Liz Farr, Author at CPA Trendlines

Alicia Katz Pollock: Create a Human-Centric Business | The Disruptors

Give your team the resources they need to do the work that makes them happy. Plus eight key takeaways.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

“Alicia Katz Pollock proves that you don’t need to begin with an accounting degree or formal bookkeeping training to be a hugely helpful resource for the QuickBooks community.”

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS: Nancy McClelland: Be the One Your Clients Ask First |Alan Whitman: Stop Accepting the Status Quo | Sean Duncan: Discover Your Own Genius | Ingrid Edstrom: True Wealth Is Not Financial | Caleb Jenkins: Firm Growth Requires Owners to Shift Roles | Chris Hervochon: Be the Leader You Want to Work For | Ira Rosenbloom: Don’t Merge for the Money | Adam Lean: Get Out of the Accountant’s Trap |

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Pollock started teaching computers and Microsoft products and used QuickBooks in her business. Then, people started asking her to teach them QuickBooks. She ran her QuickBooks set-up and methodology past a few bookkeepers, who told her, “Alicia, you have a knack for this.” So she dove in to learn as much as she could and is today one of the go-to experts for QuickBooks.

PODCAST

Nancy McClelland: Be the One Your Clients Ask First | The Disruptors

Rely on your professional network for answers you don’t know. Plus 13 key takeaways.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Nancy McClelland never intended to start a firm, but after leaving a toxic work environment, she took on a few part-time gigs. Because she’d never worked at a CPA firm, she built it “the way it made sense” without bumping up against the traditions of “This is how it should be done.”

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS: Alan Whitman: Stop Accepting the Status Quo | Sean Duncan: Discover Your Own Genius | Ingrid Edstrom: True Wealth Is Not Financial | Caleb Jenkins: Firm Growth Requires Owners to Shift Roles | Chris Hervochon: Be the Leader You Want to Work For | Ira Rosenbloom: Don’t Merge for the Money | Adam Lean: Get Out of the Accountant’s Trap | Geraldine Carter: Charging More is Better for Your Clients | Vimal Bava: When Working Smarter, Not Harder, Is the Only Option |

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The name of her firm – The Dancing Accountant – reflects her passion for dancing and membership in several dance troupes, including one where she wears miniskirts and go-go boots. Sharing that passion with her clients means putting herself “out there” and having faith that her clients respect her work as an accountant. “And you hope that they don’t laugh too hard at your dancing or that they’re not disappointed to find out that you’re just doing silly, fun stuff.”

INNOVATION & CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Alan Whitman: Stop Accepting the Status Quo | The Disruptors

The firms that shift from billable hours to value outcomes will win. Plus 10 key takeaways.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Alan Whitman wants to break the mold of public accounting. He wants to end the billable hour and the siloed practices that characterize how many firms have operated for decades. As Whitman says, “we’re here to serve clients, we’re here to deliver great value. But do we really need to do it the way we’ve been doing it since before my father was in the workforce?”

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS: Sean Duncan: Discover Your Own Genius | Ingrid Edstrom: True Wealth Is Not Financial | Caleb Jenkins: Firm Growth Requires Owners to Shift Roles | Chris Hervochon: Be the Leader You Want to Work For | Ira Rosenbloom: Don’t Merge for the Money | Adam Lean: Get Out of the Accountant’s Trap | Geraldine Carter: Charging More is Better for Your Clients | Vimal Bava: When Working Smarter, Not Harder, Is the Only Option | Dawn Brolin Says Grow Your Firm by Shrinking It | Jason Blumer & Julie Shipp: Move Leaders Out of Client Service | James Graham: Drop the Billable Hour and You’ll Bill More | Karen Reyburn: Fix Your Marketing and Fix Your Business | Giles Pearson: Fix the Staffing Crisis by Swapping Experience for Education | Jina Etienne: Practice Fearless Inclusion | Bill Penczak: Stop Forcing Smart People to Do Stupid Work | Sandra Wiley: Staffing Problem? Check Your Culture | Scott Scarano: First, Grow People. Then Firm Growth Can Follow |

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While “most firms believe that billable hours are the holy grail,” Whitman points out that “the client isn’t necessarily buying billable hours.” Instead, clients buy the outcomes and “the intellectual capital you’re delivering to them.” He believes that “the firm that can shift from production, from billable hours to outcomes, is going to win.”

As CEO of Baker Tilly, he pushed through changes that tripled the firm’s size and increased collaboration. Like law, medicine, and architecture, accounting is a technician-based profession, and “most of your identity is based on what you do,” which can lead to siloes within a practice. But Whitman argues that to deliver the appropriate solutions, “your responsibility is to not only deliver what you can deliver, it’s also to deliver what other people in the organization can deliver,” so the client is “getting what they need to prosper.”

ADVISORY & CONSULTING

Sean Duncan: Discover Your Own Genius | The Disruptors

There aren’t enough of us to help everyone who needs our help.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

What would work look like if it reflected your passions? “Imagine,” says Sean Duncan, CPA, “if you worked with the people that you loved working with, talking about the things that you love talking about, and you made a living and helped them?” As Duncan says, “That’s just freakin’ awesome!”

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS: Caleb Jenkins: Firm Growth Requires Owners to Shift Roles | Chris Hervochon: Be the Leader You Want to Work For | Ira Rosenbloom: Don’t Merge for the Money | Adam Lean: Get Out of the Accountant’s Trap | Geraldine Carter: Charging More is Better for Your Clients |

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Duncan was working at a large regional firm back in 2006 when he noticed that many small business clients were asking him for advice, but they couldn’t afford the fees of a large firm. So he started his firm out of “kind of this gut feel” of wanting to help those small business clients. Over the years, his firm, SMD Consulting and Accounting, has developed a specialty in working with video game developers, a special passion of Duncan’s.

GROWTH STRATEGIES

Ingrid Edstrom: True Wealth Is Not Financial | The Disruptors

Work-life balance means integrating work and life so that the work we choose to do expresses who we want to be in the world.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Ingrid Edstrom wants accounting to be not just a more sustainable profession but one that’s regenerative. “This idea of sustainability is really operating from the idea that things can continue to perpetuate as they are,” she explains. A firm may be financially sustainable, “but at what cost to our families, to our personal health?”

MORE PODCASTS and VIDEOS: Caleb Jenkins: Firm Growth Requires Owners to Shift Roles | Chris Hervochon: Be the Leader You Want to Work For | Ira Rosenbloom: Don’t Merge for the Money | Adam Lean: Get Out of the Accountant’s Trap | Geraldine Carter: Charging More is Better for Your Clients | Vimal Bava: When Working Smarter, Not Harder, Is the Only Option | Dawn Brolin Says Grow Your Firm by Shrinking It | Jason Blumer & Julie Shipp: Move Leaders Out of Client Service | James Graham: Drop the Billable Hour and You’ll Bill More | Karen Reyburn: Fix Your Marketing and Fix Your Business | Giles Pearson: Fix the Staffing Crisis by Swapping Experience for Education | Jina Etienne: Practice Fearless Inclusion | Bill Penczak: Stop Forcing Smart People to Do Stupid Work | Sandra Wiley: Staffing Problem? Check Your Culture | Scott Scarano: First, Grow People. Then Firm Growth Can Follow |

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The regenerative approach recognizes “that we’ve already passed a threshold of harm that needs to be healed,” Edstrom says. “Regenerative accounting is starting to reframe those ideas around ‘What does it look like to go about business in a different way that is truly life-supporting for all peoples and our planet, rather than being extractive of our planet and exploitative of our peoples?'”

Liz Farr

MORE AT STORE.CPATRENDLINES.COM

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.

Here’s what you’re looking for: Liz Farr

[Preview] The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members. | Go PRO here

Click here to load your Apple podcast app. Subscribe anywhere: Apple, Google/Youtube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/Youtube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members.

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/Youtube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members.

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music and Audible, Player FM, Audacy, Gaana (India), and Boomplay (Africa).