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Welcome to Transforming: Tales of Business Evolution, where we delve into the dynamic world of business transformation. Each episode is designed for firms of any size and scale, exploring both innovative long-term planning and day-to-day operating practices that help organizations adapt to a changing landscape.
Join us each month as we hear from leaders in the public accounting profession, sharing their experiences of reshaping their business models and inspiring you to explore new ways to evolve your own organization. Let's dive into this month's conversation now.
Hello. I'm Erin Hartman, Senior Manager with the Firm Services team at AICPA and CIMA. PCPS or Private Companies Practice Section, is focused on the evolution of accounting firms and modernizing accounting operations through our "Transforming Your Business Model" project. We aim to highlight practitioners who are doing things differently to make this a sustainable profession and one that works for their lifestyles.
Today we take you on a journey of a CPA who has had a non-traditional path from the beginning, but it's all led to and centered around public accounting, either directly or indirectly. I'm happy to be here with Rebecca Driscoll, who is the co-founder of The Collaboration Room, and coach for firm owners. Rebecca has worked for several firms, owned her own virtual firm, and has most recently co-founded The Collaboration Room. I can't wait to talk about all of this and what led you down your path.
Thank you so much for joining us, Rebecca.
Thank you for having me.
Do you want to start there and talk about that practice?
Yeah, sure. Before COVID, we had an in-person office in Florida in Tampa Bay area with about six employees and running a tax and CAS practice. Then when COVID happened, we switched all of our client interactions to be fully virtual. Then slowly over time, employees started asking if they could work remote as well, and sometimes they even had to depending on where we were at with COVID.
Then when my husband got a job in Virginia and I had to move, that really made us think about "do we even need this office?" "Do clients even know where I live anyways?" We had clients all over the country at that point. We became fully virtual. We kept the office for a little while, and then eventually we didn't even have an office anymore. That opened up a lot of possibilities of where I could hire employees. Yeah, so that's where we landed.
Now, you had employees not only in the US but in other countries, correct?
Yes. That was more in the past year. Over time, the firm got a little smaller. I kept trying to simplify a little bit as my lifestyle was changing with having young children. About a year ago, I sold a big chunk of my practice and my employees were part of that deal to another firm owner. And then I was left with maybe about 35 or so clients, and my husband and I tackled those 35 clients together.
Then quickly we realized we need a little more support, and a colleague of mine has had great success with hiring in the Philippines and helped us find two great candidates, and they helped us with all the basic bookkeeping needs that we had.
You seem to work very smoothly in this remote world. I remember just hearing you talk about this, and it's something we've talked about, especially over the years and during the pandemic, about firms having to transition to this. I remember saying to you that you would be a good teacher, and you said, well, I'm a teacher. That is your background, correct?
Yeah. I will say before we get into my background that I can see why it's a huge transition to go virtual for a lot of firms who that's not how their career started and that's not what they're used to. But as far as workload goes, we have a pretty cut-and-dry workload as accountants. You're either working on the project, you're either hitting the deadline or you're not. It's very black and white.
I feel like as long as each employee has some dashboard that shows their progress, and they're updating their progress on assignments, and management is able to track that progress and communicate it, I think the work can still get done. Then it just leaves the morale, culture, community side of that, and training and all of that, which could be a whole podcast of how I was able to tackle that. But there's so many cool tools nowadays.
There's something called Loom that a lot of firms are using now to just record their screen while they're doing something. If there's something that you are ready to delegate to a staff member, or you're creating review notes for them and you want to show them exactly what's going on with the errors they made, you can record your screen and show them exactly what need to learn. Then the great thing about that is they can press pause, take notes, rewatch it.
They could rewatch it every month when they're doing that same month-end close. There's transcripts and summary notes that come with those types of softwares now. There's a lot of ways that we can all work together without being in person. I'll send up. But yes, I did start my career as a middle school math teacher in New England, and I liked it, but I couldn't help but feel like it wasn't exactly what I wanted to be doing. I liked the idea of helping people and teaching people things.
But when I looked at the trajectory of that career path, it just something didn't feel right, and I was still in my early 20s. I ended up moving to Florida with a friend just for the summer, just to see if I liked that lifestyle, whatever.
I ended up working at this big Gourmet grocery store that was opening, and I was in charge of creating this database of all of the products that were going to be sold in the grocery store and making sure we had a SKU for each one so that they could all be scanned at the cash register. It was so much fun to organize all this data, and I loved it. Then they noticed that not only was I good at spreadsheets and data and numbers, but I also was very social.
They put me in charge of managing the relationships of all the local vendors that we were going to have, that we were going to sell their products at the store. It was a lot of farmers market-type crafty vendors. As I got to know these vendors who sold all home goods, crafts, food, canned goods, all sorts of things, they started asking me if I could help them with the accounting for their small businesses. I was just an ex-middle school math teacher at the time.
I did not feel qualified at all to be helping them, but they could see what I could do with all these spreadsheets and they were like, no, you'd be good at this. I purchased Bookkeeping for Dummies, the yellow book, and read it cover to cover, had a highlighter and just tried to teach myself double-entry accounting, debits and credits. I did the QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor thing to try to learn the software of QuickBooks.
Then I told these friends, if you'll just let me play and figure this out, I'll charge you next to nothing to let me do this, but I'm probably going to mess up a lot. They're like, deal. That sounds great, because they were all creatives and had no clue how to do all this number stuff.
Then the CPAs started getting to know me because they would be grabbing the books at tax time to do the tax return for all these small businesses, and they're like, who is this girl who is in here doing these things? They started teaching me a lot of like, this is a chart of accounts. This is how you reconcile. This is what this all means. This is a debit, this is a credit. Then inevitably, they all tried to poach me to work at their firms as a staff accountant.
I had my choice of a lot of different firms that I could work for, and I did try out a couple of different ones. But because of my generation being pretty tech-savvy as a millennial, I was able to really quickly see things like, well, why are we entering every single transaction manually into QuickBooks Desktop? I know there's a way we could sync this bank feed and all these things that just didn't really make sense and felt really archaic.
One of the CPAs that I worked for, he said, you're in your 20s. You're single, you're not married. You don't have kids. Go get your CPA license. Just do it. Just go do that right now. So I did. It was really hard because I didn't have any business classes from undergrad. I ended up having to take more undergrad classes than grad classes to get all the classes that Florida required. But I did it, and I got my master's in accountancy and sat for the four exams.
At that point, I was working on a big firm, and I really liked it. Now, this is where things get interesting with the bookkeeping versus tax and where firms are now thinking about adding CAS into their practice, because when I started working at this big firm, I had my little side hustle of my bookkeeping business always, no matter what firm I worked at. I would just have the firm do the taxes, and I would keep doing the bookkeeping on the side for my little clients.
Every firm was totally fine with that. As time went on, I realized, well, I want to learn the tax side so I can be a little more well-rounded here. When I moved to this bigger firm, it was a little more hip and modern, a lot of young staff and I had been working at these old-school, red-pencil-for-write-ups and doing everything on paper. There'd be CPAs there who would print out an email to give to you for you to scan and put in, and I'm like, you could have just emailed me.
We didn't have to print this and scan it, and upload it back. Like that happened a lot. This was really fun to be at this big firm, but this firm was separated into three departments, tax, audit, and bookkeeping. I was in the tax department because that's what I really wanted to learn.
But the partner who was in charge of the tax department was thrilled that I had a bookkeeping background, which I was getting a little better at this, but I was learning a lot and was good at bookkeeping at this point, because they were like, great. Now we can ask you bookkeeping questions so we don't have to go talk to the bookkeeping department. This is amazing. We'll just have you even do bookkeeping projects on our side so that we don't even have to interface with them. I was like, okay.
It did give me a superpower and a leg up in my department. But it was so interesting to me that these tax people knew nothing about QuickBooks or anything, and a lot of it is just learning software. They knew how to make a journal entry, they just didn't take the time to learn the software side of it and get comfortable with that. That was really interesting, and I learned a lot about tax at that job.
Then I got to the point where I was just about to have my CPA license, and one of the partners was mentoring me, and he said, you need to decide if you're going to keep building this bookkeeping business on the side or if you're going to just be a full-time employee here, because I had always been part-time because I was taking grad classes and studying for the CPA exam. He said, you can work here.
You have a desk here always, but you're already bringing in business, and that's not something we'd expect for you to do for another 10 years. You're not going to be a partner here for another decade. You have a lot of hoops to jump through before. You're a staff accountant. As much as I want you to stay, I really think you're already behaving like a partner. You need to just go be on your own, do that. He's like, okay, but I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know how this all worked.
I knew that I always had a desk there. He threw me a few clients and sent me on my way. Yeah, he was like, as a partner I want you to stay, as a mentor I want you to go.
Right.
I did hire a friend who worked there as a part-time consultant to review my work. We had a weekly standing call where I could just ask questions because I didn't feel fully comfortable just taking on anything at the time.
Right.
That was in 2016, I think. From there I started doing taxes and bookkeeping on my own, the same original clients. Then I took their tax returns at that point, so I was doing both things for them. Before I knew it, it was time to hire an employee. I needed an office. I was doing hundreds and hundreds of tax returns, and everything was new that I was learning. It was like, I would say yes to anything. It was a lot of research and learning and a lot of mistakes. A lot of CRUDs.
But it was good, and you did that for 10 years.
Yeah. It took a little while for it to get up and running. Maybe it was like my baby. I really was so passionate about it. I ended up realizing that it was really hard to service these super tiny micro businesses, like farmers market-type vendors.
I made an online course that they could buy where they could learn everything they needed to know about setting up a business, and I made a spreadsheet that they could purchase that made it really easy to track their transactions so that they didn't have to pay for like a QuickBooks subscription if they weren't ready to hire a bookkeeper. I really tried to accommodate those small business owners all the while and just really focus on that.
I ended up with a lot of local clients in the Tampa area. Then over time, through referrals and things, it really started spreading. I noticed that people didn't care where I was located. They didn't even ask where I was located, and I'm learning state laws in all these different states now, and then people just move, but they're loyal to you and they want to stay with you and they trust you. It quickly became a fully national operation.
When you moved, because you're saying you moved from Florida to Virginia.
Before I even did that, we had clients all over the country. But once I moved too, I knew that it wasn't going to be a problem. It's really become very fluid, where you live and where your clients live and all of that.
Fast forward, so you had that business for several years, and then do you want to talk about what happened in your life? Decided it was time for you to make a change?
Yeah. I remember in 2021, I was due November 29 with my first baby, and I had hired and enrolled agent who had a lot of years of experience that I really felt like was going to be able to carry the firm while I took a maternity leave and be a manager, and I was training him on everything. Then November 11th, my water broke in the office, and we're Googling, "Is my water break?" All this stuff. Shortly thereafter, I was at the hospital.
I kept saying, but it's not November 29th, it's November 11th. I'm not supposed to have a baby yet. I was on the phone while in labor with this employee trying to catch him up to speed with everything else I could possibly tell him. I was on the phone with him until minutes before my son was born.
It was this really big transition of my baby is going to be with someone else, and I'm going to have a human baby now, and that's as a mom and it was a really weird feeling because I was able to work as many hours as I wanted and just be fully immersed in my business before then. I think what a lot of firm owners are looking for who are solo firm owners is some relationship with someone at the top, because it's very lonely at the top.
That doesn't necessarily mean a business partner, but just some lead employee or something where we can feel like we're a lot less lonely up there, someone to help make decisions and someone to help us just feel less alone or that we can have a few weeks off after having a baby or just someone that can keep everything functioning well. It's hard when you only have a couple employees when you're still pretty small. That is an awkward time because the firm owners still doing a lot.
That set me on a journey of trying to figure out, should I even be a firm owner? Do I just need to make some tweaks to my client load or our services or our offerings or our pricing?
Because at this point, since I was willing to accept anyone who could fog a mirror as a client, we were doing all tax returns and all weird agreements with, well, this person we pay their invoices for them, and this person we do sales tax, but we do it for free because they sent us this client and all that crazy stuff. I did start focusing on how can we streamline? How can we standardize?
What sort of integration, automations, things can we set up so that maybe we don't even need an admin because things just flow? What kind of boundaries can we hold with clients where we don't have accounts receivable anymore, where they're paying upfront for things, so it's automatically withdrawn? What about our phone system?
Can we have a message that just plays that explains that we don't have unscheduled phone calls, but here's how we can schedule a call, all those little things to streamline as much as possible and curb our clients and direct them to places that made it all a lot easier. The thing that was still really hard for me was training my employees and being a good manager and boss to them while also trying to be a good manager and boss to my child and in my household.
It felt like I had too many children. I just wasn't able to identify someone else to take over and be the manager. That just wasn't happening. I hired a coach to help me decide what to do. Ultimately, I decided to sell about 80% of the firm, mostly tax work. At that point, I had a policy that, you know, we will only do your taxes if we also do your books to try to help us be more efficient with having less client relationships and make more money with less clients, was the goal.
It's everyone's goal. My employees were a great fit for this transition, and they were really excited to work for this new firm owner that we all knew from going to QuickBooks Connect and all these community things. We were all friendly already. That was great. Then my husband, he was getting burned out at his job that we moved to Virginia for, and when my baby was 10 months old, I got pregnant again. He had been helping me with bookkeeping in the evenings a lot.
He was slowly getting his feet wet or getting a little bit familiar with, how do we categorize transactions? How do we reconcile a bank account?
Talk about that a little bit more, because my husband is not a trained accountant.
He's an engineer, mechanical engineer. I think as long as there's some buy-in and interest in businesses and you're interested in how businesses work and how businesses make decisions and looking under the hood of a business, if that is interesting to someone, I think that is enough to dive into the world of bookkeeping.
I think that can even be a better fit sometimes. We even we talk about two things. We talk about using non-CPAs in a role that might be a traditional CPA role. Then we also talk about how that can be a better fit because just because you're a CPA and you might be the COO of your firm, because you've been there a long time, that doesn't mean that you necessarily know how to run a business.
Yes.
Being interested in running a business, knowing how to run a business isn't necessarily the same person that took a CPA exam and knows how to do taxes or knows how to audit a company. Very interesting that your husband is interested in that as an engineer, wanted to learn bookkeeping, went into business with you, so I love that. I think that's an interesting story right there.
As a non-accountant, he's out working in industry. When he looked at some of the sets of books that he was in charge of, he's like, oh, yeah, their cost of goods sold is like mine, and I worked for a place where it was like this, and we have this great metric that we use. Do they have KPIs? Because we have KPIs. And yeah, I think we usually use this factor when determining if we can afford to hire another employee. Maybe they should try that. Well, when I manage a budget, I like to do this.
I was like, oh, you know a lot about how businesses work. He's like, well, yeah, I work for a business. It's actually pretty cool to get someone that has real-life experience working at a business to help you analyze business. That worked out really nicely. I think the technical knowledge can come, but if someone is good at managing people, that is something that I am not good at, and I'm just too much of a people pleaser. I just want to be friends with everybody.
I just don't know how to manage people, and I don't want to know how to manage people. That's just not my strength. But my husband is used to managing a team of 30 and has always been told he's a great boss and loves being a boss and is great at that. He was able to quickly build his own team in our bookkeeping side of things overseas, but he knew what meeting cadence they should have and tell them to go out to dinner and that we'll buy dinner for.
He knew all the little things to do to keep them feeling connected to a community, and even working remotely, how to do that because he was a great manager. I think that's a really interesting skill set to look for as a firm owner. Even outside of our industry, are there people that are really good at managing people?
Right, and using people's strengths and what their passions are. We talk about that a lot, too. People just based on longevity become managers of people, and that's not necessarily their strength or what they want to be doing.
Right. That could negatively affect people's careers paths and possibly make them leave the profession because they're not being given the support that they need, and that can have a really powerful impact, negative or positive.
Exactly. No, those are great points. I know that you have since gotten out of public accounting for the moment. Do you want to talk about that, what you are doing? Rebecca Driscoll: You sold the rest of your clients in the brand, so the brand will live on under a new awesome female CPA, now owns the firm and will be taking on the whole brand, which I'm happy to see that live on.
I think that decision partially came from me just posting on Tax Twitter, "Does anyone want to buy a fully virtual bookkeeping and tax firm that's pretty small?" I got over 100 letters of intent in a week. That was really crazy to me that so many people wanted to buy a firm. I didn't even say it was my firm, but people were really interested in. There were bidding wars. It was crazy. It was like people really wanted to buy it.
I think a lot of it was because of the monthly reoccurring revenue of the CAS work that we had. Just we were running really efficiently and being fully virtual. It's just very funny to me how this CAS side has come full circle, that a lot of firms are now interested in adding the CAS work in when it was looked so down upon at my old firm. You're right. It is much more elevated.
I think some firm owners, they understand the value of bringing that in-house, but it's just a whole new thing to have to figure out, and they're just trying to stay afloat with what they're already doing. It's like, while they appreciate that it would be good, it's just not in the cards right now to bring that work in-house.
But I will say the monthly reoccurring revenue, the ability to see your client's income situation at any given moment so that you can be proactive with tax projections for them and just the ability to have basically the tax return done on January 1st, January 15, whenever you close the books, because the books are done. Tax season is so much easier when you are the one who did the books all year long. There's a lot of benefits.
I do think that if you're not able to bring the CAS work in-house, then at least finding a really strong alliance with a bookkeeping firm or even another CPA firm that does bookkeeping that's willing to white-label it with you or do some partnership, I think that can be almost just as good because then you're able to align with, "Hey, this is how I like to see the adjusting journal entries. This is the due date that I want to be able to pull a quarterly report.
Can we make that happen?" And still kind of work as a team to get that done for your clients. That was really great. I ultimately decided to sell the firm, A, because there was so much interest, and, B, because I was spending so much more time with other accounting firm owners than I was with my own clients, and I was feeling so much more passionate about that. I felt badly about that.
These people deserve someone who's really passionate about helping them, but I am just having so much fun giving back to my own profession. I started with doing some coaching in Jason Staats' online community called Realize. That was doing a lot of one-on-one coaching.
After doing over 100 of those sessions, I started really seeing some patterns and understanding the struggles of either new CPAs that are just decided to start their own business or seasoned ones who know that there's something wrong and they just don't know how to fix, And just helping different firm owners on different parts of their journey.
Then I've since then started doing some round tables in his community for bookkeeping for either firms that want to add bookkeeping in or for firms that are bookkeeping only, and looking at some of those add-on services that can be added into bookkeeping, like more controller-type things or CFO-type things and the pros and cons of offering those services. Yeah, I'm at the point where I'm just trying to use everything I learned to help other firm owners on their paths.
You're still in the profession, just in a different way.
I think it's just really important for accountants to think about what lifestyle do they want or need to be having, and how much money do you need to be making, and then find a way to connect those two things that works for you. For me, I realized it's not that I don't want to work, that I just need to stay home with my kids. It's not the hours of work that was the problem for me. It was the type of work.
I realized that high stress, high liability, high responsibility type work, I'm just not at a point in my life where I want to have that much liability and responsibility for a taxpayer's life. I never know when it's going to be a snow day, when a child is going to be sick, when we're going to have to go to the pediatrician.
There's so many unknowns right now of potty training and all these things that I know that being at the pediatrician's office and realizing we didn't tell someone to make a certain tax payment, and having that all be on me, it's just not a good fit for me right now. I think that it's really figuring out what's your appetite for liability and responsibility right now and how can you tweak your situation. That could have been for me finding a partner.
It could have been a number of different things to help take that pressure off.
Right. I think that's a good point. It can be different for different people. I think this is just such an important conversation to have as we talk about the pipeline and the importance of attracting people to the profession, retaining them, and just making sure that it works for their lives. It's largely about realizing that it's not just a cookie-cutter profession. It's not just about crunching numbers. It's not just for people.
You mentioned before that people you worked with realized that you're a people person and it's not just about working alone, not just compliance work from February 1st through April 15th. It's not just about deadlines. There's other things in this profession that people need. People are definitely happiest in their careers when they're using their gifts and doing what works best for their lives. You truly exemplify that.
Oh, thank you. Sometimes we need a break from being client-facing. We started to do a lot of white-label bookkeeping for other accounting firms that wanted to have a bookkeeping arm of their firm, but they just didn't know how to do that and didn't want the responsibility of doing that. We actually would white-label that so that the client didn't know that we were doing it, but we were taking care of.
I loved that for this season of life because I did not have any direct responsibility to the client. My client was the accounting firm, and they felt great because they knew they had a CPA firm dealing with their clients, so they didn't have to review anything because we were even taking care of the review piece of it. There might just be a tweak to make of, I don't want to be client-facing for a little while. I want to do the work, but I don't want to have the client relationship right now.
I don't want that level of responsibility. Or I have a friend who dropped down to part-time at that big firm that I used to work for. When she dropped down to part time, maybe a few tax returns came off her dashboard, but ultimately, the same amount of work pretty much still had to get done, and it didn't feel like there was an easy way to measure, okay, if you're working at 60%, then this is how many returns you're going to be doing.
Ultimately, she just got into a situation where she felt like she was working full-time, but for 60% of her pay and very stressed about deadlines and all this responsibility and new mom with young kids. I ended up hiring her to work based on what her terms were. She said, I can do two days a week, and I can't do emails in between those two days. But this is my skill set, and these are the things I can do during those two days each week. It was like, yeah, that works.
She didn't think she was going to be able to find any job doing that, and she was doing contract work. I told her, oh, man, there's a lot of people who would love to have a part-time CPA on staff that just plugs in and does some projects and doesn't necessarily have to be client-facing. There are so many options, so many options.
Listening to you, Rebecca, I feel like the coaching that you're doing is like the coaching you wish you had.
Yes. Exactly.
I'm sure there are so many people that are glad that you're available to help them. Like you're saying, it can be a lonely world, and sometimes you just need to know that you're not alone and that people understand what you're going through as a firm owner. That's one of the things that we talk about in the PCPS networking group, sometimes even just misery loves company. I know that the issues that you're dealing with as a firm owner, other firm owners deal with them too.
A lot of times there are solutions. Hopefully, there's always a solution that somebody can help you with, but just knowing that you're not the only one dealing with whatever the issue is can just be rewarding as well.
We have so many decisions to make as firm owners. There's so many decisions, and it's very exhausting to be the one in charge of making all those decisions, and there's so much pressure and we overthink things. Just to have someone to bounce a thought off of and just see, hey, how would you make this decision, or how have you guys decided to handle this? It can be a game changer, for sure.
In a world that is ever-changing, I think you're a great example of this is a great time to be a CPA. Choose your own adventure, whether yours is to be in public accounting, to indirectly be in public accounting, you can.
Yeah. I am so thankful for that CPA who told me to get my CPA license because I know that I have job security for life. I know that if my husband loses his job or he's not happy, I know I can jump back in. God forbid I get divorced, I know I can get my own job, and be totally independent. I think, as a woman, to have a certification like this, that I know that I have, this is just financial protection for me that everyone's always looking for a CPA.
There's always going to be options, public, private, you name it, and there's so many ideas of even just little one-off consulting-type side hustle projects that you can do too. Even the PTO at the elementary school here was like, can you do the books? Everywhere you look, there's an opportunity to help someone with a skill set that we have all learned. It's great. It gives you a lot of peace of mind that you'll always be able to make a living.
Exactly. Well, thank you so much for being here today with us, Rebecca. I thought I knew a lot about you, but I've learned so much more. You just have a great story, a great personality, and I know our audience will love hearing from you, as well. Rebecca Driscoll: Well, thank you, Erin. Thank you so much for having me.
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Tales of Business Evolution. We hope you found today's insights valuable. For more details on this episode, check the description, and don't forget to subscribe to stay updated with our new episodes each month. Visit our PCPS Transforming your Business Model page for all of our resources at www.aicpa-cima.com/tybm. Keep pushing the boundaries of transformation, and we'll see you next time.
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