S02 E08: This firm owner’s process for onboarding new clients and improving their experiences

Roman Villard
What’s up, everyone? Welcome to the accounting flow podcast brought to you by Financial Cents. This podcast is dedicated to taking a deep dive into accounting firm workflow and processes. Each episode we will spend 20 minutes interviewing actual accounting firm owners just like you uncovering specific processes that firm owners and operators encounter on a daily basis and discuss ways to improve them. Let’s go.

Welcome to another episode of Accounting Flow. Today, we’ve got Nicole MacKenzie, founder and CEO of Momentum Accounting. Thanks for joining.

Nikole Mackenzie
Hey, Roman, good to see you. As always.

Roman Villard
Fortunately, I have gotten to know Nicole quite well over the last few years. Today, we talk about onboarding, the workflow onboarding process, and everything around onboarding. So, Nicole, before we jump into that, I’d love for you to tell us a little about your firm.

So, I have been in the accounting industry for 14 years, which is crazy. I started Momentum seven years ago. I want to refer to us as a CAS advisory firm. So, it is mostly CAS focus with a little bit of advisory in there. We’ve got a team of nine, primarily US-based, a couple in the Philippines and one in El Salvador. We typically work with one to 10 million revenue businesses that are getting more into, like the financial OPs. We do a lot of technology implementation and then do the full call, like a fractional accounting department.

And so, do you work with any specific industries? Or are you agnostic?

Nikole Mackenzie
We prefer not to work with many industries. There seem to be many B2B service businesses, some blue-collar service businesses, and some technology businesses. Those are kind of like our three primary types.

Roman Villard
Okay, so you serve a variety of industries, and you have a dispersed team. Is everybody remote? Do you have an office?

Nikole Mackenzie
I have no office. I’ve been remote for ten years. I remember always having to explain to people what Zoom was, and then we were a bit ahead of the curve. Zoom catapulted everything on the same page as us, so there were good and bad there. I think initially, before Zoom, we were able to price a lot higher, and now there’s just a lot more saturation in general in the CAS market.

Roman Villard
Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of change in our industry, particularly regarding hiring remote workforce and onboarding. When you started, did you have an onboarding process? At what point in this journey did you say, okay, probably need to start focusing on this?

Nikole Mackenzie
Oh, gosh, good question. So, initially, it was just me. I was doing fractional controller work. When I started, I started hiring people, but a lot of what we used to do was going on-site to clients who had an in-house accountant who was paper-based. Our onboarding process was essentially to build a cloud-based accounting system for them. Now it’s today, now that we have a bigger team, I can do the sales. And then, essentially, once the deal closes, it gets handed off to our onboarding manager, Jen Hoover. So, part of what I think of a good onboarding process is having a good sales process.

What I do is during the sales process, we use Go Proposal, and I put an entire project plan there. So it’s understanding what the client needs, what’s hot, and what’s burning for them. So we can prioritize certain things. So, for example, getting your people paid and invoicing are always the number one things that focus on getting money in the door and getting your people paid. So we’ll go through it. I’ll put together an entire project plan for the client in two to three months. So they understand the order of operations, like handoff and accountability, right? So we’re taking over payroll, and training needs to be done. Week one is we’re getting access to everything we do and we’re getting training. Week three is taking over full accountability. So after the client signs everything on our proposal that we’ve agreed to do, our admin uploads it into our project management system.

Hence, the team knows exactly what they need to do on an ongoing basis and what’s a priority during onboarding. I also record a video of my takeaways from Big Picture, which is what the clients are looking for and what’s most important to them. So the client knows, there’s always like little things you pick up during the sales process, right, and you’re like, Oh, this is important for the client, we want to make sure that we make them happy in this one area, that may not be documented on the proposal. So and then after. So after the deal closes, I send a kickoff email with is a template, we have a musical a tool called hayver, that connects to Gmail. It requests lists of access to everything: bank accounts, software, etc. After I sent that email, I assigned it to Jen. So Jen’s onboarding manager is fully accountable for handing off the baton to her to take it from there.

Roman Villard
Okay, I’m going to stop you there. There’s a lot to dig into. So I heard Go Proposal, sales process software, a workflow management system, you’ve got onboarding manager, you’ve got admin, and then you’ve got yourself, and you’ve got communication happening. This is between you all and then within knowledge transfer systems. And then you’ve also got a project plan that is two to three months long, focused on critical initiatives up front that, you know, are high-priority items for the client. Let me take a step backward and say, when did you realize you needed an onboarding manager? I suspect you were doing all of that before hiring somebody.

Nikole Mackenzie
Yeah, I used to do all the sales and onboarding. Then, I was lucky enough to have a director of operations for three and a half years. And ultimately, she ended up doing sales and onboarding. And now she left at the end of last year. So now I’ve stepped back into sales. And so it was essential to me when I stepped back into sales that I wasn’t also doing onboarding. And it’s better whoever’s doing sales doesn’t do onboarding because it just lingers. It’s challenging to focus on both. And so once I stepped back into sales, I was like, Okay, I need a very clear handoff of sales close. Now, it’s passed on, and I’m not involved anymore. And then also being very clear with the client during the sales calls that like, Hey, I’m the one delivering the services, I’m talking about my team, I’m talking about our process. So, that was a big transition. So when Ashley or an ops director left, I promoted the gen two team lead and onboarding manager. And that’s helped a lot because we’re building trust during onboarding. And a lot of times, the client still needs to trust us. And we have to be very, very highly communicative. They need to remember what they signed. They don’t understand a lot of times. It’s their first time outsourcing. So they’re learning, and you need someone good. One is setting boundaries with the client, pushing back, saying, hey, this isn’t keeping them on schedule, and then calm, consistently reminding them of the timelines and deliverables during the process. Because, you know, they throw everything at you during onboarding. Having that person, whoever’s doing the onboarding, needs to be able to keep everyone on task. And then they also need doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing the work, right? If there’s cleanup work or tech implementations, they may be doing some of it. But they also may be delegating to other team members that are going to be doing the onboarding, onboarding are sorry, that are going to be doing the ongoing work.

Roman Villard
There are so many things that happen in onboarding, whether it’s gaining access to systems, clarifying, and walking through these initial cleanup or catch-up phases, as some implementations, as you alluded to. Throughout that process, when you’re handing that off to the team, you mentioned you sent a kickoff email, and then the onboarding manager is responsible for the next steps there and out. How do you harness clients to take the steps needed to get your team mobilized to achieve this work?

Nikole Mackenzie
Yeah, the first is that initial email; Jen reaches out to the client to set up a kickoff call. So the kickoff call gets the team, everybody on the team that will be servicing that client on a call with a client, and there’s like a little PowerPoint presentation we do, where we are presenting gender onboarding manager, this is your controller, this is your bookkeeper. These are the things that the bookkeeper does. This is your point of contact. Here’s our help at momentum accounting.com. Here’s a phone number for everything we still need access to. So, that kickoff call is getting on the same page, and a client was reminded to review the proposal again. Going to the timelines again, remind them, Hey, these are the priority items. Sometimes, after the initial, you know, 10 minutes of that presentation, Jen might stay on with them and say, Hey, let’s get access to your bank account and all your systems right now. Well, I have you because, often, that can hold people up or hold our team up if we can’t get access. On that call, she also scheduled a weekly meeting with a client for the next six weeks. That way, there’s this recurring check-in meeting where we can get unstuck if we need access to something or have questions. We also broke it down during the onboarding process into themes during the conference. We may need to reorganize their account chart. So, we need to understand who is on their team and their service lines. We may focus a 130-minute meeting during onboarding on their business model and revenue lines and getting that all corrected on their chart of accounts. We may spend another meeting on their cogs. Who on your team is a direct cost versus overhead? What kind of software subscriptions? What’s a direct cost versus an indirect type of educating the client on why that matters? So ultimately, after onboarding, they got a nice chart of accounts when you start looking at the margin and things like that.

Roman Villard
I like that a lot. And one thing I’ve heard a lot in the industry, as it relates to some degree, the commoditization of accounting and bookkeeping services, a lot of people talking about their services in the realm of skews, hey, we’ve got a bookkeeping skew, we’ve got to clean up skew, et cetera. How do you ensure that the services that you’re providing are in line with what your proposals look like? Either line item it out hyper precisely or leave it a bit broader to allow for more flexibility in that onboarding process. How do you guys approach that?

Nikole Mackenzie
Yeah, so we’ve never done packages at momentum; maybe when I first started, I did. So, when I sell something to a client, it’s more about their relationship with our firm. And it’s more of diagnosing their problem and how we can solve it. It is not necessarily in service lines but as an ongoing cost. And here is everything we will do for you within the scope. Now, during onboarding, the client may ask for more. They typically leave out many things during the sales process that will pop up. And so during onboarding, we’re just making note of those. After 90 days, or however long it takes to complete the onboarding, we often have something new that we just started doing: the offloading of onboarding. So, going through, here’s what we initially said we would do. Here’s what we’re doing. If a price adjustment or scope adjustment needs to happen, we do that, and then we let the client know, hey, you’re out of offboarding. Now, Jen is no longer your point of contact. Now, remote is your point of contact, or their main point of contact.

Roman Villard
Okay, you bring up a good point because, in that onboarding process, something was inevitably omitted during the sales scoping process of, oh, we’ve got this account over here. We’ve got this personal card attached here. We haven’t reconciled books for more months than we thought, or whatever the situation is. Like that inevitably happens. And so during that onboarding period, when those things come up that do need that attention, how do you handle that? And that’s a subsequent question: How do you price it? How do you manage that side of the relationship?

Nikole Mackenzie
Yeah, I’ll give you an example. So we, and this happens a lot, especially for taking over from some buddy who had an in-house accountant before because the in-house accountant is often doing other miscellaneous things. So we just started onboarding a client recently, and they still needed to pay sales tax. And so they had like $100,000 just pulled from their bank account. By whom does the sales tax in California come in? I forgot what the governing body there is there. But they pulled like $100,000. So because they had nobody, the business owner didn’t have a controller for the last two months, there was nobody to manage the process, and somebody needed to, like an emergency, call them to get on a payment plan so that they would return the $100,000. And so that was like day one of onboarding. So, at this point, we need to do right by the client during these 90 days. We might lose, we might win.

Let’s make an excellent first impression. Let’s go above and beyond as long as it’s in our way. House, right? So that was outside the scope 100%. Right. Then, we must manage the client’s expectation that we spent the first two weeks trying to put out all these fires and need to catch up on these other things. And so it can be challenging sometimes. But then that, so don’t worry about it as much. Unless it’s something significantly time-consuming, or like, we need to go back an extra year and do books, but I’ll take the opportunity during the reassessment of, like, okay, there are some We weren’t planning on managing sales tax for you, or we weren’t, weren’t planning on managing or Expensify for you. And that popped up during onboarding. So, let’s add that to our scope now and increase our ongoing fees.

Roman Villard
You have a templatized approach or a standard way of approaching how you navigate those modifications you observed during onboarding. Have you gotten any pushback from that after onboarding? Are you saying, hey, these three things popped up? Here’s how it will modify your ongoing scope. Here’s your new price, because that could come as a surprise to clients.

Nikole Mackenzie
Yeah, we had situations where a client thought something was included. And so we tried to, like overtime, have just been on our proposal of getting more, you know, adding more and more and more of like we weren’t, the client assumes responsibility, right? And that’s been years and years of things popping up that took time to figure it out. But often, we can keep it within the same price by reassigning something that we may take over. And they might say, hey, you know what, I have somebody internally that I pay a salary that can take this. And so we’re negotiating with a client. Hey, let’s figure out if these things are essential to you. Is it important that we do them for you, and then we can arrive at something that works for both of us?

Roman Villard
I feel like that’s such a good practice that accountants don’t resort to, in that, hey, if you want a price adjustment, if you wish to a decreased cost, here’s what the exchange is going to look like, we’re either going to move the responsibility of these items over to you, or we’re going to our deliverable deliverables, timing is going to change things like that. Instead, accounts are like, Yeah, sure we can, we can do that no problem, or, you know, it can change things quite rapidly when you start to make concessions on the scoping side.

Nikole Mackenzie
Yeah, we will play that game a lot. So, as far as moving timelines around, for example, recently, we just weed five clients, smaller clients that we were over-servicing, we’re doing monthly advisory meetings with them. And this resulted in us wanting to jump into advisory but needing a repricing or system. Let’s roll out race reporting and do these meetings. And then we have these clients, you know, paying us under $1,000 a month, and we’re just spending a lot of time prepping for the meeting. And they didn’t need monthly meetings. And so basically, I approached him like, Hey, we can increase your costs and keep doing the monthly or move the quarterly, and most of them are like, quarterly is fine. In that way, we’re not changing the cost but freeing up capacity for our team to work on our clients.

Roman Villard
One thing I’ve found challenging during onboarding and navigating any new client relationship is when they go outside the bounds of communication. And so an example that I’ve experienced is, hey, we’re in onboarding and have communicated what team members own. Here’s how you can effectively communicate with us, whether through portal email, Slack, or the assembly of the statement of work. But then, inevitably, I get a personal phone call, a text, or something outside of that bounds. And historically, I would pick up the phone, I would text back, you know, all these things. But then I learned that I was training clients to communicate with me in a specific way that opened up the door, and clearly, this is how I will do everything in the future. That was a huge strain on my time, effort, and energy because it was just one single point of failure in my text. How do you navigate clients that may go outside of the bounds? Do you nudge them back to the scope and how you communicate, or have you experienced that much?

Nikole Mackenzie
Yeah, good question. We had a challenging onboarding last summer. There’s just a difficult client, a demanding CFO, and he would like to call me every day, and that was an exception for the most part. During the sales process, clients come in through, you know, a HubSpot meeting. So we’re talking over Zoom. So they’re not really. They’ll have my email address, but they don’t have my phone number. And then having that kickoff call reminds them, Hey, use help at momentum accounting.com. Then, we give them a phone number as their main point of contact.

In some cases, we will have some of our more prominent clients, and we will take over their accounting inbox or have them set one up so we can create a different accounting channel at ABC company.com. And so it’s just like a shoot everything in that one place. Then, one person on our team will be assigned to do that. And then also those recurring meetings, weekly meetings, create a cadence where it’s like, okay, save everything. Ideally, a lot of times, depending on the personality and the client, the ideal situation is like, we’re working through things for a week, putting together an agenda or putting together things we need clarity on. Hopefully, the business owner is doing that. But they’re sending us emails. And then we use that, they know, that’s their weekly meeting to get things, questions answered, and all that. So I need to reach out to them.

Roman Villard
So it’s pointing them back to the rhythms you’re establishing during onboarding, saying, Hey, this is how we communicate. This enables us to be more effective on your account and to serve you more holistically rather than the ad hoc call text here and there that can create disaggregated communication amongst the team.

Nikole Mackenzie
Yeah, and that one we had a challenge with during the summer created chaos because he would call me, and he would actually, and then I wasn’t involved in the onboarding process. So I would tell them one thing, and then I would try to go back and telephone to get information from my team. And then they’d be like, Well, you told me this and then, or I’d want to, or they would get demanding that we didn’t answer within an hour. And so I’m like, Okay, I need an answer back. But I didn’t have enough information. So I gave the wrong answer. And it was just like, Oh, I got it. It was challenging. fucking terrible. Well, I need an answer right now. But if you give me the wrong answer, this was like, this was a, you know, a $12,000 a month client, where we were implementing bill.com, tax jar gusto off of QBO payroll. And I think we did one other software, I don’t know, it was like, it was a complete overhaul coming to a complete mess, trying to do ten things at once we’ve got five people working on their account, that was a challenging thing is because we had someone managing the gusto implementation, the build-up like, we were just like all hands on deck. Sure. So, we need Jen to be our onboarding manager now. So, we had multiple people involved. And that was like a complete breakdown. And that was the impetus of saying, Okay, we need one voice, one person the client communicates with during the onboarding process. And then they’re getting information from all the other individuals doing implementations or cleanup work to report that back. And then the Gen has also given weekly updates, here’s what we did this week, here’s what we’re working on next week, here’s what we need from you every week, that’s like a cadence of email that goes out.

Ao, we’ve got the email templates. We’ve got the task management system set up. However, regarding automation, the onboarding process is the most challenging to automate because it’s all about communication. It is like wrapping your arms around the client and making them feel like they made the right decision and going with you because they don’t trust you. They’re still like, no, I made this decision. This is a huge decision. I have interviewed many other firms and decided to go with you. It is important to make them feel they made the right decision and that we’ve got you. We’re going to end and keep them focused on the end goal, which is to get their financial functions running seamlessly.

Roman Villard
And right there is the difference between an advisory practice and a more commoditized productize type service line where they say, sign up for 300 bucks a month and enter your information. We’ll get everything categorized in a day. And it’s like zero strategies, ties, business goals, very little communication, and all cash-based accounting. And that’s generally a disservice to most companies that have the option between working with an advisory practice accounting advisory versus just a productized solution and market that’s more software-focused. And so when you talked about communication and building that relationship in the first 6090 days, like you were trying to create connectivity between the business owner and their goals, what you guys are doing at the time sort of accounts level even. Am I directionally accurate there?

Nikole Mackenzie
That’s exactly right; you articulate it much better than I did. It starts when you have that first conversation about why the client came to you in the first place, and then you make sure that gets translated to the team helping them achieve that goal. Right. And that happens a lot, like a breakdown between. Anytime a client comes back to you and is upset about something, it’s probably because your salesperson sold something that the IT team didn’t deliver. And is it because the team can’t deliver it? Or is it because the team didn’t know that was important to the client? Yeah. So, it’s communication internally and down the line. And then, like, because then you have sales, and then you have onboarding manager. And then you have the ongoing team. So, internal communication needs to be tight, too. Another thing our team does is have an internal check-in meeting before every check-in meeting with the client. So there are a lot of conferences and museums, but everybody needs to be on the same page.

Roman Villard
Do you organize internally, like Slack channels, or how does specific client communication occur once you bring a client on board amongst the internal team

Nikole Mackenzie
They have their internal meetings, and then we have a rolling Google sheet on which we keep all our notes and action items. So, anytime we’re meeting with a client. That’s where all the notes get taken there. And then we have Dialpad, so we don’t use Slack. We don’t need it. Like, because we have us, we have a regular team huddle. They have a frailer meeting, and we’ve always been able to be because we’ve operated online for so long. It’s like I used to work in an office setting. Working remotely is so much more efficient because you’re showing up for a meeting for a particular purpose. And you’re taking everything. You know, it’s not just. I remember working at a CPA firm. Whenever I had a question for my partner, I walked into his office all day. I can’t imagine getting anything done like that; it is unbelievable.

Those of a Slack hater.

Roman Villard
That’s fine. Everybody has their process. And if it’s working for your clients, then you’re doing something right. So, all right, we spend a lot of time on onboarding. The last question is on that front, and then I’ll shift gears slightly. How many years have you been running momentum?

Nikole Mackenzie
Seven years

Roman Villard
Okay, so seven years of learning, testing, and iterating? What do you think is the biggest takeaway or lesson learned during the onboarding period within your firm?

Nikole Mackenzie
Our biggest game changer was getting the right person to do that role. Having a clear cut-off between sales and onboarding and having everything in your project management system so that the team knows exactly what you sold, what needs to get done, and when the expectations are.

Roman Villard
Let’s look forward to that. There’s a lot of evolution occurring momentum. I always see you on LinkedIn, posting your thoughts and opinions. I love seeing your angle and considering how advisory should happen in our industry. What are you excited about building and continuing to progress on its momentum here over the coming months?

Nikole Mackenzie
Yeah, good question. So, I think we have a big challenge in our industry right now. Regarding how long Accounting has been around, CAS and advisory are new. And so there’s no standard way of what good looks like. And part of that is because accountants don’t have training, right? I came from the CPA world, and I had to figure all this crap out on my own. A lot of CPA firms are adding on Kas and advisory. And they’re maybe hiring somebody to come on to build out that department. But there’s no structure for what that is supposed to look like. And so, I’ve been thinking a lot about with our team. Our journey with advisory, you know, probably started three years ago with me trying to figure this out and try different things. I’ve hired CFOs I tried to refer and CFOs and none of that worked for various reasons. Ultimately, what I figured out was that it was education. It was educating my team like all these things that I had gone out and learned my perception of how I feel as a business owner and how I would want to be talked to if I was working with an accountant or team, which has never taught that so what I ended up doing was creating cashflow Show podcast if you’re interested in learning how to talk to CEOs as I As an advisor, definitely check that out. It’s me and Scott Scarano. If you know him, he’s a good friend of mine. But what we started doing was interest. So we rolled out roots reporting, and when I rolled out roots reporting, the team didn’t know because they hadn’t built the KPIs. They didn’t understand how to have an advisory conversation with the client or understand the back-end calculations. And so we had to slow down and say, Okay, let’s do like internal roleplay. So, we started doing internal roleplay, internal training, soft skill training, and reporting training. Then, combine that with the podcast, which consists of all the concepts that tie back to the reports and some KPIs. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about this need for education in our space. And so I’m excited because I’ve got something I’m working on right now that will be a solution for accountants to assess any business, or any business owner will be able to take this assessment. And then it will give them points. So it’s called profit points. And what it is, so business owner takes the assessment, it’s like 30, questions take less than three minutes, and it gives them a score. So, you know, a business owner under 40% is probably struggling with cash flow and retention because they don’t have enough money to invest in benefits and all that, and they may be in situations where it’s hard for them to make payroll. Okay, you got somebody in the middle where they’re maybe trickling along, but they don’t have excess cash to invest in growth. And then you’ve got people, which is our end all be all right, like, we want to move them into that above 70 80% percentage, where they are, they have excess cash, the owner is making the money that they want to make making the profit that they want to make. The assessment allows the business owner to do the self-assessment, but then there’s a training component so the adviser, the accountant, and anybody on your team can take this. And it’s like a roadmap. So we’re identifying the challenges that they’re having. Then, there are opportunities for you as the advisor to come in and help them get from that 10% to 90%. So my goal with this is, I think the challenge with advisory is when you sell the art industry, like here, sell packages A, B, and C, and you talked about this, right? Advisors shouldn’t be what you do throughout the client journey, not just a package you sell. And the challenge with, when you sell these packages, and you sell advisory, I think that we’ve all had this feeling of like in our stomach of like, Oh, I hope the client doesn’t choose that option, because then I’m going to have to deliver it, or maybe my team will deliver it, and I’m not sure if they’re going to be able to deliver it as good as I can’t, right. So, the advisory gets stuck at the top. And so what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to make it a system in education so that anybody on your team, no matter what their level, they’re a senior accountant, if they’re a bookkeeper, if their controller, they’ve had these basic fundamental rules that every business owner should know, they should know how to figure out what their cash reserve balances, they should know what their gross profit margin and why it’s important. They should know how to save for taxes, have a good accounts payable process, and use the right technology to do everything right. And so that’s really what’s up profit points assessment does. It’s still an MVP phase right now. But if you’re interested in exploring that, you can go to my LinkedIn profile, where I have the top link. A whole bunch of different links of I’ll have something up there with a profit points interest form. But that’s what I’ve got working on right now. I’m excited to see where that goes.

Roman Villard
I couldn’t agree more with everything you shared as they relate to the education of round advisory in our industry, which is how that occurs at varying levels. But most folks who come from undergrad and go into public accounting need to be taught these fundamental business-building finance-related points. And it’s fantastic to see you going in that direction because it is a massive need in our industry. So I’ll be excited to follow along that journey. You mentioned the cash flow show as a podcast on LinkedIn. Where else can people find you to learn more about that and connect with you?

Nikole Mackenzie
Those are the main places if, again, you go to my LinkedIn profile; I have a link there with all of my different likes, a link to the cash flow show, a link to my YouTube, and a link to my newsletter. All that kind of good stuff.

Roman Villard
Perfect Nicole McKenzie at LinkedIn. Yeah.

Nikole Mackenzie
Oh, one more thing I have on there if anybody’s interested in talking about advisory. I also have a Facebook group called REACH reporting roundtables or reach reporting roundtable advisory conversation. You can find that through the link on LinkedIn or just on Facebook. And my name is spelled in i K O L E. Mackenzie. Ma ck, Nicole

Roman Villard
Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much for talking about onboarding and then jumping into some of these profit advisory training points. I love it and am excited to see where that goes. And again, thanks for joining us today.

Nikole Mackenzie
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. I’ll see you soon.

Roman Villard
Bye. Thank you for listening to this podcast today. If you enjoyed it, don’t forget to share and write a review. This will help other firm owners like you find our podcast and gain insights into how to grow their firm. Stay tuned.