Sandra Wiley Boomer Consulting
Editor's Note: This is the fifth in a new podcast series featuring the "2016 Most Powerful Women in Accounting."
In Part 5 of our series featuring the "2016 Most Powerful Women in Accounting," Joe speaks with Sandra Wiley, president of Boomer Consulting, Inc. Sandra has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential people in accounting. In this episode, they discuss integral aspects of firm management, including the characteristics of a strong leader and how create a working team culture, as well as concrete actions to move your firm to the Client Advisory Services model.
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Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the "Scaling New Heights Podcast."
Full transcript of the episode follows:
Joe: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Scaling New Heights Podcast. During this episode, I will wrap up our series of conversations with a few of CPA Practice Advisor's "2016 Most Powerful Women in Accounting." The past few episodes have provided amazing insights by these powerful individuals. The women named as the 2016 most powerful women in accounting truly are at the forefront of our industry. They're having a very positive impact on the whole of the accounting world. Today I will speak with another of these powerful leaders, Sandra Wiley.
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Let me tell you a little bit about Sandra Wiley. Sandra is president of Boomer Consulting and is ranked by Accounting Today as one of the top 100 most influential people in the accounting profession. She earned this as a result of her prominent role as an industry expert on HR, as well as management and strategic planning. Sandra developed the P3 Leadership Academy. You can go search for that, and hosts regional trainees across the country on that curriculum.
She's also a founding member of the CPA Consultants Alliance and a certified Kolbe trainer who advises firms on building balanced teams, managing employee conflict, and hiring staff. I can't begin to list all her accomplishments. They're plentiful, but I think I've given you enough to know this is truly a leader within the accounting profession. It is an honor to have her on the podcast with us today.
Before I welcome Sandra onto the podcast here and start our conversation, I'd like to tell you about our second podcast partner, SmartBiz Loans. SmartBiz Loans provides traditional lending options to your clients in an environment where it is very difficult for them to secure that kind of low interest traditional bank loans. These are SBA loans. Through their online application process, your clients can receive the funding they need as quickly as seven days after the application is complete and approved. You can go to Woodard.com/Podcast for more information about this, including ways that you and your clients both can save $500 on loan closing costs, should your loan be approved.
Let's get started with our conversation with Sandra. Sandra, welcome to the podcast.
Sandra: Joe, thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this. I hope to bring a little bit of value to everyone who decides to listen to this podcast. I love podcasts.
They are so awesome. They're great when you're in the car, when you're on your treadmill, all those places where you feel like you're getting downtime, but you also can learn a little bit and absorb a little bit. I really appreciate your inviting me to be a part of them.
Joe: It's great to have you here, and I couldn't agree with you more about the format. I love watching my wife play tennis, but there's a lot of watching my wife play tennis. I have my little Bluetooth headset, very discrete little one I use to talk with people, and I always have a podcast rolling while I'm watching her play tennis. I feel like I'm really getting extra value out of that time. I love squeezing these things in however we can.
I have no doubt your contributions are going to be valuable for our listening audience today, if it's anything like what you brought to our audience at Scaling New Heights last year. You created a track called the Epic Firm. Inside of that track you were one of many instructors, as well as some of your colleagues at Boomer who taught in some other sessions.
In your sessions, you talked about culture being at the core of a firm's success. Why does the firm need to place so much emphasis on culture?
Sandra: It's interesting. I hope that culture will never just become a buzz word out there or one of those words that everybody uses and never really understands what it is, because
I really do believe it's the foundation for any firm. When I say any firm, it can be a great firm or a terrible firm, but what people talk about is culture. They talk about shared beliefs that people have, and the values that they have, and the customs and the behaviors of the people that are within the firm, and how it is viewed both inside the firm, from your team, and outside, how people see your firm when they look at it. When we talk about the foundation of the firm, we're talking about the attributes that you have.
I want you to think about, as you're sitting here listening to this podcast, think about how people, both outside and inside, not only view your firm, but how would they talk about your firm if you weren't standing there? How would they talk about your people issues, your people management, how you view and honor family time? How do you honor the time? Is it time card generated, or is it something else? Is it a unique culture that is different than the person down the street? Do you care about your clients and your people that work internally for you? Are you involved in your community? Those are all things that foundationally make up the core culture of your firm.
Where does it come from? When I think about core values of the firm and that foundational culture, it comes from primarily the owners and the leaders. They're the ones that can talk the talk and walk the walk and make it work.
When you are looking at your firm, and you're trying to figure out what your culture looks like, look at a couple of things - heritage and traditions that you have, your branding and the communication that you give externally and internally, and shared values that you have. A lot of people put those on their website. I looked at a website the other day. It was hilarious, because they had 18 core values. What they did is they just kind of blurted out everything that they'd ever heard about anybody's core values.
I want you to really think about what are you living? What are the day-to-day living and breathing parts of your firm? What are those core values? Probably no more than about five of them. Why do you do what you do? What's the internal message and the feel? Then how does that get messaged out to the rest of the community?
Joe: Can I interrupt right there?
Sandra: Absolutely.
Joe: I've been biting at the bits to talk about everything you've been talking about. They're such meaty topics. I wanted to jump in on this, because I think, from my own experience in building the culture of my firm at Woodard, that why has had the most direct impact on culture over anything else we've done. I agree with you on values. I agree with you on sort of the personality of the leader being strong, and positive, and creating a sort of air of optimism and direction.
When we forged out as a company a vision statement, a mission statement, and a purpose statement, and anybody that's a regular to the podcast series or Woodard Institute knows that I break them into three statements with the vision being the broad reach, life-long why, and the purpose statement being the daily task level why. It infuses purpose into every single thing I do. Then the mission sits in between as the accomplishable and repeatable and measurable goals. All of it serves as both a compass, but also as a powerful motivator.
I learned this from Disney Institute, Sandra. I went to their course. They dropped us to the back of the Epcot theme park. They gave us these specially configured iPads, and they said, "We want you to spend the next 20 minutes taking some pictures of our employees going above and beyond their job description. Get as many as you can." We're thinking, "20 minutes? How can we find anything in 20 minutes?" We did. We found all these amazing examples of them going above and beyond their job description. Then they brought us back in the classroom and told us the secret. The secret is their purpose statement, their why.
Every Disney employee is trained not just in how to do their job, but the fact that they do their job to create happiness. Disney's purpose statement is, "We create happiness." They show up with that macro goal in mind. Then every task they're supposed to perform as part of their job gets encapsulated underneath that.
Then Disney said something very powerful. They said, "We're okay with an employee going off task, as long as they're on purpose." If an employee wants to leave their station for a suitable amount of time to go provide extra care to one of their customers, they're off task, but they're on purpose. So many times, accountants lack the why, well really all people lack the why. All businesses don't define it and don't communicate it and reinforce it. Then people just show up solely for the purpose of performing the tasks, repeating the tasks, and cashing the paycheck.
Sandra: I completely agree with you. By the way, I love the Disney philosophy, Disney University. Any time that anybody has a chance to go and immerse themselves in the culture of Disney… I don't want you to turn yourself into Disney, but boy, you can learn a lot of core values out of that that you can bring in and remold your culture, if you want to.
The other thing that when you were talking about your why, I completely agree with you that at the core of what we want to do is figure out why we do what we do. If you ask many accountants out there, they'll say, "Duh, it's to make money." I don't believe that. I don't believe that at the core, if you really ask people deep down why they do what they do, the outcome is the revenue. The outcome is the money that you make. The outcome is the profitability of your company. The why you do what you do is something much deeper. We just don't take the time to go and find it.
There's a wonderful TED Talk by Simon Sinek called "the Power of Why". He also wrote a book on it. If you haven't read that yet, and if you haven't immersed yourself in that why, I think that's a good thing for you to do. That would be a good next step after this podcast is over. Have you read that one, Joe?
Joe: I have. I've seen his TED Talk on it, and it was one of the driving forces behind us creating our purpose statement. Our purpose statement at Woodard, since we're educators of accountants, is, “We empower small business advisors.” I'll walk around the halls of the company, and I'll try to catch people, "What are you doing right now?" They know the answer is supposed to be an echo back, "I'm empowering a small business advisor."
Then they're supposed to tell me how, because what they're doing never changes. They're always empowering a small business advisor. How they're doing it is what changes. If they can't answer honestly that they're empowering a small business advisor right then, right there, they're off purpose.
I'm going to draw something from what Gary Boomer said. If you're searching for your why for your firm, start with the definition or the term that Gary has started using to describe an accountant, or the ideal description of accountant. He is fond of calling accountants “agents of small business transformation”, or at least commissioning them to be that. If you know that's your goal, play off that verbiage. My purpose is to transform small business. Then ask yourself at any given point during the day, and ask the people in your firm, "Are you empowering a small business right now?" If you have large business clients, make the adaptation. That's a fantastic place to start.
Sandra: I love that. Thank you for sharing that. We do the same thing as far as our why.
We, several years ago, went through the Simon Sinek video. We read the book. We met as a team. We came to the conclusion that what we do every day is we make people successful and future ready. Whether that means internally with our team or externally with our clients or externally when we're talking to the profession, if at the end of the day everything we do points to those words, making people successful and future ready, we did well. That is truly what drives us. I encourage everyone out there to find your why. That will be where you begin to really identify your culture.
Joe: I couldn't agree more. Then make sure - if you've got the undercurrent of this - make sure your why is directly connected to your customers, your clients' experience.
I want to shift gears a little bit to a connected topic. Culture is one of the best ways to attract and retain really good team members, but… We've done some polling, and we've read the polling of other organizations. Across the board the industry is telling us as thought leaders that talent acquisition and retention is our biggest struggle. As this battle continues and firms are trying to recruit from other firms, and sometimes it's even referred to as a war for talent, as this continues throughout 2017, what advice do you have for the audience on both the retention and acquisition of really good talent?
Sandra: I do believe that is exactly what's going to happen in the year ahead, and maybe even in several years ahead. I don't believe that that's going to subside at all, but I do think there are four really basic steps. I'll give you the four steps, and then any that you'd like to expand on, I certainly can.
I think the first and foremost is hang on to the great team members you have. It's just like in a business development, since you want to make sure that you are clogging the hole of the people leaving, as well as finding new. I'm fearful that in our profession we're really getting good at recruitment. We're going out and trying to find the great people. What we're not doing as well is doing what we have to do to hang on to the best and the brightest. That's the first thing.
Second thing is I think we need to let go of team members that don't fit our organization today, right now. We have a tendency to hang on to everybody, because we're worried about finding new, but what is happening is that they are actually creating a cancer within the firm. They're actually taking down some of the other people. Be kind, but be firm, and know those people that are not working out, and let them go sooner.
Joe: Before you get to the third one, can I throw something in there? A lot of times we think someone should be retained, because they're effective or productive. That is one important measurement of retention, but it's also are they the right fit for the direction of our firm, the culture of our firm, and the vision and purpose of our firm. I've got a good example of this. We had a great leader of our network named Katherine White. She was one of our best team members. She fit our culture. She was one of the most productive people in our organization. The network grew under her leadership, but she sat in on some of my teaching about why.
She did her own exploration of her own vision, mission, and purpose and found out that her life goals were not aligned with my organization. She wanted to go back into early childhood education and leave adult education. She went with a friend of hers, a teacher friend of hers and started a charter school in north Atlanta that is creating highly innovative learning techniques for small children. She's happy. She's where she needs to be. She self-selected out, in that case, but under all the traditional standards of retention, I would have tried to keep her when she wasn't a fit. That's where the culture becomes both a motivator and a filter for having the right team.
Sandra: I so appreciate you sharing that story, because the underlying piece of that is… I think sometimes we feel bad that we're letting people go, because we feel like we're hurting their feelings. The reality is that if they don't fit your culture, and if they're not fitting in with the team, then the truth is we're doing them a disservice by hanging on to them too tight. They are not able to find their passion and what they need to be doing, because we're kind of holding on to them.
Actually, I think if you change your mind set a bit that what you're doing is helping people find their passion. You're not holding on to them too long. I love this story. That's wonderful. Thanks for sharing that.
The other thing is I think we have to step up our recruiting. I don't care what size your firm is. It has to be 24 hours, and it has to be 365, and it has to be on social media, and it has to be on your website and all of those things, because when someone's looking for a job, they come to your community. They're online looking for a new opportunity. They're not going to look through the white pages anymore. They're not going to look through the yellow pages anymore. They're looking online, and they're going to look when they need to look. It may not be at the very same time that you're needing someone, but you want to be readily available and out there front and center for them.
You got to step up your recruiting, and then refer back to the question we just talked about on culture. If you have a culture that will attract great people, they will come to you. You won't have to do a ton of recruiting. You won't have to be everywhere. What happens is if your culture is great, if there's something wonderful about you, your team will start talking about you. Your team will bring in the best people. Make sure your culture is spot on. When I think about the war for talent, those are the four things I think you got to work on.
Joe: I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. We've got a couple minutes left, and I want to shift gears a little bit to this concept of client advisory services. Some people call it trusted advisory services. I'm not a big fan of either of those terms, because of over use. So many people have inferred so many things and interpreted so many things that it's become nebulous.
I love what you guys at Boomer call this. You call it being agents of small business transformation. I sometimes refer to it as business coaching. Sage has started calling it strategic advisory services, which is a little closer to the mark. Whatever you call it, the idea is I'm going to move beyond the books, and I'm going to make a difference in my client's business. I'm going to coach them, guide them, help them to succeed. It's a big step to go from compliance to that. Do you have a couple of suggestions for the audience listening in today on why take the leap? What would help them to go ahead and step into those deep waters?
Sandra: I do think that if you're not already starting to go in this direction, you are woefully behind. I would encourage everyone out there to start really taking a look at their practice, learn how to have and teach how to have deep and meaningful conversations with your client. This is not about the behind-the-scenes work. Of course, that has to be done. Of course, you're going to still do that, but the reality is a lot of that is going to be automated soon. We have to teach people how to have relationships and deep and meaningful conversations with people.
If you don't have a sales system or sales training program that's in place today, find one. There's lots of great systems and processes out there that will teach you how to have the conversations. They'll teach you how to track the leads. They'll teach you how to look for and ask the right questions to get to the deeper place with your clients and develop new services. If you haven't found that yet, I encourage you to do that.
For us, that was Sandler Sales Training. Those are nationwide all over the place. It's not the only one out there. There's Rainmaker Academy. Joe, what kind of systems, sales systems, and primarily that business advisory systems do you see out there where people could get some new education, some new intellectual capital for their firm?
Joe: There are programs. I want to start, of course, by talking about Woodard Institute, because it offers marketing and sales training. We have sales courses at Scaling New Heights.
I would say whatever conference you're going to go to, watch the tracks to see if they offer really practical, in-depth sales techniques, not just an hour-long session on why you need to sell, but practical guidelines on how to do it. I know some of the folks listening to the podcast might be thinking, "Wait a minute.
We just took a big step from being an agent of small business transformation to telling me I need to learn how to sell." I want to connect the dots for you, because Sandra is dead on with this. What she's saying is if you can't communicate the value that you bring, you can never bring the value. It is a critical first step to becoming that agent of small business transformation.
Unfortunately, we hold that knowledge and that conviction that we can bring that kind of change to a client. We hold that very deep inside of us, mostly because we're introverted or because we fear that the client is going to feel sold to or feel like they're having our services pushed upon them. That's what that sales training is going to help you do, get past the fear of communicating your value and get to the heart of how to communicate your value.
Sandra: I love that. By the way, thank you. How crazy of me not to mention Woodard Institute. I appreciate you doing that, because we hear great things about it. From anybody who has gone, they are exceptionally happy. They find huge value. I just want to make sure I say that.
Joe: Thank you.
Sandra: I would also tell you that there's a couple of other things. Obviously, you have to carve out time to do what we're asking you to do here, which might mean you have to let go of some of the things that you're already comfortable doing. The last thing, and the thing I think very few people are talking about is - and please hear this, as a professional, hear what I'm going to say. Give yourself more credit than what you do today.
Joe: Thank you. Thank you for saying that.
Sandra: You and your team, you know more than you think you do. Our biggest enemy out there in going to being agents of small business transformation is the person we look at in the mirror. We forget that we are pretty darn good at what we do.
Joe: Absolutely. A lot of times we think, especially in the community that Woodard services, it has a lot of bookkeepers, a lot of EAs, and a lot of CPAs that have been tax preparers and bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants for so long they've not been in sort of the full-service CPA world for a while. That's a large sector of our demographic, about 60 percent of it. Those folks especially will look in the mirror and say, "That's not my area of accountancy. I'm not an MBA. I'm not a full-service CPA firm." The question is not, "Do you know as much as the top 100 most influential people in the accounting field know, or that an MBA knows?" The question is, "Do I know more than my client knows?" The answer to that is almost always yes.
If there is a gap, with a little industry training, a little bit of filler training, you can take your breadth of knowledge, go specific on what the client needs, and then quickly fill that gap and know more about how that client needs to run their business than they do. Remember, they are experts at doing whatever their business does - their trade, their invention, their service. They are not experts at being small business owners. Any level of expertise you have on that topic, you're ahead of your client.
Sandra: You hit that dead on.
Joe: I want to ask you the same two questions as we wrap up, Sandra, that I've asked every single person in this powerful women series. What's the one biggest challenge facing the accounting profession right now? What's the accounting profession's biggest opportunity?
Sandra: That is such a great question. It's also a really hard question, because I think we have several challenges out there, but I'm going to tell you that I think if people would handle this particular challenge, a lot of the other ones would probably go away. That is the challenge of succession. We have to be realistic, and we have to be laser-focused on the area of transition of our business. We have to spend time and put on our radar that the baby boomers are going to leave the profession.
The next generation, our gen X and our millennials will be and need to be moving up faster than ever. The big challenge I think we face is there are people with their heads in the sand, and they are not paying attention to the fact that in five or ten years, they're going to be doing something else. They're probably still going to be around, just doing something different. They have to have other people that they are transitioning their business to. That's the big challenge.
I think the opportunity is that current leaders in the firm have a tremendous amount of intellectual capital. They have an opportunity right now to lead and teach that next generation. The most important thing they can do in the years ahead is to find a way to pass that wisdom and knowledge on and to listen and change with what that next generation leader sees the practice and the profession being. It takes years to do this, and we cannot wait until the last year to do it.
I'll kind of end with one story that I think is sad. I talked to a small business owner. It's a small firm. They have five individuals in the firm. The leader has been the leader for years. He is 82 now. He called me in December and he says to me, "All right. I'm ready. What am I going to do to sell my practice? How am I going to value it?" I listened with great empathy. I said, "Who is in your firm? Tell me about your firm?"
Everyone in his firm was basically the people he'd had for years. Everyone… there was not one person under the age of 60 in the firm. I had to give him the bad news of, "You're an all-compliance firm. You have all people that are people that are going to be leaving the profession in the next five or six years. People are going to look at you in a not so great way."
That's sad to me, because the truth was I think if he'd started earlier, he'd have built a team around him, he'd have changed his mindset, he would have changed his focus, he would have trained differently, he would have had a practice that would have been extremely beneficial to others. Where he's at today, it's going to be pretty hard, not that we're not going to do it. We're going to find a way, but it's not going to be as fruitful.
Joe: It's not just nature of his practice. It's the demographic of his practice.
Sandra: Right, right.
Joe: If 10 years ago, 15 years ago he had hired someone in their 20s, groomed that person, given them more and more leadership capabilities as they earn more trust, and then turned them into a leader within the company, the succession would have just fallen right into place. Then that person would have also kept the firm modernized technologically, culturally. A beautiful example of this, and folks, there are plenty of articles out in the blogosphere about the succession that just happened at Boomer.
That one was handled masterfully. I would use it as a type case for the way Gary used Jim as a successor, and really the entire leadership team with you, Sandra, and Dustin, to create a succession plan for himself. If you can use that as a sort of shining bright example of what a succession plan looks like, maybe you can get some inspiration for how you're going to do your own.
Sandra, it has been fantastic having you on today's podcast. For everybody else, I want to say thank you for tuning in. This has been a great conversation with Sandra.
Our podcast is only possible through the support of our partners like Entryless. Entryless is a must-have solution for both your firm and your firm's clients. They provide automated bill pay that integrates seamlessly with cloud accounting solutions, and Entryless converts your supplier's bills and all sorts of other purchase-related data on paper into digitized data, and pushes it through to the general ledger. Entryless is offering you 2,000 automated bills for free as a podcast listener. You can learn more at Woodard.com/Podcast. Sandra, thanks so much for being on the podcast with us today.
Sandra: Thank you, Joe, once again. Happy new year to everyone on the podcast.
Joe: Yes, same here to you.
For more information about today's episode, to explore other episodes in this podcast series, or to learn more about our annual conference, visit woodard.com. That's Woodard.com. As always, we encourage you to stay tuned, stay connected, never stop learning, and scale new heights.