Episode Transcript

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

Meryl: Hey Nikole. Welcome to the Lifestyle Accountant Show.

Nikole: Hey, thanks for having me on. Really excited to catch up with you again. We've met at QuickBooks Connect when you're in the US and I've always seen you online and so it was really fun to actually meet you face to face.

Meryl: It was great meeting you and it was funny we didn't meet in any of the sessions. It was at the nightclub. That was where

Nikole: It was on the dance floor. You always find me on the dance floor at all the conferences. You will not find me at breakfast at seven in the morning, that's for sure.

Meryl: So today we're talking about the concept of what is enough and whether to continue scaling our businesses or how much effort we put into that compared to prioritizing freedom and other things fun in our lives. But before we dive into that, can you give the listeners just a little bit of background about who you are, what momentum accounting is?

What kind of clients do you work with?

Nikole: Sure. So I've been in the accounting industry for 12 years. , I live in just outside San Francisco, in California. After college I went and worked at a traditional c p a firm, did audits, did taxes. Found myself looking around one day and thinking, man, I don't think I chose the right profession.

I just didn't feel like I belong. In the CPA world. And so around that same time, our firm added on outsourced accounting as an additional service line, and I think the US was probably a bit behind Australia and New Zealand and the UK in that, zero came about. And then our main product that was always.

In the United States was Intuit QuickBooks. And so there was all this with zero coming on. QuickBooks made an online product, QuickBooks Online, that we all know and are familiar with. So a lot of the C p A firms in the United States started adding on this additional service line, and I saw the potential to do that instead.

And that really excited me. So I moved from the tax department to our CAS department, is what we call it here in the. But I loved that part of it. I loved the technology side of it. I loved being involved in more of the day-to-day operations of small business owners, and so this was like a whole new world of accounting.

A whole new career path that, like when I graduated from college wasn't a thing. It didn't exist and I didn't even know it was available to me. And that's when I just at a certain point I got burnt out at that c p a firm and decided to start my own thing. So I started momentum. About seven years ago, and we service small businesses across the us.

We've always been remote. We have a small team of eight, and we do everything from your basic bookkeeping and payroll to helping business owners understand what levers they can pull in their business to be more profitable or increase cash flow. And then we have a. In creative agencies, marketing agencies, professional service businesses and SaaS companies.

We don't do any taxes. I think I've had like P T S D from taxes, so decided I didn't wanna do that. And also, I didn't like the lifestyle of having tax season. That's one of the things I hated was those mandatory Saturdays that I had when I was at a CPA firm. For me, like I just wanted to. Build a firm that I always wanted to work out, which was more about working , smarter and harder, but like hard in the right ways and working on things that created impact and outputs rather than this idea of like, how hard can we grind and how many hours can we put in?

Meryl: It's funny when you said you were thinking about whether accounting was for you and I actually was thinking about leaving the profession back after I'd become a chartered accountant, which is like A C P A in the US and thinking I have to go to an office every day. I just wanna be surfing.

And it was actually, Through a friend of mine who was a surfer we were out chatting in between waves and she was saying, have you heard of this product called Zero? hadn't, but it was, oh, you could do accounting in the cloud. and so then I looked into that and realized, oh, maybe I can actually live the life I want of working from anywhere and having freedom and control over when I work.

And so that was how I came back to the accounting industry. I dabbled in a tech startup before coming back in into the accounting industry. So funny that you say,

Nikole: Yeah, and I think I'm similar to you in that I remember at the C P A firm, I actually bought an s a D light. I forget what it stands for. I was like seasonal depression light or something, because I went to school on the coast and so I was used to 80 degree weather every day. Being outside.

Always played sports my whole life. And then I remember when I interned at K P M G, one of the big four. I think I gained like 10 pounds that summer, and I was like, it was such a shock to my body. And so when I was thinking about leaving, I thought maybe I'll go into fitness or do something. I was like taking personality tests and I think it's a shame that there's a lot of smart in our industry that leave accounting because they feel the same way or they don't feel like they fit in, or maybe they have a different personality than a traditional cpa.

So I think it's so cool. And I think, you know, zero, they said, is a catalyst to that. It created this whole different lifestyle of we can do this, accounting part, which we love and work with clients that we love, but we don't have to have the same lifestyle as a traditional C P A.

Meryl: Absolutely. So wanted to take the conversation to those earlier days of your business so thinking about what success meant to you then, but also how you think about success now.

So what does that mean to you?

Nikole: Yeah, I get asked that a lot and I think for me, success is when I wake up that day, I like what I'm doing and I'm moving forward. And initially I put a lot of pressure on myself when people would ask that question to say, oh, I think my revenue needs to be X amount, or my team size need to be this, or I need to be making this much money.

I got myself to a good place last year where I was Really the financial situation that I wanted to be in more money than I ever. If you would've told me I was making that when I was an employee, I would've it would've blow my mind. But you always want more, right? And so I think for me, I'm focused more on one, how do I make sure I'm having fun?

And when I'm doing every day now, as long as I'm having fun, I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing. How do I continue to develop my team and the people around me? And how do I make impact for my clients? For me, impact means that we're working with a fewer number of clients and doing bigger things for them versus a large number of clients.

doing smaller things. So for example, our biggest client that we worked with for three years, when we first came on and started working with them, they had no financial function. They had been stolen from, they had been embezzled from, they were trying to sell their business but couldn't because they had no financials.

And so we spent three years basically transforming their business. And last week, Ramona and my team, Dinner with one of the owners celebrating cuz they sold their business for $3 million and are retiring in Hawaii. And those are the sorts of transformation that get me out of bed in the morning.

 The thing that I, I struggle with is I know my role right now is to be the CEO of Momentum Accounting. I think we'll always be boutique. A small firm like the most clients I think will ever have is probably like 60.

Meryl: Yeah I like how you prioritize fun. And so for me, when I have tried to define success for myself, a lot of the factors are on the personal side. So I'm have a slightly different approach, but I think working towards a similar goal. So I do document. I'm quite specific about the things that I want to achieve, and I think it's probably, I think I've always been like that, but since kids, I've had to do that.

So I know that I wanna exercise daily. But that can be hard with a three-year-old and a one-year-old. So I have to be intentional that actually that's really important to me and that I'm try to be home by 4:00 PM every day so I can have the afternoons with my kids. And. Every year I wanna do an annual adventure with my dad and my brother.

And it's funny, be before kids. I probably wouldn't have even noted those things down, but now I actually write them down. These are things that I want to happen because it's harder to make that happen. Balancing a business and family. And I think things like revenue goals can be a bit of a vanity metric.

And as accountants, we know that it's profit that matters more. And something I actually do have a number that I'm working towards, but for me, it's more of a north star. So am I going in the right direction? I use something from the fire framework. So fire is financial independence, retire early, and they have something called the 4% rule.

So if you have a million dollars in the bank, then if you had that conservatively invested and you withdrew 4%, so 40,000 each year, then that gives you a bit of a framework of how much money do you need in conservatively invested stocks or a term Yeah, in the bank

account.

Nikole: If you were to, sell your business. Like how much would you need to sell it for in order to live off that money? And it's always more than you think it is.

Meryl: Yes. And so I like having that number because it, that then helps with my partner. We can have conversations about, okay, do we wanna put it the pool in the backyard or are we gonna invest that and try to create wealth, but also, Making sure I, I had some health issues last year, which I talk about in another episode of this podcast, and so that really made me think about, I don't wanna defer life for until I'm 50 and retired.

I wanna live life now and have experiences and enjoy things now and not just be saving for a future that's a long time away.

Nikole: Yeah, and that's a good point. Like on. You know when you run your own business, for me, I'm making decisions on do I invest in my business or do I invest other places? Because Mike, my partner and I, he's in real estate or he's a firefighter, but he also flips houses. We own real estate together. He's planning on retiring early, and so we can do construction, and so there's also opportunity there to invest money. On that side of things. So I think with your business, it's kind of fun. It's like, do I, I wanna throw $30,000 at marketing and grow this, or what's the ROI on a passive real estate investment? And we're also going through the same. Discussion on do we wanna put a pool in? And part of me is oh, that's a lot of money.

I don't know. Do you wait or do you do it? Now we're in a situation where we don't have kids, so it's there's a little more flexibility when it comes to finances. We just have our two main coon cats that we have to take care of. It makes a little bit easier cuz I don't have to think about what's.

Leaving a legacy to somebody else. I can just think more about living today and what the life Mike and I wanna have together in the future. Looks like.

Meryl: And so when you made that jump and you were starting your business, what were your expectations about what you wanted to do with your business and, and has that changed from seven, eight years ago?

Nikole: I remember reading the book, the when I first started my business and.

That book is all about being the c e o versus being the worker, right? So you don't really have a business if you're the one doing the work. And so as soon as I read that, I realized that this idea of exiting each part of the business. And so in the beginning it was very much me grinding, doing all the work, going to all the networking meetings.

And it's funny, it. You leave your job because you don't wanna work 12 hours a day, and then you start a business and then you work 13, 14 hours a day. But I loved it. Like I woke up every day just super excited because I was making a difference and I was doing the things the way that I wanted to do it, and I was using the technology that I wanted to use.

 So I think my original goal was a million in revenue, and then the next goal has been 2.5 million in revenue. It's this idea of the North Star moving in the right direction. So I guess for me it's like I don't really need to make more money. actually probably within the last couple months is when I came to that realization of like, why am I growing just to grow? The reason I wanted to get beyond that. So for me, like a million dollars represented the financial situation that I wanted to be in. Like I could just stay there. I'll be making the amount of money that I wanna make, and then the next progression of that is how do I help my team make, like how do I create more economics so that my team can make more money?

So that was really the reason behind growth. Getting momentum to the point where the team's happy, they're making good money, is the goal with that. So then I can go out and build something else if I want.

Meryl: I read an interesting article recently and it was talking about the ambition tax and so , in the article it was about Tom Brady and their separation between him and his, yeah, his wife, football and footballer. For the Australians listening. And was talking about some of the things he had to sacrifice to achieve what he has.

So he hadn't attended a Christmas or a Thanksgiving in 23 years. His birthdays, weddings, funerals. So he probably had decisions to make around what is he committed to? Is he gonna be the best quarterback or is he gonna be the best father or husband? And I like to think about some of. decisions that I'm making and who am I showing up for, but also what sacrifices I'm willing to make.

And I'm interested to hear whether there's any sacrifices you had to make in the early days of your business or now. And is there anything that you would've done differently?

Nikole: I remember going to, we had this, oh God, so from the very beginning it was like Ramona, who was my first hire and me and like the shit that we went through, like we would drive two hours to clients and traffic and. Work on an e r P system that we had no idea how to use with a lady in the AP department who couldn't even figure out how to use two factor authentication and said that we were, that we didn't know. We like go to the business owner and complain about us because she couldn't physically see what was happening cuz we implemented bill.com.

And she was only used to using paper. She didn't even have a cell phone. And so we had to like put ourselves in some really stressful situations to the point where, there was several times where I question of should we have taken on this client? What are we doing? But we would always just figured it out, and I these clients that I would probably say no to nowadays. I said yes to everything and. I think saying yes, everything, and like that was like my competitiveness coming out of knowing that I could figure it out if I just tried it. And so I work my ass off, but look, I don't have kids. I probably saw my family less. probably worked pretty hard,

Meryl: yeah, when you were telling the story of the AP lady, we, I was trying to think back to some of the things I did that, that I would never do now. I remember being on a holiday in Bali and I just, I bought out my business partner, so we started the business together and we owned 50% each and I just spent a lot of my savings, but I didn't know how to negoti.

Business sale agreements back then, spent a lot of my savings and it was over in Bali on this holiday we'd been looking forward to, and I worked the whole time. I was on my little moped driving to the cafe to just work all day and raining thinking, what am I doing? Why? Why am I doing this?

Nikole: Actually, yeah, I did do that. I don't know, I think I forgot to be honest, when I worked for the X N F L football player, literally he was calling me. All hours of the night, like it was, anytime I saw the phone ring, it was like the stomach drop. I definitely did not have boundaries with clients

back in the day. Now we have very clear boundaries, but, I think I've forgotten about all of that stuff. So I,

Meryl: Blocked it out.

Nikole: I've, yeah, it was so long ago, and I think a lot of people will see success and then they didn't see all of the hard work that you put in to get there.

Meryl: Yeah, I think now I'm in a more comfortable position now too, and, but I do sometimes try to think back to some of the things I had to do to get here because it was going to those networking events when I didn't feel like it working with clients that weren't the right fit. I tried all kinds of different marketing things.

 I was doing Cold calling back in the early days. Just do I add to anything? I never got it to work, but just trying anything and so many things didn't work. But I think experimenting with all of those different things, saying yes to everything in the beginning was then what allowed later on the ability to say no and to set better boundaries

Nikole: Oh

yeah. I remember going to networking groups and standing up in front of a room terrified me going into a room with a group of people I'd never met before. Terrified me. But I just kept putting myself in uncomfortable situations, and now you can see me like I, I feel like my personality has changed a lot.

My confidence has changed a lot because I continue to put myself in these really uncomfortable situations. And now I can walk into a room and now I can stand up in front of a room and for the most part, It's not that big of a deal, but I used to stand up and just shake and I was be so embarrassed after I can't believe I said that.

I don't even know what I said. I'm just like be blacked out when I was talking, cuz I was so nervous.

Meryl: Yeah. So are there any other changes you've made in your business to focus more on the lifestyle side of things?

Nikole: yes and I think like when I think about just defining work-life balance like for me, work and life are one thing. And so when I go to accounting conferences or I'm doing the podcast with Scott, it's accounting related, but Scott's one of my best friends and when I go to these conferences, it's going on a trip, so it's, I think when you do what you love every day, your work and your life just become one and it allows you to be more authentic. Like I've definitely become more. I feel like now I can be a hundred percent myself, whether that be online or in person, or talking to a client or wearing what I wanna wear versus what it used to be when I was at a CPA firm.

And I hope that my team feels that way too, that they can show up every day and be authentic. So I think the world's changed a lot in that way, especially as we moved online. .

Meryl: Yeah. Because you, you talked about that you used to go out on site now. Now it seems to be more remote. Are there any other things like that where you've prioritized what you want or flexibility, freedom.

Or that for your team?

Nikole: So we try not to take on businesses that have cash flow issues. So we used to work with like retail restaurant types of businesses that were hard to nail down, on a computer environment because they're usually on the floor. So it'd be like after hours is when they'd be texting you be stressed out about cash flow issues and oh, people in real estate lawyers, Certain types of personalities that just stress you out or maybe see it more as a vendor relationship instead of a partnership.

And so we're very particular about the clients that we work with now. I think a lot of, at least when I was at my firm as a staff, you just are given the clients. The firm closes and typically they don't put a lot of thought into is this person someone that my team would want to work with? And Ashley, my coo does, does sales is always a good check and balance for that because for me as the business owner, obviously a new sales, like more money in my pocket, but she does a very good job of looking for those red flags and weeding out clients that we know that would negatively impact the day-to-day.

Livelihoods of our team members because they're the ones that have to, we're very embedded in our client's businesses, and that can just be very draining and stressful. When you have one client that's just like a huge pain in your ass or like their stress becomes your stress. So I would say that's definitely one thing. I do miss going in person to clients, but it is nice to be able to do work from anywhere. You know, Some of our team, Ramona, she loves going skiing, so she'll drive to Tahoe and work from Tahoe, do half day skiing, half day working. And yeah, I think that's been really helpful.

Meryl: And so what's your role in the business these days? You've got Ashley, who's taking on a lot of the COO responsibilities, and the reason I'm asking is because I think for other business owners who are trying to get to that area where they're just focus, focusing on the visionary type work, what does that mean?

How do you spend your time? Where do you have the most impact?

Nikole: Yeah, so the visionary rule for sure, and like a lot of people have read e o s, right? And this idea of the visionary and the integr. And up until three years ago, I'd probably never heard of that.

And I hired Ashley Carol, my c o o. She's been with me for over three years now. But I remember when I hired her, I was not looking for. I was looking for somebody just to do the work, right? I had hired a couple employees at this time. We had maybe 20 clients and so I was just looking for another accountant to do the accounting work, and she found me on LinkedIn and sent me a video, and I was so impressed by her as a human being that.

 And she told me she didn't want to do the accounting work. She wanted do more of this. We didn't even have a word for it then it was, now she's my c o. But I can't tell you how much that changed my life because there's nothing more impactful than having somebody that can. Integrate, like actually being able to step away and be the visionary and think about the direction of the business and come up, be creative and have that space.

And then when you have an idea and not feeling like paralyzed that you can't execute it, and someone like that, their full-time job is to take that idea and then integrate it. And so I think that was like the first time I was able to really step away from. The day-to-day grind of the business and have that flexibility.

And so since she's been working for me for three years now I'm at a really good place where I can step away from the business for a week or two and there's not a big impact. And so that's what I always wanted was like end goal for me is that if I show up to. I'm working on stuff I'm excited about, but if I don't show up to work, the business continues to move on without me.

Meryl: Yeah, I'll quickly define the visionary integrator terms for someone that might have read the book. As you said, that comes from the e o S Framework, which is in the book Traction. But there's another book called Rocket Fuel, which goes into a lot more detail around what's a visionary and what's an integrator.

And a lot of entrepreneurs are visionaries where they're great at the big ideas. Good at relationships and thinking strategy that maybe don't love all the execution of the project, manage, putting it in the project management system and holding people accountable and deadlines. And so a really nice pairing that they talk about is having that, giving the visionary that space.

To do that creative thinking and come up with new ideas, but then pairing that with someone who can take those ideas and then go and execute and make it happen, and you can rely on them to organize the team and keep things rolling around. And I think a lot of, whether you call 'em an integrator, whether you call 'em a coo, an operations manager, I think they can have a real impact.

And I know I experienced something similar when we had our first operations manager of just having so, so many things taken off my. But I think it's also challenging because that as accountants, we are thinking, is that person revenue generating? So how did, what did that look like for you? Did you bring Ashley on in a revenue generating role to start with?

Or did she go straight away into that kind of operations role?

Nikole: So she went straight away into the operations role. So I knew that was an investment. I knew it was a risk and I didn't have a job description for her. I really just invested in her. And one of the first things she did in the first year was at that time we didn't have, I don't even think we used proposal.

Like I think our contracts were like, Just super like a handshake deal on the pricing. It was just, Pull it outta my, you know, uh, just a, whatever random number I decided to quote the client. So I was, we're

Meryl: What are they willing to pay?

Nikole: fixed fee pricing and I'd put it on a spreadsheet or on a Word document. And so one of the first things she did was implement go proposal.

And so built out all of our services, went and met with all of our team members, went over each client. Took what everyone in the services that we're actually doing for those clients and put it in go proposal and then went out and met with every single client and recod them. So she increased our fees that first year more than her salary.

And so like when I say she's smart, are the kinds of things that she does. I think a good operator understands that part of their role is part of their responsibility is. The financial performance of the company, and as an operator, they have the ability to control that. And so she, she had the foresight and understanding to know that she wasn't a revenue generating employee, but she could make impact by doing something like that.

Meryl: I love that. And that's an example of someone almost thinking like a business owner that that's quite a different hat to thinking about how can I service clients well. One of the mistakes I see people make with hiring is they see someone who's a great strategist, but we're mostly small business owners.

Most of us don't have more than 20, 30, 40 staff. And I find that you need an executor. So if I was thinking about hiring a marketing role, that's where I spend my time now. I've made the mistake of hiring. People who are only strategists and then you need another person to execute. Or just that you have all these great ideas floating around and nothing happens.

So that's something I'm very conscious of when I'm hiring. encourage our team to think about too, is can this person actually execute? And I think accountants are generally pretty good at executing, but the challenges I've had have been in other roles around marketing, hr, those kind of areas.

So if you were to be giving advice to Ano accounting firm owner, bookkeeping firm owner, hiring someone that could grow, the admin or operations person and someone that can execute,

 when's the right time to hire a role like that? If you've got one employee, it might be a little too early but where is that sweet spot of the right time to hire that?

Nikole: That's a good question. I'm trying to think of, I think I only had two employees at that point, so I would say as soon as you can, and if you can hire, even if you can hire an admin, And maybe you can't afford a coo. I think you're better off hiring somebody that's an admin or somebody that can grow into an operator role versus.

Going and hiring a COO from a larger organization because you need somebody that can get their hands dirty and grow with the company. So as soon as you can say, Hey, this is the minimum, salary that I can make this year, and you want to invest in a long-term growth of your business, that's the time to do it.

 Scott and I talk about this a lot. Like last year I had a really good year financially, and then like my net profit was 0% this year, or sorry this month, but I invested in another admin. I invested in marketing, and so I think profitability is fluid and you just really have to think about these humps that you have to get over in order to get to the end goal.

In a way you're buying your freedom. And think about the long-term advantages of that over the short-term hit that you will take to your bottom line. And some people are in a place where they can do that.

Meryl: Yeah. Amazing. This has been great. Nicole. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Is there anything else you wanted to share? Talk about related to this whole theme of what is enough and having a lifestyle as well as running an accounting.

Nikole: Yeah, I think just keep having fun, like you're not having fun. Figure out why that is and think about personally what you want first before you. Started to set business goals because business is you. The reason you have your business in the first place is to meet your personal goals. So that's my only advice.

Meryl: And where's the best place that people can get in touch with you or follow you on social media?

Nikole: Sure. So, LinkedIn is a good place to get. In touch with me. My name's spelled with a K – Nikole Mackenzie, and then you can also email me nikole dot mackenzie momentum accounting.com

or go to our website, momentum accounting.com.

Meryl: Yeah,

Nikole: Long but easy to remember,

Meryl: it's a great name. Business is all about momentum. I've never actually said that to you before, but great name.

 Thanks again.

Nikole: Yes, of course.