From Cubicle to Cloud

How to Start and Scale a Virtual Professional Service Business

Jennifer Brazer

• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781626347618
• eBook ISBN: 9781626347625
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Anyone can have a good idea. Very few can turn it into a million-dollar one. Until now.

It's challenging to start and scale a business. Choosing the cloud as your platform for delivery and headquarters presents a whole new set of obstacles. This guide will allow you to leverage the cloud to streamline your processes and maximize your profits. When Jennifer Brazer founded her company, Complete Controller, she disrupted and reinvented client accounting services (CAS), creating an entirely new cloud-based business model. Whether your specialty is accounting, therapy, design, law, or any other field, groundbreaking expert Jennifer Brazer will show you how to

• recruit, train, monitor, motivate, and mentor your staff without ever being in the same room;

• price, package, and present your service so its value is recognized and desired beyond geo constraints;

• build trust and reputation with customers, colleagues, and vendors without in-person interaction;

• develop roles and processes to support your model and measure business performance;

• overcome doubt, naysayers, and traditional model rigidity for your industry;

• keep the faith, even when capital and courage run thin.

This book is for entrepreneurs at any point in their journey to the cloud, providing indispensable tools that will set up a cloud-based professional service for maximum success.

PART ONE

SCREW GUILT

“You cannot live to please everyone else.”

— OCTAVIA SPENCER

CHAPTER
1

TAKE THE LEAP

EVERY TIME YOU HAVE a new idea, ten other people are also having the same idea, so they say. This may be true, and the only thing that separates entrepreneurs from the rest of the pack is that they will actually do something about an idea. It astounds me when someone shares a new business idea with me, and five minutes into our conversation it becomes apparent that they haven’t even performed a simple Google search to see if someone else is already doing it.

When you come across this person, although they have the best of intentions, know that they are not an entrepreneur. The very first thing a true entrepreneur will do with a juicy new idea is dive deep, proving it, testing it, creating a prototype, spending late nights and long weekends doing nothing but research and development, improving it, test marketing it, and many times, discarding it as a good idea, but not worth the investment.

True entrepreneurs thrive on this process; it fuels their very core.

Anyone can have a good idea, but it is a select few who will execute those ideas and an even slimmer few who can generate enough profit doing it.

And I’m here to show those of you who have a million-dollar idea how to leverage the cloud so you can streamline your processes and maximize your profits. It’s challenging to start and scale a new business. Choosing the cloud as your platform for delivery and business headquarters presents a whole new set of challenges. In this book, we will explore:

How to recruit, train, monitor, incentivize, motivate, and mentor your staff without meeting them in person. How to price, package, and present your service so its value is recognized and desired without sitting across the table from your customer. How to attract and build trust and reputation with customers, colleagues, and vendors without in-person interaction. How to develop roles and processes to support your model and measure business performance without ever walking the floor of a physical office. How to overcome doubt, naysayers, and traditional model rigidity for your industry. How to keep the faith, even when capital and courage runs thin.

How I Made the Switch

As a single mom working in a hours-for-dollars consulting capacity, my goal was to develop a business that was working for me instead of just a glorified job where I was working for others. I wanted to collect the checks while other people did the work. And I believe that is the true model of a business versus a sole proprietorship—an entity must be autonomous, not reliant upon one person for its survivability.

As soon as I sniffed out an opportunity for building a business around providing accounting services with the capacity to reach beyond geographic constraints, I started my quest to see if it was possible. Technology was key, so I went about determining if a hosted environment was possible and whether others had done it before me. This was before the time when the words “cloud technology” had become widely understood by consumers.

In 2007 there were surprisingly few players in the market. My research uncovered plenty of companies that provided bookkeeping services as their core offering and plenty of midsize to large CPA firms that offered business management services to their customers. Meanwhile, the companies that touted “virtual accounting” were few and far between. In looking through some old notes on market competitors, I was reminded that it was a Chinese company that had the service offering that came closest to the model that was taking shape in my mind. They were not only offering to host QuickBooks but were also offering to do the bookkeeping work and had provided a process for the customer to get information to them.

So, I used their company as a springboard when creating my own business model. And you can do the very same with the concepts I share with you in the pages ahead. The brilliant thing about competitive analysis is that you can add what you like to your model and leave the rest. Often you find that the competition is not doing something that you would do. They are missing a critical segment of the market, their messaging is weak, they are using the wrong platform for delivery, or pricing or positioning themselves differently. By doing a little competitive analysis, you are in a sweet position. Someone else has already performed the research and development and executed on the first proof of concept. Now all you need to do to answer opportunity’s knock is to differentiate yourself.

Embrace Change

Most people are leery of change and like to know what’s hiding around the corner. Regardless of your profession, there are challenges that arise when making that leap from working for a firm or as a solopreneur into developing a full-blown business or building a virtual department within a firm. In many ways, the latter of those scenarios is the more challenging proposition.

I am not going to kid you; it is not easy to get people to change the way they are doing things. Change is difficult. Customers don’t like change. Staff members don’t like change. Firm partners don’t like change. The billing department doesn’t like change. You catch my drift. So, if you are creating or restructuring a department within your current firm to “go virtual,” you are going to run into a lot of resistance. Right off the bat, getting your firm’s leadership to adopt any kind of new process and new way of dealing with customers will be rough. Then to implement it in a profitable way will be a challenge, and we all know, without executive buy-in, you aren’t going very far.

That said, I am sure as heck going to give you a convincing argument to present to them. If anything, I’m hoping this book will spark some ideas about how you would want to model your business for the cloud while bringing further innovation to your industry. Really cool things happen within the cloud sandbox. There are lots of tools and techniques to play with, and if you can get it all to play off of each other, it can be very fun. The key is to create a virtual business model that is fruitful for your customers, staff, and vendors.

Trial and Error

We all know that something that works for one person or company may not work for another. And that’s okay. It’s just how things go. However, there are some general practices that we’ve honed through simple trial and error that I’m going to share with you.

When Complete Controller was starting out, we were constantly testing strategies and new ideas. It was like throwing spaghetti against the wall. You may have to do a little bit of that, and we definitely had a few years when we would throw a noodle against the wall only to watch it fall to the floor. So, we’d throw a different one. Eventually, one stuck, and then our job was to find out what the consistency of that noodle was and continue to throw it against the wall, every day, all day long.

You should expect to do the same when building a virtual model for your business. But you will have an advantage over us since you’ll be able to use what we’ve learned about our noodles to save yourself some time, energy, and noodles.

I’m a firm believer that if I tell you the why and the how, then you can make your own good choices. I even raised my kids that way. Rather than just saying, “Don’t run across the street without me.” I showed them why. I took them out to the curb and said, “Do you see this car right here? Do you see how you are shorter than the windshield? When it’s moving, it can’t see you. It’s supposed to be on the street, and you are supposed to be on the curb. It’s not expecting you to be in its way. Because of that, until you get taller than that windshield, I want you to make sure that you have someone who is taller holding your hand when you cross the street.”

Now my kids have a logic trail. Now they understand the why, so they know how to solve the problem for themselves. Find someone taller and convince them to hold my hand so I can cross the street. Bingo!

This book is packed with not just what I did, but why I did it. So you can create your own logic trail and apply my lessons practically to your unique experience.

Old Ideas

Truth is, we can’t move forward unless we know what is holding us back.

Every industry has its pillars (a.k.a. the mindset and approach) that may need to be dismantled for your business to successfully virtualize and differentiate itself from the competition. In my case, I was creating a new business formation in an industry that is resistant to change on its best day and carried many preconceived notions about how things “should be” done. I knew these old ways of thinking had to go. Here are some of the dusty ideas I was fighting to overcome:

The primary purpose of the work is for taxes, not business management. I often say that firms are doing bookkeeping incorrectly. Why? Because they do it with taxes in mind, on a cash basis. While that’s great for the CPA at the end of the year when they are filing taxes, unfortunately, that’s not necessarily the best basis in which to run the financials for customers who need to make business decisions based on their numbers. The problem is that a lot of accountants don’t know how to properly use the software to get an easy cash basis to accrual basis flip. They default to doing it on a cash basis so the customer isn’t complaining that they are having to pay for redo work at the end of the year for the tax return. When the CPA makes adjustments and updates at year-end, the customer is like, “Wait a minute, I paid you to do my books all year long! Why am I paying you again to fix your own work to do my tax return?” Customers don’t get it. As a result, the bookkeeping is done improperly, ineffectively, and inefficiently. We can do better.

The work is done because of customer demand, not because it can be leveraged for greater and more sustainable profitability. Up until a year or two ago, most CPA firms only had a CAS department because they had to. Ask most CPAs and they will tell you that they did not go to school for all those years and take difficult tests so they could be overpaid for a service they don’t want to be doing—in this case, bookkeeping. They are doing it because their customers demand it. So, they housed CAS under a name like business management services. Or, typically if it’s a solopreneur, they just call it bookkeeping services. However, more recently, the industry has experienced a shift. Rather than CAS continuing to get shoved aside, accountants are realizing that this service can be profitable and can lead to other services that are also very profitable. Sexy, right? That’s something people want to build. With the seed having been planted and virtualization becoming so prolific, it’s time to fully leverage this model. Some have expanded on CAS by adding tax advice or business strategies, but not me. I’m going to show you how I did it, so you can do it, too, in any business.

You should use the 9-to-5 model. Simply put, this hinders efficiency,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Introduction: Why You Should Read This Book
• PART 1: SCREW GUILT
• PART 2: MAKE MEANING
• PART 3: BOOTSTRAP BOOGIE
• PART 4: PEDIGREE IS A DOG FOOD
• PART 5: THE ART OF DELEGATION
• PART 6: KILLER KPIS
• PART 7: MAKE IT PERSONAL
• PART 8: GIVE IT AWAY TO KEEP IT
• Afterword: A Word to My Profession
• Appendix: The Toolbox
• About the Author