Hello and welcome to The Unique CPA with your host, Randy Crabtree. We're committed to creating a thriving community of accounting professionals who are physically and mentally healthy, fulfilled, and energized by their work. Our ultimate goal is to elevate the reputation of the accounting profession and vastly improve the lives of those in it. The Unique CPA is brought to you by Tri Merit, the specialty tax professionals. Today, our guest is Chris Williams.
Chris is CEO of System Six, not Six Sigma, as I said, before we started recording today. Not the first one to do that. Exactly. And that's okay. All right. Well, System Six is a cloud based finance and accounting firm. I'll let, Chris, probably give us more information on that, but before that, Chris, welcome to The Unique CPA. Randy, it's been awesome getting to know you the last couple of years and thanks a lot for having me. I'm super excited to be here.
And as I said earlier, I'm glad you're, not in freezing cold Chicago. Kudos go out to, we have some teammates there. I hope everybody's staying warm. It's pretty cold right now. Yep. Unfortunately, by the time we release this, it won't be cold anymore. All right, we'll probably cut that part out. No, we're fine. We're recorded in January right now. I'm in Arizona, getting out of the cold weather in Chicago. It's just my, it's my MO, not sticking around for cold anymore.
I'm getting too old for that. And so what you just said is great getting to know each other over the last two years. I actually think it's been. Less than a year, hasn't it? When did we meet originally? Time flies. Yeah, I know. Well, I don't even remember the first place cause I ran into you so many places since, but. Which conference was that? Yeah. It's hard to say which one. I mean, I feel like we talked a bunch at Gusto Next here in my backyard in San Francisco.
Probably something before that. I usually, I make the rounds with the Cloud mafia as I like to say. So yeah. What could it have been? QuickBooks Connect last year? Aye. A year? Yeah. 2022. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think maybe that's what it was, but yeah, it's pretty cool. Same thing back at you has been great in getting to know you and I'm, and the reason that I asked you be on the show is 'cause.
You're doing some really interesting things, but you personally also have a very interesting background. So why don't you give us a background on you and then we'll get into the origins of System 6. Yeah, absolutely. So personal background, I was born and raised in Washington, DC. Fun fact, actually in DC, most people from the DC area, you know, live around. I didn't grow up in the white house. My parents aren't actually in politics, ironically, but grew up in DC.
Loved DC, moved to California where I now live in 2015. And I spent my career before system six, you know, in traditional sort of investment banking and finance. So I worked at a bank for a couple of years out of college. And then I spent three years at a private equity firm and in an investing seat where we did, we were actually in real estate. And we did a lot of acquisitions.
So, you know, built an acquisitions background there, kind of picked my head up and said, Hey, I'm not sure this is what I want to do forever. I want to go explore other career opportunities. You know, maybe go back, maybe not the best way for me to do that was business school. So I was fortunate to be able to get my MBA, had two great years in business school, and that's where I discovered the path that ultimately took me to system six, which is becoming.
A more and more popular path nowadays in and outside business schools, which is, Hey, there's a ton of great businesses, you know, millions of them own across the United States and a bunch of different industries that have, you know, call it 10, 20, 30 employees, you know, five, 10, 15 million of revenue. And they don't have a succession plan in place. There's not a son or daughter who's going to take that business over.
And so there's a lot of people out there, searchers, it's come into the accounting space. So I'm sure many of, Your audience gets emails from these people, maybe myself a couple of years ago, you know, the basic idea is like, Hey, I'd love to buy your business, take over, you know, take care of your business, take care of your customers, then obviously try to grow it.
But that's the path I went on out of business school was going to find an awesome small business to buy, to grow, because I wanted to bet on myself. I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I love, you know, working with a smaller team now, really feeling a part of the result. And, you know, that's becoming a more and more popular path. And so that's, you know, ultimately I got excited about acquiring accounting and that's how we're here today. Yep. And so. A couple of things.
One, you're being humble there because you didn't tell us where you went to school, but Brown undergrad and Stanford for grad. That's a pretty big deal. Lucky to go to some great places, learned a ton, you know, and especially at Stanford, like exposes you to, you know, crazy levels of success that put pressure on you, but also like, you know, I think are very eye opening. And for me, that's where I got the confidence to go do this.
Like there's tons of people last couple of decades before me who have bought in, you know, five, 10, 15 million revenue businesses. And then over a decade turned it into a hundred million dollar revenue business. So cool experiences. And yeah, the network and the people I got exposed to was. I feel very fortunate to have been able to go to those places. So let's talk about the system six. So you're not an accounting background. You're not a CPA. You're not, you can't do any of the work.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of useless actually. So, so what attracted you to this? profession then? Yeah. And I think, you know, this is something I try to like reinforce when I'm at conferences and stuff is like, look, I know accounting can be a drag, especially this time of year dealing with clients, but it's like, this is a great industry. And as an outside investor looking to acquire a business in a great industry, like, I just want to make sure people hear that. So there's a couple of things.
I mean, first of all, you know, we serve a massive market. So system six serves, you know, small business owners. Generally doing at least a million in revenue. There's millions of those in the United States. So large market, we provide a mission critical service. We don't provide taxes. That's even more critical, but like everybody needs bookkeeping, payroll processing, bill pay, invoicing, more and more of that is getting outsourced. So. You're serving a big market.
You're doing a service that's, you know, everyone needs. It's mission critical, you know, it's consistent recurring revenue, especially as more people have moved to the cloud and gone to sort of the MRR billing environment, you know, it's decent margin business. You know, there's no CapEx, like heavy construction equipment you need to go buy. So, you know, those are all kind of finance terms. And the reality is those are a lot of the reasons I was attracted to the ecosystem, which is.
From a, you know, a place to own and grow a business. It's a great place to be for those reasons. And then the last one that I think I've really come to appreciate more just since being in the seat is it's like, Hey, we're helping small business owners grow their businesses and I get to in a sales seat, talk to small business owners. Like that's fun. We run payroll for like 1200 employees and that's a stat we get super proud of. Like, sure.
Serving fortune 500 clients is really good in other ways too, because those are great clients to serve. But I think I get, you know, some joy out of. People that we're ultimately serving, at least on the client side. So then how did system six start? Did it start with an acquisition or how would you build Yeah, so system six, I mean, all credit to Jeremy Allen and, who started the business in 2008. You know, he started System Six Bookkeeping back then.
and, you know, he grew the business from 2008, 2009 to 2021 from, you know, nothing to, you know, about 20 people. $2 million and change in revenue, he had some great people on the way, some that are still here. Kelly was his first hire, now our head of HR which is a super important role for us. So yeah, he built the business, Joe Carufe who is now at Karbon played a big role in that as well.
And then I sent him an email in October 2020, you know, hey, I like what I see about your business, I'm interested in your space, here's why, I'd love to have a conversation. And then, you know, nine months later I was lucky enough to get to acquire the business from him. And you know, he still has a small financial interest in the business, but his, he took his retirement real quick. And I think that was actually good to have a quick separation of church and state.
Yeah. I think you're probably right. It's seen it both ways, but it's often, let's just cut the ties and let's show that the new people are here now. So, so 20 employees when you took over. or And over time now, where are you at? Yeah, so we're at 38. We just hired somebody this week, fully remote, 20 plus states in the US, which, you know, creates some compliance headaches from time to time. But yeah, been really fortunate to be able to grow the business. It's all US right now, 38 people.
We've grown client size. We add about You know, three, four, five clients a month. We've increased the size of clients that we're serving a lot. And, you know, the depth of our engagement over the last couple of years, but generally speaking, you know, it's been a story of just continued growth and improvement, no drastic changes. And, you know, that's a testament to the business that was here when I was able to step into it. That's nice.
It was in good shape when you took it over, which is nice. then the growth over that time then, is that all been organic? Has there been acquisitions? Yeah, so, you know, we've looked, the answer is it's all been organic to date. So we were about, you know, two and a half million in revenue when I bought it. We're about four and 4. 2 or so from last calendar year. That's all organic. A lot of it's kind of been through my network of people who are acquiring businesses.
Now they need outsourced accounting finance services. We've looked at M& A over the last couple of years. Got pretty close on a couple, you know, nothing hit. And we are also smaller. And I was in the business more where it would have been harder for us to absorb something, you know, this year and going forward, it's going to become a bigger part of our story just now that I've got more capacity, you know, we've got more maturity as a business to absorb something.
But to date, it's all been organic. And that's another thing, back to the earlier conversation of like, this industry is also growing, you know, we're not in a industry that is going downhill. So for everybody in the ecosystem, there's opportunity to grow organically. And that's a great thing. So another reason it's a great industry to be in.
And then from a standpoint of that growth, or even when you took it over, here's, so I'm a big, I'm a big fan of niche, although I know some people say niche, I don't know if you're niche or niche. I don't know the answer either. All right. That's an argument that always comes up on the show, but was it a niche? Practice already, or have you, as you've grown, is there a certain client that you identify that you'd like to help?
Yeah, so when I bought the business, no, you know, I guess, you know, size wise, you know, when I start, when I bought the business, we were kind of our minimum monthly was plus or minus, you know, six, 700. So we weren't doing a lot of the really local small businesses. You know, most clients were. A million dollars, 500, 000 in revenue and above. But other than that, generally Pacific Northwest, Seattle area client base. That's where Jeremy spent most of his time.
That's where his network was since then. Yes. A lot of our growth, you know, if you look at our whole book of business, it's, I wouldn't say it's niched because just of the size, but.
The vast majority of our growth is coming from business owners who just bought a business in the last, usually six months, and they now need to upgrade their accounting services, either because, you know, the owner or the owner's spouse was doing it before and is now gone, or they have a bank loan and they now need to be in GAAP or modified GAAP because they're going to go through an audit.
So it's not one industry, that's across a variety of industries, but it's like a niche of a theme, which is, you know, Someone who just bought a business and now needs to upgrade. And you know, that's just primarily is because that's kind of my network. And then this year we're starting to do for the first time Google ads and digital advertising and marketing to try and build some niches outside of that.
Because I don't want it to all just be kind of my network because that's not sustainable forever. So hopefully next year I'll have more answers of more industry niches that we're in. All right. We'll do this again next year then. But your network's pretty broad. I mean, like we talked at the beginning, you've been out at conferences quite a bit. Yeah. Being That you are right now, at least, right? Strictly payroll, bookkeeping. What are the services you're offering?
Yeah. So we say it's day to day finance operations, really, and controllership. And really that just means controllership and below. So for us, a core, you know, average in client engagement is it's bookkeeping, payroll, bill pay. And usually some invoicing support. And, you know, we're in the books on a weekly basis, you know, and that's usually plus or minus, you know, 1500 to 2, 000 on a monthly basis. That's usually a, you know, three, four, five, six, 7 million client.
And there's going to be some modified accrual work in there, but then, you know, we range up to 10, 15 million revenue businesses that are. Going to be audited.
So, you know, we're maintaining all the schedules that are going to be a part of that for readiness throughout the year, you know, more of a formal preliminary close on the 8th with a meeting, you know, final close every month, like a much more kind of professional finance operation for that business that, you know, has higher expectations, but we do stop it. Controllership, like we're not doing go forward forecasting, CFO work.
Okay. We're not doing tax work, hoping to get into both of those lines of business. But for now it's, you know, all the sort of day to day finance operations type stuff. All right. Well, I was going to ask you about advisory type stuff or the tax stuff, but let's skip that for a second because I want to come back to that because it sounds like that is a potential future plan.
Okay. The question I wanted to ask on then that the services you are offering, because you said you get new clients through your connections and all that, is part of that, or have you thought about or looked at it? I mean, like full service tax and accounting firms that need to outsource this part to somebody else is, have you collaborated with other firms on things like that?
Yeah. So we have gotten a good amount of leads through a couple of like transaction advisory firms that get hired for the QOE. You know, the tax diligence, they're doing the opening balance sheet after a business is purchased. And, you know, they're hoping to have that client long term for the tax and the audit work. And so they're sending us in to sort of do the outsourced day to day accounting, you know, the CAS work, so to speak. And we're actually right now, like working on.
You know, it's been just kind of a referral game to date, friendly referrals because we send them tax work. But right now we're working on formalizing a bit of the partnership so that like when we get the client from a sales perspective, our salesperson can say, Hey, you know, we need to sort of include in the proposal. These exact type of readiness things that we know this tax firm is going to want come audit time.
So, you know, including upstairs entity management, like we're going to do bookkeeping for the holding entities that sit upstairs on these operating companies. It's been referrals to date, but we're trying to get a little bit more. Structured in that so that we can kind of deliver books that work better for the auditors, you know, the way they like to see stuff. Okay. And did I just hear you say salespeople?
Salesperson, Tim. Tim. Yeah. Okay. So besides your network, you do have somebody out generating, you know, business. How's that? And how did you make, this is new. I assume this isn't what you had. Tim joined us in April. So I would say, you know, and he has done a fantastic job and he spends most of his time, like executing on sales that are coming in. So I'm no longer, leads still come to me through my network, but I immediately say, you know, Hey, great to meet you.
Congratulations on what you're working on. Like, you know, we'd love for you to have a conversation with Tim. And so he You know, has been closing all of the deals since he joined us in April. Candidly, he's, you know, spending a ton of his time trying to drive business. You know, he's building relationships with our CPA partners, some people in his local network, but primarily most of our leads are still kind of coming in through our presence in the acquisition ecosystem.
But, you know, that's also partially because he's only been with us for nine months. You know, I'm starting to bring him to conferences and stuff, and I was lucky to, I actually was able to hire him from, or he had previously worked at another cloud accounting business. and then I'd left a year before that. So, Came to us with industry experience, which was great because he was just able to like, hit the ground running.
Yeah, I think I like that a lot because there's so many, even, you know, larger CPA firms that just do business development, you know, at the partner level rather than have a business development team. And I think the business development, we have a business development team and I think that's so important for the business. You know, that really comes from like, Hey, I'm not an accountant. Right. So like, I think about this as a business and it's like, well, every business has a sales org.
It's not sales that runs through the managers of service delivery. So I think it's super healthy for the durability of the business. Not just for sales, but I also think on retention, right?
Cause then clients feel a little bit less attached to the service delivery people cause they don't think about them as the person who also sold them that business, you know, and then, so if God forbid we lose someone on our team, they leave or whatever, hopefully there's a little less churn risk cause they're not as attached to the partner, so to speak. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess I didn't think about that way in the past, but I don't think about anything. I just go out and talk.
So that's not true. you've built a pretty impressive business, Randy. Give yourself some credit. I'm a, I just long for the ride, but what you had mentioned before, I mean, sure. I make a lot of contacts. I meet a lot of people, but I don't sell anything. I don't close anything.
But that's why we have a business development team, because like you just said, I hand it off to them and then they're the point of contact, like, Today, I had a webinar before this with a bunch of new people I didn't know.
I knew that I knew some of the people at the firm, but I brought in one of our business development people because I basically told them, this is your point of contact, you know, if you have anything that you need us to answer for you or help you with, this is who you will reach out to. And it's not the project manager, even it was business development person. And they'll get both as well. Yeah. I mean, for me, when I first started doing that, it felt icky. Yeah, I felt.
Oh, I'm just thrown off this lead to somebody else, but I kind of just forced myself to do it. And then, yeah, I just realized it's, that's just part of how the business needs to operate because otherwise we wouldn't be able to do it. No. Do the next thing.
If I was, so you're out, you're the figurehead, you're the face, you're the one that people know, and for me, I just couldn't, I mean, I'll be so, and I am nervous that I'm going to get an email and I'm not going to see, and then we're not going to follow up. And so if the emails go to somebody else, or I have an assistant now that'll forward the email to somebody else, it's just, Hey, I just don't have the time or the passion to be the one to finish off the deal.
And I think the next question that like, candidly, we haven't figured out, at least in this vertical, the acquisition vertical is like, how do I not be the face forever either? You know, I'm not closing the deals anymore, but also like at some point you don't want the leads to associate just with the person. Cause then if I'm not around in 10 years or whatever, like how does the business still sustain it? I don't have an answer for that.
Well, I mean, for us, it was, you know, I was managing partner. And gave that roll up, so I don't have to worry about any of the operations ends of the thing, and so I can be out there and let's say, whatever, be the face of the operations. Yeah. And so, but for you, I'm guessing that you are still, you know, in the operations.
Yeah. So yeah, just as you continue to grow, this is my, now I'm giving advice here that you don't care about anyways, but as you continue to grow, then that decision will be made. Where are you best suited for this business in its continued growth or is there an exit at some point for you as well? Do you feel like, are you training somebody underneath you to take over as TheMarketFace, one day or not yet? so I have people in mind, I have people that go out and do webinars when I can't do them.
I have people that internal, that a couple of people that I have on podcast occasionally with me. So yes, that is for me a concern that like, okay, who is going to take over this role, but there, I don't think it's going to be one person. Yeah. Multiple people. You You probably don't have to have it answered today because you're not going anywhere anytime soon. Well, yeah, who knows? Who knows that, I enjoy what I do quite a bit. Yeah. But it's, but I'm not getting any younger. Yeah, nobody is.
Nobody is. So, so, alright, so let's get back to Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to put you on the spot there. No, I don't mind. I had actually somebody reach out to me that, and we didn't do it yet, but he said, Hey Randy, is it okay if I'm on the podcast, but I want to interview you on the podcast, Ooh, I like that. I like that. and I told him yes, but we, I have, I should reach out to him and we should do that.
Yeah. Although I like that I get, I'm interviewed on every single podcast out there, it feels like. So I enjoy that side of things actually. Alright, let's go back to SMA system six. Not, no, he did it. I said you earlier it, that happens a lot. A lot of people say Six Sigma. Yeah. And I joke like, Hey, it's not the worst thing in the world if.
Six Sigma is like a, I don't know that much about it, but it's like a lean manufacturing, you know, Hey, if people think about us as highly organized manufacturing, I'll take that. You know, that's good. Well, there's a couple of key things that we need to still learn about what you're doing and what the plans are. And one you alluded to a little bit before, but future, what's the future you see? And we'll get into acquisitions. Cause I think that's part of potential future.
But before that, you mentioned taxes, I think going forward, you know, projections potentially. So do you have plans for those things? Yeah. I mean, the first thing is like, I got into this business, you know, two and a half years ago with the intention to. Build for a long time. I'm pretty early in my career and feel like we're in a very good industry that's not going anywhere. It's going to change a lot with AI, but like our businesses aren't going to disappear.
So, you know, I think about like decades hopefully of, you know, the journey ahead for me and system six. But yeah, the immediate kind of two year goal is we want to be. Providing kind of the one stop shop of sort of like core finance services that a small business might use, you know, third parties for. So, you know, we're doing all the day to day work.
The obvious ones are yet, you know, tax services for our S Corps, you know, we don't want to get into probably the more complicated tax stuff for some of our investor owned clients, you know, where there's audits as well, and then. Yeah, sort of CFO go forward financial advisory. We have, you know, handful of clients that are hiring fractional CFOs, you know, these days a couple thousand dollars a month, like we'd love to be a part of that.
I think CFO, I'm less clear if that's, we are 100 percent going to, you know, build and own a CFO practice or if we might just form, you know, nice referral agreements with CFO businesses or even individual fractional CFOs. I think for sure, you know, we want to be able to offer tax services. And I know for some people, you know, that's crazy. Cause it's getting harder and harder to offer those services. But yeah, we just get asked a lot by our existing client base.
It would make our job easier on the accounting side. You know, if we had more of a direct line to the tax team. So both of those lines of service, we want to have more formally over the next two years, it'll start with tax. Most likely, you know, CFO will probably just be. Friendly arrangements out of the gate and then maybe that devolves, but definitely the goal is to get into tax this year, actually. In 24? Yep. In 24 in some form or fashion, you know.
Okay. So let's talk about how that's going to happen then. Is acquisition the goal for that? Is it, or organic on tax? I mean, I think the primary goal, candidly, is probably through acquisition, just cause it'll move the needle faster. We did run a posting for kind of a head of tax position a couple of weeks ago. I saw that. It's not the best time to be, it's not the best time to be hiring.
I really did that just to kind of get a better read on like, What types of candidates are out there, you know, but the goal is to, you know, be able to offer tax to a variety of our clients, you know, and if we can do it through an acquisition that just comes with more scale, ultimately that's, you know, moves our bottom line more, which means we have more money to go reinvest and other stuff in the business.
But I definitely don't think it would be like acquisition of an old school tax practice that we then have to go modernize and get to the cloud. You know, it's the needle in the haystack of a modern, you know, cloud based organization. That's, you know, looking to have some sort of transaction. And then, you know, that's obviously why we're also looking at hiring for that type of role post April because it's hard to find those. I know it's a hard place to, harder to deliver those services.
It's getting more complicated, harder to retain. You know, we just get asked by our clients, we want to continue growing. It just sort of seems like a no brainer given where we want to be, you know, five years from now. Like, if we're going to be, you know, Triple the size in five years we should have tax. Is that the goal? Triple? That was kind of a picked up number. Yeah. I think, you know, we'd like to get in the next couple of years, we want to get to 10 of revenue.
So that's double and change and then, you know, keep growing from there. So I don't set any goals. Huge, very specific goals beyond a couple of years. So, but yeah, certainly if we're four now, at some point we'd like to be 15, you know, and keep going from there. Well, you've been on the pace. Yeah. So let's talk a little more about acquisitions then.
So, so acquisitions again in text, but just in general, this is, you're at the moment in time where acquisitions are something you're looking at, correct? Yeah. I mean, some of it's reacting to the reality that there's like a lot more conversation, you know, there's private equity coming in spades. We've talked to some of those people. And then, yeah, because we've grown, I now have, you know, more time and capacity to look at acquisitions.
And I think it's a great way for us to get into, you know, different lines of service, tax being one of them, or get into a different niche with someone that's got, you know, expertise in a brand. And a vertical that we don't have presence in, and it's also, you know, my background. So I want to make sure to, you know, leverage the hat, like it's a helpful way for me to add value to the company.
And the last thing is I do just think, especially as more stuff is changing in the industry, we need to be investing. And things like, we're not going to go build AI ourselves, but if we're a bigger business with like more EBITDA that I can reinvest into hiring a head of technology, you know, that, that type of stuff, like that's easier to do if we're, you know, double the size in terms of net income and EBITDA and, you know, acquisitions as a way to move the needle there.
So it's getting into different lines of service. It's part of, because it's a moment in our ecosystem, it's my experience. And I also think it's good for the business to be bigger so that we can actually like, Invest in more places, you know, hiring, et cetera. Nope. I agree.
And then here's a, to me, an obvious question, and I know this is a passion of yours, but culture is extremely important to you and building, in fact, on your website, it says we are focused on building and maintaining a fantastic culture. Character. I can't talk. Characterize. Thank you. Yeah. By joy, collaboration, the flexibility. So, so, you know, internally, how do you do this? But then if you're looking at acquisitions, how do you make sure that fits culture wise?
Yeah. And I mean, one, I think that your second question, that's a big part of the reason, like we haven't done one yet and we're going to be like very, You know, focused if and when we do them on making sure there's a cultural fit. But internally, look, the most important thing we can do is be a great place to work.
Like, and that has to, and does come above client service because ultimately like, look, we can have tech and we can have carbon, you know, and Zapier and the right products, but like, ultimately our people are the product, you know, our clients interact with two or three people at system six.
And if those people aren't happy, if they're not enjoying their job, They're not going to deliver as quality service, and then the clients are going to leave, the people are going to leave, and then you've got like a death spiral. So ultimately, like I feel pretty strongly about it. Like the North Star is, Hey, we want to be the best place to work in cloud accounting. When we have to make a tough decision, we're going to decide for the team first, fire the client.
You know, it doesn't mean that the client's sometimes not right and our team makes mistakes, but it's super important. So, you know, some of the stuff we do internally. You know, we've got flexible work schedules, right? We've got a 24 hour response policy. You know, which we let extend further. Some, you know, with clients we're fully remote, you know, we don't set people's hours when we're interviewing. We say, what hours do you want to work?
And, you know, that can change, you know, and then we do a lot of fun things throughout the year. We get together at least once a year as a group. You know that, and that's like, we don't talk any work that week, that weekend. It's just like, go have fun together. You know, all of our team leads, so we're pod structured. They have a budget every quarter for just like little gifts and things. You know, I've been really surprised the small stuff makes a difference.
We give every employee and every employee spouse a birthday present. We're really quick to send flowers and stuff when someone's sick or someone's kid is sick. You know, we've got profit share that we think goes a long way to help people feel part of the organization and have good compensation. We want our people to be paid kind of and, you know, top range of the ecosystem. It's just all the little things like surveys once a month on employee experience.
Kelly, our head of people meets with everybody once a month, which is like, Hey, how are you doing? How's your manager? You know, it's all that type of stuff just to make sure we have a pulse on people and that they enjoy their work. Like, I don't think it's culture is this whole thing of like, Oh, I can just go talk about it and we're going to maintain a good culture. It's just like, Know what's going on with your people, ask them a lot, take care of them, send them gifts, make them feel loved.
Don't just say it. And that's through like, you know, adding up a bunch of small actions. Like, I don't think it's one massive thing. I completely agree with you. This is my, you know, I think many people know my passions have been mental health in the profession, but my passion is still that, but the more I look at mental health can be, you know, helped.
By creating the great corporate culture, and that's, for me, starting to look at that as the base for everything, and that's exactly what you said. So, so thanks for, agreeing with me. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta enjoy your work. And some of that's, you know, systems and processes, some of it's just like being nice to your team. Have you as an organization, have you thought about or looked at EOS? Yeah, funny you should say that.
So we have, it was kind of somewhat implemented back in the day and we still have like vestiges of it around, but that's actually one of our goals for the year is we're going to implement EOS, kind of re implement this year. So probably like the late spring, you know, we're doing it at the management level and then start the longer journey of pushing it down through the org.
You know, we've been talking about it for a year and I probably have kicked the can too much, but it's time to just rip the band aid because, you know, do we absolutely need it right this moment? No, but like next year, two years from now, like absolutely. So I'm excited about it. We have implemented it and we have, we probably, and I was not involved in that at all. I stay in my lane. Yeah. I was not involved in that.
But it was kind of the same, Hey, looking at kicking around, trying to do a few things. And then this last year got serious and hired a, I think it's called integrator to come in on board, you know, everybody said in their rocks or whatever. How has it gone so far? I mean, I guess you, you aren't maybe as directly in it, but like, what's your take so far? Yeah. So, so my biggest concern with doing it, and this was a year ago, May, when we really kicked it off, my biggest concern was.
The effects on culture. Technically I'm not, I don't get involved with the leadership group or anything anymore. I honestly just go out and be the face of the company, but you know, I was talking to him. I said, I'll support this. If you can guarantee me, it's not going to have a negative effect on our corporate culture. And, you know, so they went into all that and explained it to me and how it's going to do it.
I see some bumps, I think, with culture myself, which concerns me, but overall, as it gets implemented, I think culture's going to be good. But I think we need to have, personally, I think we just need to make sure that culture is being addressed while, not after EOS is all implemented, but making sure it's completely part of it as we're going forward. Any advice for me on that? Like, is it just because the meetings become so rigid that people forget that people stop just checking in or?
That's my, a little bit of my concern. And again, I don't even get involved in the meetings. I get involved in a few meetings, our business development meeting and some marketing meetings, but other meetings, I don't even do that. Believe me, I'm very spoiled. Yeah. You're like, Hey, I just got, you know, I'm just, you know, I get to do these. I get to do podcasts. Yeah, you got a good seat.
But that is my concern is that we get concentrating so much on having these, I don't even know what they're called, L10 meetings or something like that. And forget about the whole, you know, big part of our meetings in the past. And again, I might be completely wrong, but a big part of our meetings in the past was just about the personal connections as well as everything else. We would just share, you know, you know, I'm a big fan of John Garrett and What's Your Ant?
People just get to share who they are outside of work on their calls and that kind of stuff. And I just want to make sure we don't lose that. And I don't think EOS gets rid of that. No, I just get concerned that during implementation, we forget about it. I totally know what you're saying there. And we have. Like kind of have some, like I said, some parts of semi EOS stuff. And one thing is like, you know, you start your meeting with like personal best and business best. Okay, good.
I started, got, I got, but I got stricter about that over the last nine months and I got feedback from one of our team members who was, Hey, that's like, feels very structured. And like, you know, can we just like talk about our weekend for a couple of minutes and share what's going on in our life without having to be just one personal and one business best. And I think, yeah. Yeah. So to your point, like it, it can, you know, and that's supposed to be 60 seconds each or whatever.
It's like, Hey, if we want to talk for five minutes about something that happened in my hometown over the weekend, like make sure there's still space for that. So, yeah. So John Garrett, you know, a good friend of mine, I'm very fortunate to get to know him real well. and, you know, he, this isn't his research, but things he found out. During doing research on other people's statistics is all it takes is 40 seconds of true personal interaction with somebody a day for them to feel valued.
So that minute of asking about their weekend and how it was and how was the play they went to and how was their kids, you know, concert or game and all that, that I don't want to ever lose that personal interaction. And like, ask the follow up question, right. And then remember next week to like. Oh, you told me you were doing this thing, like how to go, you know, and I don't do a good enough job of that, but I think that's important.
And then the positive is you've got, you know, that as a background, that culture is important. And we kind of went on a tangent here, but I know we're both passionate about culture. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it matters so much. And I just feel like you hear, you know, More legacy organizations in our industry, like complaining about employee churn over the last couple of years and like quiet quitting. And it's, they make it sound as if it's like the employee's problem.
Like there's something wrong with this, you know, generation or whatever. It's like, no, people are doing that because it's not an enjoyable workplace. And like, thankfully with COVID now post that, like you can have, there's more access to jobs because more companies are remote. And so, yeah, I hope that, you know, the bigger organizations in the industry, my wife's a CPA. Not active anymore, but you know, started at big four and like did two years, but that was it for her.
And I hope they wake up to like, if it's a better workplace, those people will stick around more. Yep. I agree completely. I guess if we want to look at, you know, I think we have a great culture. And if you want to look at, you know, some proof of that, we. Typically don't lose anybody. And I, for the longest time, I said we've over the last, and I think I'm accurate here, the last seven years, we had one person leave on their own accord. Somebody just this week decided to move on.
So that's two now. So we're not at that number and I'd love to be there. So that's a good goal. Yep. Well, that's why I think culture is so important. And if you want to. Quantify it. I mean, we don't have to pay the retrain, the new person, which is what, you know, 50 to 200 percent of their salary to hire on the new person. That's crazy. Plus knock on effects of that.
Yeah. You know, and so like you're asking, I mean, the original kind of, Hey, like, how do you think about culture through an acquisition? I mean, I think candidly, like that's scary. That's like probably, you know, I can look at. Client churn. I can look at revenue and margin metrics and get a big understanding on these businesses.
But yeah, like what are the people like, you know, and some of that I think shows up in employee retention and these businesses that we look at, but also like, yeah, a lot of it's got to come with like trust and faith in the owner and getting to know that person really, well. Cause ultimately, you know, in a smaller firm, Culture usually reflects that person.
And then, you know, I also think the way we think about acquisitions is it's not necessarily like jamming things together day one, like we may acquire a tax practice and like. They stay, their brand exists, you know, we're not putting the teams together out of the gate. So there's not such a shock to both systems immediately and then do it more slowly over time. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be interesting to see how it goes, but I like that idea for sure. All right, Chris, we'll. This was awesome.
I really enjoyed you, coming on and every time we have a conversation, I completely enjoy it. So thanks for doing that. Likewise. Before we wrap up, two final questions that everybody gets. one we kind of alluded to already, or I mentioned it, but I asked this question before I met John Garrett, but I would always ask everybody and I still do. What are your outside of work passions? What do you enjoy doing when you're not building this organization? What's your loves out there?
Yeah. So right now I'm recently married and we're going to try and start a family pretty quickly. We've been together, Blair and I have been together for seven years. So I'm looking forward to building a family and being able to pour into that outside passion. You know, we're not there yet, but hopefully that's coming outside of that, it's just spending time, hanging out with Blair, we both love our fitness, so, you know, try to get a workout in one way or another every day.
And then I have a. Deep passion for golf. You know, I love to play it. I'm involved in an organization here in San Francisco that is a nonprofit in the golf ecosystem. So yeah, I mean my hobby, like on Saturday, I'm going to play golf and I'm really excited for five hours doing that with some buddies. So I'd say it's fitness and golf. We love our cat Ruby that we got nine months ago. She's been a great addition. We'll get a dog one day as well.
I grew up with cats and dogs, but yeah, that's where I spend most of my time outside of work these days. Yeah. If I move my camera, I think my dog's sitting on the couch here in this Airbnb right now. Our cat thinks she's a dog. Includes like sleeping in the bed with us and everything. So. It'll be a tough adjustment for her one day. Yeah, I bet. So, all right.
And then final question, if anybody wants to learn more about what you're doing, you know, with, with the organization or in general, you or the organization, where would they get ahold of you or see what's going on? Draw me a line. yeah. Chris Williams is not the easiest name to Google, for, which is better or worse. email me chris at System Sixsix. com. I'm on LinkedIn. Twitter, CTW, underscore, SMB. So reach out to me, whatever your preferred method of communication is.
Always happy to chat to people in the ecosystem. And I just say like the ecosystem has been super welcoming. I'm able to meet you, go to these conferences, spend time with people who've been doing this a lot longer than I have because people like welcome new entrants in and I really appreciate that. So. Well, we'll put some links in the show notes as well. So if people want to get all of you or see what's going on with system six, I said it correct. There we go. Now, at the end.
All right, Chris, again, thank you for being part of the show today. Cool. Thanks, Randy. Thank you for joining us today on The Unique CPA. You can find the show notes for today's episode. And learn more about Tri Merit at TheUniqueCPA. com. Remember to subscribe and leave a five star rating on your favorite podcasting app and join us next time for more expertise and insights on The Unique CPA. ProfessionalProductions. net.