In this episode of the CFO project podcast, we discuss the idea that you don't have to be big to make it in this industry.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah. So little fish is really a play on, like, little fish in a big pond. And when I started the firm, I knew that I wanted to focus on the smallest of the small farms. So that means that probably 90% or more of our clients have one owner and teams of less than ten. And I feel like that's a really sweet spot.

We, serve service providers and part of the reason that it is important that we kind of serve that niche, if you will, is that they're just big enough that they need more than a bookkeeper, more than somebody who's just doing tasks for them, but not necessarily big enough that they need to bring somebody, in-house. And so when I think about this idea of growing to small, it's always kind of stuck with me.

The ways that accountants potentially treat businesses that they are serving that like, if you're not making a certain amount of money or you don't have at least X number of employees or Y number of projects, they just weren't giving you the same kind of attention. And I knew that we could give a concierge level experience, even if you were really small, and just treat everybody with that same level of support, even if what you actually got kind of got amplified as you moved up.

And then we started, I would say maybe a year ago thinking about this idea of build to enough and kind of as we were talking about off mike, I started thinking about how everybody was on this constant quest for more that like, they didn't even start to recognize the successes that they had already hit. It was like I made 500,000, so I'm going to make 1 million, then I'm going to make 2 million, then I'm going to make five.

And I started wondering like, what is it all for? Why are you trying to make more? Are you really aware of all of the costs and, opportunity risk and all of the other things that go into getting bigger? That is more than just I make more revenue, but as potentially I have a bigger team. Do I actually want to manage people?

I might have to offer services that I wasn't really interested in, and I really wanted to flip that on its head. And say, if you started from a place of what metric do I want to reach, whether it's revenue or team size or profit? And then I just said, that is enough for me. I'm going to make the amount of money that I need to.

My team is going to make what they need to. And if we never add another client or another team member, this is going to be more than sufficient for what we want to consider success. And that just led me to how can we make sure that the podcast in our newsletter is really giving that information to both accountants and service providers that have the same problems?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I think it's a couple things. I think society kind of always, inspire us to think that bigger is better in all ways, whether it's the size of your business to the price of your car to the size of your house, there's this expectation that really the measure of success is how big you get. I think specifically in our industry, it feels like a status symbol, for you to be respected or taken seriously or for anybody to pay attention to you, you need to be the biggest business on the block, the biggest, accounting firm, both in your region and nationwide.

And I would say that the last thing about that is, I don't think that a lot of people appreciate what they're giving up in the sector because in the quest to become bigger. And so I think about sometimes how that increase in revenue and you know this we all know this is not necessarily an increase in profit. And so sometimes I'll have these conversations with people and I'm like, okay, well if you make 500,000 and spend 400,000, you know, you could do a lot less work if you made 250 and spent 150, like it's going to come to that same ending number for you.

Does it make sense for you to keep pushing on this hamster wheel to raise your top line? If your bottom line isn't going to make those changes for you?

Yeah, I think it's a combination of both. One, it's offered me the opportunity to speak on different stages, especially for accountants, where I've gotten a lot of feedback of people just saying they felt like they got permission not to grow, that they felt like an outlier before this, where if they said they didn't want to do anymore or take any on any more clients, there was a lot of condescension and this assumption that you're lazy and you don't really want to do more from the client side.

What's really been helpful is that we're able to really narrow down on understanding that their personal goals and business goals are really aligned. And so instead of just saying, hey, I want to make more revenue, say, for the sake of making revenue, it may be I want to make more revenue because I'm interested in buying a vacation home, or I really want to hire two more people so that I can take a sabbatical next year.

And so all of that advisory and the conversations that we're having really get to lean back to our harking back to like, what do you want to do overall and how can we really set up and discuss your business in a way that it supports the lifestyle that you're trying to lead, and not just the business making its own goals and achieving them?

Because our clients, again, because they're one owner with small teams, there's a lot of overlap between what you do for your job and how much personal time you have outside of it. To be able to really spend it the ways that you want to. And when I consider that so many business owners really quit and started their own thing for freedom, there was this expectation that if I didn't work for anybody else, I could, you know, drop off and pick up my kids at the time that I needed to.

I could take vacations whenever I was ready. I always laugh at people saying, like being able to work from the beach. And I'm like, I don't want to work from the beach, I just want to be on the beach. But if that's a thing that you're looking forward to and that you want to have access to, getting out of the rat race of corporate feels like the reason that people started their businesses.

And if you're not really able to achieve that because you're now HR and it's an insert other job here for 30 employees, then we really want to reconsider whether the business that you built is the one that you want to run.

Yeah.

Yes. Yes. Now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because otherwise the business runs you. Right. Like I always give this example of years ago, I was burning out and I had this conversation with my husband, and I was kind of complaining about how hard everything got. And he was like, you built this, right? And I said yes. And he was like, you could have made any business in the world.

It came out of your brain and you built something that you hate. So like, make something else. And it was really a turning point for me to start thinking about. Was I chasing the wrong things? Was I interested in getting bigger? Or to your point, was I just on the hamster wheel of like, this is what we're supposed to do?

But I think bigger than that, I realized kind of to your point, that the business was controlling me. I would log in in the morning. It was like, whatever it happens to need for me today, I guess that's what I'm doing. But it made me and my family and my time an afterthought to what little fish needed for me.

And so when I made that switch to start thinking about the same ways that we talked to our clients, about being intentional, about how we grow and what we do, I need to make sure that I'm doing that for myself, too. Otherwise, I'm doing a disservice to both me and my team.

Everybody listening. If you haven't already, sign up for our five minute weekly email with practical tips for accountants and bookkeepers to escape the accountants trap. Go to the CFO project.com/newsletter.

Yeah, I think the first thing was I had to start considering pricing. I had to start thinking about if we were going to go deeper versus wider, which I thought was our way of making sure that we were taking fewer clients but providing more value. That had to cost more. And so the first thing was really a mindset shift, both internally and how we messaged externally to not just say, I'll take things off your plate or we will do these tasks for you and instead really say we're a growth partner in your business.

We are going to have conversations with you about what you're doing, about where you're headed. And we're going to go beyond just the task to really have a holistic relationship with you. So I think that was the first thing we had to adjust pricing and messaging to be a different kind of accounting firm. The next thing was I had to determine what my ideal team look like.

When you are striving to get bigger, there are so many little jobs and so many people that can do those little jobs. And so at first I thought, oh, maybe we'll have 10 to 15 people on the team and I'll just keep hiring. And as we get more clients, I will keep getting bigger. And instead, what I decided was our ideal team size was about 5 to 6, and we would only take as many clients as that team could serve.

It did a couple of things for me. It eliminated that kind of middle management layer that we were going to have to have if we kept getting bigger, and I started realizing as I was hiring and unfortunately firing, that that wasn't what I wanted. My job to constantly be like. We're only as good as the people on the team, and I'd have to keep like recruiting and bringing people in and training them.

And I was like, that's just not what I'm interested in. So I pare down what our team would look like. I made sure that everyone was excellent because when your team is small, you don't have time for mediocrity. And I just made a cap on that. The third thing that I had to do, and probably one of the most important final things, was I had to figure out what enough was for me so that I wouldn't be pressured to move beyond it.

And so once I determined for myself, what do I want my revenue to be? What does profit need to be? How much do I need to be able to pay myself and my team? I had to get comfortable with the idea that, for example, if we broke even, but I covered everything that I had planned to cover. That was a good thing.

And that meant unlearning this idea that, like bigger profit was automatically better. And so I should be constantly looking for ways to increase that and instead say, if I get paid the salary that I want and my team gets paid the salary that they want there, if I get paid the salary that I want and my team gets paid the salary that they need, and I'm also covering all of my expenses, if we don't make a dollar more than that, I already established a number that was abundant for me.

And so I like to remind people that, like building to enough doesn't mean broke. It doesn't mean I'm just getting enough for it to be sufficient. You are enough. Could be 1 million or 5 million or take home pay of 600,000. Whatever your number is, you just want to feel comfortable that if you tell that next potential client, hey, we're full, you don't feel like you're leaving money on the table because you got everything that you needed up to that point.

Exactly.

And you feel like you can't say no. Like it is always. If there is a client that is willing to pay us this much, why would I let them go? I'll just hire another person and they will support. And so to your point about it being stressful, it's always this constant up and down of bandwidth. And should I keep this person and when should I hire somebody else?

I wanted to make sure that that didn't have to be my life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's not sustainable. I think, you know, we all have parts in our careers and in our business ownership where it's going to require more time and effort than others. But what worries me about hustle culture is one when you already feel like you can't do enough or can't get enough time. It's a constant anxiety and stress on your body that obviously just leads to more burnout because you're constantly like, I have to be moving.

But the other part is that you can't keep doing that indefinitely if you never reach some kind of plateau or soft landing place where you're like, I'm good here, we're going to reevaluate to make sure that I'm doing what I want. But like, I don't have to do more right this second. To your point about that hamster wheel earlier, there is no place for you to get off because you're constantly chasing that next thing.

No. Yes.

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Yeah. So we offer three levels of service. All of them are holistic and year round. So we like to say that makes it kind of inflexible for some people who want to pick and choose off of a cafeteria plan. But it works for us because it makes sure if we take something on, we take all of it on.

So our base level is tax prep suite. This is really for clients who, already have a bookkeeper or advisor that they really love, but that person is not taking care of their taxes. We want to take care of everything from the filing to the quarterly estimates. Tax planning calls, reasonable comp analysis, anything that has to do with income taxes.

We want to make sure that we're there to kind of fill that gap for them as part of the rest of their financial team. The next level up includes everything that's in tax prep suite, plus bookkeeping and monthly reviews. And this is really for clients who don't have a bookkeeper, don't have a tax person, and generally are asking the question like, where is my money going?

Less advisory and more, hey, these numbers are correct. This is what's in there. Here's maybe a year to date overview of where you stand so far. Be able to use this to make strategic decisions about your next steps. And then finally our fractional CFO is all of that plus advisory. So that advisory includes budget forecast scenario planning. We like to use that as our like what's next level of service.

So if you know what all is in there we're doing a monthly call that not just went over not just went over last month, but also goes over where you are month to date. So you really have up to date information in order to make decisions. And a thought partner that's talking to you who runs a business.

I like to say that our business is a lot like our clients business is. It's no, it's no coincidence that we serve people that run businesses like ours, but also just being able to talk about everything from best practices to team changes to recommended softwares or resources that they can use. Really taking it beyond that. Hey, this is where everything is and it's accurate to what does this mean for me and my business?

We have five team members right now. And we're hiring for our six. And that means that we have two account managers, one for monthly and one for tax. We also have a senior accountant that does all of the first level reviews, bookkeeping entry information. We've got, head of ops. She manages onboarding all of our internal and back end stuff, but also just making sure that everybody from their first discovery call to actually getting into our systems is getting everything they need before they move into service.

And then finally, we've got a connections manager that manages partnerships, features, anything that is kind of putting me forward in order to talk about the firm and what we do. Thank you.

So I think the piece of advice that I would give is there's no one way to do it, but kind of peel off what you can from your peers. One of the things that has really worked well for me as a person who never worked in public accounting, didn't even know anybody that ran an accounting firm when I started Little Fish.

It's been really cool to be a part of communities where people are willing to support me, to answer my questions, to make sure that I'm like, on the right track. But at the end of the day, your firm is yours, and so you're going to get a lot of opinions about the ways that you should handle things, the ways that you should structure your services, even like how big your team should be.

And so when I think about build. So enough, when I think about like the services that we offer and how we do it, I would just remind everybody that like that is personal. And your decision of what your firm looks like and who you serve and who you hire, you have the opportunity to pick that and change that kind of regardless of what the industry is telling you to do.

Yeah. So if you want to learn more about my firm, you can go to little fish accounting.com. If you want to learn more about me, both as a speaker and as a trainer and all of those things, you can go to critico and then search for build to enough wherever you listen to this podcast and your favorites and you will find our over 100 episodes out there.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. This was cool.