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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Upstream Leader Podcast. My name’s Jeremy Clopton, so glad to be with you here again today. Summer is approaching, tax season is in the rear view mirror, and it seems that firms are getting ready to jump right into retreat and strategic planning mode, and that really is the basis of today’s episode.
What I want to discuss is the most important question that firms need to be asking themselves today—whether it’s in retreats, partner meetings, strategic planning, wherever they’re at, this is the question in my mind that is most pressing. And I know you may be thinking, okay, it’s have got to be something around, should we use AI? Should we be exploring mergers and acquisitions, or private equity, or what it means to be independent? What about people development? Do we need more people, fewer people? Should we outsource? Should we not? Don’t get me wrong—all of those are great questions. I don’t think they’re the most important question, though. Not even the technology side of it.
For me, the most important question that firms need to be asking themselves today is, “Who do we want to become?” And I realize you may be sitting there thinking, well, that seems like an awfully broad, maybe overly simplistic question. And it can be, it can be both broad, yet simple at the same time. But the reason that it’s the most important question is until you can answer that question, you can’t actually make effective decisions as it relates to all the other items and all the other questions that you may want to be asking. Now, I guess I should maybe step back a second and caveat: it’s the most important question if you want to create an intentional future for your firm. If you’re sitting there thinking, “Actually, we just want to keep on keeping on. We want to serve clients, recruit where we can. We’re not going to be specialists necessarily. We’re not going to go into a certain niche area. We’re not interested in specializing. We want to be a generalist. We’ll just take any of the clients that come in and we want to just be accountants,” if that’s the case, I know you’re thinking, I probably don’t need to answer this question, but I would argue as I think you already have. By ignoring the question or thinking that you’re not answering it, you are in fact answering that question. The answer to the question that you’re giving it is essentially, “we don’t necessarily care who we become.”
And that may sound a little bit more harsh than I intend for it to, and if it does, so be it. But that’s effectively the answer. The reason that “Who do I want to become? Who do we want to become as a firm?” is so important. Your identity, your vision for the future of your firm, the direction that you want to go, it’s really the basis for every decision that you need to make in the firm. And there’s a lot of different things that you can become as a firm: You could become a local firm. You could be the firm for Main Street where every mom and pop shop looks to you and you are their go-to. You could be the firm for entrepreneurs. You could be the firm for tech startups, for firms that are in the small business area that aren’t really sure where to go next. You could be a national firm, a global firm, a super regional, a regional, a boutique. There are so many different identities and ways to answer the question, “Who do we want to become? Who do we want to be?” That will completely change everything. That’s why I believe it’s the most important question there is.
Because once you have that question answered and you know who you want to be, now you can ask some of those additional questions that become increasingly important to help you get there. For starters, what would it look like to successfully become that firm that we want to become? What would have to be true about our firm as it relates to our people, our clients, our processes, our technology, our structure, our governance, our operations, recruiting, all the various aspects of the operational side of the firm, what would have to be true about those to become that firm that we want to become? And then the follow on question from that, we’re kind of going a few questions deep here is, okay, what’s different about that reality than the reality that we have today? And what are the most important steps that we’ve got to take, the changes that we have to make to get there?
That’s why I think it’s so critically important that we first figure out who we are, because once we know who we are, or who we want to be, now we can go find people—because I do believe our industry still continues to be people first, people focused, client centric, we’ve got to start with our people—once we know who we want to become, now we can go get the right people to become that firm. Do we need individuals that can serve more as advisors than simply accountants? Do we need more consultants? Do we need deep expertise in operations? Do we need advisors? Do we need specialists in forensics, valuation, wealth, M&A, transactions, whatever it might be. We can’t answer the people question of who do we need to go hire, how do we need to train them, how do we need to develop them, what do the career paths look like—we can’t answer any of that until we know who we want to become. We can’t figure out who’s our ideal client until we know who we want to become.
For a lot of firms, their ideal client right now is who have we served in the past and are we actually willing to get rid of them? And if not, they in a way default become the ideal client, which again, you may be thinking, well, I’m just not going to answer the question, who do I want to become? What that does is you answer the question by essentially saying, we’ll become kind of whoever it is, whoever we just naturally become based on who we’re serving, who we’re hiring, all of those things today. It’s a passive answer to the question, but it’s still answering the question. In a way, like I said earlier, it’s answering it with apathy, and that’s a really challenging place to be that we’re going to run our business answering who do we want to become with apathy?
Again, once you decide who you want to become, now you go define that ideal client profile. Now you go figure out what tech is going to help us get there. Are we positioned? Do we need to join forces with others? Do we need to find investors? Do we need to restructure our buy-ins, our buyouts, our deferred compensation, our partner compensation? All of the big questions that firms are going to be tackling over the summer when they get into retreats and strategic planning and all the things, all of your partner meetings, all of your questions, they become so much easier to answer once you know who you want to become. That becomes then the foundation, the lens through which you view every other question. Does AI in this capacity help us become the firm that we want to become? If so, it probably makes sense to explore it. If not, it doesn’t make sense to explore it. What types of leaders do we need to develop? Well, who do we want to become? How do we want to go to market? Who do we want to become? Everything runs through that lens, and so many of the really big heavy questions become much more straightforward in their answer.
Now, the answers become much more straightforward—I should clarify—it’s still really hard to do all the work to then go become that, because for many firms, when they think about who they want to become, they very quickly realize through those second and third level questions that I mentioned earlier, that what would have to be true to be successful is that firm is way different than what their truth is today. And to get there some significant changes in fundamental processes or beliefs may have to occur. What it does is that question, the most important question, “Who do we want to become?” creates clarity for you to determine the actions that you need to take. The answers to the really big, heavy questions that you’re unsure where to go, they’re really hard questions to answer right now because of the lack of clarity in who you want to become. Once you have that clarity, I hate to say it, maybe I, I don’t know that I hate it. Maybe I do. That’s when the hard work really begins. It’s easy to answer those questions once you’ve done it. Once you’ve got through it the first time, it becomes easier every time. Is this still who we want to become? Absolutely. Then we know that we’ve have got to keep making our decisions through that lens.
Then the really hard work of taking action, that really comes into play. And we talked about that a couple episodes ago when we were talking about redesigning legacy, there is a high likelihood that your answer to the question of who do we want to become is different than who you are today, than who you’ve been for the last 10 or 20 years. Maybe it’s not significantly different, but maybe it’s in a slightly different direction. First and foremost, it’s okay to have those answers to that question. It’s okay to say that who you want to become is different than who you are today. It’s really important that you get clarity and alignment on that. You may not have always 100% agreement in the leadership room, you do need to have alignment on who you want to become, because then you can start assigning out and figuring out what are the action items that have to be taken? What do we have to do differently than what we’re doing today? Sometimes what you have to do differently is incremental. Sometimes what you have to do differently is transformational. Getting people to follow through on those changes, it’s very challenging if you don’t know where you’re headed. People will fall back to that, this is really hard. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Well, it just feels like the right thing. We think it’ll get us ahead. We’re going to make progress. Those aren’t very compelling reasons. But when the compelling reason is because by taking this action, we get closer to becoming who we want to become, 3, 5, 10 years down the road, now it’s compelling.
So that’s my challenge to you. Quick episode here, as you approach your leadership meetings this summer. Maybe you take them on in the fall. Maybe you’ve just come out of those meetings and you’re still unsure exactly what to do next. I would encourage you, ask this simple question. It’s a simple question. It may take some time to answer it, especially if you’ve never really explored it, but the most important question in our profession today is “Who do you want to become?” Now, for those of you that are thinking, all right, Jeremy, I don’t lead a firm, how does this entire episode apply to me? Turn it internal. Maybe it isn’t your firm asking, “who do we want to become,” maybe it’s you. Who do I want to become as a leader, as a person, as a human being, as a spouse, as a parent, as a friend, wherever that may lead you. The same question works internally for us as leaders. “Who do I want to become?” Now, every question, every decision that I’ve have got to make goes through that lens, does this help me get closer to becoming that leader, to that person, that father, that husband, that friend, whatever it may be for me, whatever it may be for you. The most important question doesn’t change. It’s all about that future state. It’s all about having a vision. Who is it that you want to become? Who does your firm want to become?
I hope this question has been helpful to you. I know on the surface it doesn’t sound like a big question. I can tell you from experience, it sometimes leads to 3, 4, 5 hour, full day conversations. Just trying to answer that simple question. It’s an important one. If you’re going to pose that in a meeting, you may pose it in advance, have people be thinking about it. I think you’ll find you’re going to have a lot more meaningful discussions, decision making will become clearer, action identification will become more straightforward, and then you can spend your time and effort and energy taking the actions, making the changes that are necessary to get you to where you want to be. Alright, with that, I want to thank you for joining us for today’s episode of The Upstream Leader. As always, it is a pleasure to talk to you. If you want to explore this question more, you’re always welcome. Reach out to me on LinkedIn, shoot me an email. I would always be happy to chat about what it looks like to apply the most important question in our profession today. Who do you want to be within your firm? Have a great day.
