How to Build and Scale a Category-Defining Firm Without Losing Culture with Nick Leopard

0:02John Lee Dumas:Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down how to build and scale a category-defining firm without losing culture. And to drop these vibe bombs, I brought to Nick Leopard in the EO Fire Studios. Nick is the founder and CEO of Accordion, an AI and data-powered financial consulting firm focused on private equity. Since founding the company in 2009, he has grown into a global firm with 11 offices and 1 ,600 employees. And today we'll talk about no safety net, no excuses, zero margin for error, culture as a strategy, scaling without dilution, and oh, so much more.

0:39John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Nick and our sponsors. The foundation has coached over 2 ,000 students to find painful problems and turned them into software businesses. Their 12-week cohort takes you from no idea or software experience to finding a real problem and pre-selling the solution. No idea, no coding, no technical co-founder. The next cohort launches January, 2027. Join the wait list at thefoundation.com. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place.

1:14John Lee Dumas:And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com. highlevelfire.com. Nick, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I've been at this for 16 years, and I think a lot of people look at all the glamour that comes with founding a company. And I'll still say today, all that stuff is really nice, but it is not glamour. It's still hard. I come in every day. I'm fortunate to work alongside people I really trust and respect, but it's not all glamour.

2:01Even at a company of 1 ,700 employees and the leader in the space, it's still really hard, but that's what we signed up for. So it was hard at the beginning. It's hard now. And people think you get there and you just glide.

2:14John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, we're talking about how to build and scale a category defining firm without losing culture. So I want to talk about no safety net, no excuses. Because Nick, you found it accordion with literally no safety net. So what does that mean? And how did that shape your decision making from day one? I started accordion when I was 29 years old. I quit a perfectly good job where I was doing well right after having a baby. So started accordion when we had our first son, um we said you're four years four months old and at that point i was like there was no conversation around if this doesn't work out it was head down to you know radical positivity and saying this is going to work and we're going to put the work in and we're going to do it and that just had to work and so i think a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs like the whole idea of an entrepreneur has been totally sensationalized in our culture.

3:13And even with first employees, I tried to like vet out whether people wanted to just be like an entrepreneur or like part of something, or were they really willing to put the work in and do the grind? Because it's not the glamour, as I mentioned, it's hard. And a lot of people want it because it is sensationalized. And it's one of those things like, look, this is going to work and we're going to have to really put blood, sweat, and tears into this.

3:40John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about zero margin for error because you've actually described and talked quite a bit about those early days as having no margin for error. I mean, literally zero. So what does that actually mean and how do you survive that pressure? Yeah, we were a small player. There's big, large global consulting firms. And the genesis of the firm was I saw this real need, a need that we had looking at our portfolio companies and the other big global consulting firms were not serving them. But at the same time, we're going after big private equity funds as clients and all of your brand is built on trust and you're going up against big behemoths.

4:22And so we had to deliver A plus level work every single time. We had to earn the next one. The great thing about private equity is that once you do a great job, your reputation can really grow. But the inverse is also true. If you don't do a great job, your reputation can be tarnished. You can be boxed out for a long while. And so we didn't have a reputation or a brand to fall back on. And so we had to build on everything needed to be known for a consistent standard of excellence, not eight different ways of doing the same thing, but really all of our team operating in one fashion. and when I think about zero margin for Eric it reminds me of just kind of how how I always showed up saying all right I want to be the leader in this space I go back to college I was fortunate to play division one college lacrosse I showed up and there's three goalies at the time that was the third string lowest guy in the totem pole and I looked I was like god this could be a long college career if I'm not starting.

5:28And so, you know, being inexperienced, I started to just put myself out there. I show up every day before practice and it became my thing where I just get in the net and let anyone before practice even started just shoot on me. And that was defenseman, that was, you know, maze, attackman, everyone, assistant coaches were coming out and it was, you know, 10 yards out. And so it took a beating before practice even started, but it just showed those It was like willing to do something other guys were not. And it was that sort of discipline that brought to building Accordion my whole career. I've been like, okay, where's the work?

6:04Where's the discipline that other people aren't putting in? And then how do you build a real reputation and brand when you don't have one? And did that in college. Focused on that when I was building Accordion. And what I always look at is the gap between where you are and where you want to be is almost always closed by having radical discipline.

6:26John Lee Dumas:Radical discipline. I love that story, the lacrosse. It really, I think, paints a clear picture of the sacrifice that you were willing to make to be literally great. Now, I want one more story before we move on. And that story is, what was your first big win, Nick? I mean, what was the story of you at Accordion? You pitched the deal. You maybe had a few early losses. I don't know. But I mean, what was the first one where you walked out? You're like, I did it. That's a huge win. I was successful. What was that story? It's a good one. We started off, I mean, now it's a big global consulting business focused on AI transformation, value creation through the office of the CFO.

7:07But the firm started as a high-end staffing-oriented business of finance professionals. So the very first project we went was a$1 ,500 project. And we were like, oh, my God, this is awesome. So what did we do? We went out to celebrate that night. I think me and a couple guys spent about$750 on dinner. Turned out the client never paid us. So that was our welcome to reality moment. And we were just a little guy. We couldn't push back. But one thing that stuck with us is no matter what, celebrate the micro wins because that whole team was so pumped to go get the next one and maybe go to a dinner that could be paid for by actually paying us.

7:52So long-term vision really matters, but you've got to be obsessive about all these little moments here.

7:59John Lee Dumas:I mean, that actually segues perfectly into what I want to talk about next, which is culture as a strategy because you built accordion with culture as a core strategy, not as an afterthought, which a lot of people do, frankly. So what does it look like when you're in the trenches of building a company and you have culture as a core strategy? This could be applicable to any company, not just what we do. But it came from a mixture of experiences I had. I was very fortunate when I got out of college, I grew up in DC. I went back to DC for a startup commercial finance company. And it was run by young entrepreneurs, highly collaborative.

8:40Everyone knew the common mission. We ended up going public during that time. It was a$3 billion market cap company in three years. And I literally walked around. I was like a young 20-year-old. Oh, every company is like this. And then I got a job in investment banking at Bear Stearns, moved to New York. And you quickly realize that every company is not like that. there was a great place, but it wasn't that like startup, uh, entrepreneurial feel. Uh, there's already a brand there and all that. And so I always, it always stuck with me. I was like, you know, if I ever start a company, it's going to be long on culture where the young, energetic, uh, but while where everyone understands common mission, notice the role in that very much a team-oriented thing.

9:28And so I started Accordion with the notion of a better way to work in finance. And that was very different than any Wall Street firm out there. And that was saying, look, we can get really smart people that also want to go have a good time and be around others that they're motivated by. And that was a view that other people weren't taking. Other people were saying, let's have the best service, let's have the best products. But if you get the best people and you get everyone motivated in the same way, you're going to put out great service or great product. And that ended up being one where it was marked by a highly transparent culture, celebrating the micro wins, bringing everyone together and recruiting a certain type of person.

10:16And that today, we really call it a better way to work now, but that today is the North Star of what we look at as a founder's mentality firm.

10:26John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, scaling without dilution, leadership evolution, and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. You're probably spending your life building something you'll never own. Your employer's company, your client's wealth, someone else's dream. And when you stop working, the money stops. Software changes the equation. Build it once, sell it again and again. Get paid every month. This isn't a side hustle. This is ownership. The foundation has coached more than 2 ,000 students to find painful problems and turned them into software businesses. It started with Dane Maxwell, who became financially free at 27.

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12:36John Lee Dumas:For a special 10 % off, visit r-u-u-n-e dot A-I slash E-O-F. Again, for a special 10 % off, Visit rune.ai slash E-O-F. Fire Nation, ideas are exciting, but systems will allow you to create freedom. That is where High Level comes in. High Level allows you to build and run your entire business from one platform. Website builder and hosting, funnel and landing pages, email marketing, automation and workflows, calendar booking, payments and subscriptions, even course and membership hosting. Everything works together seamlessly. Plus, award-winning 24-7 support, so you are never stuck. And when you go through my link at highlevelfire.com, you unlock my full bonus stack, a 30-day free trial of High Level with full access, a private 50-minute coaching call with me, weekly live office hours with me, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something execution roadmap, and more.

13:31John Lee Dumas:Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Nick, we're back. And I want to talk about scaling without dilution. Because, I mean, let's be honest. High-performance cultures, they're easy to talk about. And they're hard to protect. So as you've scaled, how have you actually maintained standards without diluting your values? Well, our values aren't the BS values that a lot of firms just put up on a wall. Ours are very much marked by we have a core value award. It's like big ceremonies that we do. but the things are really unique to accordion but some of the things as we think about like our office leaders they represent everything and they're they're judged on how well are they extending the culture across all of our different offices at scale we also look at things in sort of a matrix of artifacts legends and rituals that are all part of our of our culture so artifacts In fact, you walk into our offices and you feel like you're in a premium hotel by design.

14:41We had hired the designers of the Whitby Hotel and the Crosby Street Hotel in New York. You kind of feel that in New York when you walk in. There's a little bit of music in the lobby going on. There's art on the walls. And it just shows you that we're not an old school advisory firm. And so somebody walks through that and they can see this big boombox print within my office. And so it's just something very, very unique. Now, every single one of our offices globally looks like that now. Then we think about legends, like a mid-level senior director sold one of the biggest projects we ever had on a bachelor party.

15:19So that accelerated him into the managing director role. And so new legends are getting created every day inside Accordion, not just the early days. And so taking those stories and really celebrating those and putting them out there as both old legends and new legends in the making has always been really key. And then the last I'll talk about is rituals. Our firm, we still get the entire firm together offsite every 18 months. We've done it in Palm Springs. It was Coachella themed. It was a big Ferris wheel, DJ. Just last year, we did it in Nashville. Our CFO and our New York office lead hosted the awards show inside the Country Music Hall of Fame.

16:01Everyone dressed up like it was the Country Music Awards. And now the team starts to think about those off-sites, and people talk about it in eras or tenure as being there. They're like, oh, I joined before Austin, or I joined before Scottsdale. And that's culture that you can't manufacture. It really comes up as like people can't wait to go and build those relationships at those off-sites. but it becomes something incredibly unique. And the way that we do it is just a way that is totally unique to accordion that doesn't feel like a corporate offsite. I mean, when you think about Ferris wheels and DJs, and then you think about where the Shazam founder come and talk about like the early days of what was probably like the earliest AI as they were listening to music, it's just something totally unique that everyone gets pretty jazzed up about.

16:49John Lee Dumas:And then the other thing I would say is we have pretty, we stayed pretty close to the organization. I'm just like a pulse of the organization. And so I talked about a better way to work in finance. We did a sort of word cloud as to how people would describe in one word, how they would describe according. And about a year and a half ago, that number one word was fun. And honestly, it kind of drove me crazy. I addressed the firm directly, tongue in cheek, laugh. I'm like, that's great. It's fun. But you know what else is fun? Winning. To me, winning is more fun than fun is fun. And that stuck with us.

17:29And people think about that. It's like when you win together and you know what we're going after, that gets to be really fun. It's not happy hours and just off sites. It's actually winning together.

17:38John Lee Dumas:So of all those, because you gave a ton of great examples, what is your actual favorite culture trait that is in your company? Talk about our off sites. I love our off sites because it's so hard to see every single person in all the offices. I try to travel a bunch through offices, but it's just hard to spend time. But when you get three days where you're like diving into content, you're having just conversations in the hallway or out at night, they really allow us to really grow with each other as a team. And you can see these real relationships get built. And then they take those out into the front lines when we go see our clients.

18:17And the clients can really feel like, wow, this place is a very cohesive team. And we can't understand exactly why, but you can feel it. And that, I think, is a product of the big investments we make in things like this.

18:32John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about your personal leadership evolution, because I want to know how your leadership style has evolved from a third string lacrosse goalie to an early scrappy founder back in the days to now leading a scaled organization? What does that evolution look like? Well, I'll tell you early on, it kind of felt like it was doing a bit of everything. That was like the value I created was very direct. On a Friday, if we were slow on revenue, they'd say, hey, Nick, go lock yourself in an office. Just call every client that we have. And I'd come out and all of a sudden, you know, all this revenue generated.

19:09And 16 years later, I still love doing that. But the role has fundamentally shifted to developing more and more leaders in the organization who are driving that value. And the turning point was really thinking about the idea that you can't do everything anymore. And I was working with a coach and said, OK, let's identify like my unique superpowers. Like, what do I also love doing? Like, where do I get energy from? Where do I not get energy from? And guess what? The things that you don't get energy from, somebody else gets a ton of energy from. And so you just need to identify those things and then identify the people that can pick up where you have non-skills.

19:52And I say non-skills for a reason because sometimes they just shouldn't be developed. Some people are like, oh, I'm not good at that. I need to go develop. And it's like, well, no, you don't. You can actually go find somebody where they already have those skills. and why don't you just double down on the unique superpowers that you have. So I've been very deliberate about where I spend my time, focusing on those superpowers. And when I did that and took a step back, people around me really blossomed and they took real ownership. And that's leverage in an organization. And I think back to just like growing leaders.

20:27I ultimately ended up being captain of my college team. And my senior year, we were 0-5, not a great place to start. I remember we had opened up the Naval Academy and got absolutely smoked. And I get a letter in my locker. And this letter, I actually brought it up on stage at our last offsite, but it's framed in my house. And it says, working with the coaches, you set the standard. We get the feeling that the team doesn't know your standards. Just set it and don't wait any longer. Sloppy passing, lack of hustle, mental mistakes are all fixable and in our control, but only if I set the bar. So that fundamentally changed how I think about building winning teams.

21:14Like leadership's not just about the intention. We're expecting people to do things. It's about clarity and accountability. So every team I build, I think about that letter. You need to set the bar and just don't assume people can read your mind. You need to really lay out expectations.

21:29John Lee Dumas:Man, Fire Nation, I hope you're taking notes about some great ways to inspire, motivate, lead your team. And Nick, we talked about a lot today, the leadership evolution of you, scaling without dilution, culture as a strategy, zero margin for error, no safety net, no excuses. In just one sentence, what do you want the listeners to take away from our conversation today? If you really want to build a real scalable platform, it's not just the first five years, not just the next 10 years. You're going to have to be the person. If you want people to look up to you, you're going to have to be the person in the trenches doing the work.

22:08Now, you may do different things, but you've got to figure out a way to really continue to inspire people and where to spend your time.

22:18John Lee Dumas:Nick, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, wants to learn more about your company, how would they do that? You can go to accordion.com. Most people spell wrong. It's A-C-C-O-R-D-I-O-N, the proper way of spelling accordion. You can find me on LinkedIn and love to connect with anyone that wants to reach out and hopefully you will reach out. Well, Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with NL and JLD today. So keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com type Nick N I C K in the search bar and the show notes page will pop up with links to accordion and everything else, his LinkedIn profile, et cetera.

22:59John Lee Dumas:Nick, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge and value with fire nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks guys. Hey, fire nation, a big thank you to Nick and our sponsors for sponsoring today's episode and fire nation. If you're listening and you're an entrepreneur on fire, get on EO Fire. Go to eofire.com slash guest, fill out the form, and you can learn more about becoming a guest. Peace. Want to build something you actually own? The foundation's 12-week program teaches you to find real problems people will pay you to solve and pre-sell your software before you build it.

23:31John Lee Dumas:No idea, coding experience, or technical co-founder required. The next cohort launches January 2027. Join the foundation waitlist today at thefoundation.com. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place. And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com.