Hello everyone, and welcome to The Upstream Leader. I am excited to be talking about hospitality on the show today, which if you’re listening in and thinking, “Wait, I thought this was a show for accountants,” you are correct. It is still a show for accountants by accountants, but we’re going to be talking about the idea of hospitality. Can accountants even be hospitable? This comes on the heels of the conversation that I shared on the last episode about client experience. But for this episode, I’m going to bring in an expert, so I have got with me today the Chief Operating Officer and a partner at Abdo Solutions, Jana Cinnamon. Jana, great to have you on the show.
Thanks for having me, Jeremy. Looking forward to the conversation.
Yeah! This is such an interesting topic to me. I don’t know that when I decided to take a career in public accounting that I ever dreamt we would be talking about the client experience and hospitality and all the things related to that. But it is such a frequent conversation that’s coming up more and more, especially over the past few years. So, I’m excited to talk about that with you. But before we do, I’ve got to start the episode the way that I do every episode—I gave you a heads up on this one—how did you become the leader that you are today?
Oh, I could talk about it for hours. I think what I would say though, first of all, I have been super fortunate to have worked with a number of great leaders. I think with that, I’ve paid attention. I think that’s something about me—it’s one thing to work with great leaders, but it’s another thing to actually pay attention to what they do and how they do it. And I would say overall in life, I’ve had this relentless commitment to getting better every day. I feel like, as a leader, who I am as a person is who I am as a leader, and it’s this “whole self” type of approach. As long as I can remember back to high school, college, all the things, I’ve always believed that I have an opportunity to grow and to learn, and taking that time to again pay attention to what I’m doing, what’s working, what’s not working, as well as paying attention to those around me, I’ve just been invested in the idea that I have a responsibility to this world to leave it better than I found it.
And so in all ways that I show up in life, I’m a leader. Whether it’s in my home, whether it’s in my church, whether it’s in my workplace, or whether it’s volunteering with my daughter’s school, those are all times that I have an opportunity to lead in some capacity, and I want to make it better than I found it. So yeah, I think that’s really what it has been, paying attention to what works, what doesn’t work, taking ownership of things when they’ve gone wrong, reflecting on when things have gone right, and trying to apply all of my life lessons personally and professionally to how do I approach tomorrow a bit better? I would say a big part of it is my personal life with that, having experienced hardship as well as mountaintop moments, realizing life is super precious, and again, I have that responsibility to bring better every day.
That is awesome, Jana. I appreciate it. I love two lessons there that are so important: Paying attention, and we hear people always talk about, oh, surround yourself with others and be around great leaders. But to your point, if you’re not paying attention, it’s so easy to miss the lessons, like, well, I’m there, but if I’m not paying attention, am I really getting anything out of it? And then applying that personally and professionally, and paying attention to the good, the bad, and how do we use it. It’s so easy the further we get from high school and college, which gets further and further than I would care to admit every day, that it’s easy to ignore all those lessons as well and think, oh, they don’t apply anymore. But I love that insight to keep thinking about those things because they can still help move you forward. I appreciate that.
It’s interesting having a daughter who’s in high school right now—she’s 17 years old—and she just recently experienced something that brought me back to high school. As I reflected on that experience and how an experience from my junior year of high school shaped part of who I am today. It was not getting an opportunity that I wanted to get, but how I made the most of that opportunity nonetheless, right? And so sharing those lessons with my daughter, but again, reflecting on, yeah, that’s part of who I am today, all of those experiences, some of them are more impactful than others, but those experiences we’ve had in life, they are part of our story and they do affect how we show up. Having that awareness as a leader is, I think, a really important part of that paying attention.
I would agree. And when you pay attention like that, you realize those experiences, they don’t have to define you, but they will definitely shape you. How you can respond to that. I appreciate that. So as we think about getting better every day, I’m going to use that as a transition. We’re getting better every day. We’re in a profession that has been around a good long while. It’s not like accounting is new by any stretch of the imagination—we’re a profession that’s been around—we’ve long been known for client service being accurate, truth keepers, all of the things that embody an accountant. Over the past few years, all of that remains true, but there’s been a bit of a focus on getting better in some other areas, which is the experience. I don’t know that most people necessarily think about experience when they think of working with an accounting firm, but I know that’s something you have embraced quite a bit at Abdo. If I recall correctly, it got started with the book Unreasonable Hospitality.
Yes, that’s correct. That was some inspiration for sure.
Yeah. So how did a book about a restaurant, and creating amazing moments, bridge over into accountants serving their clients, and what’s the overlap here?
Yeah. You know, I would take it a few steps back. I would say Unreasonable Hospitality, the book, did inspire us to take this a step further, but a lot of it had been building for some years. Just to give a little bit of background, when I came into the firm—years ago, at this point, it’s been over 10 years—I came in on the people side. I had a background in human resources and organizational development, and so that’s the expertise that I brought into the firm. However, for one, I consider myself not your traditional HR—I’m not good at rule-following and compliance and those things. I shouldn’t advertise that, but that’s not my strong suit. My strong suit is in how do you attract the right people to your firm, grow and develop them, and make it a place that people really want to work long term? Over time I started raising my hand to get involved in all sorts of firm initiatives because everything you try to do as a firm involves the people.
One of the things we know in public accounting is the people stuff is the hard challenge. Time and time again, top issues facing firms are attracting talent, retaining talent. So I started thinking for a long time about how we improve the employee experience and have been working on that within the firm: That’s all things related to culture and benefits and growth opportunities, all of those things. But one of the things that became clear through conversations within our firm, outside of our firm, and outside of our industry, is we know that people want to have purpose, and they want to feel like they’re making a difference. I saw this opportunity thinking about how do we make the employee experience more meaningful? How do we keep people in this profession where it has a reputation for being a grind, where I can use that kind of imagery of a hamster on a wheel that’s just running and not going anywhere. I really felt like as a firm, we needed to find more opportunities to make it crystal clear that we have an opportunity to make a difference for others.
While we have talked about that pre-hospitality, before those conversations, I think that hospitality focus was another way for us to really dive deep into creating a more meaningful feeling for our employees about the difference that they’re making with our clients that they’re serving. So that’s really what got me and my role really interested in it, was yes, I care about the clients, yes, I want to make sure we’re maximizing that experience, but a lot of it was really driven by feeling if we get this right within our firm and within our employee base, we’re also going to win that whole war for talent in terms of attracting people and retaining people, getting people into an environment that feels so much more than a grind or a hamster wheel.
When I started at the firm as well, my responsibility did expand into leading all of the internal operations of the firm. So I was leading our administrative team, and I am leading our marketing and HR and IT and all of these other functions. So as I was building out that team, their clients are our people, our employees, right? So I was thinking about client experience from that internal perspective. And when I went to hire our administrative manager—now she’s a director in administration—I really thought about who is the right type of profile of person for that role, and I wanted to find somebody from that hospitality background. I wanted to find somebody who had that desire to serve and care for people. Our director of administration comes from a hospitality background and has built a rockstar reputation within the firm for providing excellent internal client service and that client experience.
Interesting!
So I think that model started us down that path of, hey, we want to serve our internal clients really effectively. Now, how does this show up when we’re working with our external clients? Again, how do we get our people on board with, again, unreasonable hospitality for their clients? If you read the book Unreasonable Hospitality or if you watch, there’s a Ted Talk by Will Guidara, the author of the book. He talks about how he got the people, all of the employees at the restaurant engaged in the process, everybody from the host to the cook, to the dishwasher, to the server. That was something that we could see really doing here is building that overall experience. I think when I reflect on it—I think I’m giving you a very long answer here, Jeremy.
You’re good, you’re good! We’re going to dive deeper.
When I reflect on it, when I was reading through the book and thinking about the hospitality industry, I thought, “Wow, okay. We, as accounting firms, don’t have this reputation for hospitality. It’s not our business.” But I think about we have just such a distinct advantage over restaurants or hotels—yes, restaurants have repeat guests, but not like the types of restaurants that were in the book. These are very fine dining, very special occasion, you maybe go once in your lifetime or maybe a few times if you have the means to do that. Or it’s not a Ritz Carlton either necessarily, where some people are maybe not staying at one of those regularly. That’s harder to do hospitality, I believe, when you don’t know your client that well, right?We have just such a distinct advantage because in accounting, we have these long-term relationships with our clients, just like internally, we have long-term relationships with our employees and we can get to understand them and serve them here internally. I just saw this ding ding ding, like, light bulb moment for me of wow. If in restaurants they can pay attention to a family that’s out to dinner for a special occasion that’s never been there before, and they can deliver unreasonable hospitality, we sure as heck better be able to do that with our clients that we’ve worked with for years in some of the most intimate parts of their life and business. So that’s a long answer to your question, but that’s what got us to where we are today.
Yeah! There are so many different parts of that that we’re going to try to explore over the rest of the episode. What strikes me here is, though Unreasonable Hospitality when it’s talked about, and I’ve had conversations with dozens of firms about this and I know lots of firms that have embraced it, it’s all about the client experience: How do we increase the client experience? How do we make it better? How do we create more loyalty? How do we take care of our A-level clients? All the different things, which I’m fully on board with. I love the fact though, that you didn’t actually approach it through the client lens. You approached it through the people lens, and that reinforces one of my favorite quotes—of course, I say that. I’m not going to be able to quote it exactly, but—it was a Richard Branson quote, “If you take care of your people, your people will take care of your clients.” That’s paraphrased, I’m sure I didn’t get exactly right. But that’s something that Richard Branson has said that has always stuck with me, the fact that yes, it can be all about the clients, but only after it’s all about the people, and the idea that if we create an amazing experience for our people and teach them and demonstrate to them what it’s like to be hospitable toward them, then they’re going to have that ability to then do that.
So I love the fact that you approached it people first, because it does a couple things: One, it plays to one of the three drivers of intrinsic motivation, which is purpose, the other two being autonomy and mastery from Daniel Pink’s book Drive, which is a phenomenal read. It plays to that purpose. I like that not only from the motivation standpoint, but in a profession that can be a grind, it’s that purpose that lets you get off the hamster wheel for a minute and step back and look at, “I’m making a difference here. This is awesome.”
Absolutely. Yeah.
So how did your people respond?
Yeah. I was going to say, I work with a number of people who get that satisfaction of checking something off their list. And hospitality is not that checking something off a list. It’s not. I will say though, it’s one thing to check something off a list and feel satisfaction, it’s another thing to do hospitality and feel this fulfillment and this joy—it’s a whole different sense of feeling. And I think that’s in terms of getting people on board with it, we started telling stories of when we heard that it was happening within the firm. That’s the key with this, is it can’t just live in these little pockets and these little bubbles. We have to raise the awareness of it. It was so fun to talk to an employee who did something in hospitable for a client and truly see them light up. You can’t replicate that. It’s so genuine when you can get somebody’s true sense of, “I made a difference, I did something here that mattered.” There’s no faking that.
So yeah, I would say you brought up client experience, you brought up client service, all of those things. I will say for us, we had to invest and we’re continuing to invest in working on that. Foundationally, you can’t have hospitality if you don’t have good client service, if you don’t have a good overall client experience. And so that in terms of, you know, bringing in the idea of hospitality, we spent time as well on client service and client experience and really driving home how important it is to consider the entire client experience that we all contribute to that. So if one of us drops the ball, that does impact their experience with us. And so we can’t just, you know, swoop in with a bottle of champagne and make it all right. We have to show up consistently, reliably, effectively, accurately, all of those things that we have developed a reputation on, we’ve gotta make sure we’re getting that right.
But then I say hospitality is really that cherry on top. I think where we ran into any obstacles at first was just the idea of how do I scale this? How do I, you know, we’re working with so many clients, we have so many to do things on our list, right? How do we actually do that when we are somewhat in the grind or somewhat in the hamster wheel of trying to crank through work? And so that in theory, like big picture as a firm, that further emphasizes our efforts to make sure we’re working with the right clients. We’re saying yes to the right ones and not taking on clients if it’s just gonna add volume, because we don’t want to create that type of environment, but we also recognize there is a reality of there is a lot of work that we have to do at certain times of the year, and it can be hard to infuse that hospitality.
And so some of the things that we’ve worked on with that is to be crystal clear in who are our VIP clients, who are the ones that we want to be more intentional about? Recognizing we may not be able to do it for all, but who do we wanna make sure we’re doing a better job of paying attention to? Knowing, spending time, talking about the client, engaging in internal conversations about what do we know about them, what makes a difference for them? How can we show up differently for them? We can’t necessarily have those types of deep conversations about the thousand plus clients that we have, but we can certainly have that for, you know, by team, let’s talk about your top 10 key accounts and let’s make sure we’re paying attention to them and we’re, we’re thinking proactively about them. That’s one of the things we’ve done.
Yeah. Let me ask you, let me dive into that a little bit more if I can—I’m going to ask a question. So how did you get the team on board with that if their clients don’t make the top 10? And it’s like, “Well, yeah OK, Jana’s clients are all VIPs, so they’re all going to get this hospitality, but you know, I don’t have any VIP clients, so what mine just get decent service?” How do you reconcile that? Because I would imagine there’s a bit of a challenge there where some people are like, “Well, why don’t more of my clients get this and why do all of their clients get that?” How do you reconcile that on the team?
Yeah, I think one, it’s getting a common understanding of what makes a VIP client, right? That it’s multiple attributes and that any of our clients would have the potential to be a VIP client, so what are we doing to take a client who’s maybe not a VIP and get them to having more of those attributes that would qualify them to be a VIP? How are we improving that client? If there’s something that’s been holding them back from being a VIP, maybe we don’t have—it’s clunky working with them. Maybe they’re not prepared. Maybe they’re not ready. So we don’t consider them one of our more VIP clients. What are we doing to improve that? If there may be a smaller client with not as much significance in terms of revenue for the firm, what are we doing to—do they have the opportunity to grow that? How are we getting opportunities in front of them to expand that relationship?
Also, in terms of, you know, you mentioned previously purpose and autonomy and mastery, as a firm, from an accountability standpoint, I can’t hold the firm accountable to every client within the firm. I can hold people accountable to, “Hey, who are our top key accounts and are we delivering that experience for them?” But personal accountability, as individuals, we would certainly want people to have the autonomy and the empowerment to, if they wanted, serve one of their clients, any one of their clients, with that hospitality, they are welcome to. But in terms of more of the maybe, team effort, and the concerted approach and the accountability around it, that’s what I can do as a leader. But certainly making sure people know any of them are welcome to operate that way with any of their clients. We just may not put the systems and processes behind it at the firm-wide level.
Makes sense. Yeah. No, that’s helpful. I appreciate that.
Yeah. So yeah, I would say one of the things that has helped with it as well is again, we can say, “Hey, here’s our top key accounts that we want to be really customized and figure out ways to approach them,” but we also have found ways—they use a phrase for this in Unreasonable Hospitality, and it’s not coming to me right now, but I will use the word kind of to “systematize” the hospitality for their customer base. So
for example, at the restaurant that Will was the leader of, one of the things that regularly occurred at the restaurant were engagements. It was the type of thing where, “Hey, I want to propose to my significant other. Let me take them out to this fancy restaurant and propose.” So rather than that restaurant having to figure out some unique way of showing hospitality to each of those customers, they had a standard approach where they would bring out some wine or champagne glasses that they would get to keep and bring home—I think they might have been Tiffany and Co. champagne glasses—and also a bottle of champagne, and it was just this over the top nice gesture, but that was a consistent gesture that was offered to any of those customers that came in and got engaged there.
Similarly, within our firms, our clients go through similar types of life events, similar types of business events. And so rather than having to be super creative all the time, I know accountants get over that, like, “Oh, I’m not very creative,” we have created some more systems around how we can take typical life events or business events, organizational milestones and recognize those as well. So again, to simplify the process a bit, things like if we know that they just had a major acquisition, we have something that we can send to that client with a handwritten note. We’re not having to scratch our brains and go, “What could we do?” Being able to execute on some of those things just more easily does help to, again, not make it feel like, “Well, my client isn’t one of those clients.” Hey, if your client isn’t one of those key accounts, but they have a baby, we’re going to send them a new baby gift. Those are just some of those ways again that it isn’t just confined to one small group of clients. That smaller concentrated group of clients gets us to exercise that muscle more. Once we said, “Hey, these are the clients we really want to put a concerted effort around demonstrating hospitality,” you start to be thinking more hospitably. Now it comes to mind more regularly when you’re working with the rest of your client base.
Yeah. Well, it’s the idea that you can have a good client experience for all clients, but your exceptional clients get the exceptional client experience. You match the level of experience to the level of client, and so many industries do that. You see it in not just hospitality, you see it in travel, you see it in retail anymore as well, where you’ve got that as well.
I want to take a couple of different directions here with maybe quick-hit questions: Before you had things systematized, how did you get accountants—as you said, think a little bit more checklist, checkbox type—how did you get them to embrace this idea of being hospitable without providing a checklist? Without saying, you’re going to do this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and then you’re going to tell us you did it so we know you did it? Instead of that approach, what did you do before you got the systems in place to really, was it just finding the right people in the firm that could start to demonstrate it and buy into it? What was the approach?
First, I will say we did invest heavily just in training within the firm. We did think it was starting to really activate that thought process. We spent time, probably 8 to 10 hours, a couple of years ago, really on what is client experience, what is hospitality, how does this come up in our world, right? We’re not serving appetizers and desserts and things like that. How does it show up in our world? So we started breaking down our processes and making people think about what is good service, so what’s the bare minimum we should be doing? What does great service look like? Then, what is the difference with hospitality? We worked people through exercises to start thinking in a, “Hey, I’m not in the world of work right now. I’m not on the hamster wheel. I’m in a training room, and I’m in a workshop setting where I can start thinking about how I could infuse hospitality in various parts of my work.”
So we spent time on that training component, that group conversation to start getting that, you know, those juices flowing for lack of a better way of putting it. Then we really did kind of unleash them out there, but we started a program internally to recognize our client experience, hospitality rock stars. We had already identified through some stories that we heard and some examples we heard, we had found a couple of people who we already saw demonstrating this through client stories, examples we witnessed firsthand. So we recognized a couple of people right off the bat and said, these are a couple of rock stars, and we gave them these plaques and we awarded them. Then we started a nomination process and we started to allow people to either self-nominate or nominate others when they heard and they were aware of it, and we started recognizing them at our all-staff meetings. Every Monday morning, we would share a story if there was a nomination, and we would recognize somebody.
The reality is, we’re a firm of nearly 250 people. We didn’t have 250 people who instantly went out and started demonstrating it, but we were being intentional about paying attention and finding those stories and examples to not say, “Hey Matt, you are really a client rock star and we want to recognize you, Matt,” but actually telling the story of what Matt did and how he showed up for his clients, telling the example of what he did that was hospitality and publicly recognizing it made Matt feel great, but it also got people going, “Oh, hey, he’s doing it. I should be doing it.”
Yeah, that’s how that’s done!
Yeah, we’ve been recognizing over the last couple of years, we’re probably to about 20 people that have been recognized through this, and I think that’s a big part of it, is to recognize and celebrate. I don’t know that we always do a really great job of that in this profession—we’re always on to the next thing—but taking time to pause and recognize and tell the story and be an effective storyteller has been how we have gotten some momentum with this. All it takes is one story to inspire somebody else to do something with that.
One thing that we’re working on now is we have been doing that really at the firm-wide level, telling those stories, but we’re working with our department leaders and encouraging them to find ways to do stories even within their departments. How are you just telling that at your department meeting? We don’t have to wait for the big firm thing, you can be recognizing and celebrating at all levels within our organization. Again, it doesn’t always have to be the absolute mountaintop moment. But even if you get just a little nugget or morsel of something really good, let’s stop and celebrate that.
So that recognition and celebration brings me to my next question, which brings us back full circle to the beginning. You said that you started down this path to create more purpose—maybe not create more purpose, but—connect people back to their purpose of having a positive impact on clients and really driving the employee experience and helping with retention and therefore the result, recruiting. With the recognition, the celebration, the tying people back to purpose and empowering them throughout all levels in this regard, how’s that going on the employee side? What have you seen from an employee experience or retention? Has it had the impact that you were looking for? Are you still learning along the way? Give us a little update on that.
Yeah. I would say it’s always a long game too. It’s not like we could necessarily instantly see a difference. But I would say it’s made us more intentional about all facets of how we approach employee experience, from are we attracting the right people to our firm in the first place? Because I think if you aren’t getting the right people in the door in the first place, your retention isn’t going to be what it should be anyway if you’re not hiring correctly.
It shouldn’t be!
Right! So that will be something that I think we are going to see here longer term, is that intentionality of talking about what we are and how we approach what we do here, because that’s showing up in our recruitment process, in our interviewing, in our selection, and I think that’s going to have a longer-term result in the retention and engagement of our people, is getting the right people in the door. Because I will say, right or wrong, not every firm culture is for everybody, but this is our culture. We want to make a difference here. Yes, we want to be profitable. Yes, we want to grow. But at the end of the day, I can say with full sincerity, sitting with the partner group for years on end, yes, they care about those things, yes, they want to grow, yes, they want to be profitable. But they truly want to make a difference for the clients. That’s what gets them out of bed every morning, is knowing that they’re making a difference for their clients and that they’re creating opportunities for the next generation to grow and to lead. That’s who we are here. We’re not just here to take on clients and crank out more work and make more money. That’s at the core of who we are. Being crystal clear in that and how we recruit and onboard, I think, does impact our employee experience.
Overall, it has really helped to get people thinking about their development more strategically, in terms of, yes, you need to know the technical things. You do. But you also need to develop all of those interpersonal skills. We’ve talked about that for years. We know that the quote-unquote “soft skills,” the “success skills,” are key to this business. Early on, what has made me the leader that I am today is the fact that I paid attention to other really great leaders. I think that being more strategic about your development is recognizing “I need to spend more time with clients. I need to prioritize not just rushing through to get the work done. I need to be paying attention to what they’re saying to me. I need to engage further in that conversation and spend more time in development plans really thinking about how they’re showing up, spending time with other people.” Part of our journey to implementing our client experience and unreasonable hospitality was investing in training. But I think that’s a trap within the profession, putting ourselves into training and not actually getting into conversation with people. That’s where the beauty, that’s where the growth happens.
Yeah, I agree. I love what you shared there about the growth and the training and the importance of being strategic, but also getting clear on the hiring side of things and making sure that you’re hiring the right people and the importance of that. What you just shared is so important, that you’re using it to help people figure out how to take more control over their training. That’s something that’s so important when it comes to purpose, and again, the other intrinsic motivators, autonomy and mastery. Having the ability to take a strategic approach and become the best at what you do, it plays to all three of those motivating factors. The other thing that you mentioned, Jana, that’s so important, is getting clear on the hiring and the recruiting side. Because to your point, if you’re recruiting the wrong people, your retention is not going to be where you want it to be. And I caught myself there—I almost said your retention is not going to be good—arguably, it’s going to be good for the right people. The turnover number might just look a little bit higher than you want it to be. I like to split out turnover into two things, good turnover and bad turnover.
Yes.
A hundred percent good turnover, the people that shouldn’t be at the firm by their own admission or by the firm’s admission, they shouldn’t be at the firm—I want a hundred percent of that. But I want zero turnover in the bad turnover category. The people that are in the right place, and they’re the right fit for the firm, we want to make sure that we retain those. Your intentional approach to that, I believe, is going to be incredibly valuable.
So as we conclude, we’ve talked a lot about the book Unreasonable Hospitality, so that’s the obvious resource. What other resources, whether it’s books, Ted Talks, articles, are out there that if a firm was to say, you know what, we’re interested in this, we want to do this, we like the approach of taking it from the employee experience first, and then we’re going to go to the client side, what resources would you recommend for them?
Yeah, I would agree, certainly with the Ted Talk and the book. One of the things that I have found really inspiring, and I’m not going to have specifics to give you here, but I have really enjoyed studying other businesses of other types, and how they approach serving their customer and what that looks like. So again, the book is really about restaurants, and I actually worked in restaurants back in high school and college, and so that resonated with me. But read books by the airlines, read books by other industries as well. My husband is in the tech industry—he works in cybersecurity—and hearing about how they approach serving their clients and selling to their clients and all of those things, I think has been a great resource.
Honestly, if I were to give resources, I would say start whether you read or listen to podcasts from other industries and how they approach what they do, but also just engage in conversation with people in your network. It doesn’t have to just be business: It can be your family, it can be your friends. Tell me what you do. “Oh, you’re a nurse? And tell me how do you approach the patient experience?” There are all these little nuggets of wisdom that we think about. One of the things that I have loved is getting to better understand the healthcare industry because our learning and development director came from the healthcare industry. That’s where he was last at. And he talked about how it was small things in the patient experience that made a difference. For example, they found and did a study around how much it improved the patient experience when the doctor, when they would come in and they would pull the curtain around the patient bed. If the doctor just said and articulated, “I’m going to close this curtain to give us a little more privacy”—the reason for pulling the curtain closed was the same, but taking that extra step of saying why I’m doing what I’m doing, because I care about your privacy, that improved that patient experience. They had greater trust in their provider. It’s some of those examples, engaging in conversation with different professions and thinking through how to take that example of a doctor explaining why I’m doing what I’m doing, that it builds trust. Hmm, how should we be doing that in accounting? If we ask for some document from a client, are we explaining how that document is helpful and why we need to look at it? Those are the types of things where I think we have a lot to learn just by paying attention and asking good questions.
I love that. Getting the perspective of different industries, I know it’s sometimes a challenge because I do hear that when I share Unreasonable Hospitality or even some of Patrick Lencioni’s books that I’m a huge fan of. I’ll get somebody who says, “Well, that’s great, but that’s not an accounting firm.” That’s the whole point. It’s not an accounting firm. The question is, how does it apply to an accounting firm? There are so many things. I think it was Zappos back in the day, Tony Hsieh, if I recall correctly, they were the company that after two weeks, once they went through the culture and how they handled things, they would say, “If you want to quit, we’ll pay you to quit. We will give you money so that you can quit and go find another job, but you won’t just be without pay so you can go do that because culture is that important and making sure we have the right people is that important.” It’s a novel idea. I work with a firm that comes to mind. I don’t know that they pay people to quit, but they give them a six-month probationary period to figure out if it works. It’s across the board. Does it work for us? Does it work for you? They’re very generous at the end if everybody agrees this isn’t it. Learning from different industries gives us so much power to move our firms forward. I appreciate you sharing that.
And I will say, if anybody would like to learn from you a little bit more, they can attend our HeadWaters Conference this July 17th and 18th in Denver, Colorado. You’ll be speaking, and you will be talking about can accountants be hospitable. Folks got a little bit of a teaser and more of a conversational format here today, but that will be taking place at HeadWaters. If you’d like to get registered, you can visit our website UpstreamAcademy.com, or you can reach out to me directly and we can get you registered. Jana, if folks have questions or they just want to be connected and follow you—I know you share a lot of great information online—what’s the best way for them to do that?
Yes, I’m not hard to find with the last name “Cinnamon.” I’m the only Jana Cinnamon out there. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m active out there. Send me a message if you’d like to connect. I’m happy to talk and share and learn from each other. I will say, one of the things that matters to me a lot in terms of my whole approach to getting better every day is I believe we get better every day when we help each other. I’m willing to help others knowing that I can get that in return if I need it as well. So I’m happy to connect with people—just reach out through LinkedIn—jand I look forward to seeing some new and some familiar faces in July in Denver.
That’ll be great. Well Jana, thank you so much for joining me today on The Upstream Leader. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation.
Wonderful. Thanks, Jeremy.
