“we didn’t plan to build a 100-person firm. we just wanted to work for ourselves.”
this is a preview. the complete video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to pro members | go pro here
sponsored by tax season readiness: practical steps for a smoother busy season: see today’s special offer
subscribe to 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 podcasts anywhere: apple, google/youtube, spotify, iheart, deezer, amazon music, audible, player fm, audacy, rss
big 4 transparency
by dominic piscopo, cpa
for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
what does it take to build one of canada’s fastest-growing cloud accounting firms? in this episode of the big 4 transparency, host dominic piscopo sits down with mike pinkus, co-founder of connectcpa and host of the growth tales podcast, to unpack the bootstrapped, contrarian story behind connectcpa’s rise to over 100 staff and a fully remote, recurring revenue model long before it was trendy.
more dominic piscopo | more private equity | more pay & compensation
founded in 2014 by pinkus and co-founder lior zehtser, connectcpa was born from a desire for more autonomy – both personally and professionally. “we just wanted to work for ourselves,” pinkus says. “everything else was a byproduct.” yet within a few years, they found themselves leading a national, cloud-native firm with a deep bench of accounting, tax, and finance professionals serving scaling businesses across north america.
the firm’s early bet on recurring revenue and cloud infrastructure paid off, but the growth came with growing pains. as the client base exploded, the firm took on nearly everything that came through the door until the operational costs caught up. pinkus openly shares how a lack of data visibility and over-hiring led to margin pressure and process gaps, eventually prompting the firm to hit pause, install time tracking for its accounting team, and rework its client roster toward a more focused icp.
sponsored by tax season readiness: practical steps for a smoother busy season: see today’s special offer
pinkus also reflects on what it means to build culture in a remote-first firm. with a team distributed across canada, connectcpa relies on slack rituals, monthly social events, and shared wins to foster connections. and when it comes to compensation, the firm pays equally regardless of geography. “continuity is king in professional services,” pinkus explains. “if you pay people well and treat them well, they’ll stay.”
the conversation also spotlights pinkus’ growth tales podcast, which profiles under-the-radar founders with impressive (and often unconventional) stories. it’s an antidote to the unicorn worship of silicon valley. “the world doesn’t need another business podcast,” pinkus admits. “but it does need more real stories of people who built something great without raising a dime or being on techcrunch.”
9 key takeaways
- connectcpa launched in 2014—before “cloud accounting” was mainstream—and leaned into recurring revenue from day one. that head start compounded into real scale.
- cas evolved into a “full finance function.” they began with compilations/reviews, then pivoted (2016–17) to deliver the whole finance stack (payables, payroll, bookkeeping, accounting, advisory). that shift clarified the ideal customer profile (icp).
- it took ~4 years to hit $1m revenue; the next $1m came in ~6 months. crossing that first threshold created momentum, a team, and culture—then they optimized.
- they ditched expensive office space, hired nationally, and built an intentional culture: monthly hangouts, “sip & share,” and slack “water cooler.” they also introduced summer fridays off—small signals that matter in distributed teams.
- lead volume was never the problem; training, onboarding to “the connectcpa way,” and maintaining deep client relationships were. they even throttled growth at times to protect customer experience.
- a custom data warehouse + dashboards (fed by clockify, crm, etc.) gave visibility into client-level gross margin, ltv, nrr, nps, and team efficiency. crucially, they added time tracking to accounting/tax only ~2 years ago—then used the data to reprice and reshape the book.
- they exited misfit work (standalone t1s/personal returns, accounting without the full finance function) and tightened icp. revenue kept growing annually, but at a healthier, more profitable pace.
- they pay similarly regardless of location (as a small business), favoring perceived fairness and retention over geo-based bands—acknowledging bigger enterprises might need different structures.
- meet clients where they are—technically and culturally—no suits, zoom first, automation-minded processes, and business acumen beyond tax minimization. the goal is to reduce fear around numbers and improve decision visibility for founders.
more about mike pinkus
mike pinkus has always had a passion for working with founders and business owners. prior to co-founding connectcpa, pinkus worked for pwc in the private client services group and as an investment associate for a private equity firm. pinkus has a bba from the schulich school of business and is a cpa. currently, he is the co-founder at connectcpa, a company that provides a ‘plug and play’ finance and accounting department to scaling businesses. in his spare time, pinkus loves spending time with his wife and two daughters. he is also an avid golfer and likes to pretend that the highest score wins.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
dominic piscopo (00:01.058)
hello and welcome to the big 4 transparency podcast. i’m joined today by mike pinkus, the co-founder of connectcpa, another fellow canadian on the podcast joining me here and host of the growth tales podcast. welcome to the pod, mike.
mike pinkus (00:15.759)
thanks for having me dominic.
dominic piscopo (00:17.314)
yeah, my pleasure. so we’ve been chatting a whole bunch just in general. connectcpa has worked with big four transparency. so we had some convos around that front. and then i’ve seen you, you know, in the content game, putting out some great valuable stuff. and, you know, i love talking to people who are who putting themselves out there and dug a little bit deeper on connect cpa. and you guys have had phenomenal growth over the last i mean, ever since you’ve launched pretty much. so for some context, when did you start
connect cpa and where are you guys at today?
mike pinkus (00:49.861)
yeah, we started back in 2014, which back then there was no such thing as cloud accounting. in fact, there’s about two or three firms that say north america that started the emergence of what’s now coined to be cloud accounting. now it’s like second nature to be on quickbooks online zero in the main cloud platforms in the smb space. but at 2014 is when we got our start.
dominic piscopo (01:14.254)
i love it. and fast forward to today, you are over 100 employees, correct?
mike pinkus (01:20.005)
yeah, we’re just under 120 people and it’s been, yeah, it’s been quite wild because we never anticipated, we didn’t go in with the goal ever of growing to this size. uh, it was a business that my co-founder, lior and i just wanted to kind of break the mold of a traditional accounting firm and see where it went. but, uh, it’s been a wild ride and it’s been a decade. so yeah, things compound.
dominic piscopo (01:45.752)
that’s awesome. yeah, i mean, congrats to both. like, i guess, from that not being what you were even aiming for, like, what were you thinking in the early days when you decided to choose this? like, were you like, maybe we could do a million in revenue or like, were there kind of like benchmarks that you’re gunning towards?
mike pinkus (02:04.397)
that’s a great question. when we started, it was actually even simpler. i got together with lior. we went to his condo at the time. we were in our late 20s. the biggest thing was just we wanted to work for ourselves. and that was just due to the experiences we’d had in our career up until that point. and the general thesis we had was we were going to migrate traditional desktop
accounting platform type work over to the cloud. and, and we also wanted to create a business model that recur in revenue. and so the two main tenants of the business model were, hey, everything’s by the hour. you typically have an adversarial relationship with your accountant where you call them up. you’re on the clock at 500 an hour. they’re asking about your kids. you’re like, don’t ask about my kids. i just want to get straight to it.
dominic piscopo (02:35.596)
okay.
dominic piscopo (02:55.811)
yeah.
mike pinkus (02:56.909)
we wanted a better relationship with our clients. we wanted to add more value. we wanted them to have predictability in budgeting. we wanted to implement technology, but the core tenants were that recurring revenue piece and the fact that we wanted to run cloud-based because we were thinking three, four, five years out from building an all cloud practice, that data would become important and then you’d have api connections and other things would spawn from it. but yeah, we had no idea.
dominic piscopo (03:22.72)
mm-hmm.
mike pinkus (03:25.027)
how fast it would grow or where things would go from.
dominic piscopo (03:28.394)
interesting. so you were very focused on recurring revenue early on. was that kind of essentially what we would classify as like a cas practice now?
mike pinkus (03:38.693)
yes. so those early days were traditional, what was back then called notice to reader, now compilation and the least in canada. it was a notice to reader practice where we were doing actually, we were fully licensed. so we were doing reviews here and there, but it eventually became an accounting practice, so to speak, without like minimal bookkeeping or
what we would coin finance function type work, meaning payroll, payables, that sort of thing. it was mainly accounting. it wasn’t until about 2016-17 that there was a bit of a pivot in the model to become a full finance function for a scaling business.
dominic piscopo (04:21.142)
okay. and you were in your twenties when you started that, correct? i think you’re in your late twenties, you had said.
mike pinkus (04:26.711)
yeah, not anymore.
dominic piscopo (04:29.12)
no, no. but how did you know that you were ready? because again, that’s relatively early in the journey. and not even all of that time had been spent in accounting necessarily since you graduated. so what was the point at which you were like, you know what, i think i can go and do this out.
mike pinkus (04:50.083)
i actually didn’t know. the best way of putting it is we were incredibly nervous about the technical side of like we were inexperienced, i’d say from a technical side. now that being said, we did a few years each, lior and i in big four. we actually met at pwc back in 2007. so right before the market crash. we then went, i worked for three other small firms other than pwc and
some of them were with tax specialty and working directly with partners. so i did, i’d say i, i had, i knew enough to be dangerous to work with small smbs back in 2014 or what was our icp back then. but the main thing was that i developed a network through my career up to that point of meeting people. and so we had enough to generate what was a small base that could potentially replace our income. and so.
dominic piscopo (05:33.102)
mm-hmm.
mike pinkus (05:47.553)
it was more about the risk of lior and i were like, let’s do this and see. were excited about the cloud. we’d met a few people overseas, like in australia, that were already doing this. and we’re like, we can bring this to north america and let’s see if it works. and so the quick answer is that we didn’t know if we were ready. we just thought there’s no right time.
dominic piscopo (05:57.559)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (06:09.262)
that’s really cool. i love to hear that. and prior to even starting that practice, you had pivoted to private equity, i believe, right? yeah. after the, the accounting time, which to me is funny because, know, everyone in private equity, all the cool kids are getting accounting firms and you actually left to just go start one. was there anything you learned in private equity that like made you see like, my god, this is such a great business opportunity or like, did that help prepare you?
mike pinkus (06:28.492)
yes.
mike pinkus (06:38.949)
it’s funny because you, i think steve jobs has a quote, something like you connect the dots or the pebbles after the fact, looking back and seeing how those things influenced your career. it’s kind of that scenario. i majored in finance and business school. i wanted to be an investment banker. i ended up joining pwc because there was rumblings, economy was not
dominic piscopo (06:50.413)
yeah.
mike pinkus (07:07.429)
doing that well and lo and behold, 2008 hit and people were right. like there was rumblings that something wasn’t perfectly there. we were like riding a really, really hot market going into 2007. and i knew having a cpa would be the most solid backup plan ever. and so that’s how i kind of met lior, my co-founder. i chose the path that i am going to get a cpa because it’s the best fallback. finance isn’t a fallback plan. like you can get a cfa.
dominic piscopo (07:15.63)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (07:29.464)
mm-hmm.
mike pinkus (07:37.509)
um, i did start the cfa path actually, and, pass the first level and i was going to go for the next level, but i got the cpa and when i ended up in private equity, uh, it wasn’t what i thought it was going to be. i thought i was going to be on the phones doing deals and, uh, but i was an associate, right? so even though it’s great pay when you’re an associate, it’s crazy long hours. uh, you’re doing a lot of financial modeling and my excel skills became incredible the first day, by the way.
they like get rid of your mouse and you have to start navigating itself with just the keyboard. so yeah, i took a lot of that with me and working hard and diligently and long hours, all that stuff i think it carried with me. and so i have no regrets about my path up until then, but, looking back on it, like the next generation, they’re looking for balance and all those things. and i was looking for, i was looking more for flexibility than balance. wasn’t long hours that bothered me.
dominic piscopo (08:09.577)
that’s real. ok. yeah, ok.
dominic piscopo (08:30.893)
yeah.
mike pinkus (08:35.609)
i just wanted more control of time. so that’s kind of what led back to the entrepreneurial route.
dominic piscopo (08:41.774)
okay, interesting. and was there any part of your experience that you look back on, just in general with what you did before of like, my god, thank goodness i did that, like that really prepared me like, whether it be switching from the large firm like from working in big four towards a small firm or anything like that? was there anything that you think was particularly helpful in there?
mike pinkus (09:02.979)
i think all of it was, think starting big four was probably the most helpful thing. and i’m not saying that, by the way, it wasn’t where i honed my skills in accounting because you’re in a very narrow, i was in an audit group, very narrow focus, but i met so many people in those first two years who i’m still friends with to this day, who we still network with to this day. i think the big four really sets you up for understanding what it’s like to
dominic piscopo (09:04.685)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (09:17.4)
yeah.
mike pinkus (09:32.965)
work with big businesses where they’re coordinated and organized. you’re dealing with cfos and all that stuff. so you learn how to communicate because you’re dealing with more senior people than you from the time you’re like, you’re like a baby going in there and they put you in front of like senior people at these companies and they’re big companies. and so you just learn how to communicate. um, but i’ve, all of it was valuable. going to a small firm, it was the complete opposite. had to get your hands dirty. they throw everything but the kitchen sink at you.
dominic piscopo (09:46.563)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (10:00.046)
yeah.
mike pinkus (10:02.102)
and so i think both are incredibly valuable and i was thankful i did both. and even private equity, like learning finance is something, it’s a skillset that most accountants don’t naturally have. it’s a very different skillset. and now when you’re doing forecasting and modeling, yes, accountants are known for their numbers, but there, there’s levels of difference. if you’ve worked in banking or you’ve worked in finance to understand financial modeling, understanding how forecasts work.
dominic piscopo (10:17.208)
yeah.
mike pinkus (10:32.075)
it’s a very, very different skill set and aptitude. and so i think was all, all of it was serendipitous and lucky that it happened and none of it planned, but i think all of it was equally valuable. like i’m thankful i did all those things to be honest.
dominic piscopo (10:32.526)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (10:41.774)
mm-hmm.
dominic piscopo (10:48.31)
yeah, cool. and then okay, so going back to the journey of when you started the firm here, you mentioned that like within your network, you had enough kind of connections to set up a base of revenue. did you like canvas them ahead of time of like, hey, i’m thinking about doing this, would you join or you just kind of like went for it launched and then and then reached out?
mike pinkus (11:10.733)
no, like what initially happened was i had a gap from, and this is something i don’t recommend to people. i resigned from a small accounting firm and then had a bunch of time off. so during that time off, before the year and i linked up, i just started making calls to the people that, that i knew from like, again, linkedin was the main source. i had met a bunch of people through my career up to that point and people started making intros and it wasn’t anything significant.
i should mention lior was already out on his own. so he was already building an accounting practice and it was kijiji and just like, like that’s how we started. it was like literally grassroots reaching out to people and bringing on t1s basic, it was bring anything that hits you. like it, that’s how it was. funny enough is we didn’t really have enough to supplement their income. so.
dominic piscopo (11:43.308)
okay, cool.
dominic piscopo (11:52.962)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (12:02.349)
yeah.
mike pinkus (12:09.017)
leeran and got approached by a small firm that does condo audits. and it’s like, hey, you guys came out of big four and you have review experience and audit experience. would you want to do this? like to be a reviewer, to bridge our gap on capacity. and we’re like, yeah, we’ll do it. and so we even did that for our first, that stopped after about year one, but yeah, that’s how long it went.
dominic piscopo (12:14.464)
okay.
dominic piscopo (12:24.246)
ok, cool. yeah.
dominic piscopo (12:31.864)
you’re not honestly the only person who’s talked about that of like their firm starting via also like subcontracts to other firms like very legitimate way of doing it. and it’s like you’re kind of half getting yourself a job, but like not entirely with the with the flexibility, which is what you’re looking for. right. so.
mike pinkus (12:39.961)
yeah.
mike pinkus (12:49.861)
for sure. it can hurt you if you don’t eventually get focused and narrow, but in year one and two, you do whatever you’ve got to do to survive and keep the doors open. and that was one way of doing it.
dominic piscopo (12:54.894)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (13:03.566)
that’s cool. and then from there, how long did it take until you actually kind of like established like a baseline of, of, you know, revenue where you were kind of comfortable and felt like you had replaced your previous income and weren’t, you know, worrying about that too much.
mike pinkus (13:19.695)
things moved really fast because we were effectively building a marketplace that didn’t exist. like there wasn’t a competition in the cloud space. so the lead volume was like crazy. the problem is we were very inexperienced. we didn’t understand anything about client selection and verticalization and process organization.
dominic piscopo (13:29.015)
right.
mike pinkus (13:45.605)
none of that. like we would just take on whatever hit us. we were in a million sales meetings. what i do remember is going into year two, i think we grew like two or 300 % and that continued for the first two to three years. but those aren’t big numbers. i remember it took four years to get to a million in revenue. and ironically, the next million i think took six months from that. and so…
dominic piscopo (13:47.479)
yep.
dominic piscopo (14:02.413)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (14:10.637)
okay.
mike pinkus (14:11.657)
so like the speed once we crossed a million in revenue really, really accelerated. but it took four years to get to that first where i’d say we were like a business, meaning we had employees, we had a team, we were building culture, like it was at the four year mark, we’re like, okay, we’re, we’re probably the doors are going to stay open. and like, we actually have a bit of a company. and let’s figure out how to make this bigger.
dominic piscopo (14:37.548)
that’s cool. and were you remote right from the get go?
mike pinkus (14:42.775)
no. we were remote. we only did maybe a year, year and a half. so my funny enough, so my, dad was in a very different business where he had a commercial space. was like a small little commercial space and he was super helpful and offered to rent it to us for like below market rent to, to be able to be in there. and we were a really small team and we took what was
dominic piscopo (14:43.968)
okay.
mike pinkus (15:12.725)
not designed to be an accounting office in all honesty, it was like more a commercial space, like a warehouse in the back. and we ran out of there with like three, four employees. and the minute we started growing, we were like, okay, we’re going to get north of like seven, eight people. we went remote. we went quasi first, but i’d say a year and a half in like 2015, 16, we adopted a fully remote culture and leaned fully into it. but the tools weren’t there back then.
dominic piscopo (15:27.758)
yeah. okay.
mike pinkus (15:41.443)
so we were in skype, not zoom or teams. were in, we didn’t have slack. were like, we were just like completely hacking it because the technology had not been there yet, but we learned how to run remotely. and so yeah, it was early on.
dominic piscopo (15:41.965)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (15:53.164)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (15:56.888)
yeah, i’m just picturing a bunch of people like, you know, very professional operation running off of like msn messenger, you got like statuses and stuff. yeah, that’s cool. i love that. and was that like a very intentional decision at the time of like, we want to be remote because x, y and z it unlocks scale, it unlocks, you know, client opportunities, or was it just like, my god, how much is office space and you just kind of defaulted to it? like, what was that decision like?
mike pinkus (16:03.589)
you’ve got it.
mike pinkus (16:24.005)
a bit of column a, a little bit of column b. was both. rent was insane in toronto. really, there was a few factors. one was, first of all, i loved the in-office culture. we used to do mini-putt golf tournaments inside of the office where we’d putt from one end of the office to the other. for amazon gift cards, it built culture. there was a lot i loved about it. but we realized, the minute we realized we could hire talent outside of ontario,
dominic piscopo (16:27.148)
yeah, okay.
mike pinkus (16:54.477)
that’s where we’re like, okay, there’s talent on the east coast, on the west coast. we’re not gonna be an all-toronto team. and then yes, rent is insanely expensive. and so those two factors are the main drivers.
dominic piscopo (17:08.14)
nice. yeah, i have a couple. mean, there’s a canadian firm that’s top of mind that has come to me being like, hey, we’re looking for for talent and you being in toronto, this is a different, you know, decision matrix and them but they were in a super small town. but they’ve scaled this to hundreds of employees. and, and they’re like, hey, we’re looking for help with talent. i’m like, hey, like the answer is you’ve tapped out your area. like, like, you know, unless you’re gonna start paying. yeah. and i was like, unless you’re gonna start
mike pinkus (17:22.213)
mm-hmm.
wow.
mike pinkus (17:31.749)
everyone works through you and your area.
dominic piscopo (17:37.07)
paying salaries for someone to take a bush plane in, like you got it, you have to go, you know, and open the doors up to remote because that’s can be a real stopper for talent versus you being a remote first firm. i’m actually curious to hear like, you know, there’s always some constraint on growth for you was that more on the talent side or was it more on the demand side?
mike pinkus (17:39.992)
you
mike pinkus (18:00.197)
was, i’d say the talent side for sure because, and not necessarily finding people like what you, you naturally think it’s training, explaining core values, adopting the connect cpa way, introducing clients and yeah, all that stuff. like the one thing that’s difficult about service is if you’re growing quickly, it’s hard to develop deep relationships. and that’s why
dominic piscopo (18:04.78)
okay.
mike pinkus (18:27.545)
like there have been times we’ve even slowed things down to go deeper because at the end of the day, we exist because we’re obsessed with customer experience. it doesn’t mean we’ve always been amazing at customer experience. we’ve had times where we’ve had to improve, get into deep conversations with customers, but our focus has always been to get better and better and that’s never ever changed. so even though the business has gone up, gone down, there’s been things that we’ve had to ride over this decade.
dominic piscopo (18:50.498)
mm-hmm.
mike pinkus (18:56.313)
being obsessed with customer experience has always been there. and so that’s always what our focus has been throughout this.
dominic piscopo (19:03.49)
yeah. and that’s, think something that’s, you know, sorely missing in a lot of accounting is, the customer experience. like, you know, i never actually pursued this, but after i had left deloitte, i started picking up some crypto tax clients on the side and they were just blown away that there was an accountant who was willing to work with them in discord, right? like, and, that was the difference. and i, that was a thing i could have very, very easily scaled. mean, to a certain point, but
mike pinkus (19:18.37)
yeah
mike pinkus (19:23.587)
amazing.
dominic piscopo (19:31.308)
i just didn’t want to put all my eggs in the, you know, in the bored ape yacht club basket, understandably. but, so, you know, i decided that’s not what i wanted to pursue. and that was at the same time as big for transparency and all that. but even just like for them to see someone who’s like, i’m going to come meet you where you’re at. was like mind blowing. and that was the entire sales pitch. like they were like, cool, you’re on here. i’m in. and so what are some of the things that you’ve done kind of along that vein to like, you know, reflect
being obsessed with the customer experience.
mike pinkus (20:02.499)
yeah, so similar to like your story of discord. mean, that’s a perfect example of meeting. first of all, when we started when we started connectcpa, we realized right away we’re like, wait a minute, like these entrepreneurs are they’re fearful over their numbers and keeping the doors open and cash flow. and it’s normally a non core competency of a founder. so they’re if they’re meeting their accountant once a year.
yes, they trust them, but are they really helping them guide decision making and increasing financial visibility? and we realized they weren’t. and so we’re like, we’re not going to be dressing in suits. we’re going like to your point, we’re going to jump on a video chat. we’re going to look just like them. we’re going to understand technology the way they understand technology, meaning that when we’re looking at bookkeeping procedures or ap or ar.
dominic piscopo (20:43.278)
mm-hmm.
mike pinkus (20:58.425)
we wanna talk about automation. we wanna talk about process flow. we wanna talk about how we optimize things. and if you’re talking to a saas company or an e-commerce company, people are in the know of what’s going on. they understand software, they understand business, and i feel like that is what the equivalent of like your situation where like, this is refreshing. like they’re meeting me where it’s the same thing. like don’t drive to my office, just jump on zoom. let’s talk about.
dominic piscopo (21:11.341)
yeah.
mike pinkus (21:26.681)
what’s on your mind, what are your pain points in your business? and you wanna connect with a company that understands all the facets of what you’re going through. so it’s not just, am i minimizing taxes? okay, there’s a lot of accountants in the world, but it’s having the business acumen to go and say, what are the things that are keeping you up at night? like, i can’t make a decision on who to hire next, because i don’t have visibility into my cashflow. or i’m spending a fortune on bookkeeping because nothing is automated.
and i have five people doing this and it’s all manual. these are the things that were coming out of conversations. and so i guess what it came down to is we started from day one operating like the companies we would attract. and that’s kind of what created that bond really early on and still to this day is why someone would select us over going to a more traditional environment.
dominic piscopo (21:58.317)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (22:18.638)
mm hmm. no, i really like that. and i find like when you’re having these conversations with people and actually like really getting close to them, it ends up extending far beyond even just like what their definition of an accountant might be right. like, i know just recently another canadian firm out east, you know, he was like, my client, like, there’s a complete fire going on here. and it comes down to like, they lost their whole finance accounting team.
and so he actually ended up sourcing an employee for them through me to fix that problem, which great. mean, it was someone who got laid off from pwc got placed through big four transparency, super happy about that. but like, you know, through having those conversations, he was actually able to like genuinely solve the problem where he’s like, yeah, you need, you need a junior accountant on staff. like you cannot be just paying me to do all this. right. and so i find like it does take that level of connection to people to actually like
be able to dig deeper and go to the root cause of the issue, right? yeah. i had one more question about the remote team. you’re very heavy on culture and you talk about that a lot. what are you doing to really implement and drive home a culture at connectcpa and what are some of the kind of key things that you’re trying to instill in people who are working at your firm? and yeah, how do you achieve that in a remote environment?
mike pinkus (23:17.359)
absolutely.
mike pinkus (23:42.529)
it’s tough and you have to work at it. and every month we have a company hangout where we play games and do fun things culturally. also have, we used to do a retreat every year and something we have to be better at. and, a big part of that is a finding the time and b finding the budget and it’s complex in order to do that. but the key for remote is you aren’t meeting in person. there is no physical water cooler.
and so we have water cooler in our, as a slack channel. so exactly. so you have, you have slack, which is like where you build a lot of, a lot of, guess, connections, zoom calls are obviously a big part of it, but we intentionally schedule things that are non-work from the company hangout. have a sip and share thing that we have where we just get together, grab a beer, a glass of wine and just.
dominic piscopo (24:15.362)
yeah, yeah, i had that at my last company. i like that. yeah.
dominic piscopo (24:33.518)
mm-hmm.
mike pinkus (24:41.775)
talk and it’s normally midday during the week. so it’s not even like a friday thing. and so you need things like that to keep people engaged because it is hard sometimes being alone and being in your office and being remote also like big 4 transparency, you guys have helped us out related to, we don’t have a pulse always on everything going on, especially on the data front. like when we’re talking about like our salaries and all these things within our organization.
dominic piscopo (25:08.024)
yeah.
mike pinkus (25:11.353)
because we’re remote, you’re not in physical conversations with people in an office where you’re just going to hear more things through the pipeline. you have to intentionally see things out, meaning zoom people, slack people. and so you don’t hear those things every day from salaries to what are the trends happening at at big four? what are the trends happening in the mid-market? what are other companies doing related to work-life balance? so one of the things we adopted was fridays off all summer.
dominic piscopo (25:23.32)
yeah.
mike pinkus (25:40.569)
we were one of the first to do that and it’s a huge cultural thing. but still we have to keep our ear to the ground to hear what’s going on. like are other firms that we compete with, are they adopting this? are they doing something we’re not doing related to benefits, related to comp structure, related to all these things. so the quick answer to all of this is that it’s difficult. it’s always been difficult.
dominic piscopo (25:54.306)
mm-hmm.
mike pinkus (26:06.533)
but we do those little things intentionally to try to cultivate culture.
dominic piscopo (26:06.926)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (26:11.906)
yeah, yeah, i the last place i was at again, like was was a remote first place. and to me, like the company, the company on site or off site or whatever it ends up being, depending on what city you’re in, i found was super important for us to a lot of people that, you know, to tell me how much taller i seemed on zoom than than i am in person, which not not the not the best first impression of coworkers, but
mike pinkus (26:33.049)
yeah, i get the same thing.
dominic piscopo (26:39.438)
but yeah, no, and they managed to, again, like i was saying, like really instill a strong culture. what’s tricky to me about, you know, running a remote first practice out of toronto. also just in terms of salary bands is my recommendation for people when they’re setting salaries for that type of place for, for us listeners, again, market dynamics wise, i’d be like out of running a firm out of new york is, is you don’t necessarily need to be fishing for talent in the very high cost of labor markets.
mike pinkus (27:08.869)
mm-hmm.
dominic piscopo (27:09.216)
and so there’s almost this thing of you being in toronto. well, there’s an incentive for people outside of toronto to take those jobs, right? so it’s a little bit tricky. yeah. yeah, for sure.
mike pinkus (27:18.743)
absolutely. you need to know the data though. and that’s how we got in contact originally. you need to know the data because in full transparency, we pay people regardless of location. don’t, like a lot of firms adjust based, like if you’re in new york, you’re making more. if you’re in california, you’re making more. if you happen to be in idaho, maybe it’s like lower. in here in canada, like you would expect,
dominic piscopo (27:36.417)
yeah.
mike pinkus (27:47.525)
toronto to be a higher salary grid than east coast or even areas of the west coast. but we really do pay like the same regardless of location. a, we want people to feel highly valued, but b, if someone’s so talented, yes, maybe they’re making more than they could have got as an opportunity cost in the open market, but that might just lead to loyalty that they stay with you.
over the long haul if they’re treated properly. and so we’ve always adopted that belief and yeah, so like even though there are lower cost markets, it’s always been, we just want people to be happy and build loyalty and continuity is king in professional service for sure.
dominic piscopo (28:34.114)
yeah. and i think that’s a thousand percent the way it should be done in terms of remote salary bands as well. like i’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of firms doing that, where i think the only time it makes sense to have a distinct salary band for some people, but not others is again, if you have both remote and in, in office people and the in office people happen to be in the highest cost of living area. right? so if you had an office people, maybe it would make sense, but
mike pinkus (28:52.845)
yes.
mike pinkus (28:58.479)
course.
dominic piscopo (29:01.868)
with remote first, think that’s like absolutely the right way to do it. and it doesn’t matter, like the explanation, but if someone finds out they’re just making less for the same level of work as someone else, and they’re just as good, or maybe they’re even like, i’m better than that person that’s going to cause an issue, right? so, and they’ll find out. so.
mike pinkus (29:16.127)
right. the caveat i’d give that as well, dominic, is that we’re still small business, like relative to the mid-market and like we’re tiny. so you’ve also to keep in account that this would be a different conversation if we were, imagine we’re in the us and we’re operating in new york. yeah, there’d be a different band for new york. like that’s completely understandable given scale and size, but as a small business where we’re not that big a team,
dominic piscopo (29:23.628)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (29:37.187)
yeah.
mike pinkus (29:45.177)
that’s the way we’ve approached it.
dominic piscopo (29:47.362)
yeah. then, so speaking of kind of being remote and growing fast, i’m curious to hear, you know, of that rapid growth in a conversation previously, you and i talked about, you said there had been a point at which that growth had slowed down significantly. and you had to kind of maybe make some adjustments on your team. how? mean, first of all, how did you identify that? like, did you identify it pretty early that growth was slowing and make adjustments that way or?
did it catch you kind of by surprise? and what was that like kind of changing gears in your firm?
mike pinkus (30:22.821)
yeah, i would say that it wasn’t like growth slowing from the standpoint of sales were more just slowing or falling off. what had happened in the firm though, is that we started to, at one point we had grown too quickly, we had hired too fast. and so we were scrambling implementing processes that were not ready yet, meaning we weren’t ready for the level of growth that we had had.
dominic piscopo (30:45.646)
mm.
mike pinkus (30:48.229)
and we also didn’t have strong enough data and a huge credit goes to adam who heads up our data team. over a two to three year period, we started to get clarity over margin with customers. again, we’re a value price model, so it’s not hourly. and so even though we had some internal metrics and we had conducted time tracking and bookkeeping for years,
our accounting and tax team didn’t have time tracking until i’d say about two years ago, maybe a year and three quarters ago. if you think about it, that’s a high value team. that’s where all your cpas are really smart people. you’re not even tracking efficiency or capacity properly. and it was a big misstep. so the slowing of growth was mainly due to a combination of realizing
dominic piscopo (31:19.232)
okay.
mike pinkus (31:37.535)
not all things are equal. you have to have an icp of customer, you have to get rid at some point of customers that no longer fit the business model. maybe we had customers with us from 2014-15 that weren’t on the full finance function contract. that’s who we are. we’re just doing accounting for them, but that’s not we’re doing personal tax returns. all these things had to change. we cut all the personal tax returns that were not with corporate clients.
dominic piscopo (31:54.541)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (31:58.862)
yeah.
mike pinkus (32:04.549)
clients that didn’t have bookkeeping and the full finance function with us, we started to move away from. so the slowing of growth was we were cutting down the client mix to get more focused on icp and then simultaneously being more selective of who we brought into the funnel while correcting the data problem. so it was kind of like being in an airplane with the windows open. that’s what it was. but we’ve figured that out to greater degree now, and i think we’re on the right track now.
dominic piscopo (32:17.069)
right.
dominic piscopo (32:26.968)
yeah. yeah, yeah.
dominic piscopo (32:33.74)
okay. yeah, i’ve spoken with a lot of firms who’ve gone through something relatively similar of like, again, yeah, this is our rapid growth season. and now it’s like, it’s time to clean up season, right. and that might look like cleaning up operations, cleaning up client lists of like people who aren’t, you know, who don’t make sense for the icp anymore. and i think that that’s super important. in doing that, have you seen, you know, while maybe top line hasn’t changed significantly, did you see that greatly?
improve like gross margin and things like that.
mike pinkus (33:07.269)
so the gross margin is something that i think improves in the long tail. and to be transparent, the top line is grown every single year. even while this went on, we’ve never had a year where we haven’t had revenue growth. but it wasn’t at the rates. we were growing fast. and so it slowed down the rate of growth for sure. but yes, the biggest area it showed up is we track gross margin per customer.
that went up quite a bit due to the fact that we were finally cognizant of areas where we just weren’t paying attention. we were delivering a ton of value. a lot of it was, not the customer’s fault, it’s our fault. like a company would triple in size and five years ago, why we haven’t price adjusted them, but that’s on us. and so things like that were happening quite often. but now we have a much better handle on that.
dominic piscopo (33:49.624)
mm-hmm. yeah.
dominic piscopo (33:56.898)
yeah. yeah.
mike pinkus (34:06.091)
and we corrected a lot of those things. and i hate to say it’s as simple as having proper data, but data was the main thing that brought clarity and then allowed us to course correct to some degree.
dominic piscopo (34:17.974)
yeah. what did what did that data kind of project look like? was it, you know, practice management software? was it, you know, was it maybe like a technology around time tracking? like i remember when i was at deloitte, we tracked all of our time in an excel sheet and then we just like would manually input it. so i’m sure there’s better ways to do that these days, especially if it’s not just for billing, right? if it’s actually just for internal, internal information. what did that look like?
mike pinkus (34:32.837)
you
mike pinkus (34:45.295)
so yeah, like i said, adam’s a wizard. we have a custom data dashboard where we have like kpis that are built by department and there’s api connections to that dashboard to our crm and a bunch of different sources. the main time tracking tool we’re using is simple off the shelf software is clockify and people track their time and it all gets rolled up. like this special piece of it is we have
dominic piscopo (34:47.809)
okay, yeah.
dominic piscopo (35:05.07)
okay, yeah.
mike pinkus (35:13.633)
and again, i can’t speak to this nearly as well as adam, but we have like a data warehouse where all the data goes and gets synced back up and then gets funneled to a dashboard. and that dashboard’s broken out into, we track lifetime value of a customer, gross margin per client, net revenue retention, net promoter score. we track a lot, a lot of data. we also look at efficiency ratings on bookkeepers. like we have a lot of data.
like a lot, like probably what you’d consider overkill, but it’s allowed us to look at the thing is without this, it works perfectly at a 20 person firm, a 30 person firm. you don’t need any of this. in fact, we didn’t have any of it. we operated profitably. we never knew this was a thing you needed, but at scale, you run into two constraints. one complexity goes up and you’re not ready for it and you don’t actually understand what’s happening.
dominic piscopo (35:42.51)
that’s cool. yeah.
mike pinkus (36:10.957)
and two is your founders are way further from the action. so lira and i were too far removed from the day-to-day work to really understand how inefficient we were being in certain areas and how we weren’t just spot checking client growth and needs to the level that it should have been. and so it was a big wake up call. it was very humbling, like learning these things, but thankfully we have a really talented team and our leadership team really came together to help.
dominic piscopo (36:15.597)
mm-hmm.
mike pinkus (36:41.355)
realize that we had to shore in on this data and then take action on
dominic piscopo (36:45.804)
yeah, no, i love hearing that. i think that’s, i think that’s incredible. and it’s really, really great. and again, like once, you know, when you’re 10 people, it probably doesn’t matter that much, but like a couple percentage change. once you’re a hundred plus people that actually makes a huge difference. right. so fine tuning makes sense. once you’ve reached a certain scale and then finer and finer tuning, the more scale you have becomes worthwhile. right. so, yeah, i find that super interesting.
i want to pivot here just a little bit before we wrap up and talk about the podcast growth tales. cause i’m always super curious to hear for people who are starting a podcast for their business. like what was that decision like? and then, you know, are you seeing kind of any impact or change on the business? cause one, one thing i’ve noticed about you and your profile as well as you’re super good at celebrating like client wins. and you know, that’s actually even like a whole area on your website where you have case studies on.
on clients who’ve been guided through either transitions or things like that. and so how does the yeah, how does the podcast plan to all of this?
mike pinkus (37:52.867)
yeah, first of all, i appreciate the kind words and i echo that to you. you’re better than me at it. i’ll say dominic, is not, it’s not my strong suit. and it’s something that we didn’t plan on having a podcast. wasn’t something, again, it was serendipitous in how it came about. the main reason why we started it was first of all, the world doesn’t need another business podcast. let’s be clear about that. there are so many business podcasts, you don’t need another one.
dominic piscopo (38:07.853)
okay.
dominic piscopo (38:17.656)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (38:22.883)
yeah.
mike pinkus (38:23.269)
but most of the business podcasts that you see are centered on the 0.1%. so you’ll hear the story of shopify, airbnb, nike, like they’re the 0.1%. and i was getting into so many customer conversations with businesses and business owners within our community and ecosystem that were doing such extraordinary things that were out of the box. and i’m like, these are crazy stories. like i wish people knew that
dominic piscopo (38:44.856)
mm-hmm.
mike pinkus (38:50.757)
they have this idea of like, i’m going to raise venture capital, i’m going to build a billion dollar comp. like, no one does that. i don’t mean no one, but like, i don’t think people understand how rare it is. it’s extremely rare. but are big successful outcomes that rare? and no, they’re not. they just have a different story you’ve never heard. and so like, i’ll just give you a few quick, quick examples of the first season we did 21 episodes.
dominic piscopo (39:11.875)
yeah.
mike pinkus (39:17.477)
one of the stories was someone who failed at a cannabis company and then scaled a multimillion dollar company and sold it within three years. another one of the stories is a company that took 10 years to get to 1 million in revenue. they’re now in year 20 and they’re north of 30 million in revenue with over a thousand employees. just that alone, like take a step back and think about that. most businesses would give up if it took a decade to get to that first million. yet that’s a company north of 30 million 10 years later.
dominic piscopo (39:24.962)
wow.
dominic piscopo (39:37.304)
damn. yeah.
mike pinkus (39:47.705)
the cannabis situation, maybe you never start a business again. and the list goes on of like these stories are just unbelievable to hear. and i just felt like they should be shared. now i wish we were better at the distribution of it and the marketing of it and everything that goes with it. but maybe that will come with time because again, this is not, we’re accounting finance people by trade. and so we’re learning as we go. yeah.
dominic piscopo (39:47.895)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (39:51.597)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (40:10.422)
yeah. well, there’s a framing on that too, that i find very useful to not get discouraged when you’re in slow periods of growth for the podcast and stuff like that, which is like, think of it as you’re building up a binge bank, right? where there may be some event or some viral moment or some whatever, where, you know, you gain a bunch of traction. like for me, there was a couple episodes that really drew people in and they’re not at all the episodes you would expect them to be.
or a couple events that drew a lot of people in. and then you get this like crazy spike in volume, and then you actually like dig into it. and a lot of that spike in volume is people going back and over the next six weeks listening to five podcasts a week, right? and so it’s always valuable. yeah, yeah. and so it’s all it’s all valuable, even if it’s like you’re in a flatter period, like even just having that historical context is huge, right?
mike pinkus (40:52.963)
we’ve all done that, right?
dominic piscopo (41:04.218)
and i love, i love the idea of kind of celebrating the more, i mean, some of those are, are, are not super attainable or obvious, like the $300 million, but i think, you know, celebrating the more realistic down to earth wins. you know, there’s a company micro acquire, i think now they’re just acquire, but like, i’ve been following forever who does that. they’ll like sell these, you know, it’s a marketplace for a bunch of businesses are selling for 500 k or something. and they’re like, hey, like,
this is someone’s life who has changed forever now from this like business outcome that’s not that far out of reach, right? and i really like that. i really like the concept of the podcast and i am myself like now binging some old episodes. so i’m catching up on it.
mike pinkus (41:47.097)
i appreciate it. think the biggest thing, dominic, that i’ve taken away is how people can achieve things in like alternative routes, like where they raise from a bunch of angels. like, you, if you watch the one on lumique with michael kravchuk, like they didn’t go the venture route and, and that company at 30 million never raised money. like that’s, these are just crazy stories. and i feel like
dominic piscopo (41:48.643)
yeah.
dominic piscopo (42:07.565)
yeah.
mike pinkus (42:12.527)
people don’t realize what you can do in entrepreneurship. and it’s for also ecosystem and customers, for them to see alternative paths. because it’s a hard road. being an entrepreneur, starting a podcast, anything like that, like you said, you don’t gain traction right away.
dominic piscopo (42:30.124)
yeah, yeah, awesome. well, i’ll make sure i link that in the in the description. mean, people are already listening to a podcast, so maybe they’re into that one. and yeah, thanks. thanks a ton for coming on the pod, mike. i really appreciate you taking the time.