1746 – Unlocking the Secrets of Accounting Entrepreneurship with Roger Knecht

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0:58with us right now it's roger connect and roger i want to spell your last name because it's k-n-e-c-h-t you are the yeah you are the president at universal accounting center your website is universal accounting.com so much i want to talk to you when in fact we're recording this after you know like 12 minutes we're like man we got to get to recording here uh just finding so many commonalities, but tell me about your work with Universal Accounting, what you do and who you serve. So interestingly enough, I started more than 20 years ago with the school as a consultant. I was essentially assisting them as they were growing their different campuses and such and was given employment and rose up to the ranks to where I'm now a, not a, the president of Universal Accounting Center.

1:42So my trajectory is essentially most of the positions within the companies I filled and oversaw a variety of the different divisions of the business. So yeah, it's been a long journey with more than 20 years experience. You are also a podcaster, which I think would be really easy for a friend that's listening to this podcast right now. They can find you. What is the name of your podcast? So they can subscribe. You bet. It's called Building the Premier Accounting Firm. It's for owners of bookkeeping, accounting, and tax businesses. And who should be listening? Well, essentially it's the owners who are trying to actually work on their business.

2:14My intent in the podcast is to have episodes from the experts to help them build what I refer to as the premier accounting firm. And we just range in topics from marketing, selling, pricing, mental health, just a variety of things that people need to be aware of as they're running their companies. What might be some of the, you know, when we think about what it takes to build a premier accounting firm, what is the default? If someone says, okay, I got a great idea. I'm going to go independent and I'm going to start my own accounting firm. What are the things that they might immediately start to experience?

2:46So first of all, I think what we need to realize is they need to become what I refer to as an account entrepreneur. They need to recognize that they're not just accountants. They're now embracing this ideology of an entrepreneurship. And in starting the business for an accountant, that's oftentimes very difficult. They haven't had formal training typically in marketing, selling, pricing. And so how to get a new client, engage with them, onboard them is generally a difficult process initially, simply because they don't know what that business owner expects of them and what to actually do in that initial relationship.

3:16So we try to actually cover that, address it for them so that they can realize there is a lifetime value to this relationship and they need to actually engage it as such. And then the other thing that I'd add to this is I do believe that there's a disconnect between the expectations that the business owner has of the accounting profession and what as accounting professionals we do to service their accounting needs. In other words, many of the accounting professionals are too often very slow to speak up and give advice and offer information that can be valuable to the business. It's almost like a don't ask, don't tell philosophy.

3:48I'll provide you the financials. And if you've got questions, ask me and I'll tell you a few things. But we just kind of go off into the shadows. And really, the business owner needs so much more of the accounting professional. There's so many insights that can be derived from that. And that's where I try to give the accounting profession a voice. This is a little while back, but where did Universal Accounting come from? It started in 1979. A gentleman by the name of Alf Bostrom started of the company. Alf started it because in that era, he was known as the turnaround king. He was a business coach who'd go into businesses and actually help them transition out of near bankruptcy.

4:22And in that process, he developed a curriculum that he was using to basically help transition these companies. And it was based on the accounting information. And so he built a curriculum that later evolved into something that people wanted. So being an entrepreneur, he created the school, offered training. So initially we were a traditional school with campuses around the United States. We eventually had 22 campuses. We're now entirely online, but he essentially retired in the nineties. His son took over in the nineties and I took over 10 years ago as the third president of the company. Wow. So what are the ways that an accounting firm might engage with you?

4:59Like, you know, and again, I guess they could be at various stages. They might be early, early, early stage. Is that correct? Maybe talk about your different kind of customer personas is that you work with. Exactly. So there's definitely the accounting professional that is in that traditional employment setting where for whatever reasons, they're either supplementing an income and taking on clients on the side, maybe weeknights, weekends, or it's somebody that's doing this full time. But either way, what's happening is they're in that startup phase and we help them essentially determine what it is that they need to be offering as services, how to price those services, market, sell, acquire the clients, retain the clients, that client relation and retention.

5:34So we're helping them as solopreneurs start their accounting businesses. But at the same time, we're also working with established firms and we work directly with the owners. We help them as they're building their business, offering additional services, engaging further with their clients, adjusting their pricing models. But because we're a secondary school, as a post-secondary school, I can train their staff. And so we're oftentimes offering training to their employees to help them offer quality services along the way to their clientele. Yeah. So when somebody begins school with you, how long does that last?

6:07And kind of what's the transformation that takes place? Great question, because yes, we're a school, we're a post-secondary school, and we'd speak of our people, our customers as students, but they're generally about 35 to 55, 60 years of age, 10, 15, 20 years experience, CPAs, enrolled agents. So essentially we're working with people that are very seasoned and experienced, and we're helping them move into this entrepreneurial space, becoming the account entrepreneur. And their courses that they're going to enroll in are going to range between four to six weeks in length. So we're very in depth with our curriculum.

6:37However, we're very deliberate in making it something that's manageable. So in four to six weeks, you can start to finish, get through what you're wanting to and receive various certifications that we offer that denote your skillset and your proficiency in a certain area. Yeah. Your website, I know has a lot of resources as well. So to our friend that's been listening to our conversation, let the journey begin. So if somebody goes to your website, it's universalaccounting.com. What are some of the resources that you'd recommend that they can start enjoying? Well, first of all, it's for either the account entrepreneur or business owners in general.

7:14We have a great deal of resources there for them. But the first set is some free eBooks that we've actually put online for individuals, two of which I just recently wrote. It's Your Strategic Accountant and Your Profit and Growth Expert. Each of these are available online for free. We also have some courses that we've put together that are basically free so that we can give back. We've had a give back mentality now for a number of years. And each year we release a new curriculum and they range from money management to starting a business, getting a job. We have a couples course coincidentally.

7:46So just a variety of things to assist individuals as they're on this career path to having basically a successful career in accounting. Roger, why would you offer a couples course? Great question. So my children recently got married and the three children, when they were getting engaged, I said that they needed to meet with me for four weeks prior to getting married. And my blessing was contingent upon them meeting with me as a couple as such. And I did these meetings and everyone that I knew as friends and work colleagues and so forth were aware of this meetings and asked that I record them. They asked that I write a book and I chose rather than writing a book, I would actually do a curriculum, a course on it.

8:24And so the classes were created with the intent of either helping people in the, say, youth ministries, young adults, people that are working, people that are newly married or getting married. It's basically a couple's course to help them understand what they can do to solidify that relationship that they're just beginning to build. Yeah, wonderful. So Roger Connect, again, present at Universal Accounting Center. Your website is universalaccountingschool.com, or actually the primary website, universalaccounting.com. Before I kind of send you out of a way, can you maybe just, for those of us not in accounting, any observations around general industry trends, things that someone on the outside might appreciate knowing about kind of what's been going on in your world maybe over the past year, maybe over the year ahead?

9:14And particularly, I'm kind of curious about maybe any disruptive innovations regarding technology or AI, if that's been seeping into the accounting world as well. Most certainly, and happy to address it. Yeah, you would maybe go back five years and hear a lot of talk about cloud or even a few years before that, hearing about going paperless. Today, it's definitely AI. The AI is something that when it came out just a number of months ago was something that you wanted to become familiar with, learn the prompts, ask questions, engage with AI, and see what insights you could gain from the interface.

9:44Now, what's happening is a lot of the platforms that we as accounting professionals lean on to do our work, whether they're client-facing or internal, these platforms, QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, all the others, they're actually integrating within the platform an AI interface to enable us to, as accounting professionals, use this additional tool to do our work efficiently and effectively. So the nice part about it is we're still relevant. Accounting professionals aren't going away. We've been around for more than, you know, I say we're jokingly the second oldest profession. And as such, I don't expect us to expire anytime soon.

10:20So within our profession, we're seeing that we're getting tools and insights. It's kind of like being a doctor at the ER. I recall seeing recently an article that said that the AI could actually diagnose some of the ER people coming in better than the attending doctor. And it's not that AIs are going to replace doctors. It's just that they're going to assist. They're an additional tool. It's like an x-ray. The x-ray can diagnose and see things that the doctor can't, but you still need the doctor to actually take and use that information to do something. So we're going to be similar to that as we work with our clients and the business owners to essentially focus on what I refer to as the three core areas of their business.

10:57Bookkeeping and accounting, tax preparation and planning, and last of all, most importantly, CFO and advisory work. It's where we now really get into building a successful business, helping them get the profits that they deserve. Roger Connect, it's been wonderful having you again present. Universal Accounting Center on the web at universalaccounting.com. Roger, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. If it's about accounting, it is universal.

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