Redefining Growth From the Inside Out | Amplify S8E1

Keith, thank you so much for coming on Amplify, the podcast for accounting firm Growth. Yeah, it's my pleasure. I'm looking forward to this. It's kind of a throwback for me, as you know.

Yeah, coming back around. That's awesome. I started my career as the chief marketing officer of Deloitte. And it's exciting to be in front of an audience that absolutely gets that principle.

And so I was excited to be here actually today. Thank you. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Really appreciate it.

So I think we want to just start out with this idea of teamship, right? This is probably a newer concept for a lot of people, but I want you to just kind of unpack it. How does that really impact accounting firms? Sure.

Well, maybe what I can do, a lot of folks know my work from my first book, Never Eat Alone. And Never Eat Alone was a book really that chronicled the rise of my career from a poor kid in Pittsburgh to being the youngest officer ever elected at Deloitte and the chief marketing officer of the firm before I was 30 years of age, right? And the basic principle of that was that relationships are the key to our success. Relationships unlock every door, every opportunity you want.

Now, what was interesting about that is I brought that principle into my job as CMO. So there was no CMO at Deloitte prior. In fact, there was no organized marketing at Deloitte. We were the lowest of the big eight in unaided brand awareness.

And my view was really simple. It was, if we could build personal relationships with 500 of the most important people for our growth, we could grow our firm. And that was my whole focus. And I was doing that, and then they rewarded me with the title.

So it was really thinking about relationships as the conduit to business development But I recognize that if all of our energy focused on a few critical relationships, we'd be more successful. So that was never get alone. And I still believe in what I call high-touch marketing in professional services. I think that the likelihood of winning in a broadcast ad game is very low.

And top of funnel to me is really more focused on a few critical individuals for our growth. Now, spin ahead to today. 20 years later, after that first book came out, I had discovered a few things. Number one, I discovered particularly something that I was struggling with when I was at Deloitte at the time, which is the importance of the interdependency of the organization to unlock value.

You've got partners, you've got business development, you've got marketing, even within marketing, you've got public relations, you've got thought leadership, et cetera. It is bullshit to think that all of these silos will effectively grow a firm. It just doesn't work. What is the most important thing for a professional services firm to do is to begin to stitch together the interdependencies of creating value within an organization.

And that's what teamship is all about. It's the recognition that org charts don't matter at all. What matters are KPIs, key performance indices, critical goals, and teams of people that need to work together to achieve those goals. Now, us in marketing, we're just humble Sherpas.

of building those teams to achieve great breakthrough outcomes. And so that's what Teamship is about. It's about how do you become a leader in the world of your organization without necessarily relying on the org chart. Because otherwise you're going to get your shorts all twisted, trying to gain control, trying to gain accountability.

It's just not going to work. Does that make any sense? That makes total sense. Yeah.

So that's what Teamship is. And look, the critical elements of Teamship are things like candor and transparency. Conflict avoidance is a killer of creation of value. You've got to have a challenge culture.

You've got to have a challenge culture where everybody is comfortable speaking truth in the room, not behind each other's backs. There's way too much conflict avoidance in professional services organizations, too much deference to authority, and all of that is actually eroding our ability to grow. Now, what we've done in this book is we've created simple practices that companies can use to propel you forward in creating a high-performing team. And so for instance, if you can ask the entire partnership base, what are the two things that are stopping us from achieving growth?

And what are the greatest enablers of our ability to get people's attention in the marketplace? Well, what are the most important conversations we could be having in the marketplace that would truly break the ceiling of our ability to connect with our prospects? Those are two very different questions. And what's funny about that is you could use digital tools to ask everybody in the firm, use a Google Doc, use a Teams room, you could ask everybody in the firm to come up with their best solutions.

And then you can take the people who have similar solutions, organize them into subgroups of teams, and have them activate on those solutions. Right? That's the kind of thing that you should be thinking about if you're a marketer. How do I unleash the entire organization?

organization to be partners with each other for growth. That's when you start using tools. In the book of Teamship, we have 32 very distinct practices. What I just talked to you about was something called a CPS, a collaborative problem-solving question.

You can put these kind of tools to use to unleash the entire organization in conjunction with each other to grow the firm. That's awesome. Yeah. It's great.

So for firms that are like, yes, we want to do this. They've got the book. They're starting to implement it. What is maybe like the first thing that you would say they need to do tomorrow in order to be the most just kind of effective in that process?

You know what I would do? I would start, there's a chapter 3 of the book talks about how do you open up an entire organization for candor and what I call a challenge culture. I would start by stress testing your existing marketing strategies. If you stood in front of the partnership and said, in the last quarter of marketing, here's what we've achieved.

Here's where we're struggling, and here's where we're going in the next quarter. Ask everybody to go into small breakout rooms of two or three, have them open up a Google Doc, and have them give you advice. Have them tell you, what are we missing? Write it in there.

What idea or innovation do you have? Have them write it in there. Anywhere you'd like to help or support, write it in there. In that simple act of stress testing your marketing programs, we've created a challenge culture, we've created a curious and innovative culture, and we've created a supportive culture.

It can be so easy to implement this firm-wide, and it's a simple way to start by saying, we want growth of this firm to be a team sport. This idea that we're throwing jobs to silos is not going to allow us to break through. We as a marketing team need to be the sherpas and the marshaling of the organization coming together that will break through growth. Now what will start to happen is you'll start to see the people who start to bubble up as being interested in the subject of marketing.

Work with them. You could create a committee of partners of young people. You might find young people in the organization who have a bent toward thought leadership already raising their hands early, right? That's what we need to do.

Forget about tenure, forget about org charts, and start building around success. And that stress test, your marketing program, is probably where I would start. That's great. What are some organizations, maybe outside of the accounting industry, that you see doing this really well?

I think probably one of the best companies is a young, nimble company called Elf Beauty. It is crushing the juggernauts of the beauty industry, L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, Cody, et cetera. This little tiny company has created a real mantra of teamship, of high-performing teams being the breakthrough way in which they're thinking. And they've created more market, more shareholder value and more growth than any other organization.

If it's like these big companies don't even look to each other as their competition. They look at Elf Beauty. And so I think that's a great, and that's in chapter 10 of this book, I feature Elf. The way I work the book is every chapter is a unique shift that a team needs to make, from conflict avoidance to candor in chapter 3.

I tell a hero story and then a few practices. Chapter 10 is how the team that you're working with can become each other's coaches. Elf Beauty anchors that one and a few simple practices. So that's how the book is organized and easy to use, almost like a workbook, a roadmap.

That's awesome. Yeah, I'm going to get it. All right, Mike. Well, thank you.

Appreciate it. Jason, thanks for coming on the Amplify podcast here at AIM Summit. Yes, thanks for asking Sam and Mike. It's your first year here, right?

It's Summit. We'll get to that later. We're going to talk about why you're definitely coming back. Yes.

But first, you are planning to launch a book soon. Tell me about that. So Julie, my partner, and I have been working with a lot of accounting firms, helping them restructure, grow for many years. We work with firm entrepreneurs.

So that's just kind of what we've done. And we run our own firm and go through the ups and downs of that. So I partnered with Ian Vason, who's co-founder of Carbon. which is a project management tool for entrepreneurial firms kind of all over the world.

And we wrote a book called Scale with Purpose: The Service Entrepreneur's Guide to Intentional Growth. So it's kind of a nerdy textbook take on restructuring and building a service company that scales. Yeah, tell me a little bit about what you guys do at Bloomer. Yeah, so we work specifically with agencies.

That's kind of our main niche. I know. Well, we started it a long time ago. People ask, Why do you do that?

We I've always leaned towards being creative myself. You know, me and Mike talk about being in bands and you probably did all that too. Yeah. So we just lean that way.

And we love we love the vibe of creatives, just their their heart for just being free, free spirited. That gets them in a lot of trouble, which it has me. Yep. And so a lot of times our firm just brings a lot of structure and helps them start to look at numbers in a very strategic way, understand what numbers mean, Yeah.

And so we do that really well with agencies and they need it and want it and find value in it. Yeah. So it's a great niche. We love agencies.

So you work with a lot of people. of marketers and obviously amplify is is the podcast for accounting marketers. Yeah. If you were going to kind of give accounting marketers one takeaway from your book, not to give not to be a spoiler alert.

Yeah. Yeah. Like what would be that main that main purpose of of the book or just what you've learned? Yeah.

Well, it's it's it's in the title. As we were writing this thing, we started writing the book about capacity management. you know, the professional team's ability to deliver their services. And it really got into the intention about everything.

So, and we just taught this in our session on calendar work blocking. Everything is intentional. If you want to scale, nothing grows accidentally. So if you're not really planning to get larger or bigger, then you can kind of bump your way through things.

But if you want to scale and grow, you want to do it with intention, be profitable and efficient, you have to add structure to your company as you get larger. I think there's a lot of larger firms here, and so they feel the weight of that structure, and it hems a lot of creative people in, but that structure is necessary to be intentionally get bigger. My name is Kristen Lewis. I'm the Managing Director of Strategic Growth for Eisner Amper.

I focus on our industries and sectors marketing, and I am out of our Philadelphia office. You, uh, over the past, I think year have introduced a new system and software that you use with your team. Talk, tell us about that and why you love it, why you're excited about it. Oh my God.

Uh, we love, well, I love the, the introduction of Monday, monday.com. Uh, we are having problems. We have a, a team that, you know, we have 60 plus people.

We have, uh, marketing representatives who do, uh, industry service line or geo marketing, and then they are supported by our in-house agency, we call them functions professionals, and we were having problems with project management and the flood of emails and Teams messages and all that stuff was not working out for us. So we took a leap and for some of our old school people, maybe it was a little bit of a tough leap, but once we were able to get everyone integrated on the system, we now use that for tracking projects.

soup to nuts, A to Z, all the way through, assigning others. We've got our review process goes through there. We have forms that actually go to the outside, so now if you are a partner who needs a proposal, you fill out a proposal request form, and we get the information that we need without 10 emails going back and forth. A number of those processes just being automated has made things a lot easier for us.

And as one of the leaders in our group, as the marketing representative is reporting to me, I get to see what's coming up, what's in the queue, how busy is our functions team, and what should we be throttling back on or doing more of. Good to see you here at Summit. It's fantastic to be here. First Summit for me.

I know, That's awesome, and hopefully not your last. No, definitely not my last. I will definitely be back. Anyway, thanks for coming on the podcast, the Amplify podcast, and thanks for being here at Summit doing the podcast.

Why don't you introduce yourself to everybody so they know who you are? Okay, so I'm Mark Jamnick. I'm co-founder of Kindred, and we do... do a lot of outreach programs, training and consulting for professional services firms, specifically around accounting.

Yep. That's great. So I know probably tons of insights from this week here at Summit, but what's been maybe something that stood out for you, particularly in relation to business development? So one of the biggest things that I was able to enjoy a lot of the BD tracks, which there were a lot of, and it's always great to go back to fundamentals and learn and hear and see what different people are experiencing.

And what I was consistently seeing was a lot of questions about how do you get your partners, how do you get your other individuals inside of your firm to sell, because sell can be such a dirty word. And so I definitely, I had a chance to sit in on the Herbine session and they talked a lot about the coaching side of it. And I think there's so much about the reframing of the softer side of it. I think we could get caught up in the CRMs and all of that, which is important, and the softer side and making sure that the psychology is really there and making sure that Everyone sees sales.

Even the last session that I was at, they were talking about changing cross-selling to just, you know, servicing more and really being able to reframe some of those words. And I felt like that was a question that I regularly heard. And then also there were definitely some great insights on that and just continuing to help others inside of that space. Yep.

And I think that resonates a lot. Just knowing you, you talk a lot about like instead of selling, it's about caring, right? Exactly. Yeah.

So yeah, tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So again, when you look at sales, most people think of it as a four letter bad word or, you know, sales, I guess, is a five letter word. But when you look at what all of the doers, the the doers of the firm, you know, those that are the practitioners, They care.

They care about making sure that the books are right. They care about their clients and they don't want to oversell them. At the same time, they do really care. And so if you can simply flip that switch from them thinking, oh my gosh, I have to sell something to I need to care, just like you're caring for their return or audit or whatever it is that they may be doing.

It's being able to see it from a perspective of caring about your client, which I think is like I think that really resonates with a lot of professionals in this space, not least because they all want to be advisors. They want to have that deep relationship with their clients. And I know like... David Maester's book, The Trusted Advisor, which is kind of the gold standard in this industry for how do you get there?

So much of that is really based on like, you just serve your clients really, really well, right? And I think that does come back to that four letter care, right? That you really are caring. So I love that.

I think that does really resonate with a lot of people. Diabetes. Diabetes. Diabetes.