 or January of 24. It's now September, October. There's some date issues that I'm dealing with with that.
And so I think that probably one of the other, One valuable pieces with you with Big4 Transparency is I'm going to get data today. Yeah, exactly. And like I offer either quarterly or monthly updates where like I'll do the like cleaning and all that and you get the latest.
And sometimes when something big happens, so like this, you know, EY putting a billion dollars, this discussion, like some other firms who compete with EY are kind of like saying, Hey, Can we do like a one off, you know, little actualization of that data because it's been like a month, you have a bunch of submissions from it. And so I just did that because it felt like the right thing to do.
But yeah, there, there's a lot of like difficulty with kind of general resources where, yeah, things are moving fast. I will say like recruiters, We'll have conversations with candidates and you're getting the number of like, what someone is willing to leave for. And that's great.
And you're kind of doing a good job of like representing your clients and steering them to like what might win the candidate, but for internal pay band reviews, there is actually a difference on average between an external hire and internal promotion.
We have that level of granularity where you can get that level of nuance of like what's out there in terms of like what are people being promoted to and what's out there in terms of what are people hopping jobs for because there isn't like a often like a five or six percent difference across different levels of what those two differences are right so and also like our data often is being collected not within the context of recruitment which is nice too because A lot of people are probably
better about this than I am, but like full disclosure moment, like I was interviewing for a job in like December, January, and I wasn't that into it because I kind of had in mind that I wanted to do this. And I was like throwing out some crazy numbers and like, that's almost what it ended up being, like someone else ended up getting laid off from a competing company. And so they hired that person, but like I was throwing out some crazy numbers of what it would take to get me over.
And like, It kind of worked out. So, so like, it is like a thing where like, in the context of recruitment of like, what are you willing to take? Like, there's a little bit of like a standoff and like recruiters at the end of the day, like, you know, most of them anyway is like, you're a smart guy. You know that there's some of these games being played and all that and have a little bit of a sense for it.
But you know all these different sources of data I think is like, it's good to cross check them versus each other and then you can kind of land on where it is you want to land, right? Yeah, and like you said, I think there's always gonna be, I shouldn't say always, many times there's gonna be nuances that people are dealing with. We had a candidate Earlier this year that was in the Dallas marketplace, she's driving from far north in a suburb to downtown three days a week.
She's sitting on a toll road for an hour and a half each way. She's dropping 4, 000 a year in tolls and we've got an opportunity that's 100 percent remote and in her mind she's looking at this going, look, if they make me an offer, that's exactly what I'm making right now. Yeah. Number one, hard dollar cost. I get a 4, 000 bump in pay because I'm no longer paying totes. Yeah. You know, let alone soft dollar cost of wear and tear on my car.
I don't have to worry about driving into the office every day. I'm working remote. There's some value in that. I'm willing to take those things into account. So there's, there's always nuances like that, but I think that, you know, like you're talking about, there's The value in looking at those different data points and being able to understand, Hey, what, what is my value in the market?
Or if I'm a hiring firm, what is, what do I need to do to be competitive in the marketplace or be in a higher level in the marketplace so that I don't have to worry about my people getting poached, you know, by some other firm. When you look at the data Dom, the difference between, External Recruiting, Internal Promotion.
Do you guys have the ability to talk to firms about, you know, hey, if you go out into the marketplace and you hire this person because you don't want to give this person this bump, here's probably what you're going to have to pay. Yeah, a little bit. Versus, and it's an unknown. Yeah, with that new person, that conversation happens a little bit. I it's still trying to get that through some people's heads.
So like my favorite framing of this, and it actually was inspired by Brandon Hall, like with his firm, he's been super public about like, How useful this has been internally. And he talks about it a lot as a retention tool. So this can be a very useful tool when you're doing recruiting because you know exactly what's out there and how much you should be paying and all of that. Plus we have the talent pool and stuff like that.
But. More than anything, if you are smart, proactive, and growing, and you want to be able to do so without having to backfill everyone, this is a great retention tool where you make sure that your people continually are being paid what they should be. And then, yeah, you do avoid that little premium that you're paying to all of these people who are external hires.
Because typically there is that premium you'll bring them in higher in the band and then they're going to get kind of bad promotions for a couple years so that they get brought back into the band and then from that point on like that creates dissatisfaction because their salaries aren't going up anymore and you know it's this whole thing whereas Retention is very, like, valuable financially, and there's different models, there's different ideologies.
Some people want fresh faces in the firm because they're going to be hungrier, and, and whatever that might be. They bring new ideas, maybe they bring new clients. If that's you, that's fine. But this is a very valuable retention tool for people. Make sure that you're staying competitive, make sure that you're changing your bans accordingly so you don't get that, like, wage stagnation where the person has to leave in order to get paid properly. And so this, yeah, there's a great tool for that.
And retention, obviously, I don't need to go into all of it, but there's a ton of like hidden benefits of like institutional knowledge. There isn't that ramp up period. You maintain relationships between people, like people often churn in batches, like that person will leave. And then a bunch of their buddies are like, ah, wow, we really missed this person. The firm just doesn't feel the same. I'm out. So there's a lot that can be done there too.
So Yeah, to me, I try to nail this down for people as like, retention, this is like, get ahead of the ball. You save a ton of cost by doing that. But at the end of the day, a lot of people come to me because they're like, Oh, I'm having such a hard time hiring. It's like, all right, fine. Like I, I won't turn you around, but like, I do try to kind of have that conversation with people. So. Well, it sounds like you've stumbled onto something for lack of a better way to put it.
The, the, the mother of invention is necessity kind of mindset that. Has gone from, Hey, how do I understand what I'm being paid individually in the marketplace to now being able to leverage that and take that to the marketplace and say, Hey, let me help you be more competitive and understand what you've got to do in the marketplace to attract, retain, hold onto talent, that kind of thing.
So you've built a wonderful platform with BigFour Transparency and, and you're doing it in a way that provides valuable data to both firm owners and also, Potential employees in the marketplace or current employees with their firm. So if someone is wanting to learn more about how you're doing, what you're doing, they want to get data from that.
If there are somebody in the marketplace, especially with review season coming up, or even if they're a firm owner that wants to be able to understand what do I need to do in the marketplace with review season coming up to be more competitive? What are some of the best ways for people to reach out to you, have those conversations with you? Yeah, so BigFourTransparency. com, BigFour, like the number four.
If you go there to the platform, you're going to see there's going to be a link to the spreadsheet where you can basically just like filter as needed. So you create these temporary filters, you can filter as needed, figure out exactly kind of for your grouping, right? So do like city, stream, you can filter out what period of time you want the data to include and whatever level of granularity you need.
And And get an idea of what you should be getting paid at your current level, at your next level, at the level after that. Like, I think people should map out this trajectory in their heads. If you're just looking for a quick general idea, I have some like median numbers just ready for you on the website just to check out. Those are for US specifically. For firms, like I said, we have a dashboard, which will help you navigate this data.
And it kind of much more usable enterprise type level where you can actually like have these discussions. You can do the in depth analysis. You can look at a little bit more of the granularity of things. And yeah, we just rolled out that new dashboard a couple of weeks ago and current clients are loving it. So. Check that out. And otherwise, yeah, I'm like, I'm an absolute open book. Like I'm posting all the time about all of this on LinkedIn, you know, Twitter.
Like I'm, I think it's really important to kind of share the journey and I've learned a lot via podcasts. So listen to other people's podcasts. I also have one where I talk to a lot of firm owners and such, and you know, I share a lot on there. So. I'm kind of all over the place. You can't really avoid me now that I'm full time working on this, but yeah, like shoot me a message on any platform. I'm extremely responsive. I live on the internet, so. Any, anywhere that somebody can get online.
So we'll make sure and put in the show notes, the link to the website. Link to your LinkedIn profile so that people can reach out to you, figure out how to get this tool in their house so that they can also be a little bit more responsive with the data that, that they're dealing with and being able to manage their careers and manage their firms a little bit better. So Dom, thank you for joining us today on CPA Life. I've really enjoyed learning a little bit more about what it is you're doing.
I've enjoyed the partnership that we've been working on together and hopefully it'll continue to be a fruitful for both of us. Absolutely. Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate it, and I appreciate the invite to the pod as well. Hey, you're more than welcome.
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