Greg Tirico

May 30, 2022

Episode #392: Fourth interview with Joe Woodard

Greg Tirico

May 30, 2022

A perennial TSOE fav, Ron and Ed were pleased to welcome back to the show for a fourth time, Joe Woodard. They talked about the state of the accounting profession and shared a preview of what will be happening at Joe's upcoming conference, Scaling New Heights.

Before we get to the show notes, here is a bit more about Joe…

As an author, consultant, business coach, and national speaker, Joe has trained over 125,000 accounting and business professionals in areas of practice development, changing technology trends, strategic consulting, and how to maximize the use of accounting software in their practices. In 2012, 2014-2019, Joe was recognized by Accounting Today as one of the Top 100 Influential People within the accounting profession. Joe has been featured repeatedly in Insightful Accountant, Accounting Today and AccountingWEB in both articles and in video interviews. Joe is the managing member of Woodard Events, LLC which provides education, coaching, resources and a Community for small business advisors.

Here are some brief show notes. Use these to follow along while listening to the show.

4 times on the show for Joe! Congratulations as you are only one step away from joining the 5-timers club.
It turns out that Joe’s conference — Scaling New Heights — is the nation’s largest accounting technology showcase under a single roof. Well done!
Joe noticed an interesting sub-demographic slice when he ran a live show during COVID times. The attendees were risk tolerant, entrepreneurial, and always moving forward.
Joe noticed that bookkeepers went from “adopt” to “adopt more strategically” as COVID forced technology choices. In other words they were much more intentional, careful, structured, and standardized in their technology choices.
Ed, Joe, and Ron are lucky because they are in a bubble when it comes to technology adoption and the bookkeepers they are exposed to. These folks really get it! (And if you are reading this, you’re probably one of them)
Lots of great things happened to the accounting tech industry over the last two years. What opportunities did bookkeepers and accountants miss over that time period? As an industry, we didn’t charge for work related to PPP.
On Joe’s site at https://www.woodard.com/webinars there is a class called “I can’t see” which features the 10 pain points accountants and bookkeepers face with the day in, day out interactions with their clients.
“Anything you can pull off a financial statement is by definition a lagging indicator. It’s like timing your cookies with a smoke alarm.” —Ron Baker
Clients don’t value your services because they are like all of your competitor’s services. Differentiated nature of your services and differentiated brand are just two ways to move further out on the y-axis.
Take a moment to refresh yourself about the Cobb Value Curve, explained by William Cobb at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDGoTjF6RI4
“We’re not paying our people enough and that’s because we’re not charging our clients enough.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with this statement from Joe.
15 seconds in exchange for your 5 minutes of fame! Spend 15 seconds rating our podcast and every written review will be read on the air — good, bad, or indifferent. RateThisPodcast.com/TSOE
Our Patreon channel at Patreon.com/TSOE features bonus and commercial free episodes. Now sponsored by @90Minds. If you need a mind, get one at 90Minds.com ESPECIALLY if you are a Sage 100 customer.
The secret is purpose according to Disney. For example, Disney’s purpose statement is, “We create happiness.” Thinking through this, you can be off task as long as you are on purpose.
What is Joe concerned about in the business world, particularly in the United States? He’s concerned about small businesses lack of ability to break past the barrier of taxation and regulation.
Speaking of purpose, what does Joe state as the purpose of the Woodard organization? “We empower small business advisors.”
Ed has future glee! And so does Joe. In fact, Joe has future glee about the fact that we can elevate accountants and bookkeepers into business coaches.
One of Joe’s favorite quotes, “Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit, then also the business must die, for it no longer has a reason for existence.” —Henry Ford
Joe nailed it today —> For bookkeepers and accountants, the biggest barrier to the subscription model is a focus on the individual profitability by client.
“If you let the camel’s nose in the tent, you get a camel in the tent.” This is a great quote Joe used to describe why NO change order is too small. Hilarious and fitting!
A big THANK YOU to Joe for joining us today. His conference — Scaling New Heights — is coming up next month! More info at this link https://www.woodard.com/2022-scaling-new-heights

Bonus Content is Available As Well

Did you know that each week after our live show, Ron and Ed take to the microphone for a bonus show? Typically, this bonus show is an extension of the live show topic (sometimes even with the same guest) and a few other pieces of news, current events, or things that have caught our attention.

This week was bonus episode 393 - “Purpose and the employee”. Here are a few links discussed:

Click the “FANATIC” image to learn more about pricing and member benefits.

Greg Tirico

May 22, 2022

Episode #391: Interview with Mark Vonnegut

Greg Tirico

May 22, 2022

Ed and Ron were honored to have on the show Dr. Mark Vonnegut to discuss his 2022 book, The Heart of Caring: A Life in Pediatrics. Yes, Mark is the son of Kurt Vonnegut. This show was a firsthand look at the healthcare system, its impact on children, along with the rest of us.

Here are some brief show notes. Use these to follow along while listening to the show.

When did Dr. Mark know he wanted to be a doctor? Since a child, he knew he wanted to be a doctor but his commune in the 60’s got in the way first :)
The patient is king and if Dr. Mark doesn’t take care of them they go to other doctors. That was the simplified version of how 90% of doctors and hospitals looked at things in the early days of his career.
$6 used to be Dr. Mark’s overhead per visit. Today it is over $100 and attributable to compliance and performance metrics put on him by the insurers.
On medical care costs 30-40 years ago: “It had to be affordable when patients were paying out of pocket.” —Dr. Mark
Today it is virtually illegal for Dr. Mark to take care of someone without taking a co-payment. There is a tremendous amount of paperwork in front of the actual care.
Dr. Mark adopted electronic medical records 10 years before they were required because they can make medicine safer. Today they are billing machines weaponized by big hospitals and insurers.
Check us out on Patreon at Patreon.com/TSOE where you can subscribe and get commercial free episodes PLUS bonus episodes. Now sponsored by @90Minds. Need a mind? Get one at 90Minds.com.
Dr. Mark’s is the last generation to experience a time when you could be a doctor and be your own boss. Today, 70% of doctors are actually employees.
Along the way, we have equated health INSURANCE with health CARE. Insurance shouldn’t pay for the mundane. Your car insurance doesn’t pay for oil changes or gasoline.
“Unnecessary administrative costs as much as unnecessary medical procedures. Probably more.” —Dr. Mark
Years ago, 90% of the medical diagnosis came from what the patient said. They physical exam confirmed it. The last few % points came from the lab. Today you troll the patient through the lab and see what bites.
“Most doctors have 10 minutes to see you at most. 40% of that time is spent entering data into a laptop with very little eye to eye contact. They come up with a number or diagnosis as their job.” —Dr. Mark
“Explanations of benefits” are evil bits of propaganda whereby the insurance company claims to have paid X when the cost was Y. —Dr. Mark
“Let the school nurses do immunizations because they don’t suffer fools.” —Dr. Mark
“The only thing dumber than making marijuana illegal is thinking it’s harmless to children.” —Dr. Mark
Hiring a social worker was the smartest thing Dr. Mark ever did. They made the whole pediatric practice much more efficient.
The baby formula shortage was a foreseeable and avoidable problem. Thankfully, Dr. Mark has some of the “fancy” formulas available for patients who really needed them.
We’d like to give a shout out to Blake Oliver (@blaketoliver) of EarmarkCPE.com (@EarmarkCPE) where you can get CPE credits for listening to podcasts!
“There are more similarities than dissimilarities in taking care of patients with Ebola compared to patients with Diabetes.” —Dr. Mark
“There shouldn’t be a revolving door between the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA.” —Dr. Mark
A big THANK YOU to Dr. Mark Vonnegut for joining us today. Check out his book, “The Heart of Caring”

Buy on Amazon

Bonus Content is Available As Well

This week was bonus episode #392 - “The Klessla”. Here are a few links discussed:

Click the “FANATIC” image to learn more about pricing and member benefits.

Greg Tirico

May 15, 2022

Episode #390: Live from the Meeting of the Minds 2022

Greg Tirico

May 15, 2022

We’ll do it live!!! Despite some minor technical hiccups, Ron and Ed were excited to be doing the show live from the 90 Minds annual conference, The Meeting of the Minds in Newport Beach, CA. The Meeting of The Minds brings a membership of consultants, resellers, and software providers together to celebrate our powerful community. For two days, these consultants will share, listen, learn, and challenge their perceptions. We are thrilled to be a part of all of those things.

Here are some brief show notes. Use these to follow along while listening to the show. Ron and Ed mostly talked subscription and also fielded some great questions from the audience.

…and as we get started, it's always great to have a helping, technical hand. Here's a live shot from the event. @90minds #90MotM #AskTSOE @ronaldbaker @edkless
Is Netflix an indication that we have reached peak subscription? Not quite. Netflix pulled out of Russia and lost 700k subscribers. They recently reported a lost of only 200k in the quarter.
“The subscription model puts the relationship at the center and creates a new profit formula beyond the traditional income statement. You’re not looking at gross margins, you’re looking at customer lifetime value.” —Ron Baker
Not only is 90 Minds a sponsor of our Patreon channel at Patreon.com/TSOE, all of their members get access to the feed.
What is it that you are adding on to the subscription to keep people there? In other words, what is YOUR equivalent of the new season of Ozark? How are you plussing your model? This is how Ron/Ed think about the subscription model.
Ed subscribes to a vacuum from iRobot but what he is REALLY subscribing to is the outcome — clean floors!
Ron loves the Fender subscription model because they are not selling guitars. They are selling musicianship.
Great question from Phil today. In response, there should be a top tier subscription offering that includes all you can eat. The levels below it can be things that are “covered” and “not covered” to help delineate between tiers.
EA has decided not to renew with FIFA. Why? 71% of their revenue is subscription and NOT based on game sales. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/05/ea-friendship-ended-with-fifa-now-ea-sports-fc-is-my-best-friend/
Experiences vs transformations. We professionals have the capabilities to deliver transformations to our customers…in a serial manner!
Thank you to EVERYONE at @90Minds for joining us during the live show today. See you in 167 hours!

We captured some great live shots from the conference. Can you find yourself or someone you know?

Bonus Content is Available As Well

Click the “FANATIC” image to learn more about pricing and member benefits.

Greg Tirico

May 8, 2022

Episode #389: ESG — We Respectfully Dissent

Greg Tirico

May 8, 2022

Join Ed and Ron for a deep dive on the problems with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards, or lack thereof. ESG has replaced the Triple Bottom Line and began to receive global attention due to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) report, and is seen as a means for advancing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SEC is now proposing regulations that will force public companies to disclose environmental risk factors, at tremendous cost. What could go wrong? Quite a lot. Metrics for ESG are completely subjective, nor grounded in empirical reality as demonstrated when three different ESG watchdogs rated Tesla: Best, Worst, and Middling. How helpful. If an oil company is rated, it is automatically Worst (unless it is Gazprom in Russia, which received a very high ESG rating before the Ukraine invasion), even though oil companies saves countless lives every single day. For all these reasons and more, we dissent from the hokum being pushed by advocates of ESG.

Here are the show notes. Use these to follow along while listening to the show:

Before we get into the show today, let’s be clear: The TSOE hosts do not hate the environment, nor do they hate social initiatives, nor do they hate social governance. The ESG movement is the issue at hand.
ESG first gained global attention in 2006 as a part of the United Nations sustainable development goals. In 13-14, businesses started to take ESG more seriously which led to heightened business activities and investments.
Now we have ESG ratings agencies, watchdogs, and consultants. BDO.com/resources/esg is an example of this. They are “committed to making ESG synonymous with BDO”
Regarding ESG - “Some companies have simply rebranded older existing funds as green”. Read more at this WSJ article: “Funds Go Green, but Sometimes in Name Only” https://www.wsj.com/articles/funds-go-green-but-sometimes-in-name-only-11631179801
Here is an ESG related question posed by Ron on the show today: Do companies perform better because they are socially conscious?
At a certain level, our Patreon members get a shout out. Like Mark Gandy (@g3cfo) of CFOBookshelf.com. Check out his podcast as well! And then join us at Patreon.com/TSOE
Ron mentioned a whole list of S&P 500 indicators for ESG on the show. Check out this National Review article for more details: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/esg-a-ratings-agency-and-utah/
Something that needs to be said: ESG investments (like Blackrock’s fund) make money irrespective of the performance of the investments.
Around the 1850s, limited liability companies were created (to…limit liability) but in return they were told, “stay in your lane and serve your shareholders.” The assumption was this would keep organizations from getting too big and dominating politics. It was a very clever structure.
ESG is going to deal with all of these things — human rights, sustainable finance, social exclusion, climate change — using subjective measures. How do these subjective measures change things?
Thomas Sowell: “There Are No Solutions, Only Trade-offs” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_EtIWmja-4
Did you know that your written rating of our podcast will be read on the air? Tap this link and spend 15 seconds rating The Soul of Enterprise RateThisPodcast.com/TSOE
The purpose of a business is NOT to make a profit. Profit is the result.
Even those in favor of ESG will say, “ESG is necessary but it’s not sufficient.”
Tesla has received three ESG ratings: one is the best, one the worst, and one in the middle. As an investor, what can you do with that information?
Gazprom has been given a higher ESG rating than ExxonMobil. Did these rating agencies take into account the Ukraine war? Or the annexation of Crimea before that?
Ed mentioned scope 1, 2 and 3 on the show today. Here is a quick overview from Deloitte. https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/focus/climate-change/zero-in-on-scope-1-2-and-3-emissions.html
ESG funds are pouring into China even though China on the environment, on social, and on governance…..is horrific.
The uncertainty and subjectivity of ESG ratings is ultimately at the heart of our show today. For example, climate models have a tremendous amount of uncertainty before they are even applied.
Ed had some fun with the various individual carbon footprint calculators:
- Climatehero.me - 20.8 tons of CO2 per year
- EPA - 23 tons of CO2 per year
- Nature.org - 87 tons of CO2 per year
- Henkel - 17.9 tons of CO2 per year
We closed our show today with a quote from Woke, Inc by Vivek Ramaswamy: “We’d be strictly better off if companies and their customers ended the shared fiction that every capitalist transaction must also be part of some grand fight between good and evil.”
One of our excellent Patreon sponsors, @90Minds, is holding their annual meeting next week and we will be LIVE ON SITE during the show! Looking forward to it!

Bonus Content is Available As Well

This week was bonus episode 390 - “Transfer NOT Cancel Student Debt”. Here are a few links discussed:

Click the “FANATIC” image to learn more about pricing and member benefits.

Greg Tirico

May 1, 2022

Episode #388: The Problem with CPE with Blake Oliver and Michael Kravshik

Greg Tirico

May 1, 2022

Belying the episode title there is more than one problem with continuing professional education (aka CPE). Ron and Ed were joined this week by two innovators in the profession — Blake Oliver of Earmark and Michael Kravshik of LumiQ — to talk about not only the problems, but how they are trying to help solve it.

About Blake Oliver

Blake Oliver, CPA, is an entrepreneur, accountant, writer, and podcast host who specializes in cloud accounting technology. He is one of Accounting Today’s Top 100 Most Influential People and has been named a 40 Under 40 in the accounting profession by CPA Practice Advisor. Blake also produces and co-hosts the Cloud Accounting Podcast, a Top 50 Business News show on the Apple charts and the most popular podcast for accountants and bookkeepers in the world. He is the Director of Marketing at Jirav and lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.

About Michael Kravshik

Michael Kravshik is the Co-Founder, CEO, and oft-times main host for LumiQ. LumiQ is a mobile podcast app where engaging conversations with business leaders count as verifiable professional education. With a slick mobile app, automatic documentation tracking, and new episodes weekly, we've made professional education something it's never been before: enjoyable.

Here are the show notes. Use these to follow along while listening to the show:

Blake started as an accountant and then became a product marketer at a tech firm. Through that experience, he started Earmark CPE as a way to fix the inconvenience associated with live classes.
Earmark CPE is a user generated community. If you have a podcast targeted towards accountants or bookkeepers then your content might be eligible for the platform.
Michael started about 18 ideas (his words :) ) with his co-founder before arriving at LumiQ. They approached CPAs with the idea and ended up launching an app to make CPE (CPD in Canada) easy and convenient.
We measure earned CPE in terms of hours because it’s the easy thing to measure. It doesn’t mean it’s right.
It is the collective hope of Blake and Michael that the industry changes for the better by learning continuously on a phone instead of cramming CPE into a few days at a conference.
The real problem is that you don’t want to earn CPE because it’s not great. That’s why LumiQ takes a professional, sometimes scripted, approach to the content they create.
In Canada, one minute is one minute when listening to CPE….ahem…CPD podcasts. Listening speed is not a factor.
In the end both Blake and Michael are creating CPE/CPD content that is valuable, interesting, and engaging. That means accountants and bookkeepers are going to keep listening whether or not it is required.
Bonus AND commercial free episodes are now available at the TSOE Patreon channel - Patreon.com/TSOE. Now sponsored by @90Minds. Need a mind? Hire one at 90Minds.com
What happens to live CPE in the future? We will find out soon if they come back post-Covid but they are trending down. It’s not a growth industry.
In terms of demographics, the C-level to staff members are all involved in Earmark CPE and LumiQ. You see different age ranges gravitate towards different content but usage is up across all demos.
What is the biggest issue facing the industry? Michael sees one of two directions from the larger associations: 1) We’re going to focus on the things we traditionally did. 2) We’re going to turn the CPA into an MBA (jack of all trades, master of none).
What’s the biggest challenge facing the industry? From Blake: The rules of accounting haven’t changed in 100 years but our economy has changed a lot. The data we are collecting is just not useful today the way it was in the Gilded Age.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) divided by the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC) is the most valuable metric for subscription organizations. It remains completely unaddressed by GAAP.
A big THANK YOU to Blake for joining us today! Check out his work at EarmarkCPE.com
A big THANK YOU to Michael for joining us today! Check out his work at LumiQLearn.com