Starting Over with Intention with Chad Huebsch

(upbeat music) As you hear in this episode, running a firm can provide a wonderful lifestyle, but starting from zero isn't for everyone. And that's where this week's episode sponsor, Live Oak Bank comes in. Live Oak Bank truly understands the unique needs of your accounting and tax business and specializes in providing customized financial solutions to support firms like yours. At Live Oak, they grow with your business and want to be your firm's financial partner. Whether you're buying, building, or simply looking to grow your accounting and tax firm, they will design a loan package that supports your business goals. Their accounting and tax lending team offers numerous financing options nationwide. Ready to achieve your business goals? Visit the link in the podcast description today to connect with a member of their team. Member FDIC, now back to the episode. - Hello and welcome back to the Big Four Transparency podcast. I am joined today by Chad Hipsch, the CEO and head of tax of Blueprint Tax Advisors. Welcome to the pod, Chad. - Thanks, I appreciate it, thanks for having me. - Yeah, my pleasure. I saw you on LinkedIn, you put out some very good content on there and you're quite transparent about your firm journey and your growth that you're realizing in the firm and comparing to forecasts and things like that, which I think is a great service to the industry. So thank you for showing that out 'cause I think it's good for people to be able to see behind the curtain a little bit. But this is actually not your first firm either. So I'm kind of curious to talk through that journey, cover some of the things you may have learned along the way in what you're doing differently this time around, but even before all that, you started off in salt as well as an audit, right? I believe, but not in audit. I started while I was still finishing my undergrad, I started working for a local municipality in Arizona that did sales tax auditing. And so, okay, that's kind of where I started as I pivoted to my masters, that's where I moved into EY and it was just salt for it from there. Okay, interesting. And then you ultimately decided to move away from the kind of salt subspecialty. I've spoken to a number of people operating like salt only practices as well. Was that done with like intention of like, I think it'll be a little bit easier to scale or like make a little bit more sense to serve client-based that way, or was there just a turn of fate that ended up causing that? - Not really a turn of fate, it was definitely intentional. I felt like my first stop at EY, it was salt, but it was consulting, which in hindsight, it was the most exciting part of salt, but also limiting, like there just wasn't a whole lot of extra to do in that. And so, I then moved to St. Louis. I was in Phoenix at the time and the St. Louis worked for PWC in their salt group, but there more was on compliance work, which was helpful because I hadn't been preparing corporate or partnership tax returns even at the state level. And did that for a little bit and realized, I still want a bigger pot slice of the pie, like understanding what's going on. So that's when I went into industry. And that was federal, international and state taxes. So it was a really good experience to kind of expand what I hadn't had exposure to. - Yeah. And now within operating your firm now, like I imagine that probably is like a very useful sort of backdrop to understand kind of the client perspective and everything too, right? Like I imagine that probably only makes you a better firm operator now. - Yeah. And I feel like most of my clients now are business owners that make one to $10 million revenue size business. So nothing that I would have ever touched at you, why PWC or the big concomit that I worked for. But those experiences definitely helped just know, like the rights, right types of questions to ask as well as like when you know you need to ask the question, like reach out to support. So yeah, and everyone recognizes those firm names. So that doesn't hurt either. - No, yeah, definitely not. And then what drove you to kind of like starting your own practice? 'Cause I mean, you started it relatively early on. You did a brief stint at a smaller firm, which I imagine probably laid some of the groundwork to like understanding what actually goes into running your own shop, but what was like the key driver there? - Yeah, I felt like, well, I wanted a more well-rounded experience and I kept having people and many people do. They're like, oh, you're an accountant. You should do my taxes. And it's like, wait, I do like Fortune 500 company taxes. I don't do 1040s or individual returns. But those questions just kept coming. And so that brought me back from St. Louis back to Phoenix to work at that smaller firm. And that did a lot of just bookkeeping payroll and S-Core partnership and the individual returns. It was one of those days, earlier on in that first tax season with them that I think I prepared like 10 S-Core individual return combos that day and realized, you know, made the firm like $20,000 or something and I realized, Matt, early rate, I made like 300 bucks that day or something. And in hindsight, I know there's a lot more that goes into running a firm and it's not just, hey, this is $20,000 of pure profit, but it was just like, okay, like, I know what I'm doing now or at least I feel like I could figure it out and I wanted more of that profit for myself. - Yeah. And so from the point where you kind of decided that, like what were your first moves? So this would have been with boss advisors, but like, where did you start? Like did you start kind of picking up clients on the side or like did you just sort of make a leap of faith there? - Yeah, so no, it was definitely, there was a leap, but I started picking up clients on the side and I was very transparent when I took the job at that small firm that I had some clients that I worked with, I want to continue to grow that and they were okay with it and knew that that was my intention. So at some point, about two years into it, it was like, I'm working grinding at this firm, 50, 60 hours a week and I go home and then work another 20 to 30 hours on my stuff is like, I got, something's got to break. So the hard part beforehand was like, there's no way I'm gonna be able to make enough money to replace my salary, but within six months, I was there and that first year, 2019, that I started boss advisors, we were, I was already making more money than I was at most. - Right on, yeah, that's like an ideal scenario. And when it was time to kind of ramp things up and you're full time and you'd unlocked all this kind of new capacity and time to be able to like focus on this. Like what was the process like to, you know, probably take the growth from like a trickle of like this is a side hustle that I do to like actually properly scaling. Like what was that process like for you? Like where'd you go? - Yeah, I felt like it actually freed up a lot of like, ease of conversation with people and what's ultimately were prospects of, they inevitably asked, what do you do? And it was like, well, I do this and then I also do this and then it was just like, this is what I do. So a lot of clarity around that messaging and then a lot of trial and error of figuring out how to how to bring on clients. I found that the best way initially was just to serve my current clients really well and then they would refer and then that kind of dub-tell later on into working with financial advisors and like outs for CFOs, bookkeepers and they don't want to touch tax and I don't want to do anything that they're doing. So it became a lot of good relationships I've been able to develop over the last six plus years doing that. - Yeah. - And were those relationships kind of driven by like, you know, a cold outreach approach, Vee-Link-Dan or were you already creating content at that point and like had eyes on what you were doing or what did that look like? - Content creation was, you know, a trial by fire, a little bit just figuring out what worked and what didn't work. And so a lot of it wasn't cold outreach. It was people who I was working with as current clients but they'd introduced me to their financial advisor or as we started generating content, financial advisors would see what we're talking about and put type to clients we work with and issues they face and they'd just start reaching out. Interesting. And then if LinkedIn is accurate, you kind of did boss advisors for three and a half years. What and then proceeded to kind of start about Blueprint Tax Partners, which is where you're working today, right, and you're around three and a half years into that journey. So what drove the decision to, you know, leave kind of what was already operating to go into kind of this new thing and what did that look like? - Yeah, no decision has ever made in a vacuum but a little bit of history was, you know, we were doing a lot of everything at boss advisor. We were doing bookkeeping, we were doing tax planning, we were doing tax returns, we were also doing like CFO services and then Arizona, which is where we were based, offered what's called an alternate business structure but basically allowing non-aturnies ownership and law firms. And my business partner at the time was an attorney as well and we merged boss advisors into the legal entity and so we're offering legal services and there was a lot of nonprofit work as well and there was a lot going on. And some soul searching and figuring out, you know, I really like working with small business owners and really more than even just bookkeeping or thoseance lawyer services, I just want to be proactive and do tax planning and ultimately we do mostly that now as well as just the annual tax returns but making that pivot really allowed me to niche down into that one practice area and really focus on the type of clients we want to work with. - Interesting. - So the law, the law came along partway through doing boss advisors, is that correct? - Yep. - And I imagine on the narrative of this is a super easy cross sell to do, right? Like your clients, they're all getting legal work so when you start offering it, how did that go at the time? - Yeah, I think it went well. There was, we were the second approved ABS entity in the state, I think, and at that time, it was really just having conversations about the cross selling nature and that they don't need to go out and find an attorney or vice versa, the attorney, we have it in, you know, tax or bookkeeping practice or virtual CFL. So it was very easy to talk through in cross sell. So it was like an, it was an effective like revenue generator in terms of like the synergies between the two. - Yeah, I feel like there was a lot of, a lot of, so yes and no. So yes, in that you could cross sell fairly easily, but those are, even though they're both professional services, there are different types of businesses that you run, a law firm and a CPA practice. - Yeah, and you were feeling yourself like what, like maybe too distracted by the overall entity to really dive into what you were passionate about, is that it? - Yeah, 'cause I had, I was a 50% owner, that business partner, that was the other 50% owner, ultimately just wanting to focus more on the things that I found the most joy. Okay, so a little bit of kind of, yeah, soul searching, like you said, just speaking to what do I actually want to be doing, putting my, you know, 50 hours a week energy into, I mean, I think that's an underrated thing, right? It's obviously, it's super important that you care about what you do day to day. And then how did that exit work? Because I imagine that can never be an easy conversation where even if the economics maybe make sense for the other partner, it is like, oh, you're probably my number one lead source, right? Like it's probably easier to use tax or bookkeeping as a wedge than it is to necessarily use legal services as a wedge to earn that trust. So how did that come to be? And, you know, did you just do a partner sellout or did you both agree to kind of sell the firm outwardly just to someone else and move on? - Yeah, so it was a progression, you know, you don't go into business thinking that you're gonna split it up, you know, in our case, it was about three and a half years into it. Ultimately, we decided, you know, the way that it was set up with the legal portion, me being not an attorney, it made sense for him to keep that. But ultimately, we had it set up so that, you know, when I broke off, the clients could basically choose who they wanted to work with. And luckily for me, we had done a lot of good work with clients and a good chunk had followed me over. And there was a small monetary piece that we were able to work out. But for the most part, it was really just letting clients kind of move where they wish. - Yeah. - And there were not like pre-established kind of rules around like what a separation would look like. And you just kind of figured that out as it came up or was that like an operating agreement, right? And so there were some guardrails there, but really like it all came down to those conversations of like what's gonna be fair to him? Well, they'll be fair to me. Well, they'll be fair to the clients and staff and just working out and they'll be fine. - Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So it was somewhat of a partner buyout, somewhat of like a spin out of the operations into what is now Blueprint Tax. So now like I imagine when you start Blueprint Tax, you would have probably owned 100% of the entity. And then, you know, okay, cool. I'm the new owner. I get to call my own shots. Like what were some of the key things that you decided to do differently this time around? - Yeah, there was a couple. So at Bosphatizers, we had a physical space. And at Blueprint, I went to fully remote. The other thing that I think in hindsight, made a lot more sense than when I was in the thick of it was making that pivot and moving away and really narrowing down, allowed me to like basically rebrand it. Even to the clients that ultimately ended up following me. Like this is what we do. And really I was able to filter out a lot of the stuff that either wasn't profitable or I didn't enjoy doing or have a person that could do those services. So it really allowed me to narrow down, ultimately able to charge more, and make more money, higher staff, and do all that stuff that comes with it. - Interesting. And has like, did growth accelerate significantly from kind of moving on to that type of practice? Like obviously, you felt like you were able to serve them better, but were the financials like they were reflective of that? - Yeah, I mean, there was a good chunk, a good base to start with, but it's just continuing to grow and snowball effect. I think the biggest thing, the clarity around us not really offering but keeping or CFO services, where I was previously at the older firm, allowed me to create a lot of new partnerships with those. And so that first year and 2022 going into 2023, made some good, deferral relationships with firms that just did bookkeeping or just did for action, I'll see if I'll work. And they were able to focus on what they do best. We likewise on our side, and it created really good client experience. - Yeah, I mean, that's something that we've come across a lot with guests of the podcast is, there's a little bit of like a give and take when it comes to the either expansion or intentional limitation of scope of services, right? Like we've had Zane on from ProTiAdvisors, for example, and they're like, we're very specifically gonna stay in our lane and we're gonna do the accounting and bookkeeping work, but we're not gonna expand the service offering, which makes them a fantastic referral partner to any firm who is solidly in the tax space, right? Which I think is a really interesting strategy, but then at the same time, like we talked about with the kind of addition of legal services to boss advisors, you can also get that kind of bump of like, oh, we're gonna add the service offering and have this built in client base and be able to cross sell. So it is like a very, it's a very interesting kind of push and pull type of thing where it's like each of those has a very defensible set of advantages that comes with it, right? But ultimately, like I like the way that you framed it where it was the result of a lot of soul searching and like what you actually were passionate about and wanted to do, where it was maybe more of a founder fit. But then again, there's defensibility of the strategy of both sides of things, right? So for sure. And I'm probably biased 'cause I've found my lane that I feel like we've been able to find some success and but especially when you're starting out, like picking a niche and limiting your scope will allow you to make these relationships without fear of, you know, you're gonna steal someone's client versus otherwise. Once you get to, you know, two, three, five million in revenue, that type of firm, there's, you know, a leadership team. There's a lot that goes into that infrastructure wise. It's a lot easier to like bolt on additional services in cross sell like that. Yeah. Very cool. Within Blueprint today, like how is growth going? 'Cause I had seen you talk about sort of your forecasts for growth. I think you said you were forecasting 15%, you had a growing 10% or so organically last year. But do you, you know, upon further self reflection, like what do you think was the difference that created that gap between the forecasted growth or like the target growth and what was actually realized and like what are you learning along the way from that? Yeah, I felt, you know, once you get to a certain point, it's more, it's less about my personal efforts and more of what I can do collectively with my employees and the team that we have. And so this last year, I think part of what caused the gap was just like fine-tuning our processes, you know, staff mix as well as really just focusing on ongoing tax planning instead of just, because historically, the last couple of years it was either higher or higher risk to do your tax return plus planning. And now going into 2026, it's like, if you want to work with us, you're going to hire us for planning, we'll do your tax returns as well. And so really narrowing down who we work with, but then also the margin per client is much higher than we do planning in addition to just the tax returns. And it creates a better-- So with the experience, too, frankly. Yeah. So with the intense focus on planning, which is kind of more of an event-driven type of thing, in my experience anyways, I used to be kind of more in the tax planning realm back when I was at the big four. But let's say it's like, they're starting a business, they've reached a really good phase for growth, and then they want to set themselves up for multiplication of QSBS via family trust or whatever that is, right? I'm Canadian, so I'm trying to do the, like equivalency, but that was like a very common thing that we would do, right? That sort of events driven, but then do you then just kind of maintain, there may be no other significant opportunities for the next three, four years. So how does that work if there's a mandatory of if you're signing up for us for compliance, you're also going to do tax planning with us? How does that work when maybe they're in between phase of those three, four years? Because I imagine it just comes with a load of compliance for the family trust filings, for the business filings, individual tax filings. And is it just sort of like you'll only on board customers who are likely to need the tax planning, or how does that conversation go? Yeah, by narrowing it down to business owners in the one to 10 million space, it really helped that type of demographic needs ongoing planning. And I agree there's certain events that happen that really would trigger conversations and the need for planning. But honestly, our cell is that we're going to work with you throughout the year, year over year. And as those big events come up, we'll be able to advise you on them because we've been advising you along the way. But I generally sell tax planning as an ongoing maintenance package. Like business owners revenue and income spikes and hits valleys. And so you want to make sure that their cash flow is not hurt by unexpected tax bills, as well as just knowing that we have our arms wrapped around your situation, we're going to advise you on certain tax things as they pop up and they become relevant. So it's less, in my opinion, less events based and more of just like an ongoing, we're going to kind of be the guard rails for you. Yeah. OK. And then you have taken the initiative of like, you document how things are going very, very well. From where I follow on LinkedIn, you might have other channels where those are on. What has-- I mean, both what has come from that and then what's driving that? Because someone like, I'm on LinkedIn constantly putting out content as like a driver for the business. Are you finding a lot of client onboarding leads through that? Or I know that you've started coaching as well where you'll have early stage firms who come to you. Like, what has been the outcome of that? Yeah, it's definitely been-- it started very small and sometimes, you know, six, even 12 months in. It's like, it may actually doing anything that people are going to be reaching out to me on. And it's a trial and error. You figure out what works and what doesn't. But now I consistently get referrals and leads from LinkedIn and X. And it's really come from multiple years of consistently posting. And less of, hey, April 15th is the tax deadline day. Make sure to fire taxes. And more of like, hey, I've got this crazy client situation with business owner, QSPS, cost segregation, you name it. And just talk about real world experiences with the conversations we're actually having with clients. And I think those are the ones that resonate. And they're like, people see that. And like, that's exactly the issue I'm dealing with. So he knows what he's talking about. I'm going to reach out. So showcasing the client experience and like, the outcomes you were able to receive tends to be sort of what really works for you. Definitely. Yeah. OK. Cool. Because yeah, I get a lot of people who are sort of asking me, oh, yeah, the podcast seems like it's gone really well for you. And it has. But they're talking about, I'm thinking about doing them for my firm. And I do like to know from the content perspective, what actually resonates. Because I think it's very easy to be sort of putting out all this content while you're sort of barking up the wrong tree of like, if you're creating the wrong type of thing, like you may still be growing and following, but that might be a false lead where you're like, oh, yeah, cool. I follow accounts growing, but it's not actually impacting things in real life. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess showcasing the wins as well as the oddball situations that people may be curious to learn more about is really effective. So within the coaching business, what are some of the kind of common threads that you're within what you're comfortable sharing out? But what are some of the common threads that you find with firm owners where they really need help or like, they end up being stuck that you're able to kind of help unclog for them? It really came from the genesis of my own kind of coaching that I sought out, even early on in Blue Friend, where I'd reached out to someone who I noticed was posting on X or LinkedIn. And they looked like they were about three to five years ahead of me in their firm journey. And I'd be like, hey, can I pick your brain? And some of them, it turned to one phone call, some it turned to ongoing kind of coaching. And as I've gotten to this point now, where I've hit seven figures and got a team and we all work remotely. And I took a year while doing that and traveled the country. And the RV, people start seeing that. And they're like, OK, I'm going to reach out to Chad. Seems like he knows what he's doing around starting a firm scaling a firm. So it's conversations about that. How do I land better clients? How do I narrow who I work with? Tech stack, things like that. And those are the types of conversations I have. Yeah. Where you alluded to the three to five years ahead of you, I think that's an important point. Because a lot of people will psych themselves out of doing that on the basis of like, ah, sure, I've achieved some level of success. But there's so many people who are running $10 million for them, $50 million for them, $100 million for them. But the reality is someone who's been stuck at 150 for the last little while and really wants to get to that point where they can hire someone. That's probably not that relevant to them. And so as soon as you can become someone who can share their journey to someone who's maybe three years behind you in the journey, then that in itself becomes very valuable because it's a lot more relatable. And also, I think when a story is like, oh yeah, I remember I went through that 25 years ago. I mean, we're in a different landscape now, right? That may no longer be relevant. So I think that is cool to see people at the stage that you're at doing the coaching and offering that to people where like what you've built is super impressive, but you're not psyching yourself out of you. Like, oh yeah, no, there's all these $10 million firms or whatever, right? I think that that's like really important because it's fresh. Like your experience is highly relevant to these people. Yeah, yeah. And I feel like it's really surged. And it may be just because of the perfect timing with tax season ahead of us and people thinking about employees that are already burned out and wanting to kind of start their own thing and people that are trying to scale. I had two that I was continuing to work with on an ongoing basis. And I posted, I think earlier this week or late last week that I'm offering this type of coaching and I had like 10 people book discovery calls. Wow. So yeah. Once you start talking about it, you can't manifest something out of nothing, but as you start talking and showcasing people, people will fall, whether they be kind, and sort in this case with the coaching deal. Yeah. Well, perfect. I wish you tons of success with that. We're going to link it in the podcast show notes as well for anyone who's interested, either in that or just in general to get in touch with you. And yeah, thank you very much for taking the time today. I appreciate you coming on the pod. Perfect. I appreciate you having me. Thank you. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]