It always feels a bit surreal to watch yourself being interviewed, but KC Brothers and Gaynor Hardy (Meilke) did such an incredible job with this piece — which Canopy recently released in their “Practice Success Podcast” — that I actually found myself revisiting some important points I hadn’t thought about in a while.
It’s not fluff! They asked real questions about issues affecting our industry: we delved into branding your passions, company culture and how we strive to make our firm more human, what that has to do with artificial intelligence — AND the attention we need to give language and training in a world where AI is an integral part of our worklife.
Three Main Themes, as outlined by the producers:
Integrating passions and work: The importance of integrating passion and personal interests into professional work, as seen through Nancy McClelland’s incorporation of dancing into her accounting career.
Creating your own brand: Creating a unique brand and identity in the accounting industry, exemplified by The Dancing Accountant firm helps to build relationships with clients and leave a memorable impression.
Benefits & Challenges of AI: The benefits and challenges of incorporating AI and automation in accounting ensure a balance between technological advancements and human skills. This includes improving efficiency and the need for ongoing evaluation and training within a firm.
And I’m going to add that we talked a lot about company culture and work-life balance as well. We fit a lot into 20 minutes.
It was a great conversation and I hope these themes resonate with you and add value to your day! Find the full episode here, where you can choose your favorite podcast platform: https://ow.ly/vwYQ50QrRRf.
I met the charming and intelligent Christine Gervais earlier this year, having shared an article of hers from Tax Practice News to my LinkedIn feed with my own perspectives. We immediately connected and met via zoom to get to know each other better, compare notes on our practices, and discuss ways in which we might collaborate. (Side note: TPN picked up an important article of mine shortly afterwards due to Christine’s recommendation.)
What an honor that some months later, I was named one of Insightful Accountant’s Top 100 ProAdvisors of the Year and accepted the award at the annual Scaling New Heights conference. I had recommended the jam-packed educational event to Christine, and to my delight, she attended and we met in-person. What neither of us expected was that she ended up being the interviewer in my Top 100 spot with Insightful Accountant, as Tax Practice News is a sister publication.
The question posed was, “if you could start your own practice over again, what would you do differently?” As anyone who has been in the industry — or run their own business — for a while knows, we are constantly making mistakes and learning from them. The goal is not to make the same one twice. So it’s natural to have regrets. But sharing those stories can be immensely helpful to others in the space — whether it’s younger entrepreneurs wondering which next steps to take, or colleagues who feel isolated because they think they’re the only ones who don’t have it all figured out yet.
We had a lovely chat — she’s very easygoing and conversational — and covered the following topics, among others:
Hiring your first employee
Traits in an ideal team member – intelligence, written skills, ability to learn, detail-oriented, team-player, caring attitude, enthusiasm
Interviewing with an eye toward building team culture
How teams can collaborate
Networking with colleagues
Trusting your team and clients to support each other
Importance of joining a professional organization and attending conferences
Standardizing systems and establishing workflows
Teaching accountants and bookkeepers what they need to know to specialize and establish a niche
So check it out! And as always, please give us a like and a comment if you enjoyed it — really does mean so much to us and is very helpful in continuing to reach our audience.
If this or any other posts on the website were useful to you, and your financial situation permits it, please consider contributing to my tip jar. Ths allows me to continue to provide free accounting resources to small businesses who do not have the funds available to hire a CPA.
Nancy modeling at the Beehive In Bloom Fashion Show | photo by Zak Jacobson
It’s not often I am described as either brilliant or insightful — so it’s a banner day when referred to as both.
And what better day than today, the 22nd anniversary of starting my own accounting firm?
To celebrate, I am delighted to share a recent interview with CanvasRebel, an online magazine and podcast that highlights voices of small business owners — in their words, “stories about our business or career that we might share at dinner or over coffee, but that wouldn’t necessarily make it into our memoir at the end of our lives; stories that illustrate the nitty-gritty details of what it takes to be successful day to day, how to build and grow a client base, recruit, train and manage a team or generate a living.”
I agree wholeheartedly with the folks who interviewed me. “There is so much we can learn from each other, and we hope these stories inspire you to pursue your passion and support those who are doing so themselves.”
Their questions were thought-provoking and caused me to truly reflect and think about some of the universal truths that I’ve learned in working with small business owners as their CPA. Questions such as:
What’s the best advice you’ve ever given to a client?
How did you get to where you are today?
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
If this or any other posts on the website were useful to you, and your financial situation permits it, please consider contributing to my tip jar. Ths allows me to continue to provide free accounting resources to small businesses who do not have the funds available to hire a CPA.
Speaking with Mark was a truly gratifying experience — he was kind, organized, interested, and sincere, and asked great questions. As a sneak preview of a few good ones:
How did you end up being interested in Music from an education standpoint, and how did you end up moving towards accounting?
At what point did you decide to further your education with the Masters in Financial Analysis and why that particular major? Was it difficult to return to school?
How has your practice evolved over the years? I see you use the DBA The Dancing Accountant. Was that always the case, or did that come later? Is it related to a niche, or more about branding?
You’ve been listed on the 50 Top Women in Accounting list. Congratulations! How does that make you feel? Is it acknowledgement of hard work, even more responsibility, honor…?
What does the future look like for you if it goes exactly how you would like it to go? When you look back on your career & life, what will you want to be able to say you accomplished?
If you could go back in time and give your younger self just one piece of critical advice, what would that be?
We spoke for over half-an-hour and I felt like we could have gone on for days… his conversational style was comfortable and disarming. I enjoyed sharing personal stories, talking about the great folks I’ve studied and worked with, about how hard it was to go back to school while working, how much I love helping small businesses in my neighborhood, how much I hate saying “no”, how a client came up with my business name… and so on. Give it a listen — and raise a glass to our amazing team while you’re at it!
I would love to be remembered as someone who helped keep our communities vibrant by helping small businesses succeed. That’s the whole point of any of this, and my staff is a group of women who feel the same way. Our work really has meaning. ~Nancy McClelland, CPA
If this or any other posts on the website were useful to you, and your financial situation permits it, please consider contributing to my tip jar. Ths allows me to continue to provide free accounting resources to small businesses who do not have the funds available to hire a CPA.
“Really great interview. I appreciated how the highlights were amplified. Nancy is smart and real. Blake does a great job allowing the interviewee talk and share her knowledge. Well done!” -YouTube viewer comment
I was honored to be interviewed recently by the one-and-only Blake Oliver for Relay‘s “Gearing Up” series, where every two weeks, he talks to a real accountant or bookkeeper about ONE challenge in their firm — and how to solve it.
In this episode, we discuss how to build a team with whom you love to work (kudos to Bookkeeping Buds for helping me make that happen).
As our firm grew, I realized that building The Dancing Accountant in a traditional way was re-creating working conditions that our team and I didn’t love — it was immensely important to me that above all, we enjoy working with each other.
But first I had to convince myself I had something to offer — and decided to focus on what I knew employees wanted: meaningful work.
In the latest episode of Gearing Up with our host Blake Oliver, I open up about the a-ha moment that led to our building an entirely different kind of remote firm. In the episode, you’ll learn: Why Nancy is known as The Dancing Accountant Nancy’s favorite tool in her tech stack Three things employees want from work The non-traditional structure of Nancy’s team
If this or any other posts on the website were useful to you, and your financial situation permits it, please consider contributing to my tip jar. Ths allows me to continue to provide free accounting resources to small businesses who do not have the funds available to hire a CPA.
As with all interviews, one shares more information than can be printed, so I always enjoy posting the full interview here on my blog.
What are your goals for 2021 in the following areas for yourself and/or your business?
Career goals: What would you like to accomplish professionally in 2021, and why?
It has been a long-standing goal to start putting my company’s internal systems on the same level of importance as client work… to prioritize them in the spirit of “Profit First” (which I’m also terrible at doing, despite being an accountant). Everyone else’s needs always seem more pressing than our own company’s: cybersecurity, engagement letters, contracts, operating agreements, workflows/ procedures/ standardization, and billing. I would love to “catch up” and focus on my own company’s health with as much passion and investment as I show my clients’ companies. To that end, I am hoping to slow down client acquisition growth (we always have a waiting list, so this is challenging), develop staff internally, and hire an administrator to help keep me on-track and focused on these projects.
Technology skills: What technology skills will be most important for your job in 2021? Is there anything new you’d like to learn?
I have prided myself on being at the forefront of accounting technology for a long time, compared to many CPAs — most colleagues that I know either focus on the tax side or the bookkeeping side, whereas we make it our goal to straddle both worlds and provide value-added accounting services in doing so. I think we pull that off quite well where our clients are concerned — we have a rich tech stack and solid implementation resources for automating accounting, bookkeeping, point of sale, payroll, retirement and similar systems. However, internally, our own systems are very disjointed. Because of the challenges of staff growth and migrating away from legacy software, we do not follow the same advice we give clients — to make sure all the apps in our tech stack “talk to each other”. Therefore, technology-wise, my goals align with the career goals I mentioned earlier: focus on internal needs and improving workflows to make us more efficient. This includes migrating time-tracking & billing software, using Zapier to automate client onboarding and database population, and switching file upload software to automatically connect with our cloud file servers.
Professional development: What professional development goals do you have for 2021, and what learning opportunities are most helpful to you?
Continuing education is never-ending in our firm! It seems my staff and I are always attending one webinar or another — on such diverse topics as PPP (my favorites being the AICPA Town Halls and Alan Gassman‘s periodic free sessions); ERC and tax law changes (Tom Gorczynski and Tony Nitti are favorites); Intuit’s QuickBooks Online In The Know updates; and app demos (I recommend Hector Garcia, Heather Satterley, and Cathy Iconis‘s regular offerings)… as well as the usual suspects, such as tax updates (I never miss the NATP Annual Conference, and usually attend Tax Speaker‘s year-end class), and co-operative topics (a niche market for my firm, I like the NSAC webinars as well as the annual CPG Conference). CPA Academy also offers highly-specific free or low-cost webinars that I find quite valuable. I provide a good budget for both time and course costs to my staff because I want them all to be as excited about learning new things as I am. We each have different interests and areas of expertise.
Business opportunities: What are your business goals for 2021, and why?
The pandemic made me realize how much of a dedicated following my award-winning blog has… it truly hadn’t hit home until I realized I was one of the only reliable sources nationally for the constantly-changing Paycheck Protection Program. I started offering free zoom Q&A sessions to my clients and colleagues every week, and some of these I shared on the blog. The feedback has been incredible. It reminded me how much I love teaching, and gave me renewed interest in offering low-cost educational materials and sessions specific to small business owners (and the bookkeepers and accountants who assist them). I’ll be exploring this direction more in the coming year.
Anything else: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
My staff and I have operated a remote company for years, but I still met with clients in-person most of the time. This limited the personal goal I had of becoming a “digital nomad” and traveling while working (my husband’s software development work is 100% remote). The pandemic changed all that — we were in Yucatán, Mexico on a tax-season work retreat when Covid-19 hit, and we simply never went back home to Chicago. (We intend to do so once a vaccine is widely-available.) My clients had the opportunity to discover that I am every-bit as involved in my hyper-local community from afar as I was at home, and the silver lining is that I am now considering what my new office will look like… will it be half-a-year in Chicago and the other half elsewhere? Will we sell our home and live on a boat? What about every tax season being somewhere sunny? The options are endless and give me some extra energy and anticipation while I trudge through the challenging task of keeping my small business clients afloat to see a brighter future.
If this or any other posts on the website were useful to you, and your financial situation permits it, please consider contributing to my tip jar. This allows me to continue to provide free accounting resources to small businesses who do not have the funds available to hire a CPA.
Why Nancy is known as The Dancing Accountant 
Nancy’s favorite tool in her tech stack 
Three things employees want from work 
The non-traditional structure of Nancy’s team
