Why Accountants Can Be Natural Business Builders with Sarah Dobek (#179) — Transcript
Updated: Oct 26
THE PICTURE OF WEALTH · EPISODE 179
Can the strengths that make a good accountant also make a good business builder? Sarah Dobek joins Dustin Serviss to explore consultative selling, listening and growing a professional practice through relationships.
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This transcript was generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability. It may contain transcription or speaker-attribution errors. Refer to the recording for exact wording.
Chapters
[00:00:00] Why listening makes accountants effective sellers
[00:04:35] A different route into sales and marketing
[00:08:37] Growing beyond existing client relationships
[00:13:09] Recurring billing and communicating value
[00:17:17] Finding the real problem by listening
[00:25:06] Boundaries and the ebb and flow of balance
[00:28:54] Giving people time to improve the business
[00:33:25] Using meeting notes for marketing and training
[00:36:46] Automation and reviewing the technology stack
Guest & resources
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Sarah Dobek: One of my beliefs is that, actually, accountants are best positioned to be really good salespeople because a lot of the accountants that I work with and that enter public accounting and go into it as a profession are internal thinkers. They are people that process before they speak. They listen really well. Most of them, they take in a lot of information. And when we're in a sales situation, particularly in accounting services or any professional services, we teach something called consultative selling, which is really the relationship comes first and understanding what the needs are of the prospect or the client that you're
[00:00:37] Sarah Dobek: working with and solving those problems. It's not selling them something they don't need.
[00:00:42] Dustin Serviss: That is the voice of Sarah Johnson Dobek, who is the president founder of Innovatus Consulting. Now Sarah spends her time with CPAs, chartered professional accountants, and consulting on how to grow their businesses, how to make their practice more efficient, and ultimately gives accountants more confidence to not upsell, but to find their own personal pace or rhythm with growing their practice, whatever that means to you. Most of the listeners of this podcast will be CPAs because the content that we talk about is CPA focused and practice growth focused, and not so much hardcore sales strategy. It's definitely not that.
[00:01:24] Dustin Serviss: It's more about human interaction and how to make natural connections with people and help them, but also build your CPA practice. I'm pretty excited about today. I've not had a CPA coach, trainer, expert on the show yet, and we've done, like, a hundred and fifty episodes. So Wow. You'll be the one that we'll make sure we're highlighting, and we do work with accountants and, you know,
[00:01:52] Sarah Dobek: stuff like that. All of our work. Yeah. It's our niche is working with accounting firms, and we help them grow their businesses. So Yeah. My having, obviously, in Bellingham as a client and a accounting firm.
[00:02:05] Dustin Serviss: I think I should just jump in. Where my biggest curiosity lies when working with accountants, naturally, they're not necessarily business generators. So they start in... Into the natural progression is you start at a firm, and this is a public practice. You work your way up, your article. You know, you do your thing in Canada. This is how it works. You article, then you become a manager, junior manager, senior manager, and you're just sort of fed clients. You're encouraged to bring in your own, and the carrot gets dangled that you'll become partner if you start bringing in your own. But people retire. You get clients.
[00:02:42] Dustin Serviss: There isn't this natural thing, but we're seeing a shift. And we're seeing a shift right now with AI, you know, taking some of those professional services tasks away. So being a person who can business generate and a person who can market, I think, is gonna be very valuable. And so where I'm most curious is how you help someone with... That's maybe a shyer personality type start to unlock that, not salesmanship, but energy to start acquiring things or start even upselling their own clients in a good way. Now did I give you enough there to kinda go?
[00:03:24] Sarah Dobek: Talk about that all day long. Yeah. Great. Good. You know, this is something common that comes up. One of my beliefs is that, actually, accountants are best positioned to be really good salespeople because a lot of the accountants that I work with and that enter public accounting and go into it as a profession are internal thinkers. They are people that process before they speak. They listen really well. Most of them, they take in a lot of information. And when we're in a sales situation, particularly in accounting services or any professional services, we teach something
[00:03:59] Sarah Dobek: called consultative selling, which is really the relationship comes first and understanding what the needs are of the prospect or the client that you're working with and solving those problems. It's not selling them something they don't need. Most people think sales, including myself when I worked for my first accounting firm, was icky and gross, and it was about selling them something that they didn't need. And what I learned early in my career was really that sales is all about solving problems. And when my first managing partner helped very subtly reframe that for me, it was a game changer because I went into marketing
[00:04:35] Sarah Dobek: thinking I never wanna do sales. That sounds gross to me. I remember in college being told that I want... You know, they were being asked to get sold around a sales account manager position from some pretty big companies at my alma mater. And, you know, they're like, doesn't this sound exciting? You can make two hundred phone calls a day, and I was just like, gross. That sounds horrible. That fear of rejection two hundred times a day was not something that I wanted to do. So I took a job in marketing and marketing strategy because it was the opposite end of sales that I could do with my marketing degree.
[00:05:11] Sarah Dobek: And I was like, no way am I doing this? I'm not a salesperson. I set that as an identity for myself. And within a couple years, my first managing partner had just reframed it all for me, mostly through allowing me to shadow and see what he did. He was a very natural salesperson. I found out as soon as he passed away that he could have either taken a job in accounting or a job in sales. Those were his first two job offers. Crazy information to to know after the fact. But I think it was really valuable for me, and I naturally then moved into doing sales for the company because I'm like, oh, I'm good at solving problems.
[00:05:45] Sarah Dobek: I can do that all day long. I love it, actually. Hence, the reason I've been consulting today is because I like that piece. And so that's what we really teach to people is help them to reframe the definition of sales in an accounting firm. And so when you have that and you have somebody that is very quiet and maybe doesn't see themself in that role, we can start to see where they can bring their skills and their expertise to bear for the client, and that gets them over some of those hurdles around, you know, being shy about it or not wanting to learn and be motivated to do it.
[00:06:20] Dustin Serviss: Do you remember when your mentor was sort of sharing and telling you that sort of moment? What sort of frame of... I wanna say this. Like, in life, where were you at in your life that maybe the timing was also right in your life for your confidence level?
[00:06:39] Sarah Dobek: Oh my gosh. That was early in my career, and I was hungry. I was just ready to learn and to do anything. And, you know, as I shadowed what he was doing, it first started just participating in meetings so that I could learn more about their services because I was marketing them. And I'm one of those people that likes context. I like to have information because if I can understand it, I can connect the dots a little bit more. And this is something that we advise of a lot of partners, just bring people along. As adults, we learn better by watching, and so I would just go sit in meetings with him and observe referral source meetings, client
[00:07:13] Sarah Dobek: meetings, prospect meetings. I had a special... I have a special gift where at least at the time, I was a really good golfer. Today, I have two young kids, and I don't spend enough time golfing to be good at it. But I was like a ringer for all their events, so it gave me access to meeting the clients and going to the golf audience and doing some of the things that I might not normally have been exposed to, and it allowed me to kind of learn. And I'm very observant, and I watch what people do. And I don't think it was even intentional on his part. I was just... You know, I was motivated and hungry, and I was asking for opportunities.
[00:07:45] Sarah Dobek: And so they... You know, he'd bring me along mostly to make me be quiet because I can't answer all your questions that you have that I would pose. And he's like, just come and watch. And so that's where it clicked for me as I was really young, and we try to encourage people, teach them when they come in the door because if they wait until they're a senior manager, junior manager, you know, semi partner or on that path, it's almost a little too late. We can still teach the skills, but it takes a long time to hone some of these things.
[00:08:15] Dustin Serviss: What would you say the difference in incomes is for accountants that sort of trudge along and just do the work opposed to the accountants who are exceptional at adding value to existing clients and able to increase billings and also bring in cold turkey new files. What... Is that a big spread?
[00:08:37] Sarah Dobek: I think it has to do with how you approach relationship development with your clients. Some people are very natural and they feel very comfortable with their existing clients. I've got a client right now that they've generated a lot of revenue for existing clients, but they are now at a size where we are sort of, like, we need other avenues. And they've been a little slower to market on, you know, building that external, you know, networks of people. Some people are very good at that, and they start there, but we've kind of ignored our client base. And I think it can come from different angles, but what I see is
[00:09:07] Sarah Dobek: a difference is the proactiveness in knowing the clients and having a systemized process around how we're gonna do that. We cannot be proactive with every single client that we have on our roster, but we can start to teach our people at the different levels how to do some of those things and how they can show up, you know, in those client relationships. And that extends kind of your ability, but partners always tap. There's always a capacity limit to our time and our ability to focus on things.
[00:09:37] Dustin Serviss: We're in early June twenty twenty five. What is the landscape right now for... And, again, you're coaching CPAs across the world or US based
[00:09:47] Sarah Dobek: Primarily, right now, we've actually done a little work in Canada with some groups, but primarily, most of our clients are here in the US.
[00:09:54] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. So it's similar process, though, in relationship management and helping people sort of acquire those skills to add value. What would you say in June twenty twenty five is sort of the newest or I wanna say the evolution of the practice, of the CPA practice? Five years ago, it was... In the US, you guys were already doing wealth management and retirement planning. But in Canada, it hasn't quite cut up, and there's a bit of friction with the governing bodies that doesn't allow it open door. There is some firms that do it. But where are we at today with sort of, like, the most innovative accounting
[00:10:34] Dustin Serviss: firms that you have or you're coaching or training? What are some of those traits that are emerging? Yeah.
[00:10:42] Sarah Dobek: I think what we're seeing most in the area of growth for accounting firms here right now in the US is really expansion of advisory services that go beyond compliance. So not tax, not assurance services. The fastest growing area for most accounting firms are in two spaces right now in the US. One is in client accounting services, which has been needed, but a lot of firms have formalized this.
[00:11:04] Dustin Serviss: What does
[00:11:04] Sarah Dobek: that mean? It means outsourced accounting. So think of, like, a business that has a a bookkeeper or, you know, a controller in place. We have a lot of those people in the US, I'm sure, like in Canada, that are retiring right now. There's talent shortages across the board, and so a lot of firms are performing this service for their clients, because of those staffing concerns or just the ability to find the right level of talent that they need. So this is a really quickly growing area for a lot of firms. It's also very forward looking. So a lot of our clients are focused on developing digital dashboards
[00:11:40] Sarah Dobek: and reports that help them make better decisions on their financial data as opposed to what some of them call as, like, we do bookkeeping at the end of the year because we have to, and we need to file our tax return. It's not a source of information used to manage the business, and so there's been a big transition around some of that. The other is we have a lot of firms that are growing in their state and local tax area just because of the nature of what's going on in the US and because we have fifty different states that all have different laws and regulations around that. It's continuing to be a particular area of interest, and
[00:12:15] Sarah Dobek: more and more states are are focused on what this looks like. And so that's another area of specialty, but we're seeing them innovate other services across all different areas. We've seen the first few accounting firms, large firms, acquire legal practices. So I'm interested to see what happens there. But we have everything from technology and cybersecurity to, like you alluded to, wealth management. That's been around in the US for a very long time, but we're seeing firms really branch into these other advisory services and fold in and around the companies, and they're becoming much more consultative.
[00:12:51] Sarah Dobek: In some cases, the fastest growing firms, this is a big part of their growth picture because there's just... You know, compliance services will always be there, but that's not the sticky part of the relationship with the... It's the ability to solve these other challenges they have, and that's where firms are really looking at and growing today.
[00:13:09] Dustin Serviss: Have you seen the adoption of the monthly billing instead of... You know, in April is when our taxes are due in Canada. End of April, so it's like May, boom. Here's your bill, five grand. Instead, the accountants are spreading that out over the year and saying, okay. You pay four hundred dollars a month. Call me whenever. And, you know, it just kinda recurs. And it's the same as kind of the wealth management. Kinda whoop. And then it's kinda come down again because some clients are like, I don't know why I'm paying every month. I'm not calling you. Even though the math is still the same, they're easier to just write a check at the end.
[00:13:45] Dustin Serviss: Old school clients is like, how many hours did you put in? Where now we're seeing the, you know, this migration to, like, value billing of... If I save you two hundred grand in tax, I'm gonna charge you fourteen grand for it.
[00:13:55] Sarah Dobek: Yeah. I would say some of the clients are. I know a lot of the large firms in the marketplace. I have a good friend that does a lot of those training and coaching who has trained a lot of the large firms. I would say there's, in my opinion, there's still a lot of evolution. I know we haven't seen it trickle down to the smaller firms. We've got some new entrepreneurial firms that have come out of the gate where we've got really young owners that have launched practices that are doing it that way, but the majority of the profession is still time and billing, especially on the tax side.
[00:14:25] Sarah Dobek: Where we're seeing evolution, though, is in cast services, consulting, and advisory services. Audit has been flat fee for a very long time for most firms, but I would say there's still a lot of room to move here. And it's gonna become absolutely critical for this evolution because as we see more technology come into play, the time and billing, the hourly rate is just not reflective of all of the value that's being brought to the table as we put in place things like bots to do tax returns or components of tax returns and use more technology and outsourcing. And outsourcing isn't always cheaper. It's just giving us a labor advantage.
[00:15:05] Sarah Dobek: We still have to manage those people. So I just don't think it's being reflected correctly in pricing today. And I think we're gonna see a pickup on that evolution. We're gonna have to because firms are gonna lose revenue and potentially margin if they're not paying really close attention to it.
[00:15:20] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. I wanna... I don't wanna let this go yet. What I'm seeking is for you to speak right into the heart of the up and comer accountant, maybe early partner, senior manager zone, and helping that person, like, the tool... Without giving away too much of your secret sauce, dabble in an exercise or give the listener, because the listener of this episode is definitely gonna be a CPA. So get into their ethos with an action item that they could do to make twenty twenty five their best year or at least see incremental growth in giving themselves the confidence to start sort of leveling themselves up?
[00:16:02] Sarah Dobek: Yeah. I think one thing that I would recommend that they work on is their questioning skills. One of the things that we teach early on is how to be a really good listener and how to be a really good question asker and be able to get in and understand your clients a little bit more rather than take things at face value. Now is the time to start to build those muscles with your clients. So really simple method that I teach for probing that you can remember is TED. So my favorite question to ask uses of my children and all of my clients is tell me more. Tell me more about that. Dustin, tell me more about what you guys do in wealth management.
[00:16:40] Sarah Dobek: Tell me more about that thing that you just mentioned that you're struggling with. Explain. Can you explain more about that as another form of that question or d, which is define. And you can use these really naturally in conversation, and it almost always follows something that the client says to be able to do that. And I recommend that you ask that at least three times. Because as humans, we start at a certain level in explaining something, and there's always more information behind it. And unless you ask that question of tell me more or explain more about that to me, you don't go deep enough into the conversation with the client.
[00:17:17] Sarah Dobek: And so your job as an adviser is just to be quiet and listen. Let them talk as much as possible about what it is that they're doing because you were captured so much more information when you probe around that and learn it's something that you can then solve a problem about. Right? There's so many hints that clients drop in conversations, and we just glaze over them. We don't dig into them. And when we don't do that, we can't begin to solve their problems. Once we understand the true root nature of a problem, then we can come along and help solve it, and it's not selling them something. It's, hey.
[00:17:52] Sarah Dobek: You know, one of my advisors was on a call with me earlier, and and she heard that they're trying to grow their CAS practice. And she jumped right in and said, hey. You're not using our CAS newsletter, and it seems like it might help with what you're trying to do. Have you thought about this? And it was a perfect opportunity for her to be able to link something to, you know, something that a client was telling us in that meeting. And the same happens every day with the CPAs. Right? I remember when I was early in my career as an entrepreneur, and I remember getting on the phone with my accounting firm and complaining about bookkeeping.
[00:18:25] Sarah Dobek: I hated it. I didn't wanna do it. I just did not like it. And so many times I would complain about it, and never once did my accounting firm go, hey. You know, we can help you with that. You don't have to do it. So what I ended up doing was going outside of them and hiring somebody else to help me with those services, and they could have had those services with me. And it just... You know, one of the things that glazed over their head when I complained about it. And so those are the opportunities that happen every day with the clients where they mention a pain point or a struggle or I just don't have time to get to this.
[00:19:02] Sarah Dobek: That's when you need to pick up your head and go, hey. We might be able to help you with that. That's something that I think we could do and take off your plate. What would that do for you? Oh, that would be great. You know, that gives me ten hours back a month to go do something else. That would be fantastic to do. So I think if there's one thing we could advise, that would be it. Start working on those skills and building those muscles.
[00:19:24] Dustin Serviss: No. I think that's a great action step. Solidify the story. So can you tell me an example story in your own world where you use that on a client and it led to a material advantage for them and maybe... Not lucrative, but a revenue generating situation for you, and it felt like everyone was happy. Like, it was a completely great interaction.
[00:19:53] Sarah Dobek: Yeah. I mean, I just gave you one example. I'll give you another. We work with clients all the time that talk to us about how they're struggling with growth. And this year is a little bit slower year right now as of yet in the US for most firms. There's just... With everything going on in our environment, we've got pending tax legislation. So a big focus is really just to get in to talk to our clients. One of the things when things slow down is we look at our business development skills. And so we hear all the time in those meetings, you know, our people just aren't producing. How do we get them to produce more, and how do we get them
[00:20:27] Sarah Dobek: out in the market? And so I'll usually dig into that, and I'll say, tell me more about that. Where do you feel like they're struggling? Tell me more about what they are or are not producing and how that meets your expectations, and we'll dig into that conversation. And almost always, it'll come out with an opportunity for training. We do a lot of business development training and coaching, and it'll lead into a conversation around, you know, having and delivering on those services and who should be involved in that and what that looks like. And it... It's a win win. You know, one of the clients I just got off the phone with this
[00:20:58] Sarah Dobek: morning, we did that training for them three or four years ago. And on our call today, they said, you know, we are a different firm because of the work that you did with us, are much more proactive. They have an ability to have conversations with clients, and we only did a basic level of training with them, their first level of training services. And so if it takes three to four years for you to really build and hone those muscles, they've done a lot of work themselves internally to help develop those skill sets and take the training that we did. But, you know, those are the types of things that have an impact. Right?
[00:21:29] Sarah Dobek: It was a win for us, but it's a long term win for that client to be able to develop the skills that are needed to not only service their client, but to grow their business long term.
[00:21:40] Dustin Serviss: Thank you for that. That was a gift. I'm gonna pivot a little bit to the overall wellness of accounting firms that you're seeing. CPA firm... You know, like, corporate world has evolved, especially in Canada. You know, there's more sort of... Woah. We got a little zoom in on the camera. The corporate world has evolved to more flexible, you know, working situations. You know, people can work from home that can be flexible. I had an interesting scenario the other day where we do executive private physicals. So we don't actually do them. We counsel on them. We work with a private medical firm.
[00:22:15] Dustin Serviss: And I met with a managing partner of, I'll say, a larger firm, hundred, you know, plus employees, so reasonable size. And I said to him, hey. You know, are you interested in this private health, and what's the culture like? And and he was like, isn't everybody interested in health and mental health? And although the management partner was very interested in it for himself, he was like, I think this is a new idea. This could be interesting for our firm to bring in and sort of introduce, but to date, we've never thought of it. And so I think of the just head down working. It's not an industry traditional of sort of wild ideas.
[00:22:53] Dustin Serviss: It's more conservative. What are you seeing at the firms that you work with that are a little bit wild, are a little bit more crazy? And what is the impetus for them to become a little bit more crazy or be a little more brave in their identities?
[00:23:08] Sarah Dobek: You know, it's a quite a wide spectrum. I think mental health has to be part of every consideration for every business. I will say that a lot of firms have really focused on trying to create structures that encourage balance. We still have a lot of firms that are most firms are hybrid today. Some have leaned more into back in the office, but most, you know, have a mix. There is a benefit to being in person, and we can't miss that and including to our mental health. You can stay hold up in your house all day long. I can be a hermit like the best of them if I really wanted
[00:23:44] Sarah Dobek: to, but, you know, there's just something else about getting out and being with other people for your mental health that you just can't put your finger on, but it's so important to our own joy. And that's not replaceable with video. And trust me, we are a national consulting firm with no office. Yeah. You know, like, I get that piece of it, but there's so much value. We pull our team together in person. And so a lot of our accounting firms are focused on that. Some of the most innovative things that I've heard about is we've got some large firms in the marketplace that are bringing in coaches
[00:24:15] Sarah Dobek: and mental health professionals to basically help support people inside of their organizations. I don't know if it quite hits that executive level that you're talking about of health. I'm thinking one of those functional medicine people that, like, scan your whole body and Yep. Exactly. But I think it's interesting to explore that. But there's lots of programs that some firms are putting in place to be able to encourage and support that. But I think the reality too that we have to remember is that, you know, true balance doesn't exist. I'm a big yogi, and my yoga instructors always remind me
[00:24:51] Sarah Dobek: when we're doing certain poses, like, the wobbliness leads to learning how to balance. And so I think we have to keep that in mind a little bit in business because it's never perfect. My balance some weeks is like a teeter totter.
[00:25:05] Dustin Serviss: Yep. Yeah.
[00:25:06] Sarah Dobek: One way to the other. In some weeks, it's a little bit more even keeled, and I'm on point, and I'm not wobbling as much. But it is an ebb and flow. And if we think it's gonna be something other than that, then we are telling ourselves the wrong story around what balance looks like. And so it's our responsibility as humans to understand what our boundaries are and set what is needed for our mental health wellness, but it's also an employer's job to make sure that we're respecting those founders, but it doesn't mean working a thirty hour week. Right? That's not reality for most businesses today, and so we have
[00:25:44] Sarah Dobek: to understand what that is and what drives us. And most of us in our work, when we have purpose, we have a role in what we play, and we get joy out of that as humans. I've seen that with my children. Right? I put them to work. They have chores that they do. They are happier kids when they know that they're always like doing the chore, but when they get done with it, they feel accomplished. And I think as humans in our work, we do the same thing. But sometimes as employers and trying to find that balance, I've seen firms really step off the gas pedal, and I think it's actually having a more detrimental
[00:26:17] Sarah Dobek: effect to retention because we're not encouraging people to develop in the way that we were because we are afraid to ask because of that balanced conversation.
[00:26:26] Dustin Serviss: Afraid to expect them to work harder or afraid to, like, elaborate?
[00:26:32] Sarah Dobek: I get... All the time, I hear comments around we can't ask them to do more. And I've been thinking a lot about this in my own practice and saying, like, how do we challenge people and get them to learn? You know, sometimes I do better when somebody tells me what to do. And so I have this conversation sometimes with my team members. I'm like, I'm happy to teach you and train you. And part of that teaching and training is learning how to solve those problems yourself and figure things out rather than being handed something. And I hear it from my firms all the time. We can't ask them to do more. We can't ask them to work more hours. We...
[00:27:03] Sarah Dobek: You know, they've just told us that they don't wanna do x, y, or z, and I'm like, well, we're not challenging them. They're gonna get bored, and that's where we have really complacent people. And so how do we find that... You know, work through the wobbliness of what that's gonna be as we're talking to them because it ties directly into mental health. Right? If we don't understand what our purpose is, we're not gonna get joy out of what we're doing, and then we're just gonna show up in a really bad
[00:27:27] Dustin Serviss: place. Well, on that topic... So I would argue the other side just for a second. This book is, you can't really see it, but it's why greatness cannot be planned. And, you know, along the lines of Google giving their employees and say, we're gonna, like, work at eighty percent capacity and twenty percent you can go do whatever you want, you know, within the firm and try stuff and do things. You know, reading this, I'm struggling a bit because I'm a very objectives. I've got a binder over there with my goals from two thousand ten to this year, and it's every couple weeks I read them, and it's, like, very... And it has...
[00:28:02] Dustin Serviss: I would say it's worked out. I feel good of, you know, where I am today, but reading this feels difficult to digest because it's not where I've come from. But I do buy in a little bit to... If you're gonna find, then discover, you know, be a true... Like, he calls it a treasure hunter of innovation. If that's your sort of unofficial objective to trying to find an... You know? And I look at it from an individual client level. Instead of, oh, we gotta innovate this big business. It's, hey. Every client, you go in there, you listen. You see what's going on. You're like, hey. Maybe you need an investment that isn't something we sell.
[00:28:40] Dustin Serviss: Go talk to this person. So, again, I just wanna kind of bookend the innovation conversation with you about CPAs that are innovating. Is there anything else you wanna add to, like, big innovations that you've seen in the US in the last year?
[00:28:54] Sarah Dobek: Let me start by defining my definition of innovation is improvements to what we're doing. Sometimes those are really big, and sometimes they are small steps that make a huge impact on the organization. And so in order to be a good client servicer, you've also gotta give people the time to think. And that's where I think we can take a little bit of that Google. Like, what Google's doing is giving them time to innovate. Translating that to an accounting profession is we've gotta give people time to think about service and to translate ideas. Because if we're only responding and reacting all the time, then we don't have
[00:29:27] Sarah Dobek: time to think about what could be of value to the client. It may just be an extra fifteen minutes to connect the dots and prepare for that meeting that that we're talking about? What are those two or three probing questions that we're gonna ask that might uncover something we're doing all the way to, hey. We're gonna refine how we plan meetings and how we take notes. I'll tell you the biggest innovation that was a game changer for us a number of years ago was this AI notetaker. Right? And it's in all my meetings. I actually forgot it was here until just a few minutes ago. I'm just so used to seeing, like, an extra black screen on everything.
[00:30:01] Sarah Dobek: I don't think about it, and that was super impactful. It saved us tons of time. It was super cost effective for us to add it, and it made a really huge difference. We're using it in lots of different ways in how we service our clients. And so innovation could be something as small as that, but I think having those time to think about it or go research something or explore it matters. I don't know that we would also set a policy to say we're only gonna work you at eighty percent capacity, but we do make room in our organization for those projects. Those become a priority just like serving our clients do, and
[00:30:35] Sarah Dobek: we follow-up and we hold those accountable to being able to explore those, be able to think about them, but we also prioritize them because we can't do all the ideas. In our organization, we're really good at coming up with ideas. Me, I'm the worst at it, and I tell my team, you really gotta filter me because I could come up with all the ideas in the world, but we've gotta kind of run those through a vetting system. But we've gotta have a little bit of space to do that.
[00:30:58] Dustin Serviss: I attend a program. It's in the US and Chicago and Santa Monica and Toronto called strategic coach, and Dan Sullivan is the founder. Maybe you've heard of him. But he says to his team, unless I give you this impact filter... So it's a one pager that basically is... It takes him about twelve minutes to fill out every idea kinda that's... Not just every idea, but every idea that he's... I think we should do this. He does an impact filter, and it usually filters out cause there's a certain sequence of questions where he goes, I don't really wanna take the team off everything else they're doing. Because as entrepreneurs, we find it's like...
[00:31:34] Dustin Serviss: What I learned in the program with that tool is we go to our staff, and you're like, bam. And no one knows after the fifth idea which one is kind of in hierarchy of... And then they become immune to, oh, he's an idea guy. Just put that at the side of my desk. And you're like, where the hell is that? Why isn't that done? And they're like, I didn't know it was actually a good... That you actually wanted to see it through because you poo, you know, half the ideas. Where I wanna go right now, you mentioned... So listener, you can't see the screen, but Fathom is the note taker that Sarah's using. Can you help us understand the sequence that you
[00:32:10] Dustin Serviss: do with these notes? I don't use Fathom, but I... We use other things. But tell us how this sort of works and how you integrate it into your tech stack.
[00:32:18] Sarah Dobek: Yeah. So it started with just the number of shared meetings we have, but we're an EOS organization, entrepreneur operating system. And so one of the things that we do is we do recaps, and we do them for our clients. It helps in all the work that we do in our outsource marketing and sales coaching to say, here's what the action items were agreed to. Here's just a reminder because everyone's human, and we forget, me included. And so we were spending a fair amount of time. We had quite a robust process around what this was, and I am a terrible note taker when I'm facilitating a conversation.
[00:32:52] Sarah Dobek: And I used to have people sitting in the meetings, and that was their responsibility, was to help me take notes because I just couldn't focus on both things because I was too focused on the conversation, which is sometimes where you want people. And so when I started testing it, I usually trial a lot of our technology, depends on what it is. Before we bring in, it just was great. It would come up with the notes. It would come up with the action items. I had to make very few edits. And so I started using it just for that purpose. But then when I found out over time is now we have this this collective of information.
[00:33:25] Sarah Dobek: And so I found that as we got six months, a year into this, I was going back to notes from previous conversations with clients or meetings that we would do when we are running a project to understand it. And we could really use that information on a marketing side to help come up with tone or just revisit conversations. The client didn't have to repeat themselves. Our team was using it pretty heavily, and today, we're even using it to capture training. So recently, I've been going back to a lot of those notes as we're training new people on how to deliver on our services, and I'll pull sample
[00:33:56] Sarah Dobek: meeting notes from clients to say, here's how we run a meeting. You know, here's an example of this, and we're actually using it to help enhance training, develop process documents, you know, develop other materials and information. I'll use it when I'm delivering on training to say, you know, pulling it into AI. How can we be improving on things, capturing information? It's just been really powerful to see the evolution of that. It's been great in our sales process too. We'll use it with prospects, and we'll develop our, you know, kind of our executive summaries off of that.
[00:34:29] Sarah Dobek: And we can get the proposals turned around much quicker because we're getting some of that key information from the meetings, and we don't have to spend as much time synthesizing it. It's not an end all be all. We review the notes. We don't just kind of post and forget about it and let AI do all the work, but it's getting us, you know, into that process where it used to take us thirty minutes to do a recap for a client for a typical hour meeting and get that turned around. It, you know, it takes fifteen minutes or less today to get that out the door, and it's a lower mental burden on the team.
[00:35:00] Sarah Dobek: When you have to edit something versus come up with it, you know, that carries a different mental load. And so it's just much easier for our team to execute on that.
[00:35:08] Dustin Serviss: I had a question for you. A little bit intricate, but listener can handle it. You got multiple people on your team. They all look like super... Superstars. You all have different ChatGPT accounts, maybe or maybe not. But No.
[00:35:22] Sarah Dobek: We don't. We have a business account.
[00:35:23] Dustin Serviss: Okay. You have a business account. So is there a standard prompt that you use that everybody uses when they take those notes to put them in a proposal?
[00:35:33] Sarah Dobek: We don't have to do that. Fathom does it all for you. And, actually, Copilot too. We've been trialing Copilot because I've had a few meetings on Teams where we couldn't get our note taker in. Fathom and Microsoft don't work as seamlessly as it does with Zoom.
[00:35:45] Dustin Serviss: Gotcha.
[00:35:46] Sarah Dobek: So it'll do it for you. So what we do is we simply... And Fathom actually will help put an email together for you. We edit it because it always sounds a little more cheery than I come to market as. And we edit it. My assistant actually helps with that. She's fantastic, and she, like, literally sets it up in my email. I go in and I review it. I edit what I want, and I get it sent off. It takes minutes for me to get those out to clients, which is fantastic, and she can play a role in that. So you don't have to have a prompt for this tool. Some of the tools you might, but the technology is just getting much more seamless.
[00:36:19] Sarah Dobek: We can actually chat within Fathom too and ask it questions, and it can look across a certain number of meetings and pull that information or say, I remember talking about this, but I don't remember when can you look at these, you know, this month of meetings, and can you tell me, you know, what that was? And it'll pull, and you can talk with it, and it'll give you information back from those transcripts.
[00:36:41] Dustin Serviss: Very cool. Thank you, Sarah. Was there anything else you're most excited about you wanna share with the listenership?
[00:36:46] Sarah Dobek: Oh, gosh. There's so much technology we use. We're a marketing consulting organization, growth consulting, and our tech stack is massive. I don't even know if I could go into all of them, but I would say just leveraging automation as much as possible. We're doing it constantly. I think we have conversations once a month in our team meetings about how to streamline something, and we're paying attention to the tools and the features that come out in the technology we use. And so if you're not having conversations about those new features and how you can work them into your everyday, that's a place that I would start.
[00:37:20] Dustin Serviss: Awesome. Only because we're talking about it right now. Is there any... Because I find this with our tech stack. It gets... It just sort of balloons up because you get excited about something, and then it's just, oh, it's connected to my Google account. And I just, yep. Yep. Accept. And next thing you know, you've got subscriptions, and I've got upgrades on subscriptions that I might not need the upgrades anymore. So how often do you ever go back and sort of audit what tech stack you're using and what to get rid of?
[00:37:52] Sarah Dobek: Every year, we look at it. I'm actually evaluating right now. We love Fathom, but Copilot's note taking with Microsoft Teams has come a long way. And so that's one of the things on my radar right now is do we still need Fathom? Could we transition to Copilot? Because we're already in the Microsoft suite. We're already paying for some of the things that come with it. I haven't made a decision on it, but we are constantly looking at when we have team members that come with new ideas. Hey. I heard about this technology. It might be something we wanna explore. We'll explore it, but we'll also look at our current technology and see what
[00:38:24] Sarah Dobek: features we're not using that we might be able to use. Are they comparable? Can they do what we need it to do? If the answer is yes or pretty close to it, then we try to stay with the technology we have because to your point, it can get so expensive adding in some of these other things. We're evaluating other software that we use right now because I think we can solve some of the things that we need to get through ChatGPT or Copilot. And, you know, again, how do we lean on those things and not have to pay an additional software expense? But it's an annual review.
[00:38:59] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. I think as a small medium sized business owners, they are still pretty close to the numbers. As you get larger firms, you get departments and whatever. But I'm speaking from my own experience. It used to be, like, thirty to forty percent of your expenses was wages. Oh, when you look at the tech stack and you go, holy shit. It's like tens of thousands a year, a month, whatever, and you're like, wow. This is a lot. But the wages should be coming down, which is a little scary.
[00:39:27] Sarah Dobek: Necessary. No?
[00:39:27] Dustin Serviss: Okay. Then explain that.
[00:39:29] Sarah Dobek: I still need great people. My people can typically handle a little bit more, so my leverage looks a little different today with some of the technology. We can get things turned around more quickly, so the workload that they can handle, their capacity looks different in their assignments. But I would not say my wages are going down. My wages are going up. If you've got good people and they're not going up, you're doing something wrong
[00:39:53] Dustin Serviss: Right.
[00:39:53] Sarah Dobek: With what that is. Our technology fees are as well, but, again, with that fine eye of what do we really need today versus what we needed before. And I'm... You know, I have no problem letting go of technology if it's not working for us or if something we can streamline it with something else. You know, there's a balance between the labor is still... Wages are still a big portion of our expenses as a business. But we're in a service based business. Our people are our product. So while technology plays a big role in it, it's not the only factor for us.
[00:40:25] Dustin Serviss: Yeah. Sarah, where can people find you in your business?
[00:40:28] Sarah Dobek: Oh, you can find me at innovatus dot com. That's I n o v a u t u s dot com, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. All the other social channels too, but primarily LinkedIn.
[00:40:39] Dustin Serviss: Those... That's the one. Thanks a lot for coming on the show today.
[00:40:42] Sarah Dobek: Great. Thanks so much for having me, Dustin.