Unlock Business Growth: Offshoring, Advisory Services & Creating Capacity with Wayne Findlay & Mark Jenkins

Unlocking business growth, offshoring advisory services, and creating capacity. That’s the theme of this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders, where we’ve got some very practical insights that you are going to love. Today we’re exploring how smart businesses are creating more capacity and profitability.

We’re joined by Wayne Finley from The Back Room and Mark Jenkins of The Gap. These two guys have been in partnership for a little while together. They’ve known each other for a long time. Each other’s businesses have been helping one another. They’ve even got a special offer that they’re gonna talk to.

So you gotta stay tuned for that part of the episode. But while this conversation is gonna be particularly valuable for accounting professionals, there is something here for. Every business owner strategies to delegate effectively creating more time for high value work and building stronger client relationships that transcend price competition.

You’re gonna discover how combining offshoring with advisory services can transform your business model and help you achieve what Mark calls three freedoms, financial freedom, time freedom, and mind freedom. So let’s dive into this episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders with Wayne and Mark.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites for Thought Leaders. Today I have two guests with me, two guests who have got to know each other over a longer period of time, but I haven’t got to know them yet. So that’s what this podcast is all about. Not only getting to know one another, but to pick in and understand why their partnership works.

How they even came about in business and what, really insightful deliverables are gonna be for everyone listening in today. Because I know there’s a lot of things around the concept of advisory and and accounting and many other things that we’re gonna touch on today. So first of all, let me welcome Wayne and Mark to the program.

Welcome.

Yeah. Thanks Anthony. Hi Mark, Wayne. Thanks Anthony for having us.

Absolute pleasure. Look I think we need to kick things off and let you both introduce yourselves to the audience so they get to know a little bit about you each. So Mark, why don’t you kick things off?

Yeah. One of the things that always concerns me with a podcast and being an accountant and an introduction is.

When I introduced myself to my wife and said I was an accountant, she was quickly looking around the room for someone else to talk to. Let’s just get that spoiler alert out the way. I am a reluctant chartered accountant, had been for 30 years owned my own firm for about 20 years and probably the more interesting time, and that was when I was doing advisory work.

I sold that firm about 11 years ago and formed The Gap. And The Gap is essentially a content company to help you sell and deliver structured advisory services to your business clients. So we work with accountants, so I point fun at myself as an accountant and I’ll probably point some fun at a few accountants who are listening to this as well.

We would never do that on this program. Never make accountants. What about you, Wayne? Do you wanna introduce yourself to everyone? Yeah.

Yeah, welcome Anthony. Yeah, Wayne Finlay, another accountant. But born and bred from the deep south of Tour Tap in New Zealand. But right now in the Philippines, so it’s a sort of a long way from home right now.

Yeah, like Mark I had my own ca firm. We were located in AKA New Zealand. I did that with my brother. I met Mark when we were both in the same coaching group. Actually. We had a guy that was coaching us and that was good fun. Back in those days. We had a lot of good times and like Mark, we sold our accounting firm, it was probably about eight years ago to focus on our business.

Now, the backroom, which is an offshoring company. Based in the Philippines, and we focus on staffing for accountants across the globe. So gone for a new focus and, but still dealing with accountants and yeah, and loving it.

And before we delve into some interesting topics here, am I right in saying that a lot of the there is a crossover between how you got started, Wayne and some of the work that you know, you were doing alongside with Mark.

Yeah, be I would have to say that we probably couldn’t do what we did setting up the backroom because it, I freed up a lot of capacity for myself. So when we were, we didn’t really wanna sell, but we got approached, so we sold, but luckily we’re in a position where we could free up that time and work on The Back Room.

And that was because we used The Gap. Which helped us one, get a good, a good price for accounting firm. And two, it meant that I had that time and capacity where I could do some added value with clients. And we had a team offshore, which was, with another outfit.

And that helped us, do what we’re doing now, basically. Yeah, it was a real crossover

and I love that because this is, ultimately business is about relationships, isn’t it? And you don’t know where these opportunities create themselves. I gather, if we’ve had a, this conversation 20 years ago what you are doing now, probably wouldn’t be something that you would’ve thought of.

That’s an interesting one. When you talk to people, especially you know, from down home and to tap, which is you imagine, the back blocks of Australia, this is a bit like that. You try to explain what you’re doing to them and it’s it’s mind blowing.

It, it’s certainly interesting

and interesting from my perspective too. I think what’s changed as well is that, so I, I sold outta my firm in 2014 and offshoring and outsourcing, I would say, was in its infancy in those days. And when we started The Gap, we were. We would have a hundred accountants in a room at a masterclass, say at Auckland Auckland over towel at the airport there.

And we’d ask for a show of hands, how many people were offshoring or outsourcing. You might get out of a hundred people, maybe 10 hands going up. And then more recently when we’ve been running events you’re getting 95 to, 90, 96% of the people are offshoring or outsourcing.

And so then it’s evolved from. Offshoring and outsourcing being a must do. And then it’s just who’s best of breed? So then it’s just a conversation about, what’s the service level you can get? How reliable are they? How good are the people? And what I love about the backroom is that the owners have owned an accounting firm themselves.

So they, they have that deep subject Marker expertise of accounting firms and what their challenges are. And just as I’ve in my own accounting firm was delivering advisory services and I’ve got deep subject Marker expertise on advisory, that’s why I think the partnership is really strong with the backroom and The Gap because we do, even though we point in front at each other for being accountants, we, that, that’s the common ground and that’s the understanding we have of our respective client bases who are people that often use both our, both of our products.

It is an interesting point that you raised because I know there’s a lot of businesses that like this kind of concept of people working from the ground up and that may be true for founders that can do that, but even, I know businesses like Aldi for example, if you’re going to rise even up to the top levels of Aldi, you start by stacking.

Stacking boxes, and you might be doing that as a temporary assignment, knowing full well that you’re moving into a management role. But, getting your hands dirty and under truly understanding the niche is incredibly important. And I imagine not something you could be doing particularly in the advisory space, mark, unless you really understood that.

Yeah. And look, it goes the same for offshoring as well. If you don’t understand the problems and challenges that accountants face, resourcing is a massive pro problem. If you google the world’s most boring jobs, I think accounting comes up at number three or something in the top five anyway.

And so let’s face it, it’s not a, it’s not a desirable industry. And so we’ve got a shortage of people in New Zealand and Australia of uk who are not wanting to do this sort of work. And yet in the Philippines, you’ve got. An abundance of people who are training in accounting. And so it’s a great opportunity for both re solving the resource problem, but also demonstrating what you do with that capacity that you create when you do offshore.

And the work’s just so much more fun. It’s so much more rewarding as well. So yeah, it’s a, it’s an interesting time to be in accounting. There’s a lot going on and offshoring and advisory are. I describe it like peas and carrots on their way in, not on their way out.

So when that brings the question there.

There’s one hand you saying it’s, we’re saying here that it’s a boring job, but clearly there’s people, I imagine that. Love the boring job. That’s probably one part and I’m probably being a bit unfair in classifying it as that. And, but the second part is really this, there’s an abundance of talent that’s in the Philippines as well, and I think there’s probably a misconception that talent isn’t as qualified as it might be if they had, studied in Australia.

But that’s not the case, is it?

No, it’s not the case. I think it is accounting’s, a four year degree here in the Philippines. And then as well as that, you need to do your internships along the way. So they’re actually doing hands-on work as they’re learning. And in New Zealand, I think it’s a four year degree now, but it used to be a three year degree when I did it.

But. I always compare the hours in a week that you study. Like I remember when I was in Dunedin I think the second year I had 13 lectures a week. Then I compare it with the students here. It’s a 40 hour week plus they, they flog them here at the university. They, and then they have all these other things they have to do as well.

So the learning is a lot more, it’s a lot harder. There’s a lot more regular testing. And the students I don’t know, but there’s a lot of people who want to become an accountant, and I think it’s it is, it’s because of the BPO industries like us, because the average wage that we pay accountants, compared to other industries, is a lot higher.

So the average wage is going up all the time as well. We’re seeing a lot of candidates are account

for those in that might not be familiar with the term BPO. Do you wanna just explain that?

Yeah. Yeah. We’re actually a KPO to be really technical, but A BPO was a business process outsourcing and a KPO was knowledge process outsourcing.

So we’re processing knowledge and sharing that out. So we’re a service, that’s what we’re providing. Yeah, the where I am in Clark, there’s there’s a lot of BPOs but there’s very few that specialize in accounting. And I think that, that puts us up on a pedestal, especially, being able to provide training and also being able to get the top-notch students.

We, we tend to get the pick of the bunch as far as grads come and wanna work for us.

I wanted to just unpack a few things with what you are both doing, because starting with Newmark in terms of advisory, because this term advisory, which I love, when I was started thinking about it going, because a lot of people might use the term consulting.

And consulting carries a lot of negative baggage is a general word, whereas advisory tends to be a more positive use term, but it is more common perhaps in the accounting side of things. So tell me a little bit about what that is and why that is becoming such an important part of accounting practices.

Yeah, it’s a great question, Anthony. And I’m at risk of getting up on a soapbox here and talking about the ills of the the word advisory because it’s actually been completely overused. And. I’m a native speaker of Cantonese and gape as well, the language of The Gap. And I really don’t like the term advisory because really what advisory is in my definition it’s closer to business development.

It’s and if you define business development, if you look at Forbes, their definition of business development is providing enduring value from product services and relationships. So for me that is a far better definition, business development services. But unfortunately, the people who didn’t like the word salesperson have coined the term business development manager.

And so when you say business development, it sounds like sales and accountants don’t like selling. They really they really don’t like it at all. And so I suspect that the word advisory and business advisory services, i’m talking 35 years ago in one of the big four firms that I worked and I was in the business advisory services, the BS division.

There was nothing advisory going on there at all. We were producing sets of financial statements and telling clients how much profit they’d made and how much tax they’d pay and hope they didn’t ask us what the accounting fees have been. But, so I think consulting is not the right term either because consulting is.

If you take the cynical view, it’s somebody who takes your watch off you so they can tell you what the time is, but there’s someone you pay to do a piece of work. Now you can’t as a, an advisor, you can’t do a business plan for a client. Business advisory services, in my definition, if we go down that line of providing enduring value, working side by side with a client to help them.

Achieve their goals, overcome their problems and challenges. Things like business planning and coaching and cashflow and profit improvement work. You’re not there to advise them what to put in their business plan. You’re there to facilitate and ask questions and help them create the time and the space to create that plan, and then to hold them to account and to report against that, how they’re going.

So from my perspective. Does sound like a soap box. I’d love to change the word advisory. I don’t think I’m gonna, I’m swimming against the tide, but my definition of advisory is more in the line of coaching or mentoring. Where you are asking questions, you are facilitating planning and business improvement for your clients.

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So from my perspective. Does sound like a soap box. I’d love to change the word advisory. I don’t think I’m gonna, I’m swimming against the tide, but my definition of advisory is more in the line of coaching or mentoring, where you are asking questions. You are facilitating planning and business improvement for your clients.

You are achieving synergy by working side by side with them to get a result that’s better than what they could achieve on their own. And you might use some technology to do that, but mostly it’s about the human connection, the conversations you’re having, the questions you’re asking, and the dedicated time that you and the client are putting together to improve their business.

So it’s a very long answer to what advisory means in my world. But if we look at specific services, I’m talking business planning, accountability, coaching, forecasting, management reporting and really holding a client to account to achieve the goals that they want. So first of all, you have to get ’em to define what they are, and then you have to help ’em to get there.

So that’s a long explanation of what advisory is.

No, it’s, and I think it’s really important to get it out there and it really is interesting, we could go on for hours about the about the right terminology to use. And the trouble is often one term gets hijacked very quickly and becomes trendy and means something completely different to what it was intended.

Can just add there, Anthony as well, because I know from the accounting perspective, when Scott and I first started. A lot of, we were a bit scared of, can we do this business advisor, how, but The Gap certainly helped hold our hands with it because what they had made it a lot easier.

And I think there’s a perspective out there that a lot of accountants think advisory. You need to, have, high knowledge or you need to be special in certain areas. But for what we did with our clients was pretty basic. It was simple. It was helping our clients. It was what they wanted.

It was what they understood, which is what we understood. So we didn’t complicate things. And it certainly paid dividends for us. Yeah. A hundred percent behind what Mark was saying there.

And I imagine, mark, that this area is becoming more and more important, particularly as there are tools that are now making some of the other tasks a little bit more easier and quicker to support.

So this, the differentiator between accounting firms. Has to be some level of advisory where traditionally the contact from accounting firms would’ve been with a client during BS if that’s what’s needed, and at least once a year for tax. Fairly negative, generally speaking ways of engaging with it, but.

There’s a need to move out of that space now.

Yeah. Look, I think and there’s been a lot of talk about this for 20, maybe 30 years, about what will happen to accounting. I think someone, Wayne was about four or five years ago, there was some prediction that’d be 19 accountants in New Zealand by 2030.

Some ridiculous situation. Of course that’s not gonna be the case.

Technology. And now there’s ai, and we’re all it says we’re all going. But I don’t think that’s a situation ’cause people want to deal with people, especially in when it’s dealing with finances and money the old trusted advisor.

Absolutely.

So I think from my perspective, we can talk about technology, that’s the enabler. We can talk about offshoring as the capacity creator. And then it’s okay, so you’ve got all this technology and you’ve got offshoring in place, you’ve created capacity. So what will you do now?

And if you can spend more time with your clients. Even if you just start asking them questions and you start meeting with them to talk about their goals and their problems and challenges, and you start solving their problems and challenges in the form of a service that you offer them that’s structured and clear so that you know what to do.

Okay, I’m gonna send some pre-work. I’m going to run an, I’ve got an agenda I’m gonna follow, I’ve got a template I’m gonna use. I’ve got some AI tools that are gonna support me to do that. But first and foremost, I’m gonna have a conversation with a client, meet them where they are, talk language, that they understand the way Wayne’s talking as well.

Technology cannot do that. We, it’ll never be able to do that. And so advisory to me is just the, it’s the filler for the cr, the space that you create. By offshoring or using technology. Now, you can’t, most accountants I talked to, I did a webinar a couple of hours ago and I asked bb what are their challenges?

And they’ll say, we’ve got no time. We’ve got no time. And so everyone’s gr grappling with how do we create more capacity? Offshoring is the best way to create capacity. And you can offshore at multiple levels, with The Back Room, now you’ve got skills right the way through the chain.

Wayne, and perhaps you could talk about this as well.

Yeah. Yeah, we’ll go. We’re gonna have another webinar, aren’t we? Mark, where we’re gonna cover off. And go into more detail on this as well. But some of the key things, you don’t just need accountants. You’ve you have admin, marketing, vAs EAs. So there’s lots of resources you can get from offshore that will give you that time. Yeah, I think

one of the best books that I’ve read in recent years is buying Back Your Time. The reason why you hire other people to do that, to create more space for the areas that not only you love doing, but hopefully are more profitable.

And I think the point there is that. Capacity doesn’t equal profit. So if you create more capacity by offshoring, you’re only gonna make more profit if you use that capacity that you’ve created to sell more services or to generate more revenue at the same time. If you don’t do that, then if you don’t have those conversations with clients, then.

There’s a, my concern is there’s a real race to the bottom because margins will slip over time. Expectations of clients will be, oh, this is a transactional relationship. And I know Intuit released some research of about 500 accounting firms in Australia and 500 small, medium sized business owners, and one in three of those business clients saw their relationship with their accountant as transactional.

That’s a real worry. Only 16% of those those business clients considered they had a strategic partnership with their clients. 84% of the people who considered they had a strategic partnership with their accountants considered they got immense value from their accountant. So if you think about the clients that Wayne’s talking about, where you’ve got a deep connection, they’re not going to shop around based on price.

They’re gonna work with you based on the relationship. So how do you get to work with them more? You need a system and a process to do that, and you need to offshore to create the capacity to be able to do it.

How much of a challenge is it though, in convincing accountants that are used to having their hands dirty and in terms of getting into the numbers and doing all of those things that they might do?

To step away from that and to let that part go so that they can focus on this other area.

That’s a big thing. And that’s something that I struggled with for a start, but it, I actually got the help of our friend Rob, who helped us. Mark, remember he had something about wearing the hats, your red and your black hat.

So look at the tasks that you were doing and one would be a Red Hat, I forget. One was for admin and one was where you’re productive. And so both Scott and I in the accounting firm, we went through and we listed down everything that we did that we shouldn’t be doing, and we looked at delegating it.

And so being able to delegate. Is very important and it’s one of the things that accountants struggle the most with is being able to delegate. So we delegated and we set up our own offshoring business and you wouldn’t be able to do that if we couldn’t. And I had a real,

I had a real fear myself about delegating.

So I, I delegated all of the annual accounts review meetings to my senior team and and they the ones who wanted to there, Anthony, you’re right, some people love to just work with the numbers, and that’s just fine. There aren’t as many of those people as there used to be, and the ones coming through the next generation of leaders don’t want that.

So for those who do want that’s just fine. But tho those who want the opportunity I had this real fear about delegating ’cause I thought, oh, what will my clients think the relationship is with me? And but what I found was that they really enjoyed it. The team members enjoyed the work, the clients enjoyed having a second point of contact.

’cause they said, oh, it’s so much easier for me to get hold of your team than it is for you. You’re always in new things. And I was able to say, look. I’m not leaving I’m here to do the work that I’m best at, which is not your annual accounts and your tax. I don’t do that work anymore. So the best people to do that and to go through your accounts are the people that have done that work and the best people.

The best way to work with me is on a more of a strategic level. So if you wanna work with me on a strategic level, this is the sort of work that I’m freeing up my capacity to do. I lost one client one client left. He no. I, yeah, I came here because I wanted you to be doing my GSD or my bass.

I wanted you to be doing my annual accounts. And I said look, his name was Simon. I said, Simon, look this is not going to work. And I recommended him to a one person operation down the road and he was really happy with that. Both the accountant and the client were really happy with, and I was happy with that too.

W we did the same thing, mark it, and I would always position it, say Anna, who was a senior accountant, I’d say, oh Anna’s better than this than me, to be honest. She knows more about tax and you know how the compliance will fit. You meet with her, do the end of year, the tax ’cause that’s history.

That’s looking backwards. And then I’m gonna schedule a meeting with you in a week’s time, and then we’re gonna go look forward and we can plan for next year. We can do our budgets and forecasts, we can look at ways to improve profitability. And that was the way we positioned it in our accounting firm, and that worked really well.

Yeah I, it’s a difficult thing when you have some clients that you need to move on, but it is also an important thing for both sides of the fence. ’cause there’s nothing worse than dealing with people where you each party knows that you’re not the right fit. And that’s an important thing.

People getting to know you. And which goes back to the advisory stuff, doesn’t it? It’s that opportunity to actually have. More lengthy, detailed conversations and be more proactive with those conversations rather than waiting for isn’t it tax time?

It’s a win-win as well, Anthony, because your accountants that are more senior they always want, pay rises and you want to pay them more.

The trouble is if you’ve given them work at a lower level. You can’t justify the pay rises. As if they were doing high value work client meetings, then it’s a win-win. You can pay them more because you can actually charge out more. The client is feeling like they’re helping more, so they don’t mind paying that extra bit.

I see it as a win-win by delegating. And the other thing was, you’re helping grow that person as well. The fear was can they handle that type of work? But, you we didn’t struggle. We found out by giving them extra responsibilities, the senior team took that on board and grew with it.

Yeah it was a win-win site scenario.

Something else I wanted to explore that you guys both touched on in your introductions that I think is important for any business owner listening in to understand is this concept of how you solve the businesses. And because I’m interested on a couple of levels.

One is this, obviously this idea that you’re building a business in Indeed to be able to exit it, but also how soon you had the vision. For what you wanted to do next? Was that part of the why you were exiting or was, did the exiting happen first? Mark, I throw to you first. What was the situation for you?

Yeah, so I’ve resigned from the accounting industry, I think four times in my career. After starting in the big four I got a bit burnt out and went and ran a ski chalet in France and said, that’s the end of it. I’m not doing accounting ever again. Actually even before that, when I was in the Big Four firm, I was in the business advisory.

Division. I didn’t like that. And got out and moved into the the consulting business. Couple of floors down, and then I, yeah, then I, when I came to sell my accounting firm, I had just had enough. I was, I’d been doing it for 17 years. I needed a new challenge, but I didn’t know what I was gonna do next.

I just knew that I couldn’t do this anymore. And so I exited again the accounting industry and then found myself back in it again. With with The Gap. I didn’t even believe there was a business with The Gap. I. I, I thought every accountant did this sort of thing, that they had templates and flow charts and agendas and pre-work and proposals.

And I thought that was what everyone had. And it was my co-founder the brown rig who said, and I think there’s a business here. So we, that’s how The Gap was formed quite by accident. Viv was helping me with the brokering of my business, I wasn’t itching to do this sort of work. I love it now.

But I certainly wasn’t itching. I’m not sure, Wayne, whether what you what came first for you?

Yeah the backroom came first and, but luckily yeah we’d work with the likes of you and Rob and one of the things that we were working on was being able to, for a good business to exist. It can’t be relying on you.

It’s gotta be able to run on itself. And that was something that Scott and I had worked on quite a lot. And so the business did work without us, there was some certain things, from a director and board level that we had to do, but we’d set the business up so it could run, pretty simply without us there.

And that made it quite easy for a transition. When we got approached we looked at it and said, oh yeah, we should, because at that stage, backroom was in its infancy. I was focusing on that and Scott was focusing more on the accounting. And then yeah, we said, oh yeah, let’s sell. And we’ve doubled down on The Back Room and I think at the time we sold, we had close to 30 employees offshore, maybe 35, and now, today, we’re like close to 600.

So it’s certainly paid off.

Yeah, and I think it’s an interesting exercise, isn’t it? Because you both talked about, I guess in a way kind of losing the passion for what you originally were doing, but have found that in what you are doing now. So those opportunities that presented itself found a new purpose and and I think what’s intriguing for me, mark, with yours or both of you really, is that you’ve not only found a purpose for your own selves, but what you’re actually doing is it’s helping drive that for others.

Yeah, look it, I mean our purpose statement is far simple and profitable advisory. And so we are wanting it to be easier, but actually the reason behind that is that we want more accountants to be helping more small, medium sized business owners to. Achieve the goals that they want.

And this is something that I’ve always been passionate about. And for years I always dreamed that’s what an accountant would do. And then I found out what they did was actually nothing like that at all. I used to feel like a bit of a leech. I’d go down through the profit and loss statement of a client set of accounts and.

Try and skip past the accounting fees line because I was worried about the, what the account, what the client might say about how high the accounting fees were. And I thought, I’m just taking a little bit of their profits and not really adding any value. So I had a real driver to want to help more.

And to, on the back of my business card I had make more money, pay less tax, and have a great lifestyle. ’cause that was the passion I had was to help my clients to achieve that. And The Gap community is full of people who feel the same way, who want that for themselves and for their clients.

And when accountants realize that by giving those outcomes to their clients, we talk about the three freedoms, financial time, and mind freedom. If you help your clients to achieve those freedoms, then they in turn will reward you and you’ll achieve those freedoms yourself so long as you offshore embrace technology.

And open up those client relationships to, at the level that your clients really want. And so it’s a virtuous circle. It’s really nice to see, and we get lovely anecdotes from members all the time who share, what their clients have said, how it’s been life changing for them, and that, that’s what really gets me excited about coming back to work.

And I imagine, Wayne there’s a fair amount of people that are a bit nervous, particularly the first time that they might be using an offshoring, and then by you demonstrating what the ability is. I imagine that they keep coming back for more and understand the value of what’s, what the services did you offer.

Yeah, it like to, to hiring your first employee offshore is your hardest. Once you have your first employee, your second, third, fourth is so much easier. And what I say is it gives accounting firm options. So if someone leaves in the accounting firm in New Zealand or Australia, if you’ve got a team offshore, it gives you an option to say hey, do I replace this role onshore or offshore?

So it means that mark talked about, the shortage of accountants and even bookkeepers globally. There’s such a big shortage. It just means you have that option, and then the other thing is it frees you up that you can then you could add more people as more you can scale quicker.

There’s so many benefits to offshoring. And it gives you that ability, like Mark talked about the three freedoms. So if you can create that capacity, then you can fill that time with, maybe it is more time on the golf course or maybe it’s doing more advisory type work. And then that frees up your mind less stress.

So I think it all. It does tie it all together.

I’d love to get both of your assessments as well as where the industry is going, because, the accounting industry is not different to. A lot of other spaces as well. So I think that’s important for people who are listening in to, to understand that.

But technology has played a significant role in the accounting space and we think of, the likes of Xero, for example, being cloud-based software and much more accessible particularly to. Part, to small businesses who may have limited knowledge of how to do things and interacting that with accountants, that’s just one example of a whole myriad of technologies that come into play and a changing the way the whole space is operating, isn’t it?

Yeah. I see. The big thing at the moment is AI and how that will impact, and from what I’ve seen in talking to accounting firms. There hasn’t been a big impact yet. And that’s not to say there will be in a few years time, but I do think it will be more technology. It will just mean we’ll be able to do things a lot easier, a lot better, will be more efficient.

I, I think QuickBooks or Intuit in the us. Have started to release some products that help tax, for instance, doing tax in the US a lot simpler. So there is some efficiencies there and so there will be some changes in the future, but accountants are notoriously slow adopters of technology. Then you’ve got your clients who also that work with accountants, sometimes are risk averse as far as what technology. Certainly an interesting landscape over the next three years perhaps. How do you say it? Yeah. It’s

interesting. I, is it Jeff more crossing the chasm? The change of option curve. I think there’s a. There’s a, I would suggest that AI and robotic process automation is sitting with the technologists the two and a half percent.

Then we’re gonna get into early adopters who are gonna going to do this as well, that 13 point a half percent, but there’s going to need to be a lot of social proof that. These technologies really work before we’re gonna get that early majority that next 34% in the late majority, the next 34% adopting the the AI and the, I’m seeing a lot of AI being used anecdotally not in a particularly systemized way.

At the moment I’m seeing a lot of advisory assistant type work, data lakes where technology can access information so you can open a conversation with a client. That’s all great. That’s just another enabler. It’s another enabler and efficiency gain to help you to have better relationships, better conversations, and give better service to your clients.

So it’s the same as offshoring, it’s the same as all the other technology we’ve had in the past. I don’t believe there’s ever gonna be a substitute for the human connection. Whether the margins will stay the same on the core services. I believe the margins won’t be there longer term. But hey, look, people have been saying that for a long time and people will probably look at me and say I’m not like you.

I’m not an early adopter. I’m not a technologist. And I don’t believe you yet. And that’s just fine. That’ll, that everyone will have their own. Their own spin on this. What I really want to encourage accountants to do is to just get in touch with their clients more. Ask more questions. You know what?

What are your challenges? Or use AI to find some insights in the client data to say look, I can see there are some challenges here. I’d love to talk to you about how we could improve your cash flow or improve your profitability. And in the webinar we’re doing with the backroom, I’ll be showing a little bit about tools that you can use to enable those conversations because again, the tool is just the enabler for a better conversation.

And if we want to avoid a race to the bottom or a move to generic provision of compliance services, which ultimately means a lower price and a lower margin, then we have to stay relevant as accountants to business clients. And I think this is a great opportunity to increase the value of the conversation, increase the value of the relationship, increase the value of the service, and use technology and offshoring to.

Create the capacity even more to be able to do this work.

I think you’re right because it will there be more of a competitive landscape in the future? With the early adopters may get more clients. There’s a, the average age I think of the accountant or the principal is pretty high in New Zealand, Australia, it’s getting close to 60.

There’s gonna be a changing of the guard at some stage and it’s how the next. How the next people coming through embrace that technology. There will be com competition that are gonna drive down prices. So if you want to remain competitive, you need to take all these tools up. And one of ’em could be, offshoring and advisory, I think needs to be.

Part and pass for what you do as well.

What’s fascinating really is that when you ask the kind of question that I did, often people do jump immediately to their core activities and say here’s technology going to replace some of my core activities. But in fact, what a lot of the time can happen with the technology is it can enable you to do some of the peripheral activities much more efficiently and better.

And one of those is engagement. That’s really a big opportunity. The tools that are available now to engage with people on a more consistent basis and still make it quite personal, are far better than what they were many years ago. And they’re improving all the time.

And those things help with the advisory side of things. And of course, more of that. Being able to do more of that means, happens because you’ve got more offshoring happening. So it’s a nice kind of circle of what’s possible.

One of the tools, Anthony and Mark mentioned the webinar that we’re hosting together in a week’s time.

I’ll be able to show you. We have this growth calculator and it’s a fantastic tool that we’ll be able to share as for people that attend the webinar, but it shows you. What you can do with your firm. And at the webinar I’ll showcase what Scott and I did with our firm, Finley and Co. And how we went from a compliance driven firm to having more advisory and an offshoring team.

And you’ll see the numbers, you’ll see how it changed our firm and, and how it impacted us with our, evaluations as well. We’re dropping the jaws a little bit so you can see inside. The workings and get some tangible, what you can see from a tangible point of view is, I love

that.

By the way, I’ve had a little bit of a sneak preview of what you’re doing with the growth calculator and I don’t want to put any spoils in place for people that are going to join the. The webinar and we’ll have details of how to to find that in the show notes, of course, for everyone listing in.

And if you’re listing into at a later date to this, don’t worry. I’m sure there’ll be other webinars in the future, so we’ll make sure there’s plenty of contact information there in the show notes. But what I love is the concept of the calculator itself that I just wanted to touch on very briefly because what you’re trying to do is demonstrate a value add for people and what the impact is and.

I think that’s a lesson that a lot of businesses can learn in lots of different areas of business is showing how you can add value and make it feel a little bit more real to the individuals that are there. And is that, I imagine that was the strategic idea in the first place.

Yeah, we wanted to show how we did it in our accounting firm and we look back at where we were, and we went through our numbers, probably 10 years ago, and then up until the date when we sold and we compared them and then we put in the key drivers of what was changing those results.

And we built the calculator around that. And one of the key things, you’ll see that in the webinar was advisory, being able to fulfill the capacity. So yeah, you’ll be able to see that in detail and we can help you run through that sort of stuff.

Fantastic. We’re just about out of time, so I’ve got two quick things firstly for you and then I’ll throw to you as well, Wayne.

So firstly, mark just give everyone the quick brief outline, what will be the webinar and as the starting point.

So yeah we are really keen to it’s interesting. Wayne’s going to be talking and I’ll let him share what he’s doing, but showing value to the accounting firm, I’m gonna be showing how accountants can show value to their clients.

And so that the sale of an advisory service is a no brainer. So that because accountants find it difficult to sell and they also love structure and system and process, i’m gonna show a little tool that we use called the value gap calculator, which showcases the power of what’s possible, starting with a set of annual accounts.

So linking this to an onboarding meeting or an annual accounts review meeting, and really changing up that strategy so that in that meeting, like Wayne was talking about, we, you’re covering the history and looking backwards, and then in the second half of the meeting, you were looking forwards. Using a tool that the client can see the power of what’s possible and has the option then to engage with you in the services that will deliver those outcomes, increase cash flow, increase profit, increase margin, increase sales and how you can do that.

So I’m really excited about that because just as the backrooms tool is really easy and user friendly to use, so is ours. And we’ve been talking all of this podcast about. Using technology as the enabler. And we both have great tools that are easy to use and can really show great value.

But Wayne, tell us about what you’re gonna showcase.

Yeah. I think we, we put some of the wording around this webinar as one plus one equals three, which is a great accounting there’s a joke around that too, or we, maybe we will tell that joke later. But, it’s really showing how offshoring and advisory add up to a lot more than, two.

And in the calculator, I think that showcases that completely. So I’m gonna take people through a scenario in the calculator. And we’re gonna talk about really how different ways you can and different roles you can offshore. And then at the end of it. With the capacity that you freed up, what sort of things you could do with advisory and talk about the things that Scott and I did in our accounting firm that really made some huge dividends for us and really added value like exponential value to our business.

Fantastic. Look again, we’ve got all the details in the show notes about that. Just to wrap things up, a question for each of you to answer that I like to ask all of my guests, what’s the ah up moment that clients have when they come to work with you that you wish more people knew they were going to have?

So we gonna kick us off, mark.

I think it’s that I don’t have to sell to my clients to do advisory. I just have to sit side by side with them and. Understand what their goals are and what their problems and challenges are, and to combine their expertise with mine as the accountant or person listening yours as the accountant.

So that one plus one equals three works for the accountant speaking to their clients as well. That’s the aha moment. I don’t have to sell this. My clients will be asking for it if I could just show them the art of what’s possible. Yeah.

Fantastic. And what about for you, Wayne?

Yeah from the offshoring perspective, I think it’s our people.

So when a client gets to experience a team here in the Philippines they sell themselves basically because it is just. It’s funny, I it’s just the mindset here in the Philippines, the work ethos the willingness to just do beyond, go above and beyond what they require. Yeah I once a client, once they get involved with us and our team, yeah they never look back.

They just keep on adding more staff.

Fantastic. Look, I’ve really appreciated both of the insights from you so much to cover and so many interesting stories to tell as well that you’ve had along the way. So I know there’s a lot of value that people are going to get out of the webinar that’s coming up.

So again, people pay attention to the show notes, and if you’ve missed it, I’m sure there’s another one gonna come up as well. So it will also include. All the regular contact information, both of you. But for now, thanks so much for being part of Biz Bites for thought leaders. Really appreciated you being on the show.

Yeah, thanks Anthony. Thanks. Yeah, thanks Anthony and Wayne. It’s great talking to you.

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