Episode Transcript

Please note this transcript was generated by AI and contains errors including missing and misspelled words.

Meryl: Hey Nat, welcome to the show.

Natalie: Thanks so much for having me, Meryl. I'm happy to be here.

Meryl: I was going down a little TikTok rabbit hole before we started recording. I know that you are on TikTok and I thought I'd better do some research better check it out. And it looks like you've created a ton of content there. And I was, I saw tradies and travel deductions, 83,000 views, Aussie directors and directors id 22,000.

So it looks like you're having some success over there.

Natalie: Definitely. But the weird thing is that sometimes I'll post a video and think, oh, this one's going to go viral. And I get, maybe a thousand views and then I post something that I think, oh, this is not going to do very well, and it just goes absolutely ballistic. So it's just like, I guess there's a few factors, which is what the content is when you post it, who's online at the time you post it.

And yeah, maybe just a bit of luck as well.

Meryl: Good on you in creating that content and getting some consistency and some views. I had dabbled in, dabbled in TikTok a little bit last year. But I didn't have much success. I was talking about some crypto web 3 stuff and yeah, scrapped it after a couple of weeks, maybe I needed to be a little bit more persistent.

Natalie: Yeah, it's definitely one of those things that takes time and even if I have a little break from it and I jump back in, it takes a while to, to get it, get the views up again. It's a bit of a weird. I guess the algorithm as they say, it's a bit weird how it works. Definitely keep at it, but yeah, I guess you've gotta look at, your roi, don't you,

Meryl: Yeah, exactly.

Natalie: being an accountant, it's all

Meryl: absolutely. So we're here today to talk about remote work, working from an office and your experience with that. And I have some of my own views as well. But before we, we start down that path, I'd love for you just to share a bit more about your background with audience.

Natalie: Sure. I won't go right back to the beginning because it's a very long story, but in a nutshell, didn't know what I wanted to do when I left school. I just knew that I wanted to start working and buy a car. So I went off and worked and was just doing, some reception, office admin, and then learned some accounting doing some.

Some payables and receivables in N Y b. Really liked it. So decided that was what I wanted to do and then went off and studied. So studied part-time while working full-time, which, has its pros and cons. Then went into public practice into a small chartered firm. Worked my way up there. Then I guess as most young juniors wanted the money, went into commercial for a little bit, then realized it was a bit of a boys club and was a bit boring.

I missed the clients and the complexities of tax. So then I jumped back into to charter. And at this stage I was my late twenties, so I was 28 and it just so happened that I fell or not fell into, but was employed by a firm where the founding partner was about to retire. So within six months, I became an equity 40% equity partner, which was, when you're 28, it's all very exciting and I probably didn't do the due diligence that I should have, but I always say everything happens, for a reason.

And then when that founding partner retired about five years later I thought, okay, this is my chance to really it was like an eighties firm. A lot of the things were done the way they had always been done. And in that, five to six years, they didn't really change too much. We made a few changes here and there, but by large they didn't really, think that the 28 year old had any say in what was going on.

Even though I was a 40%, owner. So I guess then I was getting a bit frustrated and I was wondering, there's gotta be more to life than this. I was sitting in an office all day, every day doing the same old stuff. And then I, we were using, zero and learning about some of the other apps that the clients were using from the clients and their bookkeepers.

And I thought, you know what, it's either now or never. And so then I decided to start two sides and go out on my own.

Meryl: And what was that process like in terms of just making the jump, deciding to leave the firm? Was there much involved in unwinding that, The partnership and then starting, was it a competitor that you were offering similar services?

Natalie: Yeah, so the firm that I had joined wasn't in my local area. It was probably about, 30 minutes away. So I guess, back then when accountants were very local, back in, 2017 before the work from home was a big thing. I guess they didn't really see it as a competitor, but the whole process was not a fun one.

They weren't too impressed that I decided I was going to leave. Even though at that time I only wanted to take a small parcel of fees. So I had a list of, what I wanted to take. And I think from memory it was only about 60 k worth of fees that I wanted to take, the really good big group clients.

And in my mind I was like I just, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna take these fees and not even my partner's salary you guys were better off without me type of thing. And they, I think they realize all the work that I. Because I was doing a lot of the practice management type of role that they weren't, so good at.

They were probably on the tools a little bit more. So I think they realized all the things that I was doing and I will never forget it. As soon as I said that, they basically tell me to get outta the office, didn't want me there. Then they started trying to ring clients behind my back and. And that day before I left, the other partner said to me, you'll never make it on your own.

I dunno what you think you're doing. And that has stuck with me since then. And that's always in the back of my mind. Every time I'm trying to like, grow and do all these things, I'm just like you know what? You were wrong. You were wrong. Yeah. And then you're trying to unravel obviously the financing and all that sort of stuff.

That was not a fun time either. Lots of lawyers meetings and, stressful phone calls and all of that stuff. Yeah.

Meryl: And are there any lessons coming out of that? If you had advice for another young accountant who was looking at, coming on as a partner are there any things you could put in place, I suppose before signing a contract or

Natalie: That's a really interesting question, and I think the problem is when you are. In that moment of signing that deal, you're really like, I sat down with my lawyer and went through it and he was like, what about this and what about that? And I was like, I don't really care. I just wanna be a partner.

And that's all just a piece of paper. So definitely listen to, the legal advice you get. Definitely push for what you want because yeah, on the other end, if it's not done correctly, it's not gonna be a fun time.

Meryl: Your story, interestingly sound. Like another woman that I know who also became a partner quite young, in a firm with older men also ran a lot of the practice. They did a lot of golfing and and she did a lot of the operational business side of the running, the team. In doing the systems and then her voice didn't feel heard and she eventually left and set up on her own.

And many of the clients moved across because she was also managing a lot of the work. And that was an interesting experience for her about not feeling valued because she wasn't bringing in sales cuz she wasn't networking in the boys club, but actually the clients valued her. The relationship.

So I slightly different but it really, hearing your story really reminded me of that story.

Natalie: Yeah. Yeah. And definitely probably another key nugget from that I left out was definitely if you do the right thing by the clients it will like, it will be it'll come back around. So for me, during that time, as I said, they were ringing clients behind my back, whereas I was very forthcoming with, these are the clients that I want.

And so when those, when the other partner called some of the clients, they basically said, oh, Natalie's leaving. We are gonna be looking after you. Nothing changes, blah, blah, blah. And they rang me and I had told them exactly what the other partner had done and they were like, oh, we're coming with you.

Even some clients that I hadn't worked on for years. So doing the right thing definitely pays

Meryl: Absolutely. I think doing my lessons hearing that are doing the right. Been communicating early and also valuing yourself particularly if you are a young accountant coming through the ranks of yeah, believing in yourself and valuing yourself. So you then, you started Two Sign, you had some clients that came across with you.

Talk me through what that first year was like.

Natalie: It was interesting because when, when I first made that decision, I went home and told my husband and. He always supports me and my attitude was we've got some savings as well and if we, we'll be fine for, six months to a year and if it doesn't grow, doesn't work out, I'll just go get a job.

There's plenty of workers and accountant. It's not, going to be hard. But what I found was that the clients that came with me were very eager to refer and to see me succeed and do well. In the first year we more than doubled. The revenue? Actually I think it was actually, I just made a note here so I wouldn't remember.

It was it was almost triple. And then we had to, we had to hire someone. I hired, first hire was just a junior to help me with some admin. And then we had an offshore team member. And when I had the the junior admin, she was coming to my house. And that wasn't really, wasn't really working.

So I decided that it was time to go into a co-working space. So then we moved out of the home into the co-working space, which went from, part-time desk to full-time desk. And then we moved into an office there and then, As we grew we hired more people. But yeah, definitely in the early years in the first, in the beginning you're like, oh my God, what have I done?

Have I made the biggest mistake of my life? And then when it all just starts to roll, you're like, I can do this. This is gonna be a really successful business, and now we're now six years, so we're almost coming up to the, the same time I was in my other firm, which is absolutely crazy.

Meryl: It is it's funny hearing you talk about the kitchen table and I had that as well with team member coming around and would be working on something. And I even had a client do that. The client was from overseas and I felt a bit unprofessional sitting around my, in fact, I, that was in a share house at the time.

Natalie: Oh, I think I think growth wise in Newcastle has a very similar story that I heard a long time ago. It's very humbling, isn't it, to go, back to the kitchen table.

Meryl: It is, and I think you forget that sometimes. I'm almost coming up to eight years now with Be Ninjas, and this was a business before that. So sometimes it's easy to forget the things that you did just to hustle and to make it work to, it's actually it's, there's a lot of effort I think, in getting something off the ground.

And sometimes when you've got momentum now where it's not as hard to get a new client or you've got a reputation and then people wanna come and work for you or with you, it's, I think it's quite different. But I do like to go back and remember some of those, the sacrifices or the things you, you used to do.

Natalie: I was having coffee with anyone that wanted to have coffee. You know any business owner, any financial planner, any lawyer, and look, some of those meetings I was like, why did I just waste my time there? But they do, they do come full circle later on. It's all those little seeds that you plant and then you know, it grows.

I think in that first year too, I was able to go to the gym a lot. So I was like the fittest I've ever been because I had a lot of time. I look back on that and sometimes I think, oh, life was much simpler back then.

Meryl: So it sounds like when you started your business, you had a little bit of office space that was flexible with the co-working space, but you also had a an offshore team member quite early on. And so how were you managing that dynamic of having some in-person interactions with your team and then also having someone that wasn't there in person?

How were you thinking about things like culture?

Natalie: Yeah, look, that was pretty simple in the early days because really it was just an admin person in the office, and then the person that was offshore was doing all the compliance work. So it was a bit siloed, in that sort of time. And then when the offshore person left at that stage, we then had enough money to hire onshore.

So then we grew the onshore team. So we didn't have that hybrid at that time. So then we grew the team to, I think maybe five. And then we went back offshore just before Covid hit. And like maybe two months before Covid hit. And then when Covid hit, we decided we didn't, the offshore wasn't going to work for us for various reasons, and we brought it back on shore.

So there's been, as you would probably know in a fast growing business, there's lots of things that are changing all the time and trying to work out what works and what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. And it's, all those things are happening. So yeah, I guess in, in that time, there wasn't really.

A lot of culture type of things being done for the offshore onshore. Obviously, when we're all onshore, we're doing a lot of things for culture. We'd go go do bowling and we'd go out to dinner or to lunch and do all those sorts of things. And I guess now that which we're going to get into in a minute going to fully work re remotely we've gotta really focus back on that culture piece.

Cause when you're in the office, it's a bit different. You're seeing each other every day and there's not as much effort, that needs to go into that.

Meryl: I'd like to take away a little bit from I believe at some point you move from the co-working space into your own office space and which is that where you are now with the podcasting setup?

Natalie: No. So yeah, just, I love change. You can see that there's just been like my poor team just has to go along with, I think it also comes from being in a firm where, The, my business partners wouldn't listen to me and let me do anything. So then when I went out on my own, I was like, oh, I've got all the power.

I'm just gonna, if I wanna make a decision, I'm just gonna do it and run with it. And if it's wrong, then, whatever. We'll deal with it. So what happened was we were in the co-working and someone was moving out of their office, which was up the hallway into the coworking. And so we had a bit of a look at it.

It was a small office. And we decided at that stage we were ready. There was five of us, actually yeah, five of us sitting in a very small room. It was hard on the phone and it was getting a bit noisy, and so we thought, oh, let's make that jump. So it was really just, wheel everything down into the co-working and that the fit out was done.

So really we didn't need a lot of investment. We just had to buy some furniture, which I think we just got all cheap desks from IKEA to start with, and then as we had the money, we replaced them with, Big girl desks, as I like to call them, proper grownup desks. And then we almost grew out of that office and it was just after, I think the first lockdown and obviously there's a lot of office space going very cheap.

And we were like if we can get something that's. Not going to cost us an arm and a leg. And we had a bit of the cash flow, boost money in the bank that we didn't need at that stage. So let's move to a bigger office and fit it out and do it exactly the way you know, that we've always wanted.

And it was great and we are loved it. But now, fast forward three years and clients are not wanting to come back to the office. Team members are not wanting to come to the office. So we've made the decision to which we're actually giving the keys back this afternoon after this recording.

Very last recording in the podcasting studio. Yeah, we just made the decision that, why do we, why are we paying all this money on rent? We're not really using it. So it's time. So we've come a bit full circle, going back to work from home now. Yeah.

Meryl: That's so interesting and so did the vibe change in the office over time? It sounds like you had it for about three years and it sounds amazing having that the fit out that you'd wanted yourself having the team all together in this amazing space. I'm interested to, to dig into that a bit more and hear what it was like and your thought process of deciding to end that and have everyone go back to remote.

Natalie: so I think after the second lockdown, we all couldn't wait to get back into the office. I couldn't understand where all these people were staying to work from home. We were missing each other. We were like, let's get back into the office. It was all great fun time. But I think it's that whole, you want what you can't have type of deal.

So you know, then towards summer, We thought let's go and do a bit of a hybrid work from home so that everybody can enjoy their summer. And selfishly I wanted that too. I didn't wanna make my team be in the office while I was working from home by the pool. I didn't think that was really fair.

And then, over the last couple of months we've just been work coming in less and less. And everybody just prefers that. And every time we try, like we, we just hired a couple of new people and the difference between trying to get. Someone to do hybrid or someone to work from home is like hundreds of applications.

It's absolutely ridiculous. That nobody wants to come and work in the office. So I guess it's twofold. It's, trying to get talent and having that talent pool be quite larger and also, giving the team that sort of balance to be able to work from home and put the washing on and. Take the dog for a walk and do all those things.

And also I think when I made this decision, my husband was like, you finally got the office you've always wanted. And I said, I think sometimes you have to get things to realize you don't. Really want them. You know what I mean? I felt like I always wanted to prove, to my ex-business partner, to myself, to everybody that look at me, I can do this, look at my fancy office yada.

And now I'm like, I don't really care. I don't care for it anymore. Yeah

Meryl: I think. You to experience it yourself. It's like when your parents tell you something and you just ignore it. You have to go make one mistake or experience it yourself, and then you can reflect and decide whether it is right or not. It's actually interesting what you were talking about with hiring.

So were you saying when you changed the job ad? So if it was a hundred percent remote, that's what people really wanted, but if it was even hybrid, so still the ability to work from home some days, but some days in the office there was just not the same interest.

Natalie: Yep. And I also think because we're not in the city, so we're in this, we're about 45 minutes to an hour out of the city, so we're in the suburbs. So obviously the talent pool is a lot smaller as well. But just to give you an idea, we did a job ad just before the end of the, just before December or the end of December last year for remote bookkeeper.

Obviously it's a bookkeeping role as well, but we got over 600 applications. Then we did a hybrid role in January to trying to see what we would get there. And I think we got maybe 30. So and look, a lot of people say how many of those were actually good? And yes, there's a lot of junk in there, but still the level of applicants and I speak to, other, business owners accountants and they just can't get, no one can really get staff to work in the office.

I guess some of the bigger firms in the city will always get the people working in there, in the office because people wanna work in the city and have that. Lifestyle, but yeah, just not working for us. And that's not to say it might not work in the future. But for now it's definitely, we definitely get more of a talent pool and we do work from home.

Meryl: And I think that's a, an interesting lesson for anyone that's listening who, who's finding it hard to hire at the moment of, have you? Having a hundred percent remote role because if that's what accounts and bookkeepers are showing that's what they want. But I see a lot of chatter in the accounting groups of we do hybrid or we have set days in the office set from home.

I don't want someone putting on a load of washing on under my watch. I think actually that's what people, if you can't hire, maybe it's time to adapt a little bit, or at least consider how can you have a competitive advantage? As in attracting people and I'm, this podcast season is all about remote work and I'm a big advocate.

I love a hundred percent remote and having all of that flexibility and giving my team control over their schedule. But there's also challenges around that, I think specifically around team culture. You mentioned this earlier, you don't just have the interactions of just sitting across from someone and having a chat and what are you up to on Friday night?

So what are some of the ways you think about that or, I know you are in the transition at the moment to remote, so how do you think you'll keep some of that team culture and that feel?

Natalie: Yeah, so during Covid we obviously went above and beyond for everybody. So we were doing, daily huddles on Zoom, but we would get a bit carried away and sometimes it'd be an hour and a half and we'd be like, okay, we've gotta stop chatting now and get some work done. We did some online yoga.

We did, we did all kinds of things, but I think during Covid was a different. Different time. So now what we do is we do a Monday morning everyone hops on, we have a, a Zoom check-in. And then, the day today is mostly just a bit of chatting in Slack good morning, how's everyone's weekend?

So a bit of a quick chat in there. And then we're hopping on Zoom quite a bit throughout the day for things that we need. So we do a little bit different to, I guess you, I've listened to, you. For your team work from home. It's very flexible, whereas ours is a bit more rigid. We're still, eight 30 to five with a little bit of flexibility in there.

So everyone's on at the same time. So that makes it a bit easier to just hop onto Zoom and that's our main communication. So we normally would message on Slack and be, Hey, I need help with X, Y, Z, have you got some time now? Can we schedule it in? We just hop on Zoom like that as if we would, in the office.

And then, yeah, I'm working on some different things as to what we're going to do. Regarding team building and all those types of things. And that really depends on our next hire, cuz at the moment we're all in Sydney, so it depends on whether the next hire just happens to be in Sydney and we can all meet up or whether they're interstate and maybe we don't do it as regularly as, as I'm planning.

Meryl: Would you go back to the offshore team? I know you'd mentioned you'd tried it a couple of different times and it wasn't working. What didn't work for you and where are you at with your thought process there?

Natalie: So we actually do have someone offshore at the moment. But the issues that we, and we're just looking at whether we're going to. Keep that role or bring it back onshore? I think the problems that we always have is number one, the time difference. So at the moment they're in India, so I think they don't log on till about one o'clock in the afternoon.

So then there's a bit of a time lag between them hopping onto work and sending queries. And obviously my problem is that I'm a workaholic, and so if I get an email from them after hours or on the weekend, I wanna get it done so that it's just done and I don't have to worry about it the next day. So that's my biggest problem, is I feel like I'm then working much longer hours to try and keep the work flowing so that there's no.

Delays. That's probably the biggest thing. Obviously the quality of the work too. I feel like it's just never, no matter how much training you do, no matter how many check, like we have, checklists a law, we are proceduralized to the hilt and it still doesn't. It still doesn't replace having English as your first language and being trained in Australia.

It's a good stop gap. Like it's helped us at the moment with resourcing because we had a whole lot of clients we needed to get done before the 15th and may deadline. We just couldn't with the team that we had. But yeah I don't know. It works sometimes, doesn't work. Other times, like I said before, it works today.

Might not work tomorrow. And we're still trying to figure out, what works for us. We haven't got all the answers.

Meryl: So next up, I've got some rapid fire questions for you to get your perspective on. There's different topics that are, I think, relevant to the accounting industry. So the first one is time sheets, and whether you have them, whether you like them, don't like them, what do you think?

Natalie: Yeah. So when I first started I was like, no time sheets. No time sheets. I'm not doing these. And then when we hired our first offshore, our first employee who was offshore, I worked out that I needed time sheets to work out if he actually. A, knew what he was doing and B, could meet the budget at time. So we've never gone back to no time sheets.

So I'm definitely, we do fix fee. But then we have the time sheets to monitor how we're going to budget, and I think that's very important.

Meryl: I like the idea of no time shoots cuz I never liked them myself. But I still like, The data that comes from time sheets. So we're still time sheets too. So next up daily huddles. Do you do them? Why not?

Natalie: So our daily huddle, like I was saying before, is just done in Slack. So basically they'll just go in and we'll have a little, good morning and they'll say, these are the pro, these are my five priorities I'm getting out today. And if they need help with anything, they'll flag it then, so that then we can obviously schedule some time.

And I think that's really important too, because if things come in from clients, overnight, and we need to know where to slot them in. And because we do have a small team, obviously I'm still heavily involved in, the resource planning and those types of things.

Meryl: That's one of the challenges we have because we have that flexible schedule is around the people that you need online at the same time. Doesn't ha often happen unless you schedule it so it can cause delay that we don't have the same speed. To, if something comes in that needs a quick response.

So that's one of the downsides of the flexible schedule,

Natalie: Yeah.

Meryl: The bookkeeping services arm of your business. I remember hearing somewhere that was a loss leader for the business and interested in if that's still your approach or if things have changed with that.

Natalie: Look. Yeah, I definitely have said that a couple of times. Over the years, we have increased the rate over the years, so it's no longer a loss leader, although we don't probably make as much money off the bookkeeping as we do the end of year compliance because the way we cost out the bookkeeping is basically hourly rate, and that's how we do it in the engagements.

Whereas the fixed fee end of year is more. Your interview is going to cost x. We don't actually say, it's so many hours by this rate, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, definitely not a loss leader anymore. And I think if you're an accounting firm and you are not doing bookkeeping, I think you should definitely have a look at it.

If you're a smaller firm, I think, for us, that's where the majority of our leads come through is people looking, for a bookkeeper, or they go to a bookkeeper and the bookkeeper says, I don't have capacity, or I don't look at those, micro clients. Some of our bookkeeping clients are just a couple of hours per month and we do them monthly rather than, I think a lot of accountants just jump in, do the bookkeeping and the baths at the same time.

Which, we've got live data these days. I don't think we need to be waiting.

Meryl: Yeah, agreed.

Natalie: Yeah.

Meryl: At book be was a bookkeeping only business to start with. And then we gradually added service offerings. And one of the reasons we did that was because I was predicting that all accounting firms would be adding bookkeeping just cuz it made sense to me that if you could have clean data then preparing, it's just some tax adjustments to do the tax return if the balance sheets reconciled.

And then also I was, this was probably five years ago I was thinking about this, but if you wanna do advisory, I was predicting Okay. Or management

accounting. You need the clean data, you need it, standardized standards, chart, charts of accounts, that kind of thing. And I was predicting that there'd be a bit of a battle between bookkeepers and accountants of who was gonna do that advisory and whoever controlled the bookkeeping was probably gonna be in a better position for that.

It hasn't played out exactly how I thought, cuz I think some accounting firms have done bookkeeping and then thrown it in the two hard basket and not scaled it the way I was predicting, but. Do you have any thoughts on if an mechanic firm does wanna do bookkeeping, how to avoid some of the common problems?

Natalie: I think bookkeeping traditionally done by either bookkeepers or accountants is very different to the way we do it. So the way we do it is we do it similar to a month end. So if work in commercial and you do, the whole month end close, we don't do a full set of work papers like you would do in commercial, but we do it like a month end close.

Whereas I feel like a lot of. Bookkeepers just log on whenever, and they do bits and pieces and the client says I don't know where everything's at. I don't know. You know what they're doing when they're doing it. Whereas ours, we know, they know we're gonna log in by a certain time of the month. Then we'll email them their queries.

Then we get the queries, we send 'em the reports, we close, we're doing the bas. So it's all very regimented and proceduralized. Whereas I feel like, yeah the bookkeepers don't. Don't tend to think that way. And then the accountants is even more haphazard. They're just getting in there and allocating things and they're not really they're not using, the apps like Hubdoc or Receipt Bank.

They're not knowing how to reconcile with Afterpay or Shopify or all those types of things. So I think if you're going to do, as an accounting firm, you need to really sit down, have a structure around it. Don't just go, oh, we are gonna be doing bookkeeping. Now when the client comes in, someone just jumps into the file willy-nilly because they're not gonna really know what they're doing.

And they're also going to need a bit of training because, accountants doing bookkeeping. And even, I'll put my hand up. When I first started two sides, I thought I knew zero. And I, I learned quick, quite quickly along the way that there was a lot of things I didn't know that I had to, skill up.

Meryl: I think that commercial background's invaluable. If you've got an accountant doing bookkeeping, that's, I've spent some time in commerce as well and learned monthly close and just management rep, internal management reporting. And I actually think that the firms I see that have scaled it well often have someone that's come from I like, I actually like to hire people with public practice background who then have spent a bit of time in commercial roles and for me, they make the best leaders for a bookkeeping team.

Natalie: Because you understand the business side of things too. You're not just, I guess a lot of accountants just look at it at the end of the year, so they're not seeing the day to day, that's going on. They're looking at with the different lens.

Meryl: But if you just hire someone from commerce, then the fast pace of public practice and the need to get things done fairly quickly on a time

budget. Yeah, that hasn't worked for me.

Made a few mistakes there. Next up is pricing. I think you've touched on this, that you have fixed fee.

And for tax. And then Ali, for bookkeeping, do you think about value-based pricing and how do you factor that in or not?

Natalie: There's a couple of things that we do value-based pricing on. So that would be like our bas, we just have a fixed fee for the bas, but then in the background, we still have to have a budget of what we think it's going to take. And then we've got, as zero setups, they're all done at a fixed fee.

A couple of other things, but. I dunno. I just still think the value pricing works to an extent. But if you're doing time sheets to measure it, you still need to have in the back of your mind the hourly rate. Like I, I feel like with there's still a lot of work to be done in terms of the value pricing.

I think

Meryl: I agree. I've never found a way to scale it, so I'd say what we do at Be Ninjas, it's fixed. Price. We have fixed prices for everything. Apart from catch up jobs where we'll often bill in a bundle of hours just cuz it's harder to predict. You find as you explore, then you discover the mess

And need an ability to charge for that.

But, So prior to being in, I did value, I tried value pricing where I'd discussed with the person what do I think their value is. Okay. I'm, me and my little team are replacing an internal finance role. Okay. I think they'd pay 60 or 70,000 a year for that. Okay. That's what I'm gonna pitch. The price.

And it was very individualized, but I just couldn't see how to do that at scale with a lot of, if I didn't wanna handle sales anymore. And then also if you have clients talking to each other, which happens. We are in an industry niche, so all the clients all know each other. Then if you price someone quite differently to someone else because you do value-based pricing, then I can see that coming back to, to bite you as well, why am I playing paying double of what my mates paying?

Natalie: And I feel like the clients need a bit of transparency as well, so they wanna know, how that's happening. And I think like you just said too, if you want to scale and get someone else to help you with the sales. So for us, having that fixed pricing that has the hourly underlay rate, my practice manager does all the quoting in Practician and then sets up all the work carbon with the budgets.

So if I was doing the value pricing, it's a bit hard for her to be doing that. I would then have to get more involved. Yeah.

Meryl: Nat, thanks so much for coming on. It's been fun and wide ranging chat. We've covered lots of topics. Do you see yourself ever going back to an office? Is it remote here to stay? Wh where do you think things will be with two sides In a couple of years time,

Natalie: Oh, look, I don't know. And as anyone listening will be like, she's all over the place. She changes her, she changes things more than she changes her underwear. So I'm gonna say never, but for right now, like I, I think this is. This is where we're at. I think we, we moved into the office. I guess like most people, starting a new firm felt like that was what we needed to do to be, legitimate and professional and all those things.

And I feel like through Covid it's opened the, opened people's eyes about doing Zoom and not necessarily needing to see their accountant face-to-face. So it's paid for the way, for us to give this a go again and yeah, never say never. Depends on the team and the growth and all the rest of it.

But yeah, for right now it's definitely, I think where it's at for us.

Meryl: And how will you feel this afternoon handing those keys back? You?

Natalie: Yeah, look, I think relief and obviously a little bit of sadness, it's the opposite. I always wanted, I put a lot of effort into, fitting it all out, but I think the extra dollars in my bank account will make me feel better.

Meryl: Got a trip planned.

Natalie: I do actually it's it's my 40th in January, which I know is a long way away now, but I'm, we're planning to go the Maldive, so yeah, definitely every extra dollar that we can get in the bank account from not paying rent will be helpful to pay for that

Meryl: Fantastic. I've been on a couple of surf trips to the Maldives, and it's amazing. So I'm waiting until I can either sneak off on a trip without the kids or wait till they're old

Natalie: Yeah.

Meryl: Oh.

Natalie: Nice.

Meryl: If anyone, any of our listeners, wanna get in touch with you or learn more about what you're doing, where's the best place for them to reach out or connect with you?

Natalie: So I'm on all, yeah, on all the socials at Na Leno, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram also on Facebook, but probably the easiest places are the other ones. If you wanted to email me Natalie, at two sides, which is T W O S I D E S. Dot com au. Be happy to, have a chat with anybody about any of the things we've been chatting about.

Meryl: Thanks so much. Na, it's been great.

Natalie: Thanks for having me.