What if empowering accountants for better could redefine firm life?
Welcome, Chase, to the CAS Clarity in five. Thanks for taking time to join us. Before we jump in to the the five questions we've got today, just give us a quick overview of your firm size from team size to revenue if you care to share and services you guys offer.
Chase Birky:Yeah. We are about a 140 people at this point, roughly 35 of those in The Philippines. We got a corporation out there that directly employs those folks. Revenue forecasted for 2025, about 20,000,000 between the RIA and the CPA firm. Services, CAS, tax, wealth management.
Chase Birky:Of the CPA firm, CAS itself is about a third. But Dark Horse in general, you know, maybe to go click deeper on what exactly it is that we do. Firm as a service is the easiest way to think about it. And so we provide all the infrastructure, the plumbing, if you will, of what you need to start a practice, scale practice, all the way to exit, you know, so that our folks can wear the practitioner hat and lead their teams and not be burdened with all of the hats you have to wear as an entrepreneur. So that's what we've been running with since 2019.
Chase Birky:Been about six years of that. It's been fun. It's been a lot. And the ocean is not easy to boil, but nonetheless, we're crazy enough to keep trying. Awesome.
Chase Birky:Awesome.
Luke Templin:Since this series is powered by FinDaily, a tool built to automate financial digest of your numbers, I'm curious how often do you check your firm's numbers?
Chase Birky:Well, I check my cash twice a day. Some might call that OCD, and they wouldn't be wrong, but, you know, cash is the lifeblood of any business, you know. As a human, you could lose, you know, as low as 30% of your blood in rapid succession and die. Right? Even if you're perfectly healthy.
Chase Birky:The same way if you lost 30% of your cash the day before payroll, could be in an existential moment very quickly, even if you're, you know, a profitable company. So something I take super seriously, obviously, and, you know, it's something that I'll probably never fully, you know, delegate to someone else's eyes, but I guess that's just the the CPA inside of me.
Luke Templin:Yeah. That's it's I'm the same way. That stuff's hard to delegate to me as well. So let's dive into the questions. What is the overarching goal or mission driving Dark Horse?
Chase Birky:So it comes from a personal place of pain for me as well as, you know, the optimistic side. And so the pain is yeah. I started it in the big four. You know, that's a slog in a lot of ways. I was in audit.
Chase Birky:Didn't like the actual audit practice, like the work you do in audit, and then doing it for every waking hour, you know, of my life also didn't help that. So less that, went into a partnership, you know, which was a small operation in San Diego. And, you know, when you're in a partnership, you know, it's like a marriage without the physical side, you know, that can maybe smooth over some of the fights you get into. So, you know, you just never fully know what you're getting into and what you probably should have done in terms of due diligence to see if it is a good fit. And for me, it wasn't.
Chase Birky:You know? So I saw a lot of the negatives of, you know, both the huge firm side and the small firm side. I got into, you know, starting my own practice kind of about a happenstance up. You know? I left that firm pretty quickly or abruptly, I should say, and built a firm kind of without a whole lot of intention.
Chase Birky:And, you know, going from zero to one is a lot. A big lift. Anyone who'd done it knows what I'm talking about. But it's not like it just gets easy at ones. One to 10, that's hard in a much different way.
Chase Birky:Right? And so I got to a point where on one hand, you know, I was just thriving, you know, in the fact that I could, you know, have agency in my life and build a firm, you know, in the way that I wanted to, you know, and kind of write my own story there. But on the other side, it was just taking so much of my time, energy, you know, just I was pouring everything into it and pouring not enough into my marriage. And that almost ended, you know, in us getting divorced. Thank God we didn't.
Chase Birky:But after kinda going through that shakeup, I started to think, okay. Well, there's a great side to this, and there's a dark side to it. Right? How do we create something that leverages as much as the positive and, you know, presses down some of the negatives, you know, that allows people to get into practice building, you know, without the the journey that I went through. You know?
Chase Birky:And so what if we just made the actual firm the product? Right? And so we did things that empowered CPAs to build practices to, you know, scale the value that they're driving for their clients, you know, and just everyone's kind of in their their area. Right? And as we kinda went through this process, we started to realize there are just a lot of things that are really hard to do as a small firm that we could do at scale and translate down to the individual practitioner level.
Chase Birky:You know, an easy example of that's like SOC two compliance. Typically, not gonna see a firm with 10 people, you know, get a SOC two type two audit. You know? But we can do it at scale, you know, and then translate that to everyone who's under our umbrella. So it's just a bunch of things like that.
Chase Birky:You know? And, ultimately, again, we're just trying to solve for all of the things that, you know, create a great firm that are just really difficult to do at a certain size and to do the totality of it even harder. You know? What if we just leverage that all the way down to the individual practitioner level?
Luke Templin:Nice. That's an awesome story you have.
Chase Birky:So to answer your question, because I have a habit of just going down a rabbit hole. The goal, the mission of this firm is to empower accountants for better, so better practices, better careers, and better lives. That's what we're in business to do.
Luke Templin:Awesome. I love it. What's the tech tool that saves you the most time currently?
Chase Birky:Well, you're gonna hate this answer, but ChatGPT probably is yeah. I mean, I don't do a lot of the work these days, but I use it as a thought partner and helping build relevant context just to frame certain, you know, opportunities and problems that I'm trying to think through. So I would say by far and away for that level of, you know, strategic visionary thinking, that is gave me a ton of time. And then I would also say one other one would be my inbox rules. So not an app per se, but literally the inbox rules within Outlook.
Chase Birky:I have some really robust rules that basically take anything that could be remotely related to a sales pitch and permanently delete it. I've spent a lot of hours on that, but my inbox is super clean as a result.
Luke Templin:That's awesome. What's your favorite KPI and why?
Chase Birky:I'm gonna give you two. One is the percentage of gross receipts earned by our principals. So of every dollar that comes in, how much do they take home? The traditional firm, you know, has historically had a third of revenue go to partners, a third go to talent, and a third go to overhead. Our principals on average earn 44¢ on the dollar.
Chase Birky:So compared to the roughly 33¢ on the dollar, that makes me feel really good. It means we're doing something right. I always believe that if you can help someone else make money, there's a business model embedded within that. The other KPI that means a lot to me is our graduation rate from our accelerator program. So the folks who were successfully able to build a $250,000 recurring revenue practice, Obviously, just at the starting point, but that is also a a KPI that I pay a lot of attention to, and we've been blessed to have an over 90% success rate, in our accelerator program.
Chase Birky:So the two of those are kinda what keeps me going.
Luke Templin:That's awesome. I don't think I've heard the third model since managing partner I used to work for.
Chase Birky:No. Yep.
Luke Templin:So when you're stuck on either a client decision, a growth challenge, or even just having a rough day, what gets you unstuck?
Chase Birky:I never have a rough day. Fall. I love it. Yeah. Right.
Chase Birky:One of the things I do actually is get on a Peloton. So I'll do forty five minute rides, and they're not ones where I'm trying to push myself to the brink. It's more like a 60 to 70% output sort of thing. It's just enough that it, you know, takes my mind off of any external stimuli and allows me to kinda chew through problems. And so anything that, you know, I can either just be forced to be in a moment, you know, is gonna help me really get unstuck.
Chase Birky:So even with, like, float tanks. I I don't often get the opportunity to do that, but when I'm in one of those, I mean, you can't not focus on whatever, you know, those problems or issues are that are kinda eating at you, which honestly, some people don't like about these float tanks is that they're stuck with their own thoughts. I find it, you know, a very force function way to, you know, chew through some of those things. The other thing is, you know, again, using ChatGPT as a thought partner. I think just the act of putting thoughts into writing adds clarity that can help get you unstuck.
Chase Birky:And then talking about it out loud with, you know, someone you trust, you know, that you don't have to watch your tongue around in terms of saying something that's going to send them down a rabbit hole. When you have that person that you can just say whatever it is and, you know, think out loud, not to mention what they, you know, bring back to you in terms of questions or thoughts or ideas, you know, those are the ways you get unstuck.
Luke Templin:Nice. Nice. What's the one thing you wish you did in your firm sooner?
Chase Birky:I wish I would have divorced myself from client service a little sooner. You know, I would say that's kind of the pre 2020 thing I wish I would have done sooner. The post 2020 thing I wish I would have done sooner is kinda exchanging the founder hat for the CEO hat sooner. It took me a little while to realize I was being super disruptive to my company and my leadership team in an unproductive manner by continuing to hold on to that foundry hat and, you know, send them down a million different rabbit holes all at once every single day. When in fact, you know, the the company really needed me to be more in that executive role and not getting in people's way and not, you know, just stream of consciousing, you know, every idea and thought that I had directly to them.
Chase Birky:So there's a time and a place for that, and I think I'm learning that as time goes on, but I wish I would've had some awareness of that earlier earlier so I didn't, you know, create as much chaos as I probably did.
Luke Templin:Mhmm. So this is your space now to share. Either there's something you wanna expand on above, there's some other thing that you think would be useful to the accounting world, or if there's something you're working on that others should know about.
Chase Birky:Yeah. I mean, I'd say maybe on the the latter side, you know, we've obviously done what we've done for our internal accountants. So those folks are actually dark horse CPAs, and we are embarking on slowly turning over, you know, what we do internally to the external market. And so we're in the the ideation and the baking phase of exactly what that's gonna look like because we've got a lot of things that we wanna share with the, you know, public accounting industry at large, not just with our internal folks, which, again, goes back to our mission, you know, of empowering accountants for better. And, you know, I think it's naive to think that we can, you know, do that to the scale that we wanna do that just internally with our our folks, and we can really expand that vision and that mission and the impact by turning it to the outside market.
Chase Birky:And, you know, some of those more high impact pieces that just really make a huge impact for practitioners and firm as a whole. We just we wanna be able to not hold on to those, you know, those resources and those tools and, you know, the infrastructure, you know, just for our own good, but turn that, you know, back to the to the profession at large. So not gonna see anything, you know, in the immediate future, but that is something that we're working on baking out. And we'll probably be looking for some beta frames later this year to help build that with us.
Luke Templin:That's awesome. If people are interested in that, what's the best way to either follow or express interest in in that resource?
Chase Birky:Yeah. So, I mean, I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. I would, you know, recommend anyone follow me, you know, for content. You can direct message me. Better way dot c p a if you wanna start a conversation, you know, in maybe a a deeper capacity, whether that's, you know, joining the accelerator program, you know, becoming one of those beta firms, maybe even merging your firm into Dark Horse, that's gonna be the avenue to start one of those conversations, which will be fielded by my chief revenue officer, Justin Kern.
Chase Birky:But, yeah, I mean, those are kind of the two areas that we put the most focus around. So my LinkedIn or any one of my leadership's LinkedIn as well as our company page, and then abetterway.cpa.
Luke Templin:Awesome. I appreciate the time today, Chase. Thanks, Luke. Appreciate it.
