CAS Clarity in 5: Michelle Röse on 30-Hour Workweeks & Assisted Entrepreneurship
Welcome to the CAS Clarity in 5. Thank you for joining me, Michelle. This series spotlights people doing kick CAS stuff in the accounting industry. Before we jump into questions, can you give us a quick overview of your firm, team size, services, and revenue range if you care to share?
Speaker 2:Yes. I'd love to. So I'm with Breakaway, and we are a franchise model. And our size is about 4,000,000. We have 29 franchises all over The United States, and we're pretty focused on keeping everybody's week to thirty hours or less.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't call us a lifestyle firm or even a side hustle, but I would call it assisted entrepreneurship. And our franchises are bringing in roughly 200,000 a franchise. So it's pretty pretty exciting. They get to set their own schedules. They get to select their own clients and their pricing.
Speaker 2:So there's no management. They truly own their own business. We are just here to help them scale with, services and economies of scale.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Since this series is powered by FinDaily, a tool built to automate financial digest of your numbers, how often do you check your firm's numbers?
Speaker 2:So that's a great question, and I think it actually begins on our client service side. So we like to do weekly reporting, check-in with our businesses on how they're doing as far as revenue, expenses, collections. And because of how we check-in and on our clients, their revenue grows, their profit increases, thus increasing our engagements and our opportunity. And so we engage in monthly, membership kind of pricing. And so we check our books monthly, but it's we've been having about a 30 to 40% annual increase every single year.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So now let's get into the questions. What's the overarching goal or mission that's driving your firm?
Speaker 2:I think that we're committed to assisted entrepreneurship. So when I joined Breakaway, and I'm one of the founders, one of the things that intrigued me was not having to do all the, like, admin stuff, build a website, try to conjure some general liability insurance, and put all the legal letters together. So what's really nice is you can run your own business, serve the clients that you want to, but not have to do all that back office stuff. So we truly are kind of assisted entrepreneurship model, and our motto is to bring joy. And I think that the joy really comes from, like, that we're having to just focus on that kind of white glove customer service instead of all the kind of monotony that really sucks the joy out of owning and operating your own business.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Let people focus on the craft rather than the crap.
Speaker 2:That's well said. That should be a T shirt.
Speaker 1:I stole that from somebody I can't remember where.
Speaker 2:Abraham Lincoln, I think.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Probably so. What's the tech tool that saves you the most time?
Speaker 2:You know, I don't think one really comes to mind. I think if we think of it like train cars, that all of them work so well together, and we purposely curate app partners. I think that's really the magic, and that we can navigate that app misfire for our advisors, franchises, so that we can really offer them a buffet of apps that are top tier solutions to problems that various business industries have. So I wouldn't say there's necessarily one, but it's almost the combination of all those that's beautiful.
Speaker 1:Nice. That's a little unique. So do the franchise is gonna pick, say, like, on a bill pay app? Are there multiple applications they can pick from?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. So we offer two to three solutions for various, like, issues, let's say bill pay, and then we negotiate those prices for the clients on behalf of the franchises. And we also offer a lot of feedback, like, you know, to you know, I just got off an incredible call with Emilio and talking about what would take them from good to great. And so we support a lot of these apps on product innovation that really trickles down to our advisors' benefits, this, their clients as well.
Speaker 1:That's a great model. What is your favorite KPI and why? It can be either internal, external, or both.
Speaker 2:Okay. So this is kinda this is great. I love KPIs. It's my love language, I'm pretty sure. But I would say, one that I've been focusing on a lot lately is turnover, and then unpacking turnover by understanding, was it situational or systemic?
Speaker 2:If it's situational turnover, that's fine. I'm not gonna like dig into it. I'm not gonna take it personally. Now, if it's systemic, I want to improve the model. So there's something in the model that needs to be improved.
Speaker 2:So creating that level that we really push hard with our clients, which is compassionate clarity, I actually get compassionately clear with the advisors or clients that are moving on to say, like, you know, is there anything we could have done better? How could we better support you? And then really, removing all the pride and ego out of it so that we can have a stellar model.
Speaker 1:When you're stuck on a client decision, growth challenge, or just even a rough day, how do you get unstuck?
Speaker 2:Well, I think a rough day is different than, like, the business challenges. I think we're whole people with personal lives and all that. But I will stick to the business answer for this. I run any situation through our leadership principles. We have a really robust there's 10 leadership principles, and I run everything through that.
Speaker 2:Once I get to the bottom of it, I usually have a trusted group of people that I throw the concept around, and we do collective problem solving. Nice. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What is the one thing you wish you did sooner in your firm?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I really love the trajectory and the our story of how we got to today. But I would say we really benefited from growing what we call the bench. Now not bench, which is totally separate, but our internal bench. So we have an internal bench of bookkeepers and advisers that can support our franchises on an on call basis.
Speaker 2:I think when we instituted that, it gave our advisors and their respective clients the ability to kinda take a collective breath to say, okay. We have the ability to scale from one advisor to almost replacing whole financial departments with this kind of growth of the bench. Nice.
Speaker 1:Alright. This is your space to share a tip, story, or something you wanna plug for the kickass community.
Speaker 2:So let's see. That's a great question. There's so much going on. I think that it's good to know that we do have new franchise opportunities every quarter, and you join a kinda learning cohort. It's one time a week for seven weeks, and then you become a full fledged breakaway adviser.
Speaker 2:We are the only franchise in the nation that our attorney our franchise attorney has ever heard of that has no franchise start fee,
Speaker 1:which
Speaker 2:is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:It's unique. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's because of our commitment to our DE and I initiatives, which is, like, just removing any barriers to business ownership to anyone. So that's pretty cool. And I think that I'm really proud of the fact that Breakaway is completely debt free. So we are 100% revenue funded. We don't even have a credit card balance.
Speaker 2:Like, we really do eat our own dog food, as they say. Like, we we live it, so we know how to grow businesses from the ground up. We know how hard it is and the courage it takes. And so one of the things we like to say is, for owners, by owners, because I think it's really powerful when these small to medium sized business owners are talking to contractors or service providers that also run and operate their own businesses. As you know, it's such a more vulnerable relationship when you're eye to eye.
Speaker 2:And I'm really proud of the weekly report template that we put together, and I'm looking forward to sharing that with you and your team.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thanks for joining. Where's the best place to for people to find out more information on Breakaway and also to follow you along your journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn. I've got that cool oomlaude over the o, so it's pretty easy to find me. And breakawayba.com. Now Breakaway BA unfortunately stands bookkeeping and advising even though I was trained to get them to say badass.
Speaker 2:So I still say it stands for breakawaybadass.com.
Speaker 1:I like it. I like it. Awesome. Thank you, Michelle.
Speaker 2:You're welcome.
