CAS Clarity in 5: Roman Villard on Elevating Outcomes in His Accounting Firm
Roman, welcome to the cast Clarity in five. Thanks for joining us. This is a series that spotlights people doing kick ass stuff in the accounting industry. So before we jump into the questions, could you give us a brief overview of what what your firm's makeup is from team size, services, and revenue range if you care to share?
Roman Villard:Yeah. Happy to. Thanks for having me. I'm Roman Villard, founder of Full Send. We are predominantly a CAS practice in Boulder, Colorado, offering outsourced accounting, fractional CFO, and data services as well.
Roman Villard:So data encompassing like operations and automation type services for SMBs in the 1 to $10,000,000 range. We have a team size of about 16 folks, 14 of which are on the accounting side and two on the data side. Revenue range, pretty consistent of those firms that have about 16 people. So I'll leave it
Luke Templin:at that. Awesome. 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?
Roman Villard:Oof. I'm looking at transactions on a daily basis. I'm looking at numbers on probably a weekly basis. We have a pretty consistent, billing cycle where we bill on the first of every month, and so there isn't a ton of movement outside of that. But I'm in QuickBooks and looking at numbers very frequently.
Roman Villard:Awesome. Alright. Now, into the questions.
Luke Templin:What's the overarching goal or mission that's driving your firm?
Roman Villard:Our mission is to elevate outcomes for our team, our clients, and our community. And, it's a very broad mission statement, but we want to be able to say, in every task that we do, in every action that we take, that we are in some form or fashion elevating the outcome of a number, another team member, helping them learn, grow, develop, get past a problem, do the same thing for our clients and or supporting nonprofits or people or our network, to help our community move forward. So that's kind of
Luke Templin:our overarching mission. That's awesome. So what is the tech tool that currently is saving you the most time?
Roman Villard:The tech tool that's saving the most time for me right now has gotta be Make. Make is similar to Zapier. It's an automation tool that we use to take a lot of our work and turn it into, an automated process that we then layer on top of. And so,
Luke Templin:that's probably the number one thing that we that I'm seeing today as as a time saver. Awesome. What's your favorite KPI, either internally or externally, and why? Oof.
Roman Villard:I think my favorite KPI let's go external first. My favorite KPI externally for our clients is cash conversion cycle. So understanding how quickly a client can deploy cash, particularly in inventory based businesses, deploy cash for inventory, and then turn that into sales revenue cash collected on the back end. It's a tremendously important figure for businesses to be tracking and for us to be measuring and and communicating to clients. Internally, my favorite KPI is probably our team NPS survey.
Roman Villard:So getting feedback from the team and seeing how we can serve them better, how we can elevate their outcomes, how we can create
Luke Templin:a better environment for them internally at full send. I know people will ask, what what are you using to track that NPS? Google surveys.
Roman Villard:Google forms. It's pretty simple. You know, we have a we have a small team. So it's a very simple brief survey that allows for opportunity for expanding conversation post survey if somebody has something they want to speak about. But we are very intentional about trying to gather that feedback on a regular basis from the team and not just stick to a survey for it.
Roman Villard:But I do love seeing that data. Awesome.
Luke Templin:I love it. Yeah. You you usually hear NPS used towards clients, but not internally. So that's awesome. So when you're stuck on a client decision, growth challenge, or just a rough day, how do you get unstuck?
Luke Templin:How do I
Roman Villard:get unstuck? It's changed a little bit actually in the last three or four months. I get unstuck by getting outside and going for a run. I've found that the the more disconnected my physical and mental kind of states are, the more difficult it is for me to make progress. And so, if I'm in a good rhythm, moving my body, getting sunlight, pushing myself there, it helps me to unclutter the mind of things that I'm trying to solve in the business.
Roman Villard:And so, whether it's going for a long run and just thinking through a problem, or sitting in a sauna and just sweating it out, that's how I I tend to work through those types of things in my mind to get unstuck with the business. So, counterintuitive, but it helps me a lot.
Luke Templin:Nice. What's the one thing you wish you did in your firm sooner? I think one of
Roman Villard:the things that I would have done sooner is committing to a tech stack. And, what I mean by that is like, we bounced around a lot of workflow management tools early on, because I thought for one reason or another, they were the tools to get us to the next place. But I just didn't commit to them in the sense of how can we scale alongside of these. I was kind of like one toe in, one toe out, getting tech FOMO, and just bouncing around a little bit too much. And so, I wish I would have had a bit more intentionality early on when selecting tech partners.
Roman Villard:Mhmm.
Luke Templin:Yeah. Yeah. The shiny object syndrome stuff, especially with how much tech we have available to us today. It's a problem. Yeah.
Luke Templin:So this is your turn to kinda share either something you wanna expand on, another tip, or is there something you're working on that you think would be valuable to the accounting community?
Roman Villard:Yeah. You know, one of the things that just in the last few days, I've just spent a lot more time in conversation with other accountants about, is something that I've been hammering into the team all year this year. And and that's the concept of materiality, the concept of judgment, and the concept of not having to get to the, you know, second decimal point in a reconciliation to make sure it's completely perfect. I think accountants by nature love precision, love having that reconciliation zero out at the bottom. But in reality, like, that's not really driving value back to the client.
Roman Villard:Like, if you get to a point where you are materially or directionally accurate, that's what the client wants. So if you could be 95% correct and deliver the financials earlier, that often provides more value than being a 100% and then delivering them late later than expected. And so, like, this is just a concept that I just see accountants pursue that doesn't yield value. And especially if you're in an hourly billing environment and the client's getting billed for that time, like, they don't wanna pay for you reconciling that extra 6ยข. And so, like, that's a concept that I think is really valuable to understand that I've been thinking about a lot.
Roman Villard:I've been teaching the team a lot about, and something I think broader accountants need
Luke Templin:to think more about. 100% agree. Our profession is, kinda built on perfectionism, and, yeah, that can go too far at times. So thanks for joining me. Last thing before we go, where's the best place to follow you on your journey?
Roman Villard:I would certainly say LinkedIn. Roman Vilar CPA is the best spot to find me. We're at the fullsends.com as a company. We got a pretty cool newsletter too called no half sends that you can find on our website, but it's kinda hard to avoid me sometimes these days on LinkedIn. You're good
Luke Templin:at it. So I appreciate the time, Roman. Thanks. Yes, sir.
