Work for yourself, not by yourself

As Maya Angelou liked to say: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”

My friend, Kristen Keats, CPA, owner or co-founder of four, vertically integrated companies serving our industry, has never been willing to accept the status quo. A tireless entrepreneur and connector, she’s never been willing to accept the “churn and burn” model so many traditional accounting firms follow.

Keats realized early on that thousands of talented accountants would love to have their own firms — and serve clients on their own terms — if only it wasn’t so daunting to start a firm from scratch. 

Enter Breakaway Bookkeeping and Advising, which Keats co-founded with attorney and accountant Martin Moll. Breakaway provides distributed share bookkeeping, controller and CFO advisory services. 

At Oregon-based Aldrich Advisors, Keats met Moll and was first exposed to offshore accounting services in India. It was a complete game changer for Keats to see affordable, reliable, well-trained talent overseas. Keats sensed an opportunity to help firms save money while still providing excellent client service. 

“Our tagline at Breakaway is ‘Bring joy to accounting,'” related Keats. “Each Breakaway advisor has their own practice. They’re serving their own clients and we provide the infrastructure to support them — engagement letters, malpractice insurance, etc. and of course, expert bookkeeping service overseas, that are affordable for early-stage firms. This frees up the Breakaway advisor to spend as much time as possible on client-facing activities.”

Keats’s model gives advisors all the benefits of being in a firm, combined with the autonomy to choose who they want to work with, and to price them and serve them on an individual basis. And then there’s the camaraderie without the office politics.

“The main benefit for advisors is having a community of like-minded people,” asserted Keats. “We have created a worldwide network of cohorts that are very tightly knit.”

Keats found that having a sense of community was the No. 1 thing that sole practitioners, small firm partners or satellite office CPAs craved — being able to ask colleagues casually how to handle a tricky issue or which app they’re using to answer a question or become more productive.

“It was about having that office-style camaraderie built in and not feeling like you have to go to outside networking events to meet people with potentially common interests,” she related. 

Meanwhile, less than a year after launching Breakaway, Keats was approached by the owner of Aldrich Advisors, based in her hometown of Sherwood, Oregon. The owner wanted to retire and that got Keats thinking. The clients of Breakaway advisors needed tax help, not just bookkeeping assistance. But Breakaway advisors were leery of referring their clients to CPAs who they feared might try to poach their clients.

“So, we thought, why not have a strategic partnership with a tax firm we could trust, where we could have a friendly and symbiotic relationship?” Keats wondered.

An added benefit was that the Aldrich specialists liked working with Breakaway clients because they knew the bookkeeping done by Breakaway was rock solid. “That makes the tax returns easier to do, which frees up the Aldrich team for more tax strategy and forward planning work,” Keats added. 

In order to solve the talent shortage in the accounting profession, Keats built from scratch an outsourced bookkeeping team called Cadencia (Spanish for cadence or rhythm). Based in Guadalajara, Mexico, the Cadencia team has quickly grown to 35 full vetted, highly educated bilingual professionals.

It’s an outsourced bookkeeping solution for Breakaway clients that need faster results in their own time zone. It’s also for Breakaway clients that want to see their remote teams in person occasionally so they can provide detailed training face to face. 

“Our overarching goal is to bring joy to accounting, which if you recall, is also the tagline for Breakaway,” noted Keats.

Each of her businesses is a critical piece to solving that puzzle — vertically integrated businesses that support each other. In addition to Breakaway, Cadencia and Aldrich, Keats and team recently connected with the folks who started a program called “60 Minute CFO,” based on David Duryee’s book by the same name.

The program aligns with all the key metrics a small business owner and their financial team (if they have one) should be tracking so they can bridge the gap between the business owner, banker and CPA.

It turns out Duryee and his daughter, Tracy Bech, were big players in the moving and storage industry. In their work, they got together regularly with like-minded CFOs from throughout the moving and storage industry, sharing best practices and visiting each other’s facilities. Some of the get-togethers had been taking place for over a quarter of a century. So Keats realized she could partner with Duryee and Bech to make the CFO industry groups available to Breakaway advisors and that’s how Starboard Collectives was born.

“We are always looking for progressive accountants who want to do something cool with a cool company,” recalled Keats. “Whether you are a tax person, bookkeeper, controller or CFO, somewhere in our ecosystem there’s a place for people who are like-minded.” 

Five-year forecast for the profession

“The big traditional firms will always serve big clients, but as far as small-business clients go, the lack of talented, well-educated young people going into our profession is the biggest crisis of our time,” observed Keats.

Like many firm managers, Keats told me how hard the staffing shortage has become. For instance, she recently ran an ad for a manager for an entire year before the position was filled. And then that person quit 94 days later.

“I know it was 94 days because my deal with the recruiter was for 90 days. So, I lost that recruiting fee,” recalled Keats. 

She also had another manager quit exactly on April 13. Ouch. 

“I really hope that over the next five years firms will wake up and smell the coffee. You can’t just pay lip service to the term ‘work-life balance.’ You have to be committed to making it work,” observed Keats. 

From where I sit, the last three years have taught us about the importance of work-life balance and being able to work anywhere, whether at home or on the road or overseas. A tax firm in Oregon can hire somebody in Florida or India or Mexico and still make it work. That is a lot more palatable than telling yourself: “I’ve got to sit at my desk and bill 2,800 hours a year.” I know I couldn’t do that, and neither should you. 

Even men and women in the top-earning 10% of the U.S. labor market logged fewer work hours in 2022, than those in the same earnings group in 2019, according to a new study of federal data by the economics department at Washington University in St. Louis. Why not accountants?

“Even though I’m super excited about all the great people we’re training in Mexico via Cadencia, I’m passionate about getting more people into the industry in the U.S,” said Keats. “Our small businesses really need accountants. We have to find a way to make accounting more attractive to people. The big firm model of churning and burning people out with a minimum of 2,800 billable hours a year, is not flying. I want to make this industry better for accountants and for their clients.”