[00:00:05] Speaker A: Hi there and 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 with loved ones. Shout out to the listeners who have been leaving pod cash reviews we have 15 five star reviews on Spotify and another eight on Apple podcasts. I'm going to read one from Apple Podcasts. Accountant and bookkeeper founders or future founders must listen so many takeaways and great stories about how you can or should be looking at running your firm from starting up to selling up to growing or just getting it done. So much in here to unpack. Do yourself a favor and start listening. And that's from Woodstock. So thanks for taking the time to leave a review.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: If you have been enjoying the podcast.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Please go ahead and leave us a review. You can go to ratethispodcast.com forward Slash lifestyleaccountant and simply select your preferred streaming platform. That's ratethispodcast.com forward slash lifestyle accountant. Today I have Yati Kim joining me on the podcast to talk about striving to run a firm and live a life that aligns with your values. And sometimes that means tough choices. It means trade offs and making hard decisions like slowing down business growth or not taking on new clients. Yati is the founder of Growthia. He's the co founder of a four E, which is a bookkeeping and tax services company. And he's also the co founder of.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: FP and Hay, which is a newsletter and education business.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Outside of his ventures, he's an avid brazilian jiu jitsu practitioner, tech enthusiast, and is a loving husband and father of one.
[00:01:52] Speaker C: One of the things that I do, and it's actually funny enough, all starts with notion. I have a notion. I call it the schedule DB. DB just stands for database. And at the top it just says my key priorities. And so one of those things, and it ties back to my goals. One of those goals this year was take a vacation every quarter. And so every week, along with tracking my time, reviewing my timesheets, I also look at my notion, key priorities. And I just ask one question, am I actually doing that thing? And so I like to use this as a triangulation point for me personally, where I look at those goals and say, yardy, are you actually spending time with your family? You say you are. Your data doesn't really show that. You wrote this in your notion. You're not saying that. And one of the things that my wife and I talk about. I'm my own harshest critic and so I look at that and I put a lot of pressure on myself on those things. But I like to use as a triangulation point with my toggle time track and ensure that I'm spending the time that I said I would spend the time. Otherwise, I like to reassess and go, is it really a priority for me? And I like to use those monthly check ins to reassess whether those things are still true or not.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Today we cover Waigati turned down an accounting role at Amazon to take a seven month sabbatical with his wife, making the tough decision to pause growth at their firm. How he navigates parenting when there's two ambitious working parents in the family. Why he tracks time and how he uses that information to see whether he is actually spending time on what he values the most. Carving out time for yourself as an entrepreneur and parent and managing that guilt. How to relax when you also have a burning ambition to be successful. And a little bit of insight into why he started a newsletter and community business. All that and more coming right up on the lifestyle accountant show.
And now a word from our sponsors.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: This podcast is brought to you by.
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[00:04:19] Speaker A: The accounting firm and the Filipino accountant. Make sure to check out the team up newsletter for more content on building top tier accounting teams in the Philippines. That's at hiateamup.com hireteamup.com.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Hey, yati, welcome to the show.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: It's really good to see you again. How was your thanksgiving?
[00:04:43] Speaker B: Well, it was good. I mean, we don't really celebrate it here in Australia, but I do have us team members. So we've been sharing photos of turkeys and the emoji in slack and we've had quite a few team members off, but I don't personally celebrate. How about you?
[00:04:58] Speaker C: We do celebrate. It's a key thing for us and our family with our son here. I didn't celebrate it growing up, but I wanted to make sure our son had that experience. And similar to you, I had reached out to a friend who lives in Canada and I said, happy thanksgiving. She's like, thanks, yardi. That was a couple days ago. But I appreciate that you don't realize that those days are different for everyone. But, yeah, no, it was a good one. We had a nice meal and we brought over some friends.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: What is thanksgiving about?
It seems like it's about gratitude. Well, giving thanks, but how would you describe.
[00:05:30] Speaker C: I think that's how I think about it. I forget the actual history behind it, but I look at as an opportunity to kind of take a step back. I think about it and go, wow, eleven months has gone by. We're going into December, and I think we just live in a weird world where it's hard to think about what we're grateful for. And so I take a step back and just my personal journey of what I've been through in my life, I look at the things around me, the people I've met, my son that's four years old now, and I'm just really grateful for everything that's around us. I think it is challenging, given everything that we all deal with every day. But I use this as an opportunity to kind of take a step back and go, hey, I'm in good shape. I have good people around us. I have a wife and a son that I adore. And, yeah, it's just a time to just take a step back and breathe and relax. So that's how I look at Thanksgiving, at least.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I can see the benefit of taking some time to do that.
And we talk a little bit about this, you and I, when we're chatting about just how busy life can get. We've got businesses. We've got family, young children.
We've both got different hobbies, sports and trying to fit all of that in.
[00:06:40] Speaker C: I couldn't agree more.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: So I'd love to hear a little bit about we're going to dive into the business, or you've got a couple of businesses on the go, but let's hear a little bit of the backstory of your accounting career and then how that led you into starting this business.
[00:06:57] Speaker C: Yeah, that's actually a really great question. I'm going to take this back more than 15 years, way back now. So this has really shown my age now. So when I was coming out of college, I really wasn't even sure what I was going to major, and I just knew that, hey, I need to learn how to make money and save money. So naturally fell into accounting and finance. I actually got my major in finance with a concentration in investment finance. My original goal was to go into investment banking. And unfortunately, that whole industry destroyed our economy. So that was off the table. And I was very fortunate enough to land a job at a Fortune 100 company doing their financial management program. And I didn't know really anything about it. I just thought, hey, it's Fortune 100. Great on the resume. Cool. But what was really interesting about it was I was at a plant and I got to work with the people on the plant floor, and it just really sparked my interest. I looked at the situation, I just kind of took it for what it is, and I said, this is a great opportunity to learn how things are made here. I worked at a lightings plant, and it was just really cool to see how these filaments that are in your light bulbs get made. And even more cool, even cooler than that, was working with not only my manager, but the operations managers as well. And looking at how do they look at productivity, how do they look at when they're negotiating with their suppliers. I just thought the whole thing was just so interesting. And then on top of that, it was where I started learning pivot tables. And that just kind of sparked everything for me with Excel. So that's how I kind of kicked off my accounting career. And I did that for about the program was two years with four rotations, and I traveled to four different locations here in the US. So I did everything from that plan accounting role to a corporate consolidating role. At the time, it was kind of commercial finance, which is like pricing and deals. And so I did all that. And in between there, I did some auditing, I did some reconciliation. So I did the whole gamut of accounting. I did reclass journal entries, all that fun stuff. And it was an intense program. I don't know what it's like now, but you had to pass all four rotations, you also had to pass the courses. We had to do coursework. And I also got my six Sigma certification as a part of that. And I learned a lot of great fundamentals, learned a lot about accounting and just how a company operates at that level, and learned a lot from that experience. In those two years after that, I realized early on that I probably wasn't going to be there for the long term. And so I started thinking about where would I want to go. I just knew it in my heart that I didn't want to be at a big company, didn't really know how to articulate that, but knew that I wasn't going to be there for too long. And so after a couple of years, doing that, I left to a smaller company, still pretty big, I guess, relatively speaking. It was about a billion dollars in the e commerce space. And I still remember to this day, I spoke to the vice president of finance in that group, and he said to me, yardy, there is no process here. There's nothing that you've seen at a ge there. In fact, you might even hate it here. And I think he was doing his best to just kind of not encourage me to get the job, but something about it. I remember going, I really like this. It's a challenge.
My background is I wrestled in high school and a little in college. And so I love that challenge when you feel like you're the underdog. And so, long story short, I got the offer, jumped in, started doing pricing, analytics, business unit finance, and it was before the term FPNA came about. But essentially that's what I was doing. And I was working with our business department leaders, working in the sales group, marketing group, operations groups, and essentially my job was to go in there using my accounting shops and finance chops to figure out how do we grow this business, how do we get more customers, how do we improve gross margins, how do we grow EBITDA, all that stuff. And yeah, it was just a really cool experience. And did that for almost five years and got promoted three times in that time period, and did five different roles in that time period, all the way to working with our CEO and CFO, and got to see a lot of the big decisions that get made up there. And so I really enjoyed that experience, learned a lot about how really some of the biggest decisions get made at the highest levels. But yeah, in 2016, my wife and I got married, and our thought process started changing. At that moment, we started saying to ourselves, we've been doing our careers for quite a while now. It's been a long journey. Is this what we want to be doing? And it was the first time we actually asked that question. But it was that question that kind of prompted us to take a sabbatical. So that's kind of my accounting career in a nutshell. It's been filled with a lot of interesting ups and downs, made a lot of mistakes, and learned a lot from it. And the best part of the journey so far has been just meeting some amazing people along the way. Some of the smartest people I've met in this FPNA accounting journey of mine.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: Tell me about the sabbatical.
[00:11:57] Speaker C: I love this story.
When I left that job, my wife and I started thinking about, do we get another job? Do we kind of take this sabbatical idea seriously? Because it was just kind of like this idea, if you will. We had our honeymoon in New Zealand right after we had gone to Australia and we had met someone. I think we were ziplining, and we said to the woman, what are you doing here? And she's like, oh, yeah, I'm on holiday. First. I don't know what a holiday was. I was like, oh, cool, like, what holiday? She's like, no, no, I'm taking a break. I was like, oh, God. It. I understand what a holiday is now, but the thing that she said that just really pitos was that she said, I'm on holiday, and I'm taking a break from work. And I said, how long? She's like, oh, I don't know, indefinitely. And my wife and I took a look at each other and said, you can do that.
You can take a break. No, that's blasphemous. You can't do that. But it kind of started spinning the wheels in our heads, going, maybe we should seriously consider this. We've been through a lot. We're both exhausted. I used to work something like 15, 18 hours a day for quite a bit.
But, yeah, in 2017, my wife and I, we were interviewing for some places. I had gotten an offer with Amazon, and that decision of that sabbatical, we just kind of took a step back and said to ourselves, we would always regret this if we don't take the sabbatical. Which is ironic, because that's how Jeff kind of founded Amazon. But, yeah, we took that opportunity and we said, we're going to go take a sabbatical. So we ended up taking a sabbatical. We took it for six, seven, eight months, and we traveled southeast to Asia, grabbed our backpack and just went. And it was the most incredible experience that we had. It was the first time where we had a chance to take a step back and just ask ourselves some really serious, hard questions. What are we doing?
Is this what makes us happy? And it was the first time where I actually had a chance to kind of take a step back and read, and that's where my love for reading came back and just read a lot. And it was just an incredible experience.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: So what happened when you came back from the sabbatical, is that when you went into the consulting side of things, and is that when you started the business with your wife as well, or did that happen later?
[00:14:15] Speaker C: Really good question. That happened later. And this is where my wife and I, kind of similar to most people, have kind of been in this professional space, we didn't really know what we were going to do. We just knew that we weren't going to dive right back into another corporate role where we would just be end up doing the same thing anyways. Accounting, finance, working a job where you probably do that for 40 hours a week. So my wife and I kind of took a step back. We had built up strong connections and networks at that point. And so we had, friend of mine, a really good friend of mine had reached out and said, hey, we have an opportunity here. Our accounting team here, they're really struggling. They need help in their accounts, payable team. Are you interested? And for me, I've been a productivity guy for a long time. It's one of my special skill sets. I can see inefficiencies, and I know how to plug those holes. And so I remember at that time, I was going, oh, I was petrified back in the day of just even trying to switch a job. Here I am now trying to consult for a company I've never even heard of. But in short, I did take that opportunity and it was amazing. I got to go in there, never realize it, but my whole career is similar to what I was doing with consulting. It's just asking good questions and really just caring about the clients questions and problems that they're dealing with. And it was very clear working with this client, all the problems that they were dealing with. And then just using my investigative ad, just break it down into steps. Take a big problem, break it down into sub problems.
My wife and I did that. We had a handful of clients that we were doing. She did some tax clients. I was doing some finance clients where we were jumping in, helping to plug in some holes, find some opportunities where they could improve their margins. And so I did that for about two years or so. My wife too, and along the way learned a lot as well. First and foremost, charging by the hour, really bad model. Don't want to be doing that. So I learned very quickly, started, that's what actually prompted me to start reading even more. And it was that experience with me and my wife where I realized that I've always loved business. Not just business in general, but just the complexity and the problems that come from that. Because ultimately, that's what a business is doing anyways, is you're solving a problem, someone that has a problem and a need, and you go in there and plug it in. So we did that for a couple of years, and eventually from that we said, hey, how can we do something bigger that can scale and leverage, and it doesn't require just our own skill set that we can transfer that skill set. And that's how our accounting business came about from that experience.
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[00:17:51] Speaker B: And so what does that accounting business look like today?
[00:17:54] Speaker C: We started the idea around 2018, but we really kind of started kicking it off around late 2019. And at the time, it was kind of just this, just my wife who was doing some taxes. And it was around late 2019 when my wife and I kind of jumped and said, hey, let's try to scale this thing. I think we could do some serious help with this area. And I kind of put my hat on, just my finance chops, if you will, and kind of looked at the opportunities around us, and I was going, wow, there's a big hole here in not only just the bookkeeping space, but the tax space. And I noticed the same problems over and over and over again. So my wife and I said, why not take this chance and just build a real company out of this? We have the skill set. We have done this over and over again. Let's take a chance at this. And so we put together a really, what I like to say, just one of those boiler template WordPress sites, and we put it out there. I still remember it was like black and white and just says, like, we do your taxes and bookkeeping. And we threw it out there, and we started getting customers. We used our friends and connections first, and then from there, it slowly started growing. And it was the first realization of, wow, we're getting customers that aren't just our friends and family. We're getting real people who are coming in and going, hey, who are you guys? Can you help me with this. And one thing I realized during that experience as we were launching our business, that customer service is everything, whether it's at the prospecting stage, the lead stage, or even as the customer stage, that every step along the way, that customer or prospect or lead is basically testing you to see, are you going to solve my problem? And it's such a cool experience. And so today, my wife, she's kind of like, what I like to say, the brains of it all, because without her tax, like, we're kind of like we're fried. So all credit to her on that. I'm kind of the sales and marketing and the operations person in the background doing that as well. And then we have an accounting manager who's amazing. We actually found her through Facebook, of all places. And she's just kind of turned out to be an amazing asset for this company and just a really great person in general. And then we have three bookkeepers who help her and my wife to kind of run the books and make sure that we get all of that tidied up and reconciled so we can give it to our customers. And so that's where we are today. And it's been an incredible journey. And, yeah, you learn a lot when you go through this, when you're running a small business.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: And I know that you're working on some other projects now, too, which we'll come back to in a moment, but I think you've made the decision to pause growth at the moment. Could you talk about making that decision? Why?
Yeah, I think it's quite interesting.
[00:20:39] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a really good question.
I had shared earlier that my wife and I, we have a four year old now. And just like probably every dad and guy out there, it's not a problem. Get a kid in there, you can still operate at 80, 40 hours a week. Not a problem. And I was one of those guys. I was like, that's fine, little guy. Don't worry about it. We're going to keep growing like crazy. It'll be fine. Yeah, that didn't happen the way I expected it to in a good way, though.
And I mean that in a good way. Because what I realized when we were trying to grow this thing and we're throwing ourselves out there, we actually started putting less attention, and I shouldn't say we, me specifically, my wife is doing everything. I started putting less attention on my son as a result. And I realized early on, and this is something that I like to share with people, is that I write a lot of letters to myself and I realized during that experience that I wasn't spending time with my family.
I've become obsessed. I haven't taken a step back. And I think it's the plight of every entrepreneur, or small business owner for that matter, or creator that you feel like if you don't grow your business, that you will fall behind. And I felt that very much. I was like, oh, and if I don't do this, we're going to fall behind.
But my wife and I kind of had a really heart to heart chat together and we realized that we couldn't keep doing this at this pace. And my son, he's four and a half now, and he's just talking, he's giddy. And I look at that and go, in hindsight, because I remember in the moz, I said to my wife, this thing is not going to work out if we don't keep doing this. But in hindsight now, we look back, I go, that was the right decision.
It was really good that we did that. My wife and I, we've been working for a long time. We've put in some hours. And I know Marilyn is similar to you. You've been doing a lot of the similar activities as well. But yeah, we kind of took a step back and said, let's not grow. If we have a prospect that comes in that we think is a really good fit, then we'll consider it. But otherwise, we're not actively going to go out there and market and try to capture leads at this stage.
We'll revisit that in a couple of years.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. And that's partly what this podcast is all about. It's called the lifestyle accountant because it's trying to encourage accountants to take that step back and reflect and think about, well, what's important. And it might be family or children for some people, it might be travel or hobies for others that might not have kids. So what does your day to day look like now in terms of your schedule? Because you've got your son, and then you and your wife are balancing work. And then I know you've got some interests, like brazilian jiu jitsu. What does a typical week look like at your household?
[00:23:26] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. I like to say it's nice and organized and tidy, but just like any parent out there, it's all over the place. I'm one of those people who looks at their calendar very meticulously. I use ClickUp to manage projects and tasks. I have a notion to kind of manage where things are going. I like to call myself a planner. So I like to look at where things are. I visualize it every week, and then I go there from a day to day. Now, I still do the same thing that I did when we're running our business. Every night I look at my calendar and I look at the next day and I kind of just move it like puzzle pieces. Hey, I think my son's going to need this. Let's move this. I know my wife is working on this thing. I want to cover for her, so I'm going to move this down. I know I have a call with Mero coming up. I got a block this off. I got to prep an hour in advance. And so that's how I'm navigating. I also take care of dinner as well, and I'll help my wife with that. So I try to block off time for those things as a result of that, when I'm working on my click up, and I don't know if this is similar to most other founders out there, but I tend to have, like, ten things on there, and it completely defeats the purpose of David Allen's GDD. But I look and go, I can do this, but I've taken a step back to go, hey, I have ten things. What are the two or three most important things I must get done? And then I chunk that into my calendar and get it done one way or the other. And thankfully, we have a lot of great tools out there. If it's social media, I have chat GBT. I can leverage these assets. And a lot of this stuff is already kind of planned out in my notion workspace with my co founders. So we have these things where we can just leverage and move a lot quicker as a result. So day to day, I like to say it's organized, but it's like puzzle pieces just move things around and hopefully things work out the way they do.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: Yeah, and I like that. It sounds like you've got that balance with your wife. You're taking care of dinner, you're covering. Is your son in daycare? I find all of this stuff really interesting, how different families manage the work and home life.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: Yeah, he's in preschool right now. I can't even imagine. If he wasn't, that'd be a struggle. He goes to school from nine to 02:00 p.m. Every day. And so we wake up. He wakes up similar to your children, Merrill. He wakes up at, like, 05:00 a.m. And he literally drags me from bed. He goes, daddy, we're going to go play now. So it doesn't even matter. I have to get up one way or the other. And so I like to use it as a game. Like, I don't use it as a point of frustration for me. I like to use as an opportunity to grow as a father and also just use as an opportunity to bond with my son. I know that growing up, I don't know how personal I'm going to get, but my dad and I didn't have a great relationship. And as a result of that, my son and I made it very clear before he was born, I wrote a letter to myself, said, you don't have to be like your own dad. Use this as an opportunity to be better than that. And so I use every morning as an opportunity to kind of take a step back and go, this is awesome. My son. Let's go. Let's have fun. And he's, like, jumping all over my head and ripping my hair out. It's just so much fun. Dealing with kids are awesome.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: I like how you've been intentional about that. And I know because as parents, particularly with young kids, I think you can be in the trenches. It can be a grind sometimes, but I think it's awesome to appreciate those moments.
I love personal productivity, too. So let's go down a little bit.
[00:26:43] Speaker C: Of a rabbit hole because I know.
[00:26:45] Speaker B: You'Re really into it. So you mentioned that you track your time. Can you talk a bit more about what that process looks like? And I think you mentioned that you analyze it at the end of each week, too.
[00:26:57] Speaker C: I do, and I used to use something before toggle, so I use toggle now. I don't try to go crazy with apps anymore. I think as entrepreneurs, we try to look for the latest and greatest, and no matter what anyone says, it's exciting stuff. But I realized it was taking a step back from what I was trying to do, which know, be more efficient and productive with what I'm trying to accomplish in our business. But I use toggle to track my time, and I don't just track my time for the sake of tracking time. Otherwise, it's a useless activity. And one of the things that I do every week is I look at my time and go, does it give me joy or not? And I know it kind of sounds like a Mary Kondo thing, but it kind of is a Mary Kondo thing, because I think one thing that I've appreciated over the past couple of years is when you have children and you have a spouse, that every minute matters. So if I'm doing things where it's me just kind of relaxing and watching YouTube for 10 hours. Well, it's probably taking away time from my family and my wife, and I don't need to see it on their face, in their face of disappointment to know that I'm doing that to them. And so I use toggle as a way to track that time and go, am I being effective? One thing that I do, and I've been using it for the past five years now, I want to say, is I have ClickUp, which is where I manage all my tasks and projects. And then on top of that, I have a toggle integration. And so when I work on a task, I click that toggle integration and I have the toggle app on my desktop because 90% of my work is through the laptop or the computer, so the clock is running. So when I see that it's my own accountability system where I know that I must get this task done. And so when I see that timer running, I'm going, I must get this done. A couple of years ago, I don't use it as much anymore, but I highly encourage it for anyone who needs that extra boost. But I used to use focus mate. I think it's an app where they pair you with just a random person. And I found that to be super helpful.
You just kind of share with each other what you're going to do and then you just kind of just do your thing for the next hour. But I use toggle. I look at everything on a weekly basis. I track very specific things, so I don't track how long did I sleep for? Because me, fundamentally, I believe that if you track those things, it'll probably get you demotivated over the long run because it's so much work. But I like to look at those reports. I use the toggle reports to look at that timing. I go, one thing that's very important for me is to read as much as possible. And so I'll use that toggle to just reinforce it into myself and go, yardy, are you reading yes or no? Look at the Data. No, you're not. Let's go back and find ways to get more time back into that. So that's how I use toggle. And I found it to be effective for me personally.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: And I've heard you mention looking at maybe what you're not doing as well. So are you spending enough time? You've said that family is important, but you can go back and see, I think from someone's actions, it's easy to say something's important, but the way you're spending your time is probably the greatest representation of what is important. I've heard you say before that you also use the toggle timesheets to track things like that. Like, are you spending your time on the things that you value?
[00:30:10] Speaker C: Right, absolutely.
[00:30:11] Speaker B: Could you expand a bit more on what that looks like for you?
[00:30:15] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I do, and I think this is where maybe I'll make a video one day and showing how that system works. But it actually, funny enough, all starts with notion. I have a notion. I call it the schedule DB. DB just stands for database. Because in notion, everything can be a database. And sometimes you kind of forget, what's a database. And so I use a little acronym, just DB. And my co founder loves it because it's the easy way to find databases. But I have a thing called schedule DB. And at the top it just says my key priorities. And so one of those things, and it ties back to my goals. One of those goals this year was take a vacation every quarter. And so every week, along with tracking my time, reviewing my timesheets, I also look at my notion, key priorities. And I just ask one question, am I actually doing that thing? And I always tell myself, and you had said it earlier, I do jiu jitsu. One reason I love Jiu jitsu and wrestling is that your skills, you can't lie about your skills. You have to compete against someone. And if you get beat, there is no excuse. You've gotten beat. And so I like to use this as a triangulation point for me personally, where I look at those goals and say, yardy, are you actually spending time with your family? You say you are. Your data doesn't really show that. You wrote this in your notion. You're not saying that. And one of the things that my wife and I talk about, I'm my own harshest critic. And so I look at that and I put a lot of pressure on myself on those things. But I like to use as a triangulation point with my toggle time track and ensure that I'm spending the time that I said I would spend the time. Otherwise, I like to reassess and go, is it really a priority for me? And I like to use those monthly check ins to reassess whether those things are still true or not.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: And do you manage to carve out time for jiu jitsu now? It's probably a bit harder with a young family and multiple businesses. What does that look like? These days.
[00:32:12] Speaker C: Oh, boy. Yeah. When I first started back in 2013. Oh, jeez, that was a long time ago. Back in 2013, I was obsessed. I've always been an athletic guy. Wrestled, did football across track, boxing. And so I used to train something like 2020, 5 hours a week. I absolutely loved it. Went through two surgeries in that time period, and then I got married. It was like three times a week. I didn't realize at the time. I probably did probably too much and probably put a strain on my wife. I appreciate her. Thank you.
And then now with a son, it's probably on average of once a week now, which is tough. But I look at it again from the perspective of, I'm grateful that I can at least fit that time in still, and I'm glad that I can do it. I am a brown belt now, so the next belt after that is a black belt. But I think it's good too, because I've been doing it such a long time. My back and my bones are hurting a little bit more nowadays. But, yeah, I do try to put in jujitsu in where I can, and if I'm lucky, I'll get in like twice a week. If I'm really lucky, I'll get three times a week, but I don't think that's happening in the near future. So as long as I get once in a week, I'm happy.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: I can relate to that. We've chatted about that before, whereas surfing is my thing. So pre kids, I try and go every day, or at least sometimes the conditions aren't right, so you can't surf every day, but at least start my day at the beach. Whereas now with kids waking up at 05:00 a.m. It's pretty hard to get a surf in before work. But I was actually lucky enough to today. So it takes some negotiation and some juggling, but what an awesome way to start the day. So now I'm happy if I can get one surf in a week or one surf mountain bike ride or something fun. And I try and generally have Friday mornings, do the drop off at daycare and then have that time, no meetings booked, have a couple of hours to get out and do something.
[00:34:09] Speaker C: That's awesome. I was going to say, how long do you surf for?
[00:34:12] Speaker B: Usually these days it's pretty quick. 45 minutes or an hour, just in and out. We've got to get back and get.
[00:34:19] Speaker C: Back to the family.
[00:34:20] Speaker B: Whereas previously I'd be driving around checking different surf spots. Are the conditions right there? No driving. So the whole thing could take two or 3 hours on a weekend.
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[00:35:29] Speaker B: Mean I know that you're into reading. You've got the family time.
How do you go cutting out time for reading these days?
[00:35:39] Speaker C: Yeah, it's really funny. So a lot of the reading I've been doing as of the past five, first and foremost, I realized I can't read a physical book. Sounds really weird. I fall asleep if I read a physical book. I don't know if anyone else goes through that, but I fall asleep. What was funny was that I forget where it was. I think it was in Thailand when we were on our sabbatical. I remember thinking, I need to read a book, but I can't bring a physical book. But maybe you can get a book on your phone. And so this is where you get your kindle on your phone. And that's how I started reading. I realized you can increase the font on the phones. And so in a book you might get this tiny little font, but on a phone you can really expand that thing. And so what I realized was that when I expanded the words, I could actually read and not fall asleep. And so I ended up reading something like ten books in like twelve months, just really quickly because of that.
So I fell in love with reading, and I still do it to this day. I actually have my phone right here. I have like 30, 40 books in here. Now, the other thing that I do is that I have an app here. It also does text to speech. I think it is text to speech. And so I'll leverage that as well. And I put it on like two x speed. And so I'll read through it very quickly. One thing that's been interesting, and it's a little productivity of mine. And I think it takes a little training, but when I listen to podcasts or I read books, I've trained myself to listen to it at two or 2.5 x speed. And so what takes a podcast, let's say 30 minutes to listen to? It'll take me 15 minutes, 10 minutes. And so it's great because with kids, as you know, Meryl, it's hard to fit in even 10 minutes sometimes. So now it's being able to listen to things in, like, 10 minutes. It's wonderful. And you retain everything still.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: So being a pretty goal oriented guy, and you've got your systems and you're working towards things, how do you go about relaxing to switch off that kind of achievement? Focus to relax. Do you find it difficult, and what kind of strategies do you use to help?
[00:37:46] Speaker C: I will readily admit it is difficult.
It is very difficult. I think even, like, right now, as we have this chat, it feels like I'm in that jujitsu mode. I'm ready to go spar. Like, I'm ready to get going again. But one thing that really helps me, and this is just for me personally, is I like to listen to either lo fi music or this. I think it's called brainwave music or something like that. I forget what it's called. It's called brain music. And what I like to do is just like I have in my ear right now, the headset is I'll go on the couch and I'll just listen to that. I'll just kind of zone out for a little bit, and I'll just do that for five to 10 minutes. And I like doing that because it allows me to kind of reset relvel. And then I like to consider myself a very introspective person in the sense that when I use that opportunity to take a step back, I ask myself, it's okay, take a step back. It's okay, take a step back. And I'm a firm believer that language is very powerful. I learned a long time ago in wrestling, I had a great coach. I had joined the wrestling team on the whim of a friend, and my coach had told me, hey, ten of you guys, there wasn't a lot of people who joined the wrestling team. It very much had a stigma, and it might still have a stigma, but I remember our coach said very specifically, yardy, out of ten of you, maybe one or two of you guys will stay. And I remember him saying and looking at me, and I'm sure he was looking at everybody, but he looked at me and said, yardy, are you going to be one of them? And I remember that really stung me for some reason. I was like, that is painful. I'm not a quitter. And I remember back then, even in high school, I would just kind of go home and I used to run at 5530 in the morning every day to get ready. And I would use that opportunity to kind of just take deep breaths and just go, yardy, it's okay. You're going to win. You're going to do this. You're going to keep moving forward. No matter how hard things are going to get, you will move forward, you will persist. And I would just say this over and over and over again. And I realized running a business is very similar to that. When you get constant rejections through leads or prospects, it's just a reminder to take a step back, breathe. And so I like to kind of just use those types of activities, like listening to brain music or lo fi and just kind of repeat to myself and say, yardi, it's okay, take a step back. Breathe, breathe. So I found that to be, I.
[00:40:15] Speaker B: Find so I can find it hard to relax because I'm goal oriented and always like, running towards the next thing and find business exciting and want to achieve. And so I can find it hard to switch off because my brain, if I let it, it never stops thinking about the next business thing or the next idea.
So I have to work hard to not look at my phone or not check email or try not to let myself think about business at night. So if I'm in the shower in the morning, then I can think business stuff. But shower at night, I'm not trying not to think about business related topics or any to dos or achievement or anything like that because I'll hop into bed and then I won't be able to switch my brain off.
[00:40:54] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: So I have to use some strategies like that because otherwise I'm just constantly thinking about things and finding it fun. But I also find it takes me a couple of days into a holiday to actually fully relax. And I agree, get the to do lists and kind of get all of that out of my head to then to fully relax. So a short holiday is not really worth it for me if it's only four days. I'm just getting into holiday mode and it's time to better look at my calendar and get ready just in case.
[00:41:28] Speaker C: That's why I use that excuse with my wife. Just let me go to jiu jitsu. It'll unwind me from the business stuff.
[00:41:37] Speaker B: Well, that's what I find. If you're doing something like that, surfing, there's no room to be thinking about anything else. If you're not concentrating, then you're going to hurt yourself. So that kind of focus I find really refreshing as well. And I find I need to do something like that. So even if I can't fit in a surf, I like having a drive home from work or something where there's silence just to process. But if I've not had half an hour to myself in a day or over a series of days, then I find I haven't been able to process my thoughts and it's all kind of buzing around and I need to go and find somewhere quiet and make some notes and get it out of my head.
[00:42:13] Speaker C: I relate to that so much. It's a struggle. It is hard. And you said something that resonated. I'm very similar to you. I find this business stuff in whatever you want to call it, just fun. It's fun. It's a problem. You're just trying to solve it. And if you ever get into Jiu jitsu, Meryl, you'll probably find it very interesting as well because it's just problem solving at the end of the.
[00:42:38] Speaker B: Well, it's. It's funny. I've got some friends that are into jiu jitsu, so I have gone down a bit of a YouTube rabbit hole to learn about it because I love strategy. So I love sports strategy as well as business strategy. And it seems like it's so strategic around, well, if you do this, then how do you defend against a bit? I don't want to get hurt.
No contact sports like that.
[00:42:58] Speaker C: For me, it is very painful. I did think about it.
[00:43:08] Speaker A: Yadi recently started a newsletter called FP and Hate. For the australian listeners.
[00:43:14] Speaker B: FP A is a bit like the financial forecasting team within the finance department of a big business. So future focused rather than historical reporting. And that was an area where Yarty and his co founder of the newsletter.
[00:43:30] Speaker A: Business, Drew, worked for many years. I spent quite a bit of time.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: Chatting with Yati about this new business.
[00:43:35] Speaker A: Model and how he and Drew plan to monetize what they're doing to grow.
[00:43:41] Speaker B: The newsletter subscriber base and how they carve out time to work on this when they both have a number of.
[00:43:47] Speaker A: Other commitments, work wise and family wise. I'm really interested in this topic and I'm interviewing some other accountants about this.
[00:43:56] Speaker B: Business model of newsletters, course content and community. And so all of that's going to be compiled into a separate episode just about that topic.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: So that will be coming out later on.
[00:44:15] Speaker C: If you want to subscribe to FPN. Hey, you can go to fpnhay.com. It's free. You'll get all of our newsletter tips and tricks on a biweekly or even weekly basis. We might be changing some stuff up. We have some exciting things coming up in 2024, like a podcast, so stay tuned for that. And if you want to reach out to me, you can reach out to me at me at yardy Kim.com or you can reach out to me at
[email protected] as well, which will be in the link down below, I assume. But yeah, you can. I'm also on LinkedIn and Twitter, so if you have any questions, I'm always available. I like to say with my co founder and I that, hey, our doors are always open. We're always happy to have a chat with anyone.
[00:44:53] Speaker B: Amazing. And we'll drop links to all of those in the show notes. Well, thanks again for coming on. It's been great.
[00:44:58] Speaker C: Thank you so much, Merrill. I really enjoyed this. And yeah, now we can go back to our jiu jitsu and surfing.
[00:45:08] Speaker A: Yati and I have been online friends for years. He's someone I admire for his disciplined approach to living a life aligned with his values and is also a bit of a personal productivity guru. And as a productivity nerd myself, I have enjoyed comparing systems and notes with him over the years. A few things that stood out to me in this episode, but also had me thinking after we recorded there is a ramit sessi quote, show me a person's calendar and I'll show you their priorities. And I've met lots of people who say their family is a top priority, but when you look at how they spend their time, it looks like work has been much more of a priority. Now, I don't want to judge anyone for their values. I think that's quite a personal thing. But I do try and hold myself to high standards when it comes to living in alignment with my values. And I try to support others in doing that, too, that once they've selected their values, which may change over time, can I support them in living out those values? I've heard a lot of working parents, particularly fathers, say I work these long hours for my family, and there's a key high article from Rad Reeds.
[00:46:19] Speaker B: I hope I said his name correctly.
[00:46:20] Speaker A: I've been reading his newsletter for years and he talks about this. So he was one of the youngest managing partners at a hedge fund in America, getting paid over a million dollars a year in salary and bonuses. And then he quit and started a solopreneur business. And he's got ambitions to be successful and build a great solopreneur business. And he talks about when he feels that desire to work long hours, long hours to the point that it cuts into family time. He pauses and asks himself, am I doing this work for my ego because I want to be successful or am I doing this to provide for my family? And his family is already comfortable financially. His conclusion is that mostly he's doing this extra work because he wants to be successful and it's ego based. And so I found that quite confronting when I read that as someone who is ambitious and really enjoys working, sometimes I feel that temptation too, to do those extra hours. But it does cut into family time. So again, something to think about. The last point that resonated with me was the importance of carving out time for yourself as a working parent. And for Yardi, that's brazilian jiu jitsu, and for me, that's surfing. And an hour of activity like that where I need to completely focus, work, family, anything else is far from my mind because I need to focus on what I'm doing in the moment, catching waves and being aware of my surroundings. I think it's really important for everyone to have something like that. It doesn't need to be physical activity or an adventure sport. I still sometimes feel guilty carving out that time because I could be doing something family wise. So this is a message to me, but it might be helpful for others to remind myself that it's really important to do great work, to be a great parent, to be a good partner. I think I'm better at all of those things. When I've had that chance to clear my mind and do something for me, then I'm ready to give for the rest of the week. I'm hoping when my kids are a little bit older that I'll be serving most days and hopefully they'll be coming with me closer.
