Meryl Johnston is behind the team at Bean Ninjas, and was recognized as Bookkeeping Partner Of The Year in 2019. Her name may ring a bell: we interviewed her a couple of years ago when she hit her six-figure milestone in eight months! We interviewed her on how she got to that milestone, and now we’re picking her brain again to see how she has overcome some challenges she’s faced while growing her firm. 

Podcast

Summary

• About Bean Ninjas
• Inflection Points
  • Part-Time vs Full-Time Staff
  • Hiring the Right Person
  • Self Removal from Bean Ninjas

Related Posts

• How To Start & Open Your Own Bookkeeping Business
• A Practical Guide to Hiring your first Business Development Specialist
• How To Recruit Great Talent To Your Firm

Recommended Reads:

• Why Remote Work Is So Hard – and How It Can Be Fixed
• Rob Walling -The Stairstep Approach to Bootstrapping
• Brian Castle – Productize and Scale

About Bean Ninjas

Bean Ninjas have just over 15 people and primarily of full-time staff, but with some part-time staff members as well. When the business started, it transitioned into online business, which was still fairly broad at the time. Bean Ninjas now specializes in eCommerce businesses and agencies, but they still have quite a few clients that have software as a service (SaaS). They generally work with businesses of various sizes ranging from micro to small businesses. 

They offer bookkeeping services to clients who are getting into six figures, or maybe they’re pulling in over $200,000-$300,000 each year. From that point, they work with eCommerce clients up to eight figures. Typically, people assume that a business should be carefully niched, so the types of clients that Bean Ninjas work with may be very broad, but according to Meryl, “it’s basically where a business is; it’s not just the founder. They’re starting to build a team, and we work with them to help scale their business to the point that it makes sense to build an in-house finance team.” 

The Inflection Points

Growth for Bean Ninjas was never linear, and there would be a spike in growth when there was an emphasis on marketing and sales. Eventually, Meryl realized that the business’s systems and team weren’t designed optimally for the size of the firm. As a result, there were times when there would be stress and strain in trying to find the right people to do the right job, which in and of itself is rather time consuming. Several of the business’s inflection points surrounded these issues. When Bean Ninjas was at the six-figure mark, Meryl said that she and her co-founder were working hard to build themselves out of the service delivery. 

Part-Time vs. Full-Time Staff

Meryl explains her reasoning in the beginning for the systems she had in place, stating, “I used to do accounting consulting, and the thought process behind that was that I wanted to build a team and systems to do delivery so I could focus on running the business.” However, one of the challenges she encountered with having a team of contractors was that they didn’t always give their business the necessary time and attention; Bean Ninjas weren’t always their first priority.

In contrast, full-timers were engaged in the business, they would love the team culture, and they would exhibit loyalty to the business and their goals. Meryl said, “They’re really there for you,“ she continued, “And you’re there for them.” Contractors often have jobs on the side, and some of them were working just as hard to grow their own businesses. 

Meryl even recalls one time when Bean Ninjas had a team of 10 contractors, and there was a lot of tension in deciding who was doing what and when. As a result, this brought concerns surrounding the business’s reputation with regard to service. Meryl’s central concern was “Can we stand behind our quality?” To remedy the problem, Meryl and her co-founder rethought the model to hire staff, but moving to full-time staff brings a host of other challenges.

Hiring the Right Person

Every business wants to bring in thriving, fresh talent with a passion for their trade, and Beans Ninja did just that, attracting people from firms like Ernst & Young and BDO. The problem was that such amazing talent was not looking for a side gig of bookkeeping, which, as mentioned earlier, is one of the inherent qualities of contract work. Furthermore, hiring a candidate full-time involves a financial commitment, and it was more expensive — too expensive to even try it. Meryl elaborates, “We couldn’t decide we’re moving 10 contractors to 10 employees, there was no way that we could do that financially. So we had to think about team structure, think about having our managers come on as team members first.”

However, even this presented its own challenges. In many cases, Meryl recalled how they would have to hire people with different skill sets while being well aware that the candidate was going to be a full-time team member and manager. It took a significant amount of time for the business to transition, but early on, the money just wasn’t there to implement the idea.  

Even so, they still couldn’t quite find the right person who fit the profile for the managerial role in the beginning. Meryl explains the managerial history of Beans Ninjas in further detail saying,  “We had two different managers, and they didn’t embody the kind of culture of the team that I wanted. I wanted young motivated people that really want to improve and learn and grow, and embrace technology, and love our clients.” Again, this desire for invigorating and zealous candidates was a significant roadblock that trickled down to the core, the culture of the company itself. Employees don’t want to work for managers who aren’t engaged and don’t reflect the ethos of the business. Simply put, employees don’t quit businesses, they quit their managers. 

Self-Removal From Bean Ninjas

Because of the leadership vacuum that stemmed from the hiring troubles, Meryl and her co-founder found themselves well integrated into business operations to the end of acquiring the revenue so that they could eventually hire more people. 

Meryl recalls how she would hustle to get clients in the door so that Bean Ninjas could build up their monthly recurring revenue, which would even allow them to invest in marketing and build better systems. As a result, they didn’t have an ideal client; any client was ideal. Furthermore, the issue of the quality of work raised to the forefront. Meryl, being ambitious and with a drive to succeed, would often get hands on in order to make sales, and she nailed her goals!

…However, clients began to expect this level of work from the business as a whole, and she gave the impression that she was going to be this involved with some of the jobs. Meryl reflects, “That was not the direction I wanted to take the business.”

To learn how the story continued for Meryl and Bean Ninjas, listen to the full episode! If you would like to reach out to Meryl, you can contact her on Linkedin.

The innovative Della Hudson started and grew a sellable business, working only 25 hours per week. On this week’s Growing Your Firm podcast, we’re asking how she did it!

Della breaks the mold in how she approaches her marketing and lead generation as a speaker, coach, and award-winning author of the books The Numbers Business: How To Grow A Successful Cloud Accountancy Practice and Growing By Numbers: How To Scale Up Your Business With Confidence.

Podcast

Summary

• Selling the Firm
• The Organization of the Firm
  • Personal Assistant and Accountant
  • Client Ratio
• Gaining Leads Using Social Media

Related Posts

• How to Use Social Media to Market Your Firm for Free
• How to Find Accounting Leads
• 47 Lead Generation & Marketing Tips for Accountants

Selling the Firm

Della’s tagline listed on her Twitter account is “Mentoring accountants to build a better business in 25hrs/week.” Work will come through the boundaries you set for it. When Della first started her business, she was raising children, and she had to fit all the work she did within a typical school day: 25 hours per week.

The business that Della Hudson sold in 2017 was highly systemized and structured so that it did not particularly rely on her involvement to operate. Instead, her role as a leader centered on being the face of the business. Personally, she is a triathlete, an identity which she uses uniquely as she markets herself on social media. In fact, Della explains that “Just prior to selling the firm, I did an Iron Man triathlon, and so I cut my working hours down to 15 hours per week so I could do 15 hours a week training for the Iron Man.”

To better understand how she could create such flexibility with her time to train and participate in the Iron Man, we first need to look at how she structured her business.

The Organization of the Firm 

First off, right from the start, the team was set up for remote working, so the whole team—8 in total— wouldn’t necessarily be in the office. At the initial introductions, clients would meet some of the team present at the office. The team worked flex-time and part time. Della continues, “We’d make the introductions, so that people knew there was a team behind me when we received their accounts.” 

It’s also worth mentioning that Della has a personal assistant who would email them the relevant details of the accountant who was going to be looking after them. So through careful orchestration, Della set up a system to ensure that clients were dealing with a person all the way through, but with a friendly front-end.

Personal Assistants and Accountants

Some may have stumbled onto a quagmire: when is it appropriate to hire a personal assistant? Many are concerned that they are not “big enough” to make such a hire, but Della’s example clearly illustrates a break from the assumption.

She hired a personal assistant for two principal reasons: 

1. To make sure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes.
2. To ensure a personal touch when interacting with clients, creating a stellar first impression.

Between these two reasons, she explains that she finds little value in making direct calls to clients for certain kinds of information, like books or signatures. Her emphasis on creating a warm, personal interaction with clients spills over to how she handles the accounts who are assigned to clients. 

She tries to keep the same accountant working for the same client for at least three years. Della says “It wasn’t always possible. Sometimes the main contact was busy with something else…so we did not allocate them as permanent accounts manager,” she continues that she still prefers to give both the accountant and the client a breath of fresh air by allowing a new set of eyes to look at the business and numbers.

Client Ratio

Della had her staff in rotation as they worked with clients, balancing a personal touch with efficacy, but how many people could each staff member serve?

It depends on the client, and again, Della illustrates her emphasis not on quantity but quality and need. 

When she has a client with complex needs, then she may assign a fully qualified accountant. On the other hand, if the client is large but with less complexity, she may hire a junior trainee with the fully qualified accountant supervising. “Accountants were allocated matching the right client to the right individuals.” Della further divulged that she was taught that as a general rule of the thumb, the accountants should earn about three times their salary.

Gaining Leads Using Meetings and Social Media

With a clever way of maneuvering her team to help her clients, one can’t help but wonder where does she find her clients? We have offered several tips for generating leads and finding clients in our blog. Here are a few general pointers you may want to consider:

1. If using LinkedIn, be sure to post high quality content consistently.
2. In contrast with LinkedIn, Twitter is a chatty platform. So running ads are cheaper, and you can strategically run ads to convert your leads into prospects.
3. Consider attending and hosting online meetings and seminars for its cost effectiveness and reach.

For Della, about 30% of her clients came through social media, and she dedicates a lot of time on Twitter. She also recalls how the blend of expertise and social media know-how was pivotal to establishing authority:

“We used to run quarterly events and branded them as ‘Money Matters’ events with myself and a guest speaker. We spoke on some topic that would help growing businesses, about taxes and accounts; It just wasn’t interesting enough.”

When she was doing in-person events, seminars, and network circles, she was sure to engage her audience by approaching them with familiar topics that were relatable: motherhood, triathlons and training, and other sports. It is through the personal social media space that she can chime in whenever someone may have a tax or accountant-related question on social media. 

And by working with another person, they bring in their own contacts, which further expands her network and reach. Through social media events and referrals, and sometimes some direct mail advertisements, she will often get quick responses. The only downside is that the clients tended to be small; however, even smaller clients have the potential to become the best clients when your business is systemized well.

Della echoes this sentiment, stating that it often takes three years for her best clients to “come in.” It first begins with a conversation about her services, then bookkeeping, accounts and business advisory. Clients may want certain services, but they can’t afford it; so in the meantime they work with what they can afford. The best clients took three years to land because “they understood the benefits of the full package with the advisory,” as Della explained.
Want to reach out to Della personally? You can find her on Twitter at @DellahudsonFCA, or you can visit her website at www.hudsonbusiness.co.uk.

Sometimes firm owners can’t help but wonder how other businesses are managing their teams, so we’ve created a new series that covers the challenges and successes of managers and business owners. David Worrell is partner and CFO at Fuse Financial Partners, and in this interview, he shares how he strategically cultivates a culture that makes his team a powerhouse for clients. 

Podcast

Summary

• Fuse Financial Partners: Beginnings
• Organization Structure
• Weekly Meetings
• Autonomy
• Client Dissatisfaction Blindside

Resources

• How to Manage a 35-person Remote Team Without Client Work Falling Through the Cracks
• Everything You Need to Know About High Performance Teams In 10 Minutes
• How to Create a Culture of Effective Communication in Your Firm

Fuse Financial Partners: Beginnings

David Worrell tells us that Fuse Financial Partners began as many other businesses do: with a savvy business idea and a name with matching flair. “We started off calling ourselves fractional CFOs because we thought that was the cool, sexy thing to be a couple of years ago.” But sometimes a novel idea may be too far ahead of their time. David and his partner realized that many clients couldn’t produce the financial documents to offer the stellar strategic advice the business could offer. Instead, the business transformed into a completely outsourced finance department for small and medium-sized businesses. 

Fuse Financial Partners does not consist of typical CPAs. The 12 of them don’t do any tax or audit. They do have some CPAs on staff, but their niche lies in creating a set of books and management tools that give their small business client the power to tackle day-to-day operations and steer their business towards growth without worrying about taxes and audits. 

David says, “We set up good processes. We have great looking books, but in general, these books are going to look the way the CEO wants them to look. And they’re not going to be a hundred percent gap or a hundred percent tax or a hundred percent anything,” he continues, “They’re going to be tailored to the CEO so that he can run the business more smoothly and productively.” In order to accomplish their vision, Fuse Financial Partners has a distinct structure with a diverse staff.

Organization Structure

The business contains CFOs, controllers, and accountants, all with different specialties in each of those areas from different industries like agriculture, manufacturing, supply chain, or software. Accountants do the day-to-day transactional accounting. Controllers who were CPAs look at month-end journal entries. CFOs are there for client relationship-building and big projects, banking, and investor relationships. 

Even with the staff coming from different areas of expertise, Dave and his partner worked hard to keep the organization flat and maintain a familial atmosphere. He said, “We try to be one big family and not have bosses and org charts, but we really struggled with how to manage.”

He continued to explain how as the number of staff members become over 8, it becomes difficult for one person at the top of a hierarchical pyramid to manage. So the first solution was to keep the structure flat, and to divide the 12 people into two pods of six people. These two pods are responsible for working with clients from beginning to end instead of passing on portions of the work from one member to another. In order for this to be effective, internal communication becomes incredibly important.

Weekly Meetings

The key to making sure that the teams remain high performing begins with how meetings are conducted. For Fuse Financial Partners, team meetings last about one hour. As a tactic for maintaining a close knit, honest and safe culture, David took some of the tactics from the Entrepreneurs Organization to make the weekly meetings “warm and fuzzy.” 

“Warm and fuzzy” doesn’t necessarily mean introducing overly sentimental moments into the workplace, but rather fostering vulnerability at the beginning of the meeting so as to encourage open conversation. David mentions that this could be achieved simply by asking everyone to talk about something good that has happened since the last meeting. This could help staff share their failures or successes or even discuss challenges they face with clients.

After the “warm and fuzzy” segment of the meeting, David’s staff walk through what’s going on with each client. If that’s what’s needed to solve a current problem, his team will begin to collaborate then and there, offering advice and recommendations. 

Even though the team works wonderfully together, David also exhibits trust that they will accomplish their tasks within a reasonable amount of time. 

Autonomy

One would expect that, since staff members have exclusive access to client information, there may be issues with “blockers.” When asked how his staff tracks their tasks themselves, David feels comfortable allowing them to handle and manage their work their way. He explained, “I don’t know how they keep track of it themselves, honestly. We do use Jetpack, and I think that that’s probably where the most of their workflow lives… All of my folks are a little bit older, a little bit more experienced.” He adds that if a member of his team doesn’t know something, or needs help with a client, then the culture is open enough so that they can ask David directly. 

Client Dissatisfaction Blindside

Internal communications aid in creating solutions for challenges that the client may not see. But what happens when the clients themselves are the obstacle? What happens whenever there is a tension between the team member and the client? David says that he poises himself between the client and the staff member, taking into account the grievances of both parties, and generates a solution. He gives the following analogy to explain further:

“At every traffic accident, you can look at it from the West side of the street and say one thing. And you can look at it from the East side of the street and say something completely different happened. Every story has got two sides. I try to call the team member personally one-on-one and ask them, so what’s going on with this person or this account? Eight times out of 10, you get just as much animosity from the staff member, as from the customer. It’s bad chemistry. They got off on the wrong foot.”

After identifying the problem and applying the solution, David can coach the accountant to help them smooth out their relationship with the client. He acknowledges that accountants may not be the strongest of communicators, but as a leader, David makes up for the gap and teaches them when appropriate. Later, because of the open culture of the team, this issue may come up at the weekly meeting as a learning experience for everyone, reminding them that they will also be held accountable for their behavior.

Want to reach out to David personally? Listen to the podcast for his phone number and give him a call!