CAS Clarity in 5: Tailor Hartman on Proactive, Automated Accounting
Welcome, Tailor, to the cast clarity in five. Thanks for joining us. This series is designed to spotlight people doing kick ass stuff in the accounting industry. Before we jump in, Taylor, could you give us a quick overview of your firm, team size, services, and revenue range if you care to share?
Tailor Hartman:Yeah. Yeah. So I own a firm called Celerity Accounting. We've been in business for three and a half years. I have three full time bookkeepers.
Tailor Hartman:Me, we're currently hiring a senior accountant, and I have an operations person as well. Revenue wise, we are MRR, right around mid sixties right now. We had some churn for our first time last month, and, yeah, we're, you know, gross margin, 60% roughly. Bottom line, 25% roughly. Services.
Tailor Hartman:Yeah. That's a good one. We do outsourced accounting services for mid market businesses, and we are we don't necessarily have an industry niche, but we focus on QBO and NetSuite.
Luke Templin:Awesome. Yeah. NetSuite's a good one. Alright. Before we jump into five questions, since this series is powered by FinDaily.io, a tool built to automate financial digest of your numbers, how often do you check your firm's numbers?
Tailor Hartman:I check my bank accounts probably every other day, I would say. And then I check my financial statements, I would say maybe once a week.
Luke Templin:It's way better than me. I'm a coddler's kid over here. Although, I will say I got my financials and looked at them done yesterday, so that was nice.
Tailor Hartman:Nice. Yeah. I have a lot going on right now, so I feel like I'm in a position where I need to kinda stay on the
Luke Templin:pulse. Nice. So what is the overarching goal or mission driving your firm?
Tailor Hartman:The overarching goal or mission, I guess, is to when I I worked at BDO before I started this firm, and we I hated the types of clients where we just churn out financials and, like, we it would be kind of painful, and they wouldn't even care and, like, look at their financial statements. So I wanted to build a firm where we, one, kinda remove the pain around the accounting processes, which we've all kind of onboarded new clients and seen, like, the crazy stuff that the previous accountant was doing and, like, the bad work. And I just really wanted to do solid work and give finance or give solid financials to business owners so they could make good decisions and make it less painful. And also trying to automate as much as possible and kind of use technology as a way to, provide more value rather than just the financial statements and just, you know, a p and l and balance sheet on the fifteenth or twentieth of the month. You know what I mean?
Luke Templin:Oh, yeah. That no one looks at. So on the topic of automation, what currently is the tech tool that saves you the most time?
Tailor Hartman:Tech tool that saves me the most time probably is Missive, and that's an email app, if you're familiar. I'm not sure. Familiar familiar. But, basically, it's like Front or Superhuman. So it's a consolidated email app so you can share with your whole team emails.
Tailor Hartman:So we work with bigger businesses, like twenty fifth 20 to 50,000,000 a year in revenue. So they they need their own accounting email typically, or like an AP email. And I can plug in their email and basically share it with my team, and we could do task management, delegate stuff really well in there, and assign specific emails to people to deal with things. It's a really good way, to manage lots of clients and lots of emails in one place. That So probably saves me the most time, I would say.
Luke Templin:Nice. What is your favorite KPI, either internally or externally, and why?
Tailor Hartman:Yeah. I'm gonna go internal for this one, and it's the direct labor efficiency ratio. And it is because we I've I've been trying the time, the perfect time to hire somebody, with the pipeline coming in, with potential churn, and with pulling myself out as, like, the owner of the business as well, pulling myself out of client work. So we've been really kind of evaluating our expected efficiency ratio over the next six months to kinda see where I can pull myself out and hire the right person to kinda get in there and take client work for me.
Luke Templin:Awesome. That's my, favorite external one because I feel like in advisory, the number one question we are answering is when should I hire and fire? And so I'm a big fan of Greg Crabtree. I was fortunate for him to be a mentor of mine, and I highly recommend everyone read Simple Numbers if you're interested in the advisory space. So onto the next one.
Luke Templin:When you're stuck on either a client decision, growth challenge, or even just having a rough day, what do you do to get unstuck?
Tailor Hartman:I work out. That's my big thing, I would say. I work out or I cook something elaborate that takes, like, an hour or two. Those are my big stress relievers where I can, like, disconnect from the work, disconnect from sending 500 emails every two hours, and kinda, like it forces me to kind of fully disconnect when I go run or I go workout or I go cook something.
Luke Templin:I have not done I love to cook, and it's been a while since I've cooked something elaborate, and I totally forgot that it's a really good way of kinda spacing out. You got a favorite dish?
Tailor Hartman:A favorite dish? Oh my gosh. Ramen.
Luke Templin:Okay. Traditional I love ramen.
Tailor Hartman:Ramen. Yeah. Like, make the broth the day before and spend, like, twelve hours making the broth and, like like, the whole thing. It takes forever. And that's actually what I did on my last birthday.
Tailor Hartman:Like, my wife just bought all the ingredients, and I just, like, spent a day and a half making ramen, and it was the best.
Luke Templin:Awesome. What type of broth?
Tailor Hartman:The type of broth? Tan katsu.
Luke Templin:Tan katsu. Nice. Alright. Last one. What's one thing you wish you did sooner in your firm?
Tailor Hartman:That's a good question. I think if I could go back in time, I would probably hire someone a little bit more senior earlier who could take work and also train the staff with the work that we do, because it's kind of fallen on me in a big way over the last three and a half years to kind of train people, to get them up to speed, to kinda get them used to working with multiple clients. And I think had I had some help there, I could have spent my my dollars a little bit more efficiently to pull myself out of the client work faster than I have so far.
Luke Templin:Awesome. Alright, Taylor. This is your time. If you have, you know, an additional tip you wanna share, an experience, or something you're working on that you think others should hear about.
Tailor Hartman:Can I I'll give a tip, and I wanna wanna talk about my newsletter probably? So and this applies to my newsletter because this was actually depending on when you post this, this was the last one I sent out. I think the accounting space is changing a lot right now. And the CFO whether you're a CFO or whether you're, you know, doing the bookkeeping or the accounting work, I think it's important to think about with technology and AI, it's getting so much easier to provide the value that we provide, and so it makes us a lot faster. And I think it's gonna be hard to be competitive in the future unless we're packing more value into what we serve our clients with.
Tailor Hartman:So something like a FinDaily, where you're providing more communication around the bank balances and their QuickBooks reporting, or so little things like that with, like, thin daily and proactive communication, I think, are gonna go a long way in the next couple of years. So I would challenge anyone that's listening with this to focus a little bit more on proactive accounting versus reactive, because I think there's gonna be a big disruption in in the next couple of years because it's so easy to provide our services these days, at least for the smaller businesses. And we are it's we're gonna be so much more efficient, so we might as well pass that on to the client. And then the newsletter, so that's something I recently wrote about, and I do wanna plug the NetEffect, which is my new newsletter where I'm kind of building I'm trying to kind of talk about topics that are actually useful and less, corporate. A lot of accountants talk about, you know, the same things over and over again.
Tailor Hartman:I'm trying to be outside of that a little bit. And then I also wanna talk about my experiences building my business and kind of in a no bullshit kind of way. Sorry if I'm not supposed to swear on this.
Luke Templin:You can cuss all day on my podcast. I
Tailor Hartman:just hate the fluff. I hate the stuff like that, and I don't really wanna be raw and kind of talk about the things that maybe no one else talks about on the newsletter. So that's the focus. If you're interested, I'm sure there'll be a link somewhere on this.
Luke Templin:Yeah. For sure. We'll put a link. I'll definitely put a link so I can earn a dad hat too. But, yeah, I would I would highly encourage everyone subscribe.
Luke Templin:Taylor has a very interesting journey from what I've learned on starting his firm and growing his firm to where it is today. So appreciate it. I thank you for joining us, Taylor. Is there a best place I know you're on Twitter and LinkedIn for people to follow you to kinda keep up besides the newsletter.
Tailor Hartman:LinkedIn is becoming the place for sure. But Twitter, if you want accounting stuff and firm running stuff mixed in with some random personal stuff, Twitter might be the place to go.
Luke Templin:Cool. Awesome, Taylor. I appreciate it.
Tailor Hartman:Yeah. Thanks, Luke.
