Liz Mason is the Founder and CEO of High Rock Accounting and Rebel Rock. In this episode, Liz shares with Gary what services her companies offer, how they've created an advanced integration system, and why Liz is phasing out "titles" in her company.
Liz Mason is the Founder and CEO of High Rock Accounting and Rebel Rock. In this episode, Liz shares with Gary what services her companies offer, how they've created an advanced integration system, and why Liz is phasing out "titles" in her company.
Live from Xerocon 2022, Liz shares her upcoming plans for her company, her preferred tech stack, and how her company's profits grew over 300% in just the last three years!
Listen now to learn the driving force behind her success, and how High Rock Accounting made The Inc.'s 5000 list!
Learn more about High Rock Accounting
Learn more about Rebel Rock
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Gary DeHart
Welcome to accounting insiders. I am here at the heart and publisher of insightful accountant and today got Liz Mason from like nine verb names.
Liz Mason
Hierarchy accounting. Yes, Rock County. Yeah, the tax department. I think that's a Jerry.
Gary DeHart
Okay, so that's three. Yeah. No, I exaggerated. Those are the exaggeration. There's a few tech companies, but who's counting? So maybe not. It wasn't too far. Maybe not. It wasn't too far. So I did say, I'm not checking text here. I'm not looking at what we said, we're going to talk about Okay. That's right. I can't do.
Liz Mason
So I can't stop people social behaviors.
Gary DeHart
It's not possible for me to do that. So. So your list based on what just said that? What do
Liz Mason
I it depends on the day, really. I mean, I'm a CEO and founder. So most of the time, I'm setting really weird ideas in other people's hands. And that giving them the support and encouragement to execute on that. That's generally my day to day,
Gary DeHart
but not actually. So your step well enough to be able to do that.
Liz Mason
Yeah. So I do believe in like the visionary integrator magic that happens when you have somebody who has all the crazy a disruptive ideas, and then you have somebody that's like an extreme, organized a bit like Executioner is not the right word, but like ability to
execute on things. I jokingly call her my execution of execution. And that's Melissa Diaz, and she is phenomenal. And so I come to the table with all these ideas. And I'm like, okay, so what if we do this crazy thing like the other day? Like, what if we just get rid of titles? We have no word titles, and people get compensated for the value they bring to the firm. And they get responsibilities based on what they're actually good at? That she's like, okay, like, how do we actually take this idea, make it possible in this, you know, society and communicate that to our team. And also figure out, you know, the details behind how you compensate and measure somebody for the value they bring to the team? Because nobody's done it before. So
Gary DeHart
do this in a day and a half, how long does she
Liz Mason
know what we're doing this through the end of the year? And this is like, you know, we're in the feasibility stage. We don't even know if that's going to work. But that's the idea.
Gary DeHart
seems to make sense to me. Right? But But tracking it right? How do you always get confused, objective and subjective, but it's very subjective, right? Yes,
Liz Mason
it can be quite subjective, unless you figure out very objective measures, I'll tell you, which, of course, is problems that we'll figure out. Right? Yeah.
Gary DeHart
Right. So some things don't have to be done. But they may not have a high perceived value Exactly. But if it doesn't get done, we don't put gas in our cars on the run,
Liz Mason
right? And then also, you know, do you compensate on the value of this specific tasks humans are performing inside of the organization? Or what they're capable of performing? And where do you divide that line?
Gary DeHart
Right? Well, we'll talk again, three or four months and see if she like, two weeks in mind, and we're not doing this, but she
Liz Mason
said no, yet. And most of the time, if there's a hard stop, it happens pretty quick.
Gary DeHart
Oh, that's good. Yeah. So that works well. But what's the craziest thing that you have gone to her and said, we need to do this? And she said, That is crazy. We're not doing that. Does that happen?
Liz Mason
Um, no, actually, it hasn't happened, where there's been like a full cardstock been an idea that was like a good, crazy idea. I mean, there's been like some really terrible ideas that I've come up with. But mostly the ones that have to do with the firm and not starting a new business should do a thing. Like I had a really terrible idea for the terrible client firm. So basically, you create a firm, and then you take all the terrible clients from everyone else, but you haven't really paid, they pay you to take their terrible, you make their offboarding of the other firm and the onboarding onto your firm, amazing. You give them the best quality service, like you take care of them, like handhold them, they get incredible. And then you pass it off to a call center in the Bronx. And you just have to hang up on them and refuse to answer their emails. And eventually they leave, right. But you build into your contract that there's like, they have to pay you for six months after they leave. And so I'm just saying it's a very lucrative model. I
Gary DeHart
like it. They get rid of their bad clients. Yeah. And their life is
Liz Mason
much better, right? So Melissa did shut that one down. And she's like, I don't want to run a firm that was built for Terrible. Terrible In fact, it's really funny. Yeah, but so yeah, there's been a few like other ideas that have gotten shut down but,
Gary DeHart
but keep that and we were talking Earlier in practice management is kind of your that's your your passion. Right? And, but that's part of practice management, right is is the team, the tools and technology. But having structuring your far, so that she can say to you, I'm willing to try it. However, I mean, that's critical. So let's go to a little bit deeper on the practice management. What, what's trending, if that's even the stuff in accounting trend, but what's trending in practice management, what do you see? Or will say, what are you seeing in practice management that what's the biggest gap right now the vendors need to solve.
Liz Mason
So there are lots of good programs handling different pieces of practice management. And so the issues we're trying to solve is having like an end to end integrated practice management system that gives us the data we need at each point in the process. And so there are, you know, tools that are handling the project management and the client management, there are tools that are handling engagement letters and payments, there are tools that are handling the marketing feed and the CRM, like into the sales funnel, the problem is from from the perspective of an accounting firm, there are not truly fully holistically customized end to end client management systems. And so when I mean end to end, I mean from the first interaction they have on the marketing side, through the sales pipeline through to engagement letters, getting, you know, payments built in, and then pushing that over automatically into project management, and then handling the recurring nature of whatever it was scoped in that project. And then if they do off board, right. And then of course, like all the because it's a circle, when you think about it, right. And you're continuously marketing to your current clients with newsletters and other information, but making sure that all of that is updated. And then the biggest piece of that is the data around it right. And so like, you can solve any piece of that independently with apps, you can string a bunch of them together, and kind of duct tape your way into an end to end system. But you don't get the data points that you need.
Gary DeHart
Right. Like some some here, there's some there are some over here,
Liz Mason
right? Or understanding the efficacy of your team? Like, how are they performing on this project? Right? And what does that look like when you actually wrote that into the scope that you had? And what's the trend of that, you know, is it like there's always a quarterly jump in time it takes them to perform those tasks isn't always, you know, like continuously growing the time it takes to do that. And it's not just about time, but when you start looking at like the number of people assigned or when the team starts roping and CFOs, or when there's like extra task lists that are client tasks that haven't been completed. But all of the data surrounding the performance of the practice is kind of piecemeal right now. And trying to get to the point where we can have, you know, kind of a snapshot of okay, this is everything. This is the pipeline, this is the likelihood of us closing based on all of these characteristics we've learned from before, missus, you know, capacity on this specific industry team, and really understand like, how projects are going, how we're serving our clients, and then rope and things like client surveys. How did they feel we're doing right? Because that's a factor that needs to be related to, then, what do you guys use, as the we've moved, the majority of all of our marketing and sales is on Microsoft Dynamics. Our proposals are integrated through dynamics into PandaDoc. And we're working right now on an automation to move after that signed into our project management system. Currently, we're using active kolab, which we've integrated from a team's perspective. So that shows up right in Microsoft teams with all the projects and tasks people have. But we're thinking about, is there a different project module that is already either built into Dynamics integrated with dynamics that would allow for that piece of it to happen? So like, realistically, we've gotten probably 50% of the way there. Honor, integration. And who does
Gary DeHart
that? If somebody on your team? Yeah, yep. Or is that your passion? You're like, I gotta get?
Liz Mason
No, my code is horribly inefficiently written. I can totally do it. But it's like a real good or like setting because why your logic makes it. So we do have a team. We have a tech team, our director of technology is Jay Campbell, when he joined our team earlier this year,
Gary DeHart
I was actually talking to him earlier. Yeah. And that's so funny, because he said, I'm doing all the technology and we're just sitting here talking about just didn't even dawn on me that and I knew he was doing it for you. But so
Liz Mason
yeah, yeah, Jay is fantastic. And he you know, that's always been his passion. Like he's good at client work. That's not his passion, his passion is the tech side, and how to utilize the tech in the best, most meaningful way to serve the industry. And so he's he's been in charge of that project and doing an exceptional job. And then we have a team with Derek as well. So we have people that handle tech on our team. It's great.
Gary DeHart
Yeah. Yeah, having people that you can assign things to or bring around the table kick ideas off five, right? You can do a lot more when you have people.
Liz Mason
Oh, yeah, well, and, you know, luckily, we have a brand that attracts, like innovative thinkers and people that want to do things differently. And so they're not coming at it from a, this is how it's been done before. And I'm just gonna repeat that process. They're coming at it from a, okay, so here's the current process, here's how we can make it better. And here's how we can implement technology and throw that process out the door and create something totally new. And that's the fun part for us to be able to take a step back and be like, Okay, well, why is this here? Like, is this step lucrative, like for any other reason? Or is it just because somebody at some point, replicated a paper based process? And now we do it using technology in the same way? Why? Right? And but we have a whole team asking those questions. That's fantastic. It's fine.
Gary DeHart
And now when you get that built out, is that something that that you would turn around and sell to other firms? Because a big part of the model?
Liz Mason
Yeah, so we've talked about doing that. And it really like, honestly, there's two pieces of that that matter, one being how it goes over the next year, maybe two, with our firm, making sure that we're building all of the needed modules, making sure it's all integrated, like, right. And then the second piece of that is, do we want to build a sales team? Or do we want to have customer service? Right, so that that that'll be a question for the future? And that will be generally an opportunity cost question, right? Should we invest our money in starting a new industry team and doing accounting services? Should we invest our money in building out a software sales channel? Right? That the future may tell us? Soon enough, right. Yeah.
Gary DeHart
So you've got a session to run to I didn't mention we're at zero con. Yeah. In New Orleans, zero con 2022. What is today? I don't even know it's Wednesday.
Liz Mason
The 24th of August.
Gary DeHart
I was gonna say July like I know it's not July. So it's August. It's August. All right. Yeah. Bye. Nice and cool. It's not hot, and it's not at all.
Liz Mason
Not humid. Don't look at the hair,
Gary DeHart
my hair frizz this morning. So let's talk about two more things. One high level on the overall tech stack, like we just talked about kind of practice management, what's in your what's in your stack? And then tell us about your what you're telling me prior just about being bogged down?
Liz Mason
Yeah. So our tech stack really depends on the industry team. That is to say, sorry
Gary DeHart
to interrupt. You heard industry team being industry being the industry that you're serving cracks. So just for clarification,
Liz Mason
our structure is that we have people dive really deep in the industry they're serving. So we have four teams right now. We have a technology, which is SAS biotech team, we have a nonprofit team, we have an econ team. And then we have services team. And those teams really focus very heavily on what they're doing. Oh, and, of course, we have our rebel rock team, which is cannabis, it's just, that is technically a separate brand, but it's pretty integrated in the way that we do it. But we do a ton of cannabis work, so I can't forget them. But anyways, so they dive deep into the industry that they're serving. And sometimes one tool or another is better for that industry from an operational perspective. And so you know, the core of our teams, the majority of the museum well, and then gussto, generally is our go to for payroll. Depending on the types of payments they take, we work with pretty much all the payment processors, right? So we work with stripe, we work with gocardless Hey, Rex, and then you know, pay bail. That's the old standby. And then you know, from there, it depends on like what you're talking about. So with our tech startups, a lot of them are scaling very quickly, and they need dimensionality. And so we use agent Max with that, because we're saying, okay, so if they're, you know, raising $3 million, now $10 million in two years, if they're gonna go from like, no customers to 1000s of customers, we need to be able to handle that volume and transaction. And so we'll implement early and get them ready for scale, which is, it just makes sense. And then, generally with those, we're integrating bill.com, which we use, we still use on some of our other clients, although we also use a theme and we use Emilio and a few other payment processors. And then we have The QBO that we use on a few other teams, like our nonprofit team predominantly uses QBO. From the tags and the tracking, it makes it a little easier to do the complications needed for reporting perspective for nonprofits. And then I know there's like a few grant management systems that they use on that side. But yeah, so it's, you know, we try to focus on using tool tools. But then we also build our own API connectors that we have to do. So if we have a client, and they're using some operational tool that has accounting information we need. And it has an API, generally, we'll work with, we have a sub set of contractors we use for development, and we'll call them up and say, Hey, what's it gonna cost to build this API connector? So we don't have to dump reports out of here? So we do quite a bit of that. On the cannabis side, we use zero because they're supportive of the cannabis industry. Whereas some of the other tools are not. Yeah, we've we've seen some accounts shut down and QBO for cannabis company, hardcore data shutdown. We also recommend if anyone is using QBO, on that side to do backups on a regular basis, yeah. You know, or use one of the apps that goes out for you regularly, I think they do a daily or hourly in some cases. And then also on cannabis payments. It's like one of the bigger issues because he can't use a payment processor. So it's pretty much all cash. Yeah.
Gary DeHart
If you had told me that maybe two years ago, I didn't realize that I think you were told me that like, that's, I understand. Let's say I understand the why. Yeah. I don't really understand why. But I get it. Yeah. But that's insane. Yes.
Liz Mason
It's absolutely insane. So of course, like we we've been working on it cash, like a cash tool, basically to be a catalog, like a digital catalog. Where because most people are just writing it in a journal right now, which isn't seen if you really think about it. And some of them are using Google Sheets, thinking things that are just not secure enough or like stable, free, because in Google Sheets, like anyone can go change it. And then you have like giant reconciliation discrepancies. And so we've been building like a little app to handle it, just just cash log, and then download that into Xero directory. So like, there's a few small tools like that we build out just for fun.
Gary DeHart
Just for fun. I mean, you know, like, oh, well, JB working on that. Does that something?
Liz Mason
Yeah. So Jay helps them nice. Yeah, to sue. We're also working on his tax tool. We're just doing tax OCR, and just making it super slick and build out work papers, just because it's, I mean, the software's that exist, unfortunately, they haven't updated their OCR in a while. And they're just the the rate that they're correct is not high enough firms.
Gary DeHart
So needs to be correct. Yeah. Yeah. Supported. Exactly. All right. Before we wrap up, Inc. 5000. Plus, talk to me,
Liz Mason
we hire off made the Inc 5000 list was announced two weeks ago. Thank you, over three years, we had over 300% growth. So it was me.
Gary DeHart
Is it 300 per year or 300? Over the three years? Yeah, it was over
Liz Mason
300%. So it's over 100%. Mm hmm.
Gary DeHart
That's fantastic. Yeah. What? What do you think is the primary driver of that growth. And maybe there's more than one, maybe it's not just revenue.
Liz Mason
So I think honestly, though, there's work everywhere, right like, and there's no shortage of accounting work that needs to get done. And the approach that we take in generating technology, the fact that we have a tech team that comes in and streamlines processes and helps companies really figure out what the best tools are for them to use. And then knowing that we have the capability to build any kind of custom integration then might need to be built to to really make data more available in real time. I think that that gives us a it still gives us a competitive advantage. Even though there's a ton of firms doing very similar to what we do, they don't take the same approach and they don't have the same methodology. And so we get a ton of referrals just in general and we go deep in the industries where and and so like the cannabis industry exploded, as we're, you know, when we're pretty early adopters, so to speak in that in that field. And so there aren't many people like rubble rock, they can say like, we have the depth of knowledge in your field. We've been through fundraiser as we've been through licensure, like we totally understand everything from you know, grow operations, through processing into dispensaries. We know what the flow of product should be. We understand that the controls that need to happen. And there's just not that many people that are coming to the table with that level of expertise. And then, you know, the other industry is like we have Megan turnout on her team who's like an incredible nonprofit accountant. And very, very vocal in both the you know, industry like In the accounting industry and also just in the nonprofit world, and you know, we have Jay who's phenomenal on the econ side, right and, and the accounting side and say we just have gotten a bunch of really cool, really talented humans on our team. And that's driven growth. That's great. So
Gary DeHart
niche, provide great service, the right tools, naturally, and the more you build those tools, right, kind of the stickier the clients gonna be to, that it's gonna be really hard. As long as you're not doing a terrible job. It's gonna be really hard for them to leave. I mean, long we've,
Unknown Speaker
I mean, we've had clients.
Liz Mason
And most of most of the clients we've had, we've had been where they wanted to work with, you know, like me or Melissa, right? Because when we started the firm, you know, did their work for years. And as we scaled, we can't do drone work on a daily basis. And so it was the clients left move, because they just wanted us to do, but they were unwilling to pay for that. And they didn't trust our team
Gary DeHart
and your startup rate. Right.
Liz Mason
Exactly. But yeah, I mean, and it's fun to be able to hand a project back and say, hey, when you gave it to us, this was a two week umum job, and now it's a two day a month job. You're welcome.
Gary DeHart
Yeah. That's awesome. I know. You've got a session to run tune in. Thank you for joining me. Yeah. It's really good to see like, when did I see you last wasn't scaling and whites?
Liz Mason
I was not where you were to county one.
Gary DeHart
No. Must have been engaged. Yep. Yeah, I'm getting engaged. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. We'll get this posted shortly. Awesome. All right.