I haven’t been to a Connect event since Toronto 2019, so it’s been a while since I came up from under my rock.
I did convince my wife to attend since she’s never been to Vegas. Her assessment:
So she probably won’t be coming to any conferences in Vegas again. Where’s the next place we should visit for a conference?
We got in on Saturday mainly because it takes 7 hours of flights for us to get to Vegas, but also because we were going to the Chiefs-Raiders football game on Sunday with some awesome people (see picture).
Highly, highly recommend checking out The Sphere if you get a chance. We saw the U2 Immersive Concert Film and it very much felt like a concert. Fan sounds were piped in from the original live concert and they have speakers underneath every seat with the bass turned all the way up. Interesting choice but it worked. Definitely check it out.
Sunday was probably my favorite day, and it wasn’t even a conference day. The wife and I walked around the strip in the morning to get our bearings a bit better and visit some shops. Then we met up with some friends at the Chiefs-Raiders football game. I finally met Renee in person since she started at Blueprint in March 2023.
The game was solid and the Raiders almost made a comeback but the Chiefs are way too good. The best part though was catching up and hanging out with Laura, Twyla, Roman, Luke, Byron, and Keila. Love those people!
The walk back to the Aria felt so long (62 minutes to be exact) but at least we were in good company. If you’ve ever been to Allegiant Stadium, there’s a bridge from the stadium to Mandalay Bay and when we got there it was basically a zombie hoard crossing the bridge. If you’re familiar with The Walking Dead, you know exactly what I mean. Funny to see it in person.
The Pre-conference event was that evening, hosted by Ignition. I finally met the FinOptimal team (the people I knew anyways) and they are just genuinely great people. Great products, too (more on that later). If you ever go to Intuit Connect in the future then definitely go to Ignition’s pre-conference party. It’s well worth it and you’ll get to mix and mingle with a lot of your peers before the conference even starts.
I promised myself I would go to some sessions so I strategically chose sessions that I thought would provide value to me and my firm.
If you don’t know about Blueprint, we’re not a tax firm… yet. We focus more on corporate accounting, keeping your accounting up-to-date so you can make decisions faster. But the reasons I attended this session are:
“If you don’t do on-boarding effectively you’ll know all the problems a month or two down the line.” - Keila
This quote from Keila spoke to me because I really try to onboard effectively at Blueprint. I know it’s the first time a client sees the other side of the sales process so it’s gotta be a great experience. So I wholeheartedly agree with Keila here.
As the conversation progressed a lot of people were asking about what they need to focus on first. It’s always so tough making that decision. What if that decision is wrong. I think Tony summed it up nicely in one of his responses.
“... recognize where you are in your firm… whatever hurts the most is what you should focus on.” - Tony
Such a simple, straightforward take on what to focus your energy on. Tony had another quote that I’ll paraphrase and is a great analogy:
“Don’t go to the doctor for a cough when you have a broken arm. Focus on the broken arm, not the cough.”
Fix the biggest pain first.
The biggest takeaway from this session for me was around how to intertwine accounting and tax together and still maintain a great client experience.
It’s one thing to be more efficient with your processes, but if they make the client experience worse then why even implement the new process in the first place. Same goes for team experience - if the new process makes things worse then it’s not getting implemented.
This was the battle I had the entire time I was in Vegas so admittedly I did a bit of client work in the afternoon. I ended up missing some sessions I really wanted to attend.
Another from Keila on Concierge Client Experience: Integrating AI to Elevate Service. I love me some AI so I was excited about this one. I believe we have a pretty solid client experience at Blueprint, but there’s always something to improve on. I’ll bug Keila for her notes.
Another I missed was from Marcus, Rachel, and Amy of Dillon Business Group called SOS: Rescuing the Sales-Onboarding-Service Transition. Such an important transition and again, there’s always something to improve on. Might have to message Marcus about his slides, too.
Other than the client work I did, which was very minimal, I probably could’ve gone to one or both of these sessions. What did I do instead? It was a nice day out and, well, I’m from Canada so it’s starting to get cold here. I went and met up with the wife by the pool, didn’t go swimming, and instead we walked to In-N-Out Burger. For a $4 burger it’s pretty good. But I’d still choose Five Guys over In-N-Out.
Remember how I said my wife didn’t like the Vegas vibe and everything seemed so far away to walk to? Well, on the way back from In-N-Out we walked through Caesars Palace, Bellagio, and finally into Aria. But because we were inside the entire time it didn’t seem like a huge walk (spoiler: it still was).
Why do they start Tuesday and Wednesday earlier and earlier each day? I never understand that. Monday started at 10 am. Perfect. Tuesday - 9 am. Wednesday - 8:30 am.
I totally messed up my schedule. Not that I didn’t want to see Roman, because Roman is a fantastic presenter. I showed up to the wrong room and realized it immediately. But I stuck around for 10 minutes listening to Roman.
And as expected, Roman gave me something important to think about in my own firm around my branding and with my team.
You know how you write down your Mission, Vision, and Values and talk about them always with your team? Yeah, I haven’t been doing that. Shame on me.
But Roman got me thinking about that in the 10 minutes I was listening to him talk about branding. And I’m not saying that as if it surprised me. Roman is definitely someone you should follow if you aren’t already. But listening made me think more and more about how I position Blueprint’s MVV’s to my team and clients. I really should be going back to them more often. Truth be told, I have been…. In the last two weeks… leading up to the conference. But those 10 minutes were a gut check for me, so thank you, Roman.
My biggest takeaway from Roman’s session on branding was to focus more on our mission, vision, and values. Really drilling it home with my team but also using that as a guideline for leads we may want to work with. If we don’t have an agreement with a lead on our MVV’s then it’s not the right fit, and that’s okay.
If you’re not familiar with Brittany, you should be. She’s one of few people in our industry that when she speaks I listen very intently.
Brittany is the CEO of LedgerGuru’s, an eCommerce niched accounting firm. She’s gone through the ups and downs of ownership so has a ton of experience and stories to back up what she says.
Now this particular session was a 1 hour 40 minutes workshop, so there was lots to do during it. We went through workshopping things like “what questions would you ask during a discovery call” to “how can you price out complex engagements” to her even sharing a new way that she’s onboarding clients.
Brittany even showed screenshots of some of her firm's processes on assessing and pricing to help get the crowd's creative juices flowing.
People had a ton of questions, and Brittany did an amazing job. Highly recommend her sessions if you have the chance to see her speak at any event.
This session really made me think about our sales process and how we can better determine whether a lead is a good fit (and paired with Roman’s session above), but also how we can better sell the value we bring to leads.
Yes, they’re looking for a service from us. But I know what Blueprint is capable of being and that starts with being able to sell our value first and foremost.
I like the occasional beer and I thought I’d reach out to my friend Kenji of Acuity to exchange some beers. Ontario for Georgia. We had a good chuckle exchanging them in the exhibit hall.
Note: no beers we exchanged were consumed during the day at the conference. We only drank the Intuit-provided beers.
The reason why I’m telling you this is because I told Kenji I would come heckle him at his afternoon session called Blue ocean: flip from service-led to advisory-led discovery calls (also featuring Roman Villard and Bob Wang).
The great thing about this session was Bob used the audience to get everyone engaged. I showed up late but at that point they had gone through an example discovery call with Jordan Brown following a service-led approach. Apparently he had a janitorial service company.
I sat on the other side of the room and Bob asked for a volunteer. Nobody raised their hand in the first 5 seconds so I put mine up having no idea what was going to happen (remember, I just arrived).
Bob goes on to ask the crowd what industry my business should be in so I shouted out…. A brewery. Someone else shouted out that we’re a $50 million top-line brewery. Things are looking good for me, if only this wasn’t fictitious.
So I had the opportunity to go through an advisory-led discovery call with Mr Roman Villard. I commented on someone else's recap about how great of a session that was and Roman mentioned we only got 25% of the way through our discovery call.
In all honesty - I was already hooked at that 25% mark. If I were an actual brewery owner and needed help (we focused on cash flow issues) I truly would’ve been hiring Roman’s firm. He did a fantastic job of weaving my emotions about cash flow issues into his questions and getting me to open up. It really gave me some perspective on how I can change my own sales discovery calls. Now, keep in mind this was totally made up and I was riffing off the cuff about my cash flow issues, but the way Roman made me FEEL was how he hooked me. Great job, man!
I could probably repeat word-for-word what the takeaway was from Brittany’s session. As you just read, Roman made me FEEL what I needed fixed in my brewery. I really need to dig into that side of the sales process to pull out the emotions from a lead and tie that into our value.
This was such a fascinating session because there were four thought-leaders (Ashley’s own words 😜) on a panel discussing AI for accounting firms.
We had Korey Cournoyer, Ashley Francis, Wesley Wahlberg, and Chad Davis.
Everyone did a fantastic job sharing their experience with AI at their firm. It was interesting to see the difference between Wesley’s firm (9K employees) versus the other three panelists' firms (much smaller).
But I’ve gotta give props to Chad on this one. He came straight out of the gate saying “I’ve been using AI for two years but I have no frickin idea what’ll happen in the next little while.” Paraphrasing of course.
It was a very open viewpoint from him to share these thoughts. I think where he really knocked it out of the park was when he shared an automation his firm uses: summarizing recent tax court cases using AI and pushing the response into Slack. On top of that, the automation also tells his team WHICH CLIENTS THIS WILL EFFECT!!
Everyone was curious about this automation because:
And this all comes from a RSS feed from a specific website.
Talk about brilliant! Great job, Chad and LiveCA!
I could nerd out here about automations to build and implement some AI driven automations. That’s going to happen anyways because of my love for tech and automation.
The real takeaway is to keep an eye on AI because it is absolutely going to change what we do as accountants. I think I heard it first from Jason Staats where he said
"accountants who use AI will replace accountants who don’t.”
I couldn’t agree more and I think this session really opened people’s eyes to that idea.
I got nothing for ya. The wife and I had to leave on Wednesday so we could make it back in time for Halloween. Having two young kids and a day of travel will always make that happen.
I’m a techy accountant so I like visiting the Exhibitor Hall. I walked around a bit but I had some specific apps I wanted to talk to.
Number 1 on that list was FinOptimal. I mentioned them earlier so if you got this far then keep reading.
We’ve been using FinOptimal’s Accruer and Booker in our firm for a few months now. This was my first chance to meet Tom, Michaela, Jesse, and Eric in person and it didn’t disappoint. What a great team! Even better apps that they’ve built.
I am in no way being paid to say this, but my team loves both apps. Probably more so Booker since we do a decent amount of allocations. But both apps have been game changers for our workflows. How you ask? Let me tell you.
For Accruer, it’s as simple as adding the words “For the period” in the description of a transaction, then entering a timeframe. Example: For the period October 2024. If the expense was paid for in March (as some of my Intuit Connect expenses were), then entering the above takes the expense out of March and sets it up automatically as a prepaid. I don’t have to create an entry myself, Accruer will do it automatically. AND, it produces your prepaid schedule. That’s just one use case.
For Booker, you can live in Google Sheets and have journal entries posted automatically to your QBO file. The most common use case we have is payroll allocations. We export a file from Wagepoint and drop it into our payroll entry workbook and using formulas can then automatically have the data show up on a summary page to post the journal entry into QBO and allocate payroll costs. We’ve now taken away the act of having to manually go upload the entry, but also have templates to easily convert Wagepoint payroll extracts into an uploadable journal entry. And it all happens automatically.
We already use Karbon in our firm but it was nice to catch up with some people I hadn’t met in person yet. I had the chance to meet Ian Vacin, Mary Delaney, Matt Delaney, and fellow Karbon Expert Melissa Stout. Melissa actually onboarded my firm to Karbon 4 years ago.
I also do Karbon Expert consulting for firms, and as I was coming up to the Karbon booth there were a few people from Badger CPA. I just so happened to help them implement Karbon a few weeks before the conference. Talk about full circle moments.
All in all, it was a pretty fun experience to be at a large conference again. I saw lots of people I haven’t seen in person in a while. I definitely have many takeaways from the sessions I attended.
We shall see if I go next year, but if it’s in Vegas, don’t count on my wife attending with me.
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