The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

113 ⎸ [NICHE] E-commerce with Meryl Johnston

• Episode 113

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In this NICHE series episode, I talk with Meryl Johnston, the co-founder of Bean Ninjas. She shares her journey into e-commerce accounting and the valuable lessons she's learned along the way. From managing a team of contractors to choosing profitable clients, she provides valuable tips for success.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • The number one thing to think about when starting or growing a firm
  • How to analyze your client base for niching down (step by step!)
  • The most important quality to look for in hiring senior employees

Resources mentioned in this episode:

About our guest:

Meryl is a Chartered Accountant and investor. She founded Bean Ninjas in July 2015 with $1,000 following the 7 Day Startup methodology. Now 8 years later the company operates in Australia, the US and UK and has a distributed team of 30 people. She is now focused on her podcast, the Lifestyle Accountant Show, and investing in businesses in the accounting industry.

Connect with Meryl

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so we were looking at a range of different options. So where can we stand out? So e commerce accounting is hard. It's much harder than service businesses. So there's a lot more transactions. It's more complicated. You need to understand how the tech works. And if something goes wrong, there could be thousands of transactions that are wrong. So a lot of accounts haven't put the time in or don't want to learn that. And so that was something we did understand. So it was a point of difference. And that meant that our e commerce clients having worked with someone else and then come to us often were happier than our other clients because they'd had a bad experience. And then they would go, Oh, wow, you guys understand it. And then, then recommend friends. And then we're also looking macroeconomics. What industries do we think are dying? And what ones do we think are growing? It seems like e commerce is growing that more and more people will be buying online. So we want to jump on something that's growing. So it's easier. And there's more and more businesses that need our services. And we also were concerned about they making money. So they profitable businesses themselves. So they're not going to argue so much about fees or they're happy just to pay the fees. Welcome back to the ambitious bookkeeper podcast. I'm your host, Serena Shoup. This is part of our niche series as part of this series, spanning July and August. You'll be listening in on interviews with niche, bookkeepers and accountants. I thought it would be really inspirational and super valuable to bring on bookkeepers and accountants who have built niche firms to take you behind the curtain of what it looks like to get to the point of serving in a specific niche. My hope is that you'll gain the inspiration and information that will help you hone in on your niche. Or if you already have one. Find different ways to help your clients. I'll be asking some similar questions of each of our guests, like what their minimum fee is, how they got into their niche and what their firm team structure looks like. I'm super excited to bring this to you. And I hope that you enjoy. If you're ready to hone in on your own niche and build a bookkeeping business that gives you the life that you want, check out the bookkeeping business accelerator by going to ambitiousbookkeeper.com/bba the link is also in the show notes. If finding a perfect fit client is something that you've needed. Check out my mini course, the bookkeeping client closer, go to ambitiousbookkeeper.com/closer. All the links will be in the show notes. Now let's get into today's episode. All right. Welcome back to the ambitious bookkeeper podcast today. I have another, special guest as part of our niche niche series. Like I'm going to just say both every time. Today we have Meryl Johnston on the podcast, which I'm super excited about before we hit record. We were talking about how we both felt like we knew each other because of online, but we've never actually met. So this is really cool. Welcome Meryl. Thanks. Yes. Great to be here. Great to actually be chatting outside of LinkedIn. Yeah. So you, are the founder of, and we're the CEO, which I'm sure we'll get into the story, but of Bean Ninjas, which is an e commerce accounting firm. So do you want to go ahead and kind of give your background of like how you got here or there and where you are now? And then we'll just dive into kind of like the whole running a niche firm. Yeah, sure. So I, I'm from a family of accountants. My mom was a chartered accountant when there weren't many female accountants and my parents ran a business. So I was always interested in business and that was a topic of conversation around the dinner table. And so the reason I studied accounting was because I wanted to own and run businesses. I didn't actually know whether I wanted to be an accountant, but I thought that that was a good way to get into understanding how businesses. Worked. So I did my accounting degree. I worked at BDO, which is an international firm in audit for three years and then thought, Oh, I became a chartered accountant and I'm not sure what I want to do next. I'm going to go traveling for a while. So I did that. I'm a surfer. So I moved cities. I am originally from Melbourne. After my travels, I moved to the Gold Coast, which is an amazing surf spot in Australia. There's a world tour surf event about 10 minutes from my office as I've been here ever since I had to worked in commercial roles. I did a little stint in tax, but my goal was always to own and operate businesses. And so eventually I started a consulting business, so using my accounting skills and I was doing software implementations. So that's where I became familiar with Xero and cloud accounting, but I was also doing payroll projects and other systems related accounting projects. I found that business hard to scale. It was. Project base ad hoc, it was hard to build a team. And so I sat down and thought about everything I would want in a business. So I wanted recurring revenue. I want something that was more simple and process based. So I felt like it would be easier to build a team. I wanted it to be international, which ruled out some, things like tax as I reflected it on, on all of that. And also. I was thinking a lot about startups and had been involved in trying to build a tech startup briefly. So I was trying to bring some of that methodology to starting a business. And so that was the story of where I started thinking about Bean Ninjas. And I met another accountant who had a similar philosophy about wanting to build something to scale that was not your traditional accounting firm. And so we met for a week and we started that business. And we've launched that business in a week. So we built the website, came up with our fixed fee packages and got a customer within within five days. Wow. that's, that's a bit of the story. I suppose I can take you to where I am now. So that business is eight years old now. And two years ago, I stepped out of a full time role and now I'm a part time advisor for that business. And I've started investing in other businesses in the accounting field and focusing on my podcast and still kind of trying to figure out what's next for me. Yeah. Ooh. Okay. So one of the things that you said, when you were talking about launching Bean Ninjas was that you stepped back and looked at what you really wanted in a business or out of a business. And for the listeners, like being intentional about what you really want out of this thing is going to help you get there so much faster. Instead of just floundering. So like take the time to really figure out what kind of business model you want. What kind of, you know, team you want to build, if you want to build a team, like, even if you know, it's not going to happen right away. If you have that vision, it'll keep you focused. So, kudos for that. I think a lot of us get into this and it's kind of like an accident, like, Oh, I'll just do this on the side. It's freelance. And then it grows into something and then we have to like revisit like, okay, now what do I actually want out of this? Whereas you were kind of, you already knew from the beginning, like you wanted to be intentional about it. Yeah. And a couple of things I didn't mention there. So I talked about the, what I wanted the business to do for me. So the business model, but I didn't talk about the lifestyle side of things. And so that was actually really important to me and also Ben, my co father. So we met in a community for, they, they described themselves as location, independent entrepreneurs. So it was very lifestyle based. So we wanted a business. That we could run from anywhere, where we didn't have to work set hours. And then we're also trying to build financial freedom for ourselves. So that they were some of the early goals we realized about a year in, or we can't really get a team behind a selfish mission like that. If we're just trying to do that for ourselves. And so then we realized and engaged the team in setting the vision and values and realized, well, that's actually what we want for our team as well. Is that flexibility and freedom. And then we want to help our clients achieve that. So some of our clients are doing very well financially, but our goal isn't to help them buy the next Ferrari is to help them create freedom. So through the businesses that they're operating. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I really like how, so how did you get the team to buy into it? Was it like, do you want to talk about that? Yeah. Well, so I didn't know that much about running a business when, when we first started, I was kind of learning everything on the fly and it was only, so I was reading a lot of business books, but it's only about a year and a half into the business. I realized, Oh, okay. There's a reason that businesses have a mission and vision and values. Oh, we should probably do that. So I read. Different books about how other people were doing that. And then already we had team members based in different countries. So we did in person from my office where we could, and then we were at people on zoom calls all over the place. And then we were just collaborating. broke off into little groups and we were brainstorming. But what do you think we're all about? What are our values? What are we trying to achieve here? And then we came back as a big group and discussed it all, took lots of notes. And then I had. Our operations manager, kind of distill everything. And then we came back with, okay, this is what we, we think we're about. This is what our values are. Let's get feedback from everybody. So it was a bit of a, we wanted everybody to buy in, but then ultimately I made the final decision based on everybody's input. And that's, we've revisited that over the years and some things have changed. And that one of our values we reworded slightly, but the core driver has always been freedom and that's never changed. Yeah. So at that point, how big was your team? Oh, it's going back a while now. I'd say we would be more than 10 people. So we, we grew quickly. So we started with nothing. We put in 1, 000 to get the business going and we, we didn't invest any money for the first year and a half. So we had to, And every dollar before we could spend it on anything, but we were spending everything back on the business, not really paying ourselves for the first couple of years. So I think we had about 10 contractors by the time we were, 12 months into the business. And then I think we, I can't remember exactly. I think we did this about 18 months or 2 years in. So we were probably between 10 and. 15 people. But we had a lot that they were not full time. So we couldn't afford any full time staff at the beginning and these were all contractors. And then it was only, so they had other things going on as well. I mean, that's a whole other story we can talk about, but eventually we switched to a different model where we had people working full time or close to full time. That, yeah, that. We're having people only working part time or with their own businesses cause challenges, wasn't like there was only one or two people in the hindsight. I would have liked to set, that earlier and start out with all of the values and what we're all about. You learn on the fly. I think that's important too. you can lay out a plan, but I think actually what's really important with a new business is moving quickly. And so just. Starting the business, getting customers. And that's where you, you learn is by iterating, testing something, getting feedback, and then trying again. So I think a bit of a plan is important, but it's actually more important to move fast. Yeah, I agree with you and experimenting. So it's, it's like that. I, I don't know what the quote, who the quote is from, but something about failing fast. Yes. Yeah, exactly. it. So when you started Bean Ninjas, did you start out with the intention of being an e commerce accounting firm? We didn't, we had no idea. I didn't even know about Niching back then. we were trying to like a tech startup that happened to be in bookkeeping. So we would call ourselves an accounting firm now back then we described ourselves as bookkeepers and we were only doing bookkeeping and we just wanted to grow quickly and we're working with everybody tradesmen, law firms, HR. I think we had one business in the hospitality industry. There was just all kinds of businesses. So it actually took us a while to figure out. That actually it's better to focus on one. I mean, other accounts it's listing, you'd know in the zero or the QuickBooks ecosystem, there's that many different apps that you can learn depending on what industry your clients are in. It's a nightmare to try and stay on top of all of those. Yeah. So I'm kind of curious to know, did you start to niche down around the same time that you switched people to employee full time status? Which one came would have been, yeah, so it was quite a slow transition of switching people to become employees instead of contractors, because the people that were contractors, what they wanted to do that for a reason, because often they were also running their own bookkeeping business. And then we were a good source of income, stable income while they tried to grow their own thing. But we, so they're very experienced, could do great work. But it was hard to have them work, be online at the same time to collaborate or, or to review or manage. And they weren't as interested in team culture because they were kind of doing their own thing as well. So it was just a gradual transition that we started to hire people as permanent part time. So they weren't even full time. They were just employees where this was their core focus. And then we also started to look offshore to build a team offshore. So that was happening gradually and that took us a number of years. To transition to that point with the, the niching, that also took some time. So again, it probably was about a year in that we went from Bean Ninja's cheap bookkeeping, which is not how we were positioned now. But back then I think we offered bookkeeping for 99 a month, which is just outrageous to think you can make money doing that. That was our cheapest package. So we started out like that. And then we changed our positioning to. Beanage's bookkeeping for online businesses. So that was a lot more narrow than everybody. And then over a series of years, there's subsets of online businesses, selling courses, software, e commerce. It is actually a whole range of business businesses we were working with within that category. And then it took another couple of years of testing and analysis to finally decide, okay, we're going all in on e commerce. Yeah. What was one of the deciding factors of going in on, e commerce versus, Online service providers or another, category within online business. So, so we were looking at a range of different options. So where can we stand out? So e commerce accounting is hard. It's much harder than service businesses. So there's a lot more transactions. It's more complicated. You need to understand how the tech works. And if something goes wrong, there could be thousands of transactions that are wrong. So a lot of accounts haven't put the time in or don't want to learn that. And so that was something we did understand. So it was a point of difference. And that meant that our e commerce clients having worked with someone else and then come to us often were happier than our other clients because they'd had a bad experience. And then they would go, Oh, wow, you guys understand it. And then, then recommend friends. So we actually had a spreadsheet. So we had all of our clients in the spreadsheet, we were checking, so what's the revenue? What's the profitability of each client? Do they refer us work? How happy are they with us? Do we like working with them? I think that it's been quite a few years. I think they were all of the columns, but it was something like that. So we're trying to evaluate. And then we're also looking macroeconomics. What industries do we think are dying? And what ones do we think are growing? It seems like e commerce is growing that more and more people will be buying online. So we want to jump on something that's growing. So it's easier. And there's more and more businesses that need our services. And we also were concerned about they making money. So they profitable businesses themselves. So they're not going to argue so much about fees or they're happy just to pay the fees. Yeah. So we were thinking about that from an industry perspective. And then we also analyzed our client base and realized, okay. This is the best category for us to focus on where we can stand out and differentiate. we actually were considering, or I was thinking, should we create a separate brand because I was so worried about e commerce was probably only 30% of our client base or less at that time when I was really worried about, well, what about all of these other clients? There's great clients there. We understand, understand these other categories too. And so I was thinking, well, should we actually create a separate brand? Keep Bean Ninjas for online businesses, and then we'll have this new brand. And I'm so glad that I had friends convinced me not to do that. It's hard enough building one brand, creating content, social media, all of that for one brand. What a nightmare to try and do that for two. So I'm glad we did not, Mm we did not go down that path, but I was seriously considering it. And. Thinking about it for probably six months. So what we did instead was just gradually transition our branding. So we started to write more content about e commerce. We started to go to more e commerce events, and that's just where we focused behind the scenes, but it wasn't so much of a public. Statement that we only work with e commerce brands. And then as our portfolio of clients gradually increased to be more e commerce, we felt more comfortable to actually change our website to say e commerce growth accountants at the top. And then we actually sold off parcels of, we did this a couple of times, sold off parcels of fees of the non e commerce clients, which helped us to get some cashflow to, to rebuild that client base with e commerce clients. So again, all of it was a transition. We didn't just do it overnight. This took a number of years to get to that point. Yeah, that's such a good point to make and. Even though we talked about moving quickly before there are certain things you can move quickly on, but they're still going to take time. This is one of them, right? Yeah, that is so interesting. You say that cause I'm always talking about moving fast. I'm always trying to push our team of, well, why does that need to take two weeks? Why can't we do a paired back version of that in one day? So I'm always trying to move fast, but then I know, especially. Relationships or things to do with change, you need to give people a space to, to come around. And so I like the tasks within the project to move quickly. So if we're rebranding, well, let's get that project done quickly. But that doesn't mean we necessarily have to put that out to the public yet. Yeah, that's such a good point. And it's like the same with raising prices, make the decision that you're going to raise the prices on. In these phases, but the phases themselves may take longer, right? You don't have to spread it out to all your clients at once. I think that's where a lot of accountants get hung up and bookkeepers because it's like, we have this like perfectionism tendency. That's like, everything has to be perfect before we move. Everything has to be the same across the board so that everything lines up and is in order. And, um, it's just when there's relationships involved, like you said, you have to ease into some things. And the perfectionism thing's interesting too, I had that beaten out of me a bit because I worked in audit. And so I remember learning about materiality and me saying, this is wrong. And they're saying, Oh, it's only a hundred thousand dollars. I was only a million dollars wrong. And what that's wrong, it's not material. It's not impacting decision making. So we need to move on. We've got other things that we need to do. So I remember learning that I think the same can apply to accounting firms. So we don't want errors in our account. So there's certain things that they need to be right. And we need to have the processes and the systems to allow that. But there's a lot of other things that don't need to be perfect. And I think marketing or writing content is an example of that. It's better to test and iterate and try. And the same with new technology. How can you get out there and try it quickly? You don't have to change it for all of your team or all of your client base, but it doesn't have to be perfect from day one. And you'll learn more just by trying to get to that next phase of testing. Yeah, such a good point. Okay, so, You did not start out as e commerce. You transitioned to that. I love the way that you, talked about, analyzing your client base. There's some very actionable tips and things in that. So if you're listening, rewind and go back and analyze your own client base if you're looking at niching down. So then Are you still positioning yourself as a bookkeeping firm or more of an accounting firm at this point? Now we say accounting firm. So we changed our positioning and our prices. So I mentioned we did. It did bookkeeping for 99 at the beginning. And we quickly realized we couldn't make a profit doing that. So when we decided to focus on e commerce, we realized actually we're more of a premium brand now we're specialists in this field and we can charge premium prices for that. And so we check, so our average fees are probably more like 1500. Dollars a month is what a typical client, we'd have clients on less than that and more than that, but that probably gives you listeners an idea of what we would charge for bookkeeping and management accounting, or in a, in the U S as it's probably the term that people know. So it's all of the accounts payable, the processing, but it's also preparing management accounts. So that's what we are deliverable is accurate, timely, monthly reports that are specific to e commerce brands laid out in a way. That shows the key metrics for what an e commerce brand should care about. But it was interesting. So back in the early days of business, I heard of a triangle, which helps you with your brand positioning. So there's quality, there's speed, and then there's price. And you can only be two of those things. So you could, you could have high quality and you could be fast, but then you can't be cheap. And so. The beginning, we would try to be all three at B& H's. So we never wanted to compromise on quality. We always wanted to have good service and accurate accounts. People need them fast. If you're sending management accounts, there's no point in sending them two months later. They need to be within 10 business days or 20 business days. Depending on what you're getting paid, so that's not an option and we were trying to do it cheaply. And, and then we realized, well, we don't want to compromise on either of those things. So we need to significantly increase our prices. And as you can see, there's quite a difference between the 99 and the, you know, 1500 or so a month. And so that's a different client that expects different things too. But I'm glad that we did that. So we actually reduced our client count as we sold off the fee parcels and have a smaller number of clients, but higher revenue now, I have a couple questions from that. One of them is, have you had challenges getting team members up to speed on the e commerce world, like sales tax and A2X and like, because it is a highly specialized thing. Like it's hard to find people that understand it. It is, it's very hard. So we actually have to do a lot of training. So we hire senior staff, senior accountants with a lot of experience, but we still need to do hands on detailed e commerce training, and it can take six months for someone to really get up to speed and understand all the different scenarios that we come across. So that's something that we're aware of. It takes a while for someone to get up to speed and it can be quite challenging and overwhelming for new accountants who join and. Some of them don't make it through the trial period because they just go, wow, this is complex. I'm not enjoying this. Not for me. But the ones that do make it through, then they're kind of converts and they love e commerce accounting. I can talk a little bit more about how we hire, if that's relevant. I was just going to ask, like, what is one of the key, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but I want to hear what, it is for you guys. But what do you think is one of the key differentiators for the team member that does make it through and is successful in their role versus the ones that are like, this is too much. I'm out. Yeah. They need to have a mindset of being interested in growing. So, so some accountants, particularly if they're doing bookkeeping work, And they're working on simple small business files, service businesses with not that much complication. The same thing every month. They can get used to just clicking okay, not having to think too much, everything's coded to the same accounts, quick check, and they don't, they've gotten used to not having to think too much. And they like that state. Whereas this. This kind of accounting requires some complex things that you need to think about and problem solve. And so they actually need to enjoy that or find that interesting. And it's not like that every day, but it's going to be like that sometimes. And if they don't enjoy that, then that's not going to be a great fit. So I think that's part of it, that they've got that mindset of wanting to learn and grow. And that's actually one of our other values is always growing, which is about continuous improvement and wanting to embrace knowledge, radical candor, so give feedback to peers, managers, where we're all trying to improve. I was going to say problem solving Yes. for anyone listening, wondering what, what my answer was. And, and you did say it, that is, but yeah, being a thinker, being able to problem solve and growing and improving because yeah, there is. Especially when you introduce the integration and things like that, and the sales tax, none of those integrations are perfect. There's going to be things that break and you need someone that can troubleshoot it. and I like how you pointed out that you, hire a senior accountant. So you're hiring people that they already have accounting experience, right? Exactly. we have tried with juniors too, but we're a remote team and we don't have set work hours. So I think if you've got junior staff, I go back to my, my days as a graduate, I had so many questions a day. I was, I'd work on something that I get stuck and then I'd need just a quick answer and then I could keep going. And then half an hour later, I was stuck again. So. I don't think that works very well remotely when someone's stuck and then their manager's not online for another three hours because they're enjoying their flexible work and taking their kid to assembly and off at yoga, which is the life we want our team members to have, that we don't have the ability to, to really train junior staff well. So usually they would have. Five years of accounting experience normally So we, we hire a lot of staff in the Philippines. And so usually they would, we try and get at least two to three years of experience working for a U S or an Australian firm. So they've been trained on communication on the standards that are expected work papers, balance sheet reconciliations. They know how all of that works. They're familiar with all of the typical, the tech stack. And then we just have to focus on the e commerce part, not the rest of it. Oh, yeah, that's such a good point. And then one of the other things that you talked about when you were talking about the triangle was that as you transitioned to positioning yourself differently, clients fell off or you sold them off it was now a new type of client that needed your service. So I always like to point that out that like, When we're looking at our revenue goals and our profit goals and the amount of time you want to spend in the business that sometimes decides for you, the level of client that you're going to be working with, you can no longer, like you did, you can no longer sell $99 bookkeeping services. If you only want 10 clients and only work 10 hours a week, right, Exactly. But I should, I realized it might make me sound callous saying we sold off, sold off by portfolio. So I should just say that that went well. And we had actually had clients thank us when we said, well, Hey, we're not the right service provider anymore. We're specializing in e commerce. We're not specializing in your industry, but we've found another accountant who is a specialist in your type of accounting. And if you'd like us to, we'll do a full transition. I won't ask you any questions. They'll ask us. We'll share all of your files. It's going to be the same price that you paid us. We'll handle all of the transition. So we didn't just sell the clients to anybody. We did research to find out, well, who can we send this portfolio of clients to, that's going to look after them where they'll get a similar experience to working with us. Oh, actually maybe they might even get a better experience they're not going to get stung with a big increase straight away. Yeah. So what was that process? Was it just contacts that you had made, or did you guys, like, I imagine it took a while to find It did. I've done it a couple of times now and each situation was different, but generally it's always been through someone that I know, but, but one of the strategies I tried, I didn't want to use a broker. So I posted in a Facebook group that I'm part of to say, Hey, we've got this portfolio of clients. They're great clients, but they're just not e commerce, which is our specialty. And then I asked anyone that was interested to fill out a form with a little bit about who they were. The name of their firm, what their current revenue was, how much the dollar value of fees they were willing to buy, because I was open to selling one parcel or if that was too expensive for someone, it could be split. So kind of getting information. And then I wanted to know, could they pay cash up front or did they need to do installments? What kind of valuation would they use? I tried to get a whole lot of information up front. We'll probably had about 30 people fill out that form. So I vetted everybody and I did between 10 and 15 zoom calls just to try and get a sense of who they were, how they worked, would our clients be a good fit? Did they operate similar to us? And then narrowed that down, negotiated terms with think about three or four. And I ended up going with a friend of mine who I knew we would be able to do a transition in one of these cases. And so we, had contracts drawn up about lawyers involved, but we'd already agreed on all of the key terms. So I think it only took a week of a little bit of backwards and forwards in adjusting the contract. and that transition went really well. And we just had a couple of clients drop off, but she was really organized at her end. And we had our director of service delivery, which is, you know, head of accounting, handle it at our end in giving access to all of the files. had a shared Slack channel. So her team could chat directly with our team. So we weren't bothering the clients. So I was really, yeah, really happy with how that went. Wow. How long did that transition take to get fully, just like, be done with those clients? I think the transition took about three months from not bad. it, her team's probably a team of 20, 30 people. So they're decent sized operations. So she already had good systems and they had capacity and she's very well organized. And then Michelle and Alwyn's very well organized too. So I think we planned out communication to the clients. I did a video. To explain it, what it all meant to them. yeah. Let the clients know. we transitioned over, I think it was beginning of the new financial year, and then we provided, I think it was three months of support to the, the new service provider, but they didn't need much after they had access to everything and had a few questions here or there. I'll take credit. Some of the credit, we must have had good work papers, Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I was just going to say they just looked at what happened last month. Figured it out because they're good problem solvers. Oh goodness. Okay. So nowadays I briefly, mentioned at the top of the episode that you've, and you talked about it too, that you're now in more of an advisory role with Bean Ninjas and you're doing lots of other things. So can you talk about what that looks like to be in more of an advisory role? Are you like on a board of directors? Are you like, what is this? Yeah, so I had to figure that out. So we do, they're not official board meetings, but we call them the advisory board. So not everybody's a director of the. The entity that we meet. So there's four of us that meet once a quarter. And then we also talk, in Slack, we have a Slack channel. And so we're talking and sharing notes throughout that, but we're in three different time zones, Australia, the U S and UK. So somebody is going to be up late at night for the call. So we just do that once a quarter. And then each of the country managers share their financial results, so they have a report that gets shared and we talk through that, but mainly it's to talk to brainstorm and talk about, well, oh, you're having the staffing shortages is a challenge in hiring. How are you solving that? Or how are you solving or what are you doing for fee increases? Okay, that's how you communicated it. So it's a lot of brainstorming, but having that group also create some accountability about everyone. Actually writing their report. I think there's a lot of learning. I think the main benefit is not so much us discussing it, but it's each of the leaders having to write that report and go through their financials and and see what's happened and also accountability against the goals that they set. So, to me, that's one of the main benefits. And so I'm more facilitating that to make sure that everybody's. Doing that, creating the space for accountability, but also some collaboration. So that's part of my role. And then I also work one on one with each of the leaders. So whatever comes up, they're working on a referral agreement. Okay. Let's chat about the terms that we should include in that. And how do we protect our risk? Or they've had a difficult situation with a team member. Okay. Let's talk about that. So it's more kind of ad hoc as things come up and what each different leader needs. So I'm still, still figuring out exactly what that looks like and how I can support the team best, but I'm really trying To step back and let other people step up as leaders and try not to interfere. So that's what I'm doing there. And I still also run marketing. So when I say run marketing, I do strategy, not execution. So there's marketing team members that deliver different things like our email newsletter and content, social media, but I really enjoy that and I'm still attached to the Beanagers brand having built it from the beginning, so I still am involved there a little bit too. Yeah. that's on the Bean Ninjas side it's taken me a while. So it actually felt strange when I went from full time, then I went to a four day work week and now I kind of do about one day a week, but spread across multiple days, so check in here or there. And it took me a while to adjust to that for seven years. I worked towards that and, and then it happened and I thought this should feel better than it does. I feel kind of guilty. What am I going to do with my time? I do have two little kids. So, that was nice to be more present there, but it, I found it odd, not having had a goal and, and striving for it for so many years, then. When I achieved it, which was stepping out, being able to step out of the business, I, it felt strange not having something new to work towards. So now I've filled that gap a little bit. I've started a podcast called the lifestyle accountant show, which is, it's for accounting firm owners. And often it's more on the lifestyle side. So how can you create a business that helps you achieve the life that you want to lead and what you want to do outside of work? So I'm doing that. And then I've also just started investing. In businesses that solve problems for accountants. So I've learned some lessons there. I don't know that might be taking us off on a tangent, but, , that's been a eyeopening experience as well. so you had a goal From the beginning or like midway through your business, you have the, let me know you have that goal to be able to step out of it. From the beginning, so Ben and I, when we started the business, our goal was freedom and then we defined that at least a million dollars of revenue and working a 20 hour work week. And then over time that changed, but it, the goal was to remove myself from the business. So I have it run without me, but have it still financially providing for me, but not having to work in it anymore. And so I used to have an organizational chart where my name was in every box. And then gradually over the years, I gradually removed myself from each of those different roles. Yeah. And how did you do that? It was all your was hard. Well, I started with everything to do with servicing clients. And then gradually moved out from there. So first of all, it was bookkeeping, then it was hiring a manager to review the work and manage the team. Then it was onboarding and building out processes and the system there and having someone manage that sales was last from client facing perspective. And that took the longest and then I found the hardest to give up. And then internally building a marketing team. I'm still involved, but having other people execute, I used to write the newsletter and write the blog posts and do all the social media. So gradually doing that and then internal finance, that took me a while to let go of as well. I would, I may be being an accountant and I'm still, I'm still bit involved with that. I still like to get reports every week with what's happening with our internal finances. So that took a little while to hire for and. An operations manager to be involved in running the business. But all of that was later after our main focus was on building a team to service clients and manage relationships. Yeah. that gives us a good little roadmap for anyone that has that vision for sure. It's an interesting choice because my mindset or the way I see myself is the business owner, not so much as an accountant, but there are also some accountants who love accounting, love the client relationships. And so they might be better hiring someone on the business side to run the business so they can focus on. Great client relationships and really technical work. So I think either path is fine, but it's understanding yourself and what do you want? And for me, I love running businesses and I'm, I like accounting, but I'm love business. And so for me, that was the right path. Yeah, I, think it is important to know yourself. So if you're like the one that I personally, I hired help very early on in my business because I don't prefer to do the day to day accounting. I'm okay. Like reviewing things and I can pick everything apart, but when it comes to doing the actual repetitive work, that is not my favorite. it's good to, good to know yourself for sure. Okay. So you have the podcast, you mentioned that you are investing and you briefly talked about some lessons that you've learned from that. if you want to dive into that, that Yeah, well, that's where I, yeah, I've been, that's where I've been spending my time learning about investing this year. And so I, I started with an angel investment and so I tried to educate myself and I read some books about angel investing, talk to other people that had done it, and then I thought, okay, the best way to learn is just to dive in. And so I talked with two startups in the accounting industry who are solving problems for accountants and yeah, just dived in and. I've read the agreement. So they use a safe, which is like a convertible note. So then once you've got the agreement, then you can dive into it and understand, well, how does this work? What would this look like in different scenarios? So I mapped it out in Excel to cut, to see what would happen and just actually trying to understand how does all of this work and when do you get a return on your investment? And I did due diligence, which I realized I did not enjoy. so try to figure out, well, the valuation that they're using. Do I agree with that? Do I not? It's a pre-revenue business, which I'm not that familiar with. So I didn't enjoy that component. I did customer calls to try and validate the problem. So I read some books about how you do customer research and then I thought, okay, well, I could apply this to try and validate this startup's idea. It's in the accounting industry. I know lots of accountants. So I just jumped on calls with some friends not asking leading questions. So I didn't mention the product. I wasn't talking about specifically what they solved, but I was just trying to explore how are you solving this problem in the advisory space at the moment? And what would you pay to solve that problem? So that was interesting. I found that part fun. And then my other lesson was. I think to do angel investing, well, you kind of need to be in the business of angel investing. I made one investment and it's high risk and could possibly go to zero, but I'm going to put that I'll chalk that up to learning, but to do this properly, I probably need to be making 10 investments a year. And to do that, I might need to be vetting 50 deals and then do that every year. Do I want to be in the business of angel investing? I don't know that I do. Yeah. Doesn't seem passive. Exactly. Exactly. So that was one experience. investing in real estate. It's kind of like the same thing. People. None of it's truly passive. You have to be very actively involved in what's happening. So I think really the only passive investments are like mutual funds. That's what I do now. I've done it for many years. Yeah. Vanguard fund, index fund, don't try and pick individual stocks. Just put it in there, set and forget. And it's not amazing returns, but it feels safe and I don't have to allocate too much thought to it. So, so the second investment I did was slightly different. So I wouldn't define it as an angel investment. In a tech startup, this is a service business that's solving problems for accountants. And so this is in the recruitment space. It's called team up when it helps accountants hire offshore team members. And so that this was different in that I understand how service businesses work. I understand the valuations I felt more comfortable, but also because it's not a tech startup. I'm not a tiny, you know, 0. 1% investor. I could actually buy a decent chunk of the business and feel like I can have import. And to me, that's more fun than being I'm trying to help this other tech startup brief. And then that's great. And I chat with the founders a little bit and help where I can, but I'm just a tiny investor along with lots of other people, but with this other business team up, I feel like, Oh, actually I can make a contribution here. And I'm finding that more fun that I can actually get in and help. With their marketing strategy. I can talk with the team and so I'm finding that enjoyable, but that's not scalable and that's not passive. So that's not, I couldn't do that 10 or 15 times. So I'm still trying to navigate this and figure out, okay, what's next for me. I've been dabbling in a few things the last year and a half, and it's been fun with investing and I think I'll do a little bit more, but I, but maybe not the angel investing, but maybe I will, I'm not sure. Yeah. That's exciting. It's nice to hear, about that from someone who's kind of like new at it and just you're sharing your experience because I, I feel like. Sometimes that's a goal for people, right? When you, sell your business. Now you have a chunk of change for retirement. Now, what do you do with it? You usually invest it, but there's so many ways to invest it. So if, like you said, you're like, what do I do with my time? That's one way to get involved, right? And to, to work on projects and that are still going to have hopefully a return on your investment, but it's not your own business. So that's exciting to hear that perspective. So. we talked about what your team size was towards the beginning, but how big is the team at Bean Ninjas now? Because you're in three countries. So we're between 25 and 30. I don't know exactly today because I know we've got open roles and some people left, but I think. It was about 27, but I don't know exactly between 25 and 30 is how I say it. Cause it's a bit variable. So within that we're in six countries. So most of the team is in the Philippines, but we've got some staff in America. We've got one guy in the UK. Someone lives in Spain, someone in Serbia. and in Australia, obviously, which is where we were founded. So we have time zone challenges. That's definitely one of the downsides of being in multiple countries with time zone flashes. eight years ago. We just wanted to hire the best people regardless of where they were living in the world. And that's worked for us. And so we just have to work around those challenges of time zones and people's availability. And then it's a good excuse to meet in a cool country and catch up in person when we can. So we've done a couple of team, we've done one big team retreat and some micro team retreats and hopefully have one in the Philippines later this year. Our last Filipino retreat in the Philippines was cancelled due to COVID. So we're due to have another crack at it. Yeah. So have you, has it, have you not had a team retreat since before COVID at this point? Okay. We haven't. I've met up with my business partner, Wayne. I came across the QuickBooks Connect. In Vegas last year, which was awesome. So we, we try and meet up in person once a year, but we haven't done a whole team or leadership team thing since pre COVID, but we're, we're overdue. Yeah. What, size were you when you started doing, in person meetups like that? How big was your team? We did start doing it from the early days, but they weren't, it was just the leadership team. So we we've flown out Tom from the UK. He's been out here a couple of times to work from the Gold Coast office. And then same Wayne's been out a couple of times. So it was more just the leadership team that we try and bring out to spend time with other leaders. And then I think The first retreat we did in Australia, we had about eight people there. The team was bigger, but again, it was just the leadership team that we, flew in. So expensive trip out to Australia. So, and that was fantastic. So it's really valuable. I think that in person time does to. To get to know each other and build relationships and talk about things that you might not, if it's down to business on a zoom call with an agenda, then you might not be talking about your family or what you did on the weekend. We try and do a little bit of that, but it's different when you've got three hours over dinner and drinks or offer a surf together. I Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing everything. I, there's a lot of our audience that, are maybe just starting their bookkeeping business or in the early stages of it. Do you have a piece of advice or something that if you started over that you would do differently to share with our listener? think it's about getting clear what kind of business you want to build. I recorded an episode just recently about start small, stay small. And it was a story about micro firm. So someone that's very successful, but has no staff. And so I think that's, what's important is to not worry about what everyone else is doing or feel the pressure to grow. It's okay. If you want to do that, but it's about reflecting on what kind of business do you want? What kind of business, what kind of lifestyle do you want and how do you build a business around that? And not don't compare yourself to other people or feel pressure seeing other people's success. Just keep coming back to what you want and then shape your business around that and make decisions. Around the type of clients that you work with the team that you hire or don't hire, make all of those decisions to come back to that kind of life and business that you want for yourself. Oh, I love that. Thank you so much. That's such an important, piece of advice to take into account. Because like I said, a lot of us do start this because it's like, well, I'm on maternity leave. I don't want to go back to corporate. So I'm just going to start building this thing to replace my income. So it's like a job, right? And then some of us start out with the intention of, I want to build an asset and sell it eventually and have a big retirement. And either one is okay. Like either one is okay. You just have to, and you can change your mind also. Like that's the other thing. Great. Okay, I have one last question I just thought of. Is Bean Ninja a Xero firm or a QBO firm or do you do both? Oh, controversial. we were, we were Xero only for seven years. And so we were Xero's Australian Bookkeeping Partner of the year a few years ago. I was part of X Pack, which is Zero's partner advisory Council. So we were very zero oriented, zero heavy e-commerce clients in the us. One quick books, a lot of the time. And so we, we made the decision after years of deliberation. And so we've started offering a quick book service from January of this year, 2023. So it's pretty new, but more than 50% of our new clients coming on are picking quick books now that we're giving them the option. So that's, that's been interesting. And that was why I came across to the QuickBooks Connect conference last year was as part of our strategy of, okay, we need to learn about this. We need to build relationships in the ecosystem and let's try and make a splash when we announced that we're, we're finally, after all these years, I'm going to offer QuickBooks as well, but I am, I am speaking at XeroCon this year, so in Australia. So, we never left the Xero ecosystem either. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you, you have to be zero in Australia, but did you find that you were turning clients away because you weren't offering QuickBooks? yeah, we're turning away so many clients, particularly when we moved up market, it's not like these clients have no accounting software when they move to us, they're normally, they have an accounting software, they have an accountant, they're just not happy with how it's going. And so we were having to say, well, We, we had to sell bean ninjas and we had to say, Oh, you need to completely change your tech stack, redo what you've got as well. So they had to be sold on two different things. So we found it was easier to say, okay, yes, we can manage what you have. We're going to optimize the tech stack and, yeah, come across to bean ninjas. We understand e commerce accounting, so it was the right move, but it took a while to get there. Were you the one digging your heels in? I was, it was me, because I wanted, I like everything to be process based. And so to me, I want everything streamlined, one tech stack, one way of doing things, one system, one everything. And so I felt like we were opening ourselves up to chaos by having to learn a whole new system, new certifications, different integrations, different processes. And so it was me, but, Wayne did a good, he was very persistent. My business partner. I know, and I'm glad he, he outlined the pros and cons and so it made sense. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for indulging me in that last question. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. If someone wants to connect with you, where's the best place to connect. and. Shout out your podcast again, so that people can go and listen to that since they're listening to a podcast right now. Yeah. So the podcast is called the lifestyle accountant show. So you can search for that on your podcast app or go to lifestyle accountant. co couldn't get the. com. Otherwise, I'd love to connect on LinkedIn. So that's Meryl Johnston on LinkedIn and happy to chat there and, and also answer any questions if you're trying to build a firm and, and have a specific question, I'd love talking and helping other accounting and bookkeeping firm owners. So yeah, feel free to reach out thank you again so much for coming on and, listeners, please connect with Meryl. Listen to her podcast, follow and connect with her on LinkedIn and, Thank you again. been great. Thanks for the chat.

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