Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Lifestyle accountant Show. I have Eleanor here with me. Producer Eleanor, we'd like to have a little bit of a chat before we start rolling the interview. Eleanor, how are you?
[00:00:21] Speaker B: I'm great. I was very excited to see your 2000 thousand and 23 year in review post. Went up on LinkedIn this morning as at the time of recording. So yeah, awesome to see it all written down. How did you feel posting that?
[00:00:36] Speaker A: I was so happy. I'm so happy with how it came together. The process, as you would know, being the writer editor of the article, not.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: My angle of bringing it up, by the way. I was going to pretend that that wasn't what happened.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Another job outside of being a producer. But I was really happy with it because I write my own review covering everything, and then that's not really in a format that's suitable to share. And so having a summarized version with the highlights, I was just so happy with how it came together. And Chantel, my partner, read it and she said, did you write this? And I had to say, it's my ideas, but I had some help finessing the writing.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: It's all you. Everything is you. It's just, yeah, had a slight bit of a zhujing, I think they would call it.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: I'm hoping that people will read it. LinkedIn doesn't really like it when you share links, which is what I've done. But I love reading other people's reviews. That's something. I'm a bit of a urine review junkie, so I read lots of other people's urine reviews and I find it inspires me. So I'm hoping that other people maybe who read this might share their reviews with me, or at least some of their reflections or their goals for 2024.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: If anybody does want to read your 2023 year in a review, it is up on Lifestyleacountant Co. Under the blog section if people want to want to go and find that. So apart from publishing, what else has happened this week? Have you gotten outdoors much?
[00:02:04] Speaker A: I have. Last week I didn't have as many calls or podcasts scheduled, so there was white space in my calendar, which I absolutely love. That is my favorite kind of week as much as I love. I actually really enjoy doing podcasts, whether it's this podcast or being a guest on other shows. That's one of my favorite things, too. But just having space in the calendar. I went for two midmorning surfs when it wasn't crowded, beautiful days on the Gold coast, and it just felt like I was able to get through deep work, hard work, but in an unhurried way because I wasn't trying to squeeze it in between meetings. I could focus and didn't have to think, oh, I'm going to have to switch train of thought. So I really enjoyed that part of the week as well as getting outdoors. And given that we're now end of January, coming into February, my kids are both back at daycare. And so that's just created a bit more space in the calendar as well to work and to exercise, as well as family time.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: Nice. And a bit more. I think there's lots of people at this time of year that are enjoying getting that predictability back again when it comes to family life. Right.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: I think our kids do better with that, too. We found behavior was challenging over the summer holidays, and I think it was because it was less routine. Probably they're eating worse food than usual, maybe a bit more screen time. And we found the last couple of weeks where my kids go to daycare twice a week, and the youngest one just started three times a week. And the older now goes to a nature play bush kindy type program, plus the normal community kindergarten. And so they're in a regular routine, same kind of things each week, things to look forward to seeing their friends. So, yeah, I feel much more relaxed.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: I'm following keenly along in your footsteps with the bush kindi outdoor kindy. I adore that. And so, yeah, we're not quite there yet, but also being based on the Gold coast as well, I'm hoping that you'll share all of your insights with us as we get a little bit closer when jacket's a bit older. So, yeah, lots of exciting things to look forward to.
[00:04:09] Speaker A: And how about you?
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Well, this last week, I've had a little resurgence of my love for TikTok. Actually, I was kind of into it maybe like 1218 months ago, and then I kind of just went totally off it. I was like, I'm not going down this rabbit hole, but I'm looking at it now really through a lens of. It's just such a phenomenal learning tool. Are you spending any time on TikTok at the moment, either consuming or creating?
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Neither. So I don't consume on TikTok. I also dabbled in creating on TikTok for a little while, and I still think there's a great opportunity there. But I'm not creating really any short film video content at the moment, even though I see it as a massive opportunity.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: Well, maybe we should think about this we'll have to take this part of the conversation offline, but the thing I've been keenly learning about lately is property investing, the value of owning your own home versus just rent vesting and blah, blah, blah. We've already got one property, and then we're sort of looking at expanding our portfolio and personal wealth creation, blah, blah, blah. All of these things that I know you adore and love.
But, yeah, TikTok, just as a tool to be able to go on there, search for exactly whatever it is you want to find. It's delivered to you in the most beautiful digestible format and it's so much more. I think, just as a search engine, it is so, so powerful and so, yeah, just particularly from a love of learning perspective, which I know we share, we've done like ship 30 for 30 together before, we've done peak Persona together before, we've done a bunch of different courses and different things. And so, yeah, I thought that had really sparked my interest in the last week because it's just actually so phenomenally good as a learning tool.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny you mentioned about things being so digestible on TikTok. So I've been going down a bit of a YouTube rabbit hole, learning about website creation, and someone I follow on YouTube actually rebuilt his website and he's a designer and then self taught developer, so I value his opinion. But the video was just too long, so I can't remember if it was 1520 minutes, something like that. And I just wanted the quick bullet points of how did you approach it? What order did you do it in?
Were there any pitfalls or things to be aware of? And so even though I respect this guy at the time that I wanted to digest that information, I didn't have 15 to 20 minutes to sit there and watch it totally.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: And I think that our appetite is just changing so much in terms of what are we willing to. I guess hopefully it's not putting up with it when you're consuming content, but when you are really there for a specific purpose, you do have to be mindful about how you're delivering it. So that video might have been better chopped up into 15 1 minute pieces rather than being a 15 minutes video.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: And hopefully I'm not just missing something crazy, given that I'm working on the team up website right now. So hopefully I haven't made a mistake in not watching that, but time will tell.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Look, I'm sure we'll find out and then that will become really interesting segment. If there was something that got stumped up along the way. How is the team up website coming along? I know we were chatting about that last week.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's coming along. So we've figured out, we start with the home page. We figured out all of the sections and I was writing the copy, but we decided to work with a professional this time. And so she's come back. We've done two drafts with her, and that's been great. And longtime listeners of the show will know that I don't like meetings and that I prefer asynchronous communication loom videos slack and email. But I did have a call with Isaac, who's the founder of Team up, to just brainstorm and go through section by section, the copy and give direct feedback to go through it together just in real time. And that was amazing. We made so much more progress hopping on that call together and having a laugh as well, working through it.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's certainly like it gets to that tipping point sometimes, doesn't it? Where there are situations and times when async, it's so much more efficient, it's so much better, it's so much more convenient. And then sometimes, especially when you just need that quick feedback loop, it is just sometimes easy to jump on, get it done in the five minutes rather than however long it might have taken to do it.
[00:08:26] Speaker A: Async and I think different work styles play into can. Isaac's probably more of a creative than me, and I'm more about how can we get this done fast and efficiently and work through the different sections? And I realized that my style wasn't really working for him when I was on the call, and so I chilled out a bit and we had a bit more fun, and that's when his creativity really got going. So a lot of the great ideas were his. But I don't think initially I was creating the right environment for that by trying to work through things fast and efficiently. But once we had a bit more of a joke around, that was when his great ideas were getting sparked.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Sometimes it's almost like, I guess you might consider that to be slowing down, but then you've still actually sped up in the grand scheme of things, haven't yeah. Different people. Yeah. Definitely work in very different ways.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Well, you have to tell me about what rent vesting is. I heard you mention that when we were talking about TikTok, and then I went down the TikTok rabbit hole. But I have to ask you, I mean, it sounds like an interesting term, and maybe I could guess, but what is it?
[00:09:31] Speaker B: I don't know if this is fair. I'm not the TikTok property investing guru, specialist, expert. I can refer you to some great videos if you want the official answer. Look, this is my understanding and full disclosure, I'm not an accountant. I'm not great with these kinds of things.
So basically, I think rent vesting is just where you're focusing on. I'm going to redo this already. Rent vesting is basically where you continue renting in order to be able to build your property portfolio and personal wealth and get on your personal wealth creation journey through property investing faster is basically my understanding of it. I'm sure that every single one of your listeners could probably explain it better than how I've just explained it. But, yeah, it's pretty much we're just trying to weigh up those different options, and I guess it's which I know you and I have spoken about a lot, which is weighing up the present day comfort and luxuries versus prioritizing, I guess, that comfort and luxury for down the track, because it's hard to be able to do both. So we're trying to walk that tightrope at the moment. How's that for a rent vesting explanation?
[00:10:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I love it. And it comes back, I think, to delayed gratification of, okay, what are you willing to sacrifice now for the future? But you don't want to sacrifice everything, because there might not. I don't want to be too dark, but you never know what's going to happen in ten years down the track or two years down the track. And so that's an interesting thing. It's an interesting question to think about.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: And I think you probably have better insight about that than a lot of people with your health journey that you went through a couple of years ago. And, yeah, Meryl, I feel like you're probably in one of the best positions of all to be able to, I guess, speak to know, given your breast cancer diagnosis from a couple of years ago. And I know, know clearly had a lot of thoughts and done a lot of thinking into that, the now versus later. So where are you landing on that?
[00:11:37] Speaker A: When I was growing up, I was strongly in the delayed gratification camp, so I'm willing to work hard now and make sacrifices now to build the future that I want. And the breast cancer diagnosis changed my attitude on that as well, as my partner has had two deaths in the family of people that weren't that old and were both unexpected. And so that's really changed her perspective on, okay, you don't know what's going to happen in the future. How can you live for now, but also set up a good future? And so now I'd say probably more towards the middle of that. That, yes, I still want to save, I want to build wealth, and I'm willing to make sacrifices to achieve goals, but I'm not willing to sacrifice everything. There's still boundaries around the non negotiables of what I want in day to know.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: I feel like there's so much in that topic that you should do a podcast about.
I'm so sorry. I just couldn't resist making a really corny joke in there. Speaking of the podcast, Meryl, what is happening on our episode this week? The perfect segue. And then we have two segues that we can choose from.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Yes. So today's episode, I'm talking with Jacqueline Anku. So we're talking all about education and community, and she's got a lot of experience in the space. So she describes herself as a small business and accounting community enthusiast. And I came across her when she was working at Gusto, leading Gusto Academy, which was their education product. But she's also very involved in community, and she's recently taken on a new role at Intuit, doing something very similar, working within their partner program, but through the lens of education. So I've got a ton of questions for her all about, well, how does this relate to accounting firm owners? And are there business opportunities for accountants in this education and community space? And spoiler alert, yes, we both think that there are. But listen into the episode to see where there might be some opportunities for you.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Yeah, this is such a good episode, and it's so interesting as well, given that you have so much experience creating courses and creating community as well. Maybe it'd probably be good to just give the listeners a bit of an overview of your course building experience and community building experience if you want to do that.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So a couple of years into beaning's, so that's going back many years now. I was really attracted to the idea of trying to build some products within the business rather than only selling services, because it felt like when we were selling services, so bookkeeping and accounting services, to scale revenue, we also needed to increase our headcount. And it felt like the bigger we were going to get, the more people we were going to need. And I liked the idea of building a small business, but wasn't really attracted to running a firm with 100 people. That was never my goal. And so I was trying to think about different revenue streams that we could add and education products were really interesting to me. I used to work as a tennis coach. That was actually my first business, and I did a minor in adult education when I was at university. So I've always been interested in teaching and coaching, so I felt like it was a good fit for my skill set. But I made a ton of mistakes in trying to bring a product to market for beaningers. And instead of testing out the idea or running in person workshops or webinars, I went straight to an expensive course. I worked with a course creator. I think I spent about $15,000 high in video production and working through what the course would cover without really understanding who my customer was going to be, how I was going to market it. There were some learnings there. I eventually got so stuck with that that I tried a different model where I pre sold a financial literacy course for business owners. And many of them were beanages clients that went through the course, but some weren't. And then I did that on the fly. So each week we had a Zoom call, and so I would create the course content for that week just a couple of days before it was due, record the videos, create the tasks for them, and then it was a really tight feedback loop. And there we.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: Yeah, they're two very different kind of models, aren't they?
[00:16:04] Speaker A: And I feel like the low production quality one actually ended up being more useful because I was adapting to the learner, because I could get feedback in the Zoom calls, they could ask questions, I could explain things on the fly. So I'd say that was one of the challenges. And if I was to do it again, I'd do much more of an MVP style launch. And then also marketing courses is very different to marketing accounting services, and you need to sell a lot more of them.
If you think that you're selling, maybe a client pays you $20,000 a year for accounting and bookkeeping services, and they might pay 500 or $1,000 for the course. Then you just need a lot more people buying. And we hadn't built that marketing funnel at that point to be able to.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: Get the mass that you really needed to make it worth it. Yeah, it's an interesting and hard trade off, isn't it?
[00:17:00] Speaker A: So we actually put that part of the business on hold. So during COVID when we were making a lot of tough business decisions, we shut down the courses part of the business. People can still buy it online, but shut down the cohort based course component.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: So do you think you might perhaps dabble again in the future.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: I'd like to. I still think there's opportunity, both with courses and also with community. I still believe in the model. I haven't got it to work yet, but I do intend to be back for another attempt. Not exactly sure what that's going to look like yet, but watch this face.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: If at first we don't succeed, try, try again.
That's the moral of the story with basically everything in business.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Well, I guess let's hand over to your past self and Jacqueline.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Meryl Johnston. The lifestyle accountant show exists to help today's accounting firm owners build successful firms while also living a healthy, happy life without sacrificing sleep your weekends or time.
[00:18:06] Speaker C: With loved ones if you are doing community and education programming at the top of your particular funnel. So in your example, if that's ecommerce, then the financial literacy, that's more of a general interest topic that's relevant to everyone makes a ton of sense. And maybe that's a lead generation or business development play for your firm. Whereas if you're looking to build community and education programs for clients who already work with your firm and you're looking to connect them to each other so that they can grow, that's a slightly different business problem that you can solve.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: So today we cover whether the expert in the course content should also actually be creating the course or whether it's better to split that role. So should your first piece of educational content, should it be a webinar? Should it be a DIY course that people can work through something else? So we talk through different options there and then we talk about whether community building is a topple funnel activity. So is it there to drive leads to your accounting firm? Or is it more of a retention strategy to build relationships with existing clients to help encourage them into purchasing different service lines?
[00:19:23] Speaker D: And now a word from our sponsors. This podcast is brought to you by team up, helping you to recruit top filipino accountants without the ongoing monthly fees. They can source accountants with experience working at us or australian firms who are familiar with tools like Xero, QBO, and Dext. They can also recruit specialist roles like bookkeeping, team leaders who have leadership experience.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: And australian tax specialists.
[00:19:49] Speaker D: I recently came on board as an investor and advisor to team up, and I love their ethical approach to the offshoring industry, where they look after both the accounting firm and the filipino accountants. Make sure to check out the team up newsletter for more content on building top tier accounting teams in the Philippines. That's at hireteamup.com. Hireteamup.com.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Jacqueline welcome to the podcast.
[00:20:18] Speaker C: Thank you for having me, Meryl. I'm so honored to be here.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: We're going to be chatting all about courses, education, community in the accounting industry.
I was really excited to talk with you after seeing what you'd created with the Gusto Academy. But before we dive into that, I'd love to get a little bit of your background about how you ended up at your role at Gusto and now intuit.
[00:20:42] Speaker C: Yeah, well, these are my favorite things to talk about, so I can't wait to dive in a little bit about me first. I'm born and raised in California, so California by hearts. But I had a real passion for working with small business entrepreneurs who were creating economic mobility for themselves through creating small businesses. And I also saw that small businesses in our neighborhood really helped the local arts and culture thrive. So I knew that this was my passion. And after school, I worked at a nonprofit micro lender here in the Bay Area that provided startup capital 5000 as well as technical assistance to first time entrepreneurs. I worked on the technical assistance side of the house, where we'd work with folks who'd received their capital and coach them on how to manage their cash flow and then plug them into different community resources so you can think local SBDC chapters or score chapters where they really got that coaching and guidance they needed. And I absolutely fell in love with the work.
And it was this experience that made me realize just how critical it is that these small business owners have a clean view of their financials as well as advice from an accountant. So when the opportunity presented itself for me to hop into tech and go work at Xero with accountants, I just couldn't believe it. I was so excited.
Didn't need to convince me. I went over to Xero, had an amazing experience doing community and education there, and really looking at how they'd scaled their program at a global level and just how much thoughtfulness and beauty went into the overall design of the experience and how they think of education as a content product.
[00:22:26] Speaker A: I have to jump in there. So when you were working at the not for profit, you were working with some of these local entrepreneurs on things like cash flow. Did you come from some kind of accounting or financial background?
[00:22:39] Speaker C: No, I didn't actually. I actually studied the arts in school, which has served me well now that I'm doing more creative work and content production. But I did end up going back to school to get my mba. So I had knowledge of finance and marketing and systems from that academic experience. But it turns out that working with hundreds of clients, it's pretty easy to see patterns emerge. So, yeah, that's kind of how I ended up doing that.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: And then what year were you at, zero?
[00:23:09] Speaker C: Oh, gosh, I think it was 2017 to 2019.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: That would have been an interesting time. So I've being based in Australia, the zero ecosystem is huge. So we've seen it's got huge market share in Australia and the ecosystem really expanded and I think changed the industry with cloud accounting and then that allowed firms to go into value based pricing or fixed fee pricing. But with my firm beanages, we also operate in the US market. And my sense is that Zero found it a lot harder to get traction. And actually it's a great product, but there's a really well known software company that you now work for, that household name.
What was that like for you? I think zero, back in 2017 to 190, would have been fairly new, I think, in the US market. What was that like?
[00:24:01] Speaker C: I feel so lucky. I think I worked at Xero at a really magical time where it was just on the up and up. It was presenting this alternative solution that some of the leading folks in the space really were attracted to because it was different. And I think Xero stood for something that was a more intuitive, easy to use experience for both the accountant and their clients. And like attracts like. So the community began to grow. I think Xero has also done a phenomenal job leading with education and community.
So I feel incredibly lucky that I got to see Zero on this upwards trajectory and to have seen how far the company's come.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: And then I believe when you were at zero, you might have met someone there that then led on to the next phase of your career. So do you want to share that story?
[00:24:51] Speaker C: I sure did. So Xero also, as part of their community offerings, has done a great job building up a network of brand ambassadors. And one of the folks I worked with at the time was named Will Lopez. He happens to be a known figure in this space, and he got picked up by Gusto to go build out their partner program. And at the time, Gusto had achieved product market fit, but was very much in the early days of building out its partner programs and marketing offerings for accountants. So will's just done a phenomenal job there. So he called me up and was like, hey girl, you should come on over to zero and help me build out the education and community offerings. And I kind of thought it was too good to be true, to be honest with you. But then I felt like, I don't know, I kept on pitching myself for the next four years.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: Wow. And good on wilt for building those relationships in the industry and then tapping you on the shoulder, because I've seen from the outside what Gusto's done in that community and education space, and it's phenomenal. Phenomenal. I'm just going to go back and rerecord the. Can't say phenomenal, but anyway, yeah. So can you talk about your time at Gusto and what your role was there?
Yeah.
[00:26:10] Speaker C: So I started at Gusto with this mandate to build a certification program because I think the folks at Gusto sort of generally were aware of, like, hey, accountants have an appetite for education. But other than that, it was pretty much a blank slate where I got to come in and craft it from the ground up. So it was a phenomenal opportunity for me in my career. I think the big learning for me, though, going from a general ledger company to payroll, was really wrapping my head around, how do accountants think about payroll? And why is it that people don't like payroll? What is it about payroll that just feels so hard?
So that was a big learning. You know, I'm sure to this audience's recognition, payroll is very high risk. And as a subject matter, it's not taught, at least in America, as part of undergraduate. Typically, it's not taught as part of the CPA exam, which means that most practitioners end up learning it on the job. And that's scary when you think about, not only are my clients paychecks on the line, but also there's a lot of tax implications. So I think then, from the firm owner perspective, it leads to this hesitancy around, well, do I really want to offer payroll as a service? And if I do, okay, maybe I will to some of my clients who I care about because it makes them stickier. But generally, we were finding folks didn't think about this as a revenue opportunity for their firm.
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm an accountant like that. I had a bit of exposure to payroll when I was in audit, and to me, it felt like a high risk area where and low return in that clients wouldn't pay that much for it. But if you got it wrong, there was fines, there was potentially legal action, there's unpaid taxes. So there was all of these risks of things that you were potentially liable for. Quite easy to get wrong in Australia, because there's so many different laws around payroll, but the clients wouldn't pay that much for it. So I would have been one of those at BDG is one of those firms that kind of, we have to do payroll sometimes because the client needs it. But it felt like, oh, we're kind of being dragged into this rather than something we want to do.
[00:28:19] Speaker C: Yes, I think you very accurately represent the voice of many accountants, and definitely what will and I were hearing back at the time. But will had this incredible insight back when he was in practice and working with clients that, hey, as their trusted advisor, clients are coming to you with questions about their business. And in today's knowledge economy, many times business is run by people. So if you, as the accountant, are in a position to answer questions or point your clients in resources when it comes to their people, then you're actually not as valuable as you may think. And that was really the impetus behind people advisory as this new consultative service in which accountants pair their knowledge of finances with knowledge of people operations.
[00:29:12] Speaker A: Amazing. And so the goal was that part of the strategy of carving out this new space of people advisory and then building education and community around that.
Could you talk about that strategy?
[00:29:27] Speaker C: So will had this initial idea for people advisory, and then Covid hit, and all of a sudden, people advisory started coming to life in the real world, because clients were turning to their accounts to ask for advice on PPP and what it would mean to keep their team around and how they balance their overall operation, but by putting people at the center. So the timing of bringing people advisory to market really couldn't have been any more important in the sense of we were sort of introducing a language and a way of thinking to something that accountants and clients alike were already experiencing.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: And then where did the Gusto Academy fit in with that strategy?
[00:30:13] Speaker C: So we launched our first certification program on people advisory. And over time, we've realized just how important it is to meet people where they're at in their overall learning journey. So for many of Gusto's partners, they're ready to rock. They want to dive into people advisory training. They're ready to go into the accelerator program to build up their firm. But there's quite a few others who are maybe just there. They just want to learn payroll. They're just ready to get payroll certified. And later on in their own professional journey, they'll adopt people advisory. So when we went from offering people advisory as a single program to this broader suite of learning paths where people could go broad or go deep on the learning adventure of their choosing, it became clear that we needed to create a new programming vehicle that was Gusto Academy, sort of contain this rich library of training that we've created over the four year period.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: Has that worked well from a business strategy perspective for Gusto? From the outside, it looks like it has. But I'd be interested in your take on that. Was the goal achieved in creating the Gusto Academy and the education and community around that.
[00:31:27] Speaker C: Yeah, I'd like to say yes, pretty biased. But when I think about the business impact of Gusto Academy, I like to think about this through the framework of a know. At the top of our funnel is really how is Gusto differentiating its brand and telling a different story above and beyond the features it offers as a payroll product and people advisory? And the programming that we built in service of people advisory really allowed gusto to innovate and push the profession forward in a way that it desperately needed, because there hadn't been innovation around payroll in so many years.
So from a brand awareness narrative perspective, yes.
Then when you think about, okay, education helps attract the right firms into the partner program because they see the value of what Gusto is offering as a partner. So Gusto is showing up as a partner, not just as a software company. And then we get those firms into the partner program, and then we add fuel to that fire by actually putting them through the training that we'd created.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: And so if you were thinking about education and community from an accounting firm perspective, do you feel like there's an opportunity for firm owners to build? Maybe not to the size of Gusto academy, but some kind of educational community offering for their clients or potential clients?
[00:32:50] Speaker C: 100% yes. And I know this is a passion of yours, Meryl, so I'm so excited you brought up the topic. And I would say there's a lot of parallels there in terms of thinking about, as a firm, your funnel. At the top of your funnel, it's about telling the story of your firm and your brand. So almost every firm has a website or does some level of online promotion. So how do you stand apart from the crowd? What is it that you're offering? And creating these types of resources really does allow you to tell a different story.
Then, of course, client onboarding is a pivotal moment in which education, of course, plays a big role, because you're training your clients on more tactical things, of how to work with you, how you can both speak the same language. And then if you think about the long tail of their journey with your firm, how do you connect them with their peers and give them resources? Especially if you offer services for a niche, how do you give them more insight above and beyond that possibly one time a month you meet with them to review their financials.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: So I'm a big believer that there is an opportunity for educational products, but also building community with accounting firms. I have tried it at Beaningers, and we didn't get it right, but I think the main reason, there's two main reasons for that. So we tried it about four years ago, and I created some online courses, recorded a whole bunch of videos, and we definitely had people, we probably had about 30 people go through cohort based courses, charging about, we were trying to build it as a revenue stream. So we're charging about $1,000 a person to go through a cohort based course with people actually attending live sessions and having homework. And then we also tried a community, so a slack community, but with organizing meetups. But I think our issue was, that was before we were really, the firm was in the ecommerce niche, so it was very broad around, well, what problem are we trying to solve with this community? And there's all different kinds of businesses, all different sizes of business, and different, they had different problems in their businesses that they were trying to solve. And so I think our challenge was, I think we would have done much better once we were in the ecommerce niche to build a community, talking about finances just for ecommerce, just for a certain size of business, and creating education around that. I think our issue was that it was too broad. So there was not a real, we weren't really solving a clear problem with the community. And then the same with the courses, it was, again, too broad. It was financial literacy for every type of entrepreneur, rather than just for ecommerce. And then we also realized, selling courses, you need to sell a lot more of them than you do to make the same revenue than if you provide accounting services for a client. And our marketing wasn't strong enough back then to bring in enough lead or bring in enough participants to do the courses. So I definitely feel like there's an opportunity. I've tried it and it didn't work. But I do see other people out there in the industry doing it. Well.
[00:35:51] Speaker C: Yeah, it's hard. And I think you bring up a good point, is that community and education are content products, and you have to market them in the same way you do other products and have messaging and positioning and marketing budget and all the things behind it. Even if that budget is bare bones, that's fine. But you have to think about it in terms of how am I going to sell this product, as opposed to just, I'm going to build it therefore, people.
[00:36:14] Speaker A: So I'd love to hear about what it actually looked like building out gusto academy, and there might be some lessons in there around how you approached it, what kind of team you brought in to help, and then how some of those lessons might apply to the accounting firm owner that wants to get started with education or community.
[00:36:36] Speaker C: Yeah, I'll walk you through the process that I took and then call out how folks could maybe approach it in a more mvp style along the way. So I would say the absolute most important thing is starting with knowing who your learner is. So it's the same thing as knowing your customer. In this case, you have to know your learner. So when I think about it, for the type of programming we're building out here, it's not just, oh, I'm out to teach accountants. It's, well, there's many different roles within a firm. There's hands on practitioners, there's decision makers, there's firm leaders, there's payroll specialists. So who exactly is my learner? What baseline of knowledge do they already have and what action do I want them to accomplish? And it's in doing those two things where you can then come in and do some sort of gap analysis, say, what action do they need to accomplish? What do they know now, and what do they need to know in order to accomplish that thing in learning? And that's called a needs analysis. And through doing a needs analysis, you can then craft your learning outcomes. So, learning outcome for anybody who's taken a webinar or done CBE credits, these are those three things typically in the description of through doing this, you're going to identify XYZ, you're going to understand, blah, blah, blah.
But those are sort of sacrosan that those learning outcomes are what all of the content needs to ladder up to, because in proper learning design, the learning outcomes, you have to be able to test on them.
Did my content actually do the job of teaching the person this thing that they need to go identify or analyze or understand? And can I test you on it? So you understand your learner, you craft your learning outcomes, and then sort of comes the fun part of getting to create the content with gusto. Thankfully, with the resourcing I had there, I got to bring together a diverse team of instructional designers along with subject matter experts. Now, instructional designers are sort of the content creators, if you will, who are incredibly knowledgeable about adult learning theory and overall learning design.
And they work in partnership with a subject matter expert. What we call SMEs sort of help mine their knowledge so in this case, a SME would be an accountant, right? The accountant actually knows what they do, but it's the instructional designer who's going to bring that knowledge to the top and then craft it in a way that a learner can digest. What I find lots of times in this space is that sometimes the SMEs are asked to do the instructional design or they're asked to teach, and that can be really hard because there's something called the curse of knowledge, where when you just know something, it actually becomes harder to teach it. So that partnership really helps offset the curse of knowledge, if you will. So the instructional designers create the content, and then once that's created in what we call storyboards, then you get to dive a little bit deeper and say, okay, what's the creative treatment I'll give to these storyboards? When do I use video? When do I use storytelling from our community or interactive clickable elements to really help the learning stick?
[00:39:52] Speaker A: So if an accounting firm owner was creating the content themselves, they might not have the budget to be paired with the instructional designer. So what are some tips around if they're trying to do both parts themselves to make that content digestible? So say they were in the real estate niche and they wanted to create some kind of educational content, what do you think they should start with? Should it be something like a 1 hour webinar, or should it be more like an online course?
What would you recommend the first product is? And then also, what are some of the instructional design tips to get that subject matter expert hat off and to make it easy content to digest and learn from.
[00:40:40] Speaker C: Yeah, you got it. So I'd say the first thing, no matter your budget, always start with who your learner is and what they need to learn so that you can craft your learning outcomes. I would recommend a website if you Google Bloom's taxonomy.
I google it all the time. You'll pull up all of these different verbs that show you different ways you can craft your learning outcomes. It's sort of relatively lesser known in our space, yet hopefully a handy resource for folks who are listening. Then you can craft your learning outcomes, and you sort of just have to have that discipline yourself to say, you don't have to boil the ocean. You don't have to teach your learner all things.
What is it that they just need to know in order to hit those learning outcomes? I would say when I think about modalities, self paced training, or elearning, if you will, is much more costly to produce than webinar programming. You can almost think of this as producing a movie versus a play. Movies, once you've filmed the thing, you're stuck. That's what you have to live with versus a play. You get to change it every night, right. So I would say, as you're starting out, go with what we call instructor led training.
So this could be a webinar, this could be a class to your local community and just give feedback. Is this making sense? Is it resonating?
I am very much of a mind that very few Netflix movies are longer than 90 minutes. Overall, adult attention spans are dwindling by the day. So force yourself to have that discipline to do teach more, but in less time. And this usually just means getting really specific.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: There's a quote I like related to that. I forget who it's from, but it basically says, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter, which is basically saying that it's harder to make something more simple and concise. That actually takes more effort to do that than to just have a brain dump of all kinds of information.
[00:42:43] Speaker C: Yes, that resonates so much. And what I found with people who are just new with this type of content development is that there's a tendency to want to teach everything which is beautiful and amazing, and yet not always the most helpful for our learners.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: I struggled with that when I was creating my financial literacy course for business owners, because I almost was trying to create what I learned in my accounting degree. And then I realized, no, I don't have to teach all of this. What are the essential elements? And a mistake that I made there was instead of doing what you recommended, which was the play approach, where I could have adapted and changed and got feedback on my learning, I recorded a whole video, paid for, production quality video content, ten module.
I think something like ten module course took months to create. And in hindsight, I should have started with something much smaller and tested it.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: And got feedback.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Because that kind of video quality, it's nice, but it wasn't needed. First up, I should have been testing. I would have actually liked to teach it, live with people in the classroom and get their feedback and then just keep on practicing and iterating and practicing until really figuring out what was going to work well for an online course before investing.
[00:44:09] Speaker C: I think that's so well said, because there's something so magical about being in a shared space with your students or your learners and just seeing their body language and seeing those lights go off. It's so energizing to use the content developer and also to just give such clear signal of where people start fidgeting versus where they're leaning in of what you need to hone and tweak for your next iteration before going all in and producing know Hollywood level end course production that is quite costly.
[00:44:39] Speaker A: I believe you're at gusto for four years and now you've moved to Intuit and I think you're doing something similar in the education and community space there. Could you talk a bit about your new role?
[00:44:51] Speaker C: Yes. I am just a few months into my intuit journey and I am so excited to be here to work at a company that just touches so many lives.
It's very humbling to think about how many pro advisors are certified and how that has helped shaped their career journeys and their overall professional development. So I'm quite honored to be in this role where been invited in to really push pro advisor training and certification into the future so that it's of service to those CAS practices who are growing and providing more sophisticated services to their clients.
[00:45:29] Speaker A: And so what does that role look like day to day? Is that involving creating new trading programs, adapting what you have something different?
[00:45:39] Speaker C: Right now that I'm in the early stages, it's been a lot of listening and absorbing from internal folks and from the community to hear first, how does our current suite of programming resonate? Is it helpful? How can it be more helpful? How can we make sure that we're driving as much impact as possible and then zooming out from what exists, what doesn't exist that should? How can we be sure to build for where the profession is headed as opposed to where it's been? So from just early observations it feels like there's a real appetite for programming around how to build a CAS firm for all different levels of the practice. Firm leaders at firms both small, medium and large, how do we make sure that they have the resources to drive the change that they're looking to drive? And then for decision makers, how can they stay abreast of all of the different great things that are going on in the market? And then of course for practitioners, how do they have the skills, both soft and technical, that they need to make the leap from compliance into advisory?
[00:46:46] Speaker A: And it's interesting that you're talking about CAS specifically. I've got some views on that that I'll share in a moment. Why do you think intuit is focusing this attention on CAS, which I think is a fair. It's a newer industry segment than the tax specific firms or tax specific offerings. So why do you think it's an important area that the intuit's deciding to invest into.
[00:47:10] Speaker C: It's investing in all different areas of the profession. I would say I have a particular passion for cas and wanting to make sure that we're showing up well for those firms. When I look at the data from AICPA and from accounting today, CAS is the fastest growing niche the profession seen in decades, with 16% year over year growth. And that's not slowing down. So how do we make sure that if it's not slowing down, that means that those clients need those services from different firms? So how do we make sure that we're all being of best service to the small business entrepreneurs and large business entrepreneurs, and those entrepreneurs who really need that help?
[00:47:54] Speaker A: And what does Kaz actually stand for? Because I hear different definitions. So what is the intuit definition?
[00:48:01] Speaker C: Yeah, agree with you that there's lots of different definitions. At Intuit, we define it as client advisory services.
[00:48:09] Speaker A: Okay, client advisory services.
In my head, I had cloud accounting services, so I'm glad we cleared that up. Lots of people have different definitions. To me, in Australia, cas is probably bookkeeping plus management. Accounting is how we would define it. And again, there's not a clear definition of what that work. Generally, it's not tax work. And in Australia, advisory is separate to the processing of the data that creates the monthly management accounts.
I think it's interesting that it's still being defined as to what actually is that service offering.
[00:48:49] Speaker C: Yeah, I agree. Thank you for clearing that up. And I agree, it is really fascinating that there's no one clear definition, but that also too, sort of reflects in my mind how quickly it's grown. And there's been relatively little standardization. There's not a cast degree that one can go out and get, or a learning path in the same way we see with tax and audit. So in some ways, therein lies the opportunity for someone like myself to come alongside and continue building education and community programs that can really help push the profession forward.
[00:49:24] Speaker A: So beaning is, my firm was started, we called it bookkeeping, which actually, we moved away from that term, because if you call something the same piece of work bookkeeping or accounting, you can charge more for it if you call it accounting. So we stopped using that term. But that's a service line that's close to my heart. And I think there's opportunity in building firms that start with that and then add tax. And it wasn't possible before cloud accounting because the work had to be done on site by an internal accountant or bookkeeper, whereas now it can be done in the cloud. I actually think that's the heart of accounting, is those accounts payable, accounts receivable, daily bank reconciliation processing that gets you accurate data, which then off the back of that, you can do tax work, you can provide advisory services. So I feel like in the future that will actually be the core hub of accounting practices. And we're seeing a bit of a transition in Australia with newer firms starting like that. Whereas many traditional firms are tax first and then are having to build out. It's a different skill set, in my view, to understanding tax law, to understanding how these internal finance processes all fit together. So I think clever of intuit to potentially you'll be carving out another space similar to what you did with people advice.
[00:50:48] Speaker C: That's the hope. That's the hope.
[00:50:50] Speaker A: So is there anything else that you'd like to share on the community building side of things or the education side of things that you think would be helpful for accountants, accounting firm owners to embrace this as an opportunity in their firms?
[00:51:06] Speaker C: You know what was sparking for me, Meryl, as you were sharing your lessons learned from having done this is a few things, I suppose. One is that the sort of impact one can drive with any type of community and education programming really sits at the center of solving for both a customer and business problem. So it's in the middle of that Venn diagram, and I think that's what's really made me fall in love with this type of work, is that you have to think through the stool lens. What do my customers need? How does that help them, and how does that ultimately impact my business in a way that's positive and will get me money to reinvest back into the space.
So there's different reasons to do this kind of work. And I think that that intersection of customer and business problem changes based on where your customers are in their overall customer journey and the problems you're looking to solve. So if you are doing community and education programming at the top of your particular funnel. So in your example, if that's ecommerce, then the financial literacy that's more of a general interest topic that's relevant to everyone makes a ton of sense, and maybe that's a lead generation or business development play for your firm.
Whereas if you're looking to build community and education programs for clients who already work with your firm and you're looking to connect them to each other so that they can grow, that's a slightly different business problem that you can solve. So I just really encourage people to think through that dual lens and think about how the business problem they could solve differs as you move through that customer journey.
[00:52:52] Speaker A: And I wanted to drill into the community side of things quickly. We've talked about the education side, and there's different options of the way that you can pass on, educate different learners, and sometimes that could be solo learning, where they're self paced learning, they're going through that themselves. How do you bring the community piece into that, where you mentioned that they can be interacting with each other? What are your thoughts on the best way to do that?
[00:53:20] Speaker C: When I think about why trading or community and education go hand in hand, education is just a point in time. Even if you have a certification program that's say, 4 hours, really, it's not about getting people certified, it's about trying to change their behavior. So it's about what happens after they get certified. And behavior change many times is driven by having accountability, and that's where community comes in. So community is there for the long tail of your overall journey. When I zoom out even further and think about this through a community builder lens, many times education serves as a point of initiation to bringing someone into the fold of my community.
So the education is going to give them the skill set, confidence and knowledge they need to be successful and to show up as their full self within this community of peers that I've created for them. And once they're there, what are those rituals that I build to help keep them engaged? That we do daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, sort of give a sense of meaning and purpose to their role within this shared space.
[00:54:30] Speaker A: I hadn't thought about it like that, but that was actually what happened when I ran the cohort based courses. So they were normally groups of six to ten people that would come together for the six weeks. They actually got to know each other and stayed in contact afterwards. And it was easier to try and build community with them because they already had spoken, they knew each other, they'd been talking about their business problems through a financial lens. Then when we were trying to do the cold start slack community, where no one really knew each other and there wasn't a reason for them to engage. So we created community by accident with the course, because, as you said, education brought them together, whereas when there wasn't a particular reason for them to engage and they weren't working on the same tasks, we found that harder. So what kind of rituals have you got? Some examples of rituals that you can use. And also, what's the forum? Where do they connect? Is it something like Slack or a forum software, how do you maintain those relationships?
[00:55:33] Speaker C: Yeah, okay. I'm shaking my head vigorously at everything you're saying. So I'm so glad that that framing resonated with you. And we've just seen it time and time again, that when you bring people together for a shared experience, and many times that is an education experience or program that helps build that sense of togetherness and unity. In terms of the rituals, yes. If it's a geographically dispersed community, then having some sort of virtual hub, the technology, there's so many different options on the market, but I think Slack's a great one because it's in so many people's workflow. And the way that I think about rituals is the more frequent the ritual, sort of the lower the production value. In a know intuit. Our annual ritual is, and that's this huge, fabulous experience in Las Vegas that's once a year. It makes sense that it would be like really extravagant and sort of fantastic in nature. Whereas a more humble daily ritual could be posting a Monday morning update on the Slack channel to share something special that happened in your weekend or posting a Friday win of the week, you want to share with your community something that brought you joy during the week and that you want to celebrate with them and them with you.
[00:56:53] Speaker A: Jacqueline, it's been amazing having you on the podcast. This is one of my favorite topics. I really enjoyed the chat. Lastly, I wanted to see if you've got any predictions. In the accounting industry, it doesn't have to be related to education and community, but it can be for the rest of 2024.
[00:57:12] Speaker C: Okay, this is a good one. I would say I'm biased here, but there is also an opportunity for firm leaders to build community and deliver education to their own teams. So in addition to investing in these types of programs for your clients, you can also take that more l and D lens and think about how do I invest in my teams? Feel like we've seen over the past few years, in light of the talent shortage and other factors, just this over indexing on automation and tech stack, and then you add AI. But at the end of the day, in my humble opinion, it's all about people. It's all about the people on your team and how you're empowering them to have a great experience at work. So the more firm leaders can lean into community and education their own teams, the more that their firm will thrive.
[00:58:01] Speaker A: I love that. And we were talking about how education can lead to community. And I can see how creating those programs within your firm would lead to a stronger team, a stronger team culture. So love that. Awesome. Well, Jacqueline, thanks so much. Thanks for coming by.
[00:58:17] Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:58:22] Speaker A: I had a blast chatting with Jacqueline today about one of my favorite topics. As I said at the beginning of the episode, I haven't quite got education products or community to work for me from a revenue perspective yet, but I still believe in the model and I'm hoping to have something to show in the next couple of years. A couple of standout points from my perspective of things that Jacqueline was sharing. Start with the learner in mind, and this is a bit like if you're giving a presentation, then start with the audience in mind. She also talked about being aware of what their baseline knowledge is and thinking about how do you take them from that to where you want them to be after the course, it was another reminder for me to always start with an MVP, a minimum viable product, and think about how to test the idea for the course in simple ways without spending a whole lot of money or worrying about high production quality. And that's something I remember learning about in the ship 30 for 30 course where they talked about data driven writing. So test an idea with a tweet or a LinkedIn post and if that works, then maybe a short form article or maybe a long you can then progress to a 3000 word article and then progress to the course. And so that's something I try. What I think is useful when thinking about courses or online education products, but also just generally. How can you test something in a small way before you spend a whole lot of money or resources? If you've been enjoying the podcast, then reviews make a big difference to help encourage other people to check it out. So if you are enjoying it, I'd really appreciate it. You can go to ratethispodcast.com lifestyleaccountant to leave a review or comment.
See you again next weekend.
