Joe Montgomery: Find the Sweet Spot of the Right Clients, Right Services and Right Prices

An engaged team with a great culture is better than landing at the perfect ratio of payroll to revenue.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
for CPA Trendlines

Before Joe Montgomery started his firm, he had an epiphany.

He asked himself, “Why would I ever want to own a firm, if that’s what it looks like?”

He saw firm leaders chained to their desks, working long hours and dealing with waves of turnover.

“There’s got to be a different way to do it,” he thought.

After too many 100-hour weeks with a wife and three kids he never saw, he reached his breaking point and exited his family firm to start his own firm and his coaching business, GroupUp.

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His focus in his accounting firm and in GroupUp is finding that sweet spot of the right clients, right services and right prices. The first step is “making sure we have the right people in the right structure with the right motivators behind it. Those three components can build an unstoppable team,” Montgomery explained. Next, he said, “on the client side, we do the right service that’s in our wheelhouse, that we can consistently deliver to the right client…and for the right price, so we have enough money coming in the door.”

With that structure in place, Montgomery said, firm owners “can get out of production and lead the firm,” changes that can lead to “you running a firm that gives you more freedom.”

A key to making those changes is to be willing to delegate and empower. “We advise our clients to outsource and grow and scale their business,” Montgomery said. But many firm owners fail to practice what they preach. By failing to build out an empowered team, he explained, “We have a bunch of worker bees, and we become extremely busy, too.”

12 More Takeaways from Joe Montgomery

Posted on May 31, 2023

Liz Farr

About the Author

Liz Farr, CPA, is a special contributor to CPA Trendlines, bringing an insider's clear-eyed view of the tax and accounting business and a passion for advancing the profession.

She's the host of the hit CPA Trendlines podcast series "The Disruptors," available everywhere: Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music and Audible, Player FM, Audacy, Gaana (India), and Boomplay (Africa).

As founder and proprietor of Farr Communications, she is the secret weapon that her clients use to get their messages out. She has written blog posts, web content, articles, white papers, case studies and books for accountants and accounting tech companies. Her specialty is ghostwriting for coaches and consultants who want to move accountants into the future. She can bridge the gap between the dream these visionaries have for the future and the mindset and reality that today’s accountants are living in.

Five of her past and current clients have been named to Accounting Today’s annual list of 100 most influential in accounting. She has written under her name for the Journal of Accountancy, Intuit’s Firm of the Future blog and AccountingWEB. She has also appeared in Forbes, CFO.com, and Accounting Today.

Farr has a broad educational background, studying biochemistry at the University of Munster, Germany, and obtained her bachelor's degree as a double major in biochemistry and German at the University of New Mexico. She also studied German, Spanish, computer science and linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and continued her studies in linguistics at the University of Washington. She earned her master's degree in accounting in 2004 from the Robert O. Anderson School of Management at the University of New Mexico, qualifying as a licensed CPA in 2005.

Professionally, Liz began as a tax preparer at H&R Block before working at several local CPA firms in the Albuquerque, N.M. area. At her last assignment as a tax manager, she helped a team develop streamlined processes for getting tax returns out faster and more accurately.

After spending 15 years working as an accountant in the Albuquerque, N.M., area, she traded in her ten-key for a pen and has been writing full time since 2018.

She can be contacted at Farr Communications.

When she’s not writing or studying the accounting business, she’s hiking or skiing in the mountains of New Mexico.

Click here for more by Liz Farr

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