Dave Cain: Welcome to unsuitable on Rea Radio, the award-winning financial services and business advisory podcast that challenges your old-school business practices and the traditional business suit culture. Our guests are industry professionals and experts who will challenge you to think beyond the suit and tie while offering you meaningful modern solutions to help you enhance your company’s growth. I’m your host, Dave Cain.
We’re heading in to a new year. For many of us that means a fresh start. Oh my God, I think it’s a new diet coming up. Got to lose weight this year. Not again. It’s also a great opportunity to set goals for the coming year. Joining us today is Rea’s incoming CEO and long-time advocate of the goal-setting process, Don McIntosh. Not only will Don share some tips to help us set effective goals, he’ll also share ways to help you establish a culture of accountability. Don is certainly no stranger to unsuitable, and we’re glad he’s joining us again. Welcome back to unsuitable, Don.
Don McIntosh: Thanks, Dave. It’s a real pleasure to be back.
Dave: Thanks. We’re looking forward to the next few minutes on goal-setting and accountability. Before we do that, I noticed in your bio that … Of course, with your position you need activities to unplug. In your bio, it said that you like to do work in the yard and around the house. Is that true?
Don: It is true. That’s what my wife tells me I’m supposed to be doing.
Dave: You have a tractor, a riding lawnmower?
Don: I do. Absolutely.
Dave: Does it have one of those compartments for refreshment when you’re mowing?
Don: It has a nice big cup and it has a little compartment. Yes, it does. I can’t believe you’d ask me that.
Dave: You take advantage of that?
Don: When you’re out there on a hot day, David, it’s very … You don’t want to be dying of thirst out there and you wreck the tractor.
Dave: Do you have a beer fridge in the garage?
Don: We have a fridge, yes. It’s actually stocked for anything anybody needs.
Dave: Great. Great intro. Don, again, thanks for joining us. You have a long list of accomplishments. One, congratulations first and foremost on becoming the next CEO of Rea & Associates. After 78 years, you will be the fifth CEO of Rea & Associates. Great job.
Don: Thank you. I’m really excited about that. I’m going to be the fifth?
Dave: You’re going to be the fifth.
Don: All right.
Dave: Prior to that, you certainly were a leader in the government segment as a consultant. You were also our Chief Leadership Officer and Vice President of Operations. Your list of accomplishments is long. We’d love those kind of guests on unsuitable.
Don: I appreciate it, Dave, but you know what it is? It’s all about having great people that work along with you. That’s the key.
Dave: That’s what we start with, the culture that you have been a part of and helped to develop over the years. This goal-setting is such a challenge for not only CPA firms but businesses of all kind and all industries. We want to talk about that goal-setting. Give us a couple tips. Get the listeners started. Where do you start with the goal-setting?
Don: Dave, I think the first thing you have to do is decide what’s really needed. What do you want to do as an organization? You’re going to brainstorm when you’re going through a bunch of mud up against the wall, and you have to decide what the most important things are and then you’re going to have to narrow them down to what is absolutely critical to moving the needle towards wherever you want to get to.
Dave: How many goals do you recommend as you sit down with our team? We’ve seen studies where there’s 10 goals, there’s four goals, there’s two goals. Where do you start?
Don: I’ve been doing this a long time, and I screwed up a lot. I used to have four, or five, six goals going at a time, and it would take me forever to try to get to them or get them done right. I never really got all those done right. Once we figured out that once you can actually zoom in on one or two really hardcore, this is what you want to do no matter what type of goals, then you start seeing real action towards getting those goals accomplished. It’s just a great feeling to get something done. Otherwise, you feel like you’re getting nowhere. You’re just spinning your wheels, and you get frustrated, and the people around you get frustrated.
Dave: When you sit down with the group, obviously you have to convey, “Here are the company’s goals. Here’s where the company wants to go and the strategic plan.” I would assume you would try to get those goals to surround the strategic plan to tie into that directly.
Don: Yeah. As you mentioned earlier, I was coming in as the new CEO. The one thing that we have done this past year and a half is actually get our strategic plan up to speed so we have a really great idea of where we want to go. That’s the key. Once you know where you want to go, then it’s just figuring out the best ways to actually get there. My job is to build on what we have, which is fairly new, and decide which goals as the CEO that I have to communicate to the firm, “This is where we’re going to go, and this is how I’m thinking we need to get there. Now I’m going to need your help from the partner group down to the staff, everyone in the firm, to figure out what they need to do to try to do their part to move that needle.”
Dave: So many companies that we’ve both worked with, and we look at their goals, one of the goals they have is, “I want revenue to reach X. I want to increase revenue by 10%,” or whatever that number is. I think you’ve taught us that that’s not the place to start. That’s the end result. Where you have taught us very well is what are the issues, what are the goals that we can do to help push the needle and move revenue? Let’s talk about what I would call lagging goals.
Don: Your lagging goals are just that. Those are the metrics that you’re going to look at after something’s actually been accomplished. If you actually want a lagging goal of a certain dollar amount or whatever it might be in your organization, that’s all fine, but you’re going to have to devise your plan to address those to try to reach those lagging indicators. That means you’re going to have to jump into leading indicators, and that’s where the real mud against the wall starts happening. You’re going to have to figure out what is the best way to meet those goals. If it is in fact revenue, it might be, “What impacts revenue the most? How do we move the needle, I guess, to reach those lagging goals?”
Dave: Okay. Let’s say I tell you, “I want to lose weight.” Is that a good goal?
Don: No. Your goal has to be something that you can really focus on, “I’m going to lose so many pounds,” or, “I want to weigh this by a certain date.” Really are the things that you can do that is predictive and that you can influence? Predictive, that means, “Okay, if I do so much exercise today, I should be burning so many calories. Is that something that I can determine what I do, or is that left up to somebody else?” If it’s left up to someone else, then it’s probably not going to work. If it’s left up to me, then you need both those criteria, I think, to help meet your goal.
Dave: In that example, instead of, “My goal is to lose weight,” the goal should be, “I’m going to join a gym. I’m going to lose 10 pounds by June 30th.” Is that the process that you’re using? Do you think I should lose weight?
Don: I think you look fabulous, Dave. I think you’ve been keeping yourself in good shape.
Dave: Thank you. Are those the process that we should go through?
Don: You can decide whether or not you actually want to go to a gym, but at the end of the day, that may be one of those things that you decide, but at the end, you really have to figure out how do you want to go about this? Do you want to lose weight by diet? Do you want to lose weight by exercise? Do you want to lose weight by doing both? If you want to do just by diet, then no, you may not want to go to a gym at all.
Dave: Now, let’s get real personal. You ready for that?
Don: Oh yeah. Let’s go.
Dave: Okay. As the incoming CEO of an organization, you have some goals.
Don: I do.
Dave: Can you share one of your goals with our audience?
Don: Wow, okay. Yeah, I could probably do that. One of the goals is definitely we have a goal that we want to create a number of certain type of clients by the end of the year. How are we going to go about that? First of all, we’re going to make sure that we communicate that to everybody, so there’s clarity within the entire firm, from the top to the bottom. We’re going to work with a partner group to figure out what are all the different ways that we can actually create these type of clients within our own client base. What I mean by that is get them up to a point where we are actually providing them services that we would bill up to a certain dollar amount, whatever that threshold might be.
From there, we will design the plan on how to go about actually doing that with a client base itself. How are we … We’re going to meet with them. We’re going to come up with different ways that we’re going to be able to help service the client in a way that might be different than we’ve done in the past. We anticipate that the performance that we have with clients is going up. It’ll be enhanced greatly. I think that’s going to be a great client satisfactory. I think they’re going to be happy with that. At the same time, we’re going to be able to help them reach their goals. Through that process, we’ll be bringing in experts, et cetera, et cetera, into those clients to help them reach their own goals.
Dave: I set you up on the last couple of questions. That was by design just to indicate how hard and how difficult it is to set goals, meaningful goals, stretch goals. I know you’re a proponent of the stretch goal and tough goals. Sometimes it’s really hard to define the goals right out of the gate. I think you’ve done a nice job of coaching and mentoring some of the team members on their goals. The smart goal concept?
Don: Yeah. The smart goal is something that’s going to be attainable, number one. It’s got to be a stretch goal, but it’s got to be attainable. Otherwise, people will get frustrated and give up on trying to achieve that goal. You don’t want that. There are things you need to do, as you get people involved within the entire company is, you need to get them involved. They have to have buy-in. That means that they need to have a say in what they can do to actually reach those goals.
Dave: See, one of my goals for the podcast is to get some money to pay appearance fees, so we can pay you to come here and be a guest, but I’m not there yet. I got to work through that. Give me some time on my goal.
Don: I’ll try to work on the budget so you can have that.
Dave: Thank you. Appreciate that. Now we have these goals and spent an awful lot of time putting those together and thought-process. I know that is just tough no matter what level you’re at in any organization, any type of industry. Now we have the goals. Let’s talk about accountability or operating above the line. How do you do that in a CPA firm? How do you help an individual reach their goal? What are some of your tricks?
Don: How do I help someone reach their goal? I think number one is you have to believe in that person and you have to know that you have to have a feeling of wanting to help that person right out of a shoot. You got to have that going for you. If you don’t have that, then I don’t think that you’re going to think deep enough to even help out somebody. That being said, I think it’s absolutely critical that you meet one-on-one with people and you talk about what the firm wants to accomplish or maybe what their department wants to accomplish. Most of all, you have to ask them what is it that they want to accomplish in their career here at Rea.
From there, you take that information and you say, “Okay. Let’s talk about setting up a plan to reach those type of goals.” I think that you have to give them a little bit of time to throw out some ideas, and then at that point, you have to be very careful that you don’t dominate the way that that goes down. I think that you can help and coach them through that a little bit, guide them a little bit, but at the end of the day, it’s absolutely critical that they feel that yes, they believe in this goal. You may have helped fine-tune it for them, but they believe in it. Then what you need to do is say, “Okay. How can we help you? How can we support you to reach your goal?” That is the piece that sometimes is missing in the goal-setting with people in your firm.
The other piece is, “How would you like me to hold you accountable for you to actually do these things? How often do you want to meet to go over your goals and what you said you want to accomplish?” That takes time, and you mentioned that earlier. You have to be totally committed to that process. What you do is, the more you do that and you show people how to do that, then those people can show the people underneath them how to do that, and that’s how you start creating, number one, a culture of living through goal-setting, as well as accountability. That accountability piece, as we said, is really critical.
The other part is obviously when you meet with them, and whether it’s in a team environment or whether it’s in one-on-one, and you’re going through how are they doing on meeting their goals. In other words, the goal is not the end in sight. It’s more of, “What are you doing to try to reach that goal?” It’s those leading indicators that you need to be doing day one, day two, day three each week on and on and on persistently, that’ll actually ultimately get you to that goal. That’s when you start saying, “How are you doing on that?” If you’re doing really well on that, I think it’s critical that you absolutely applaud them. That’s really necessary.
First, they need to know how to major it. It’s kind of like a scorecard type of thing. You can sit there and say, “Fantastic. You have met where you need to be at this time in this process.” That encourages people to keep on going with their goals. Again, this takes time and energy, and you got to wonder, “Oh my gosh, is this really worth it? I need to be going out there doing something. I need to be doing sales or working on a client, or I need to be doing something else.” Your people are the most important part of this whole process. You have to spend time with them.
Dave: Isn’t it extremely important in the process that the individual has to be, want to held accountable? They want that. That’s in their DNA. That’s in their operating system. They want to be held accountable.
Don: I think they absolutely do. There’s a big difference between being held accountable and being beat down on. Let’s be clear about that, because some people, when you hear about accountability, they’re like, “Oh, gosh. Here we go. I’m going to get beat up today.” That’s not it. I know myself. I actually like being accountable. I actually ask people to hold me accountable. As you get caught up in your day-to-day job and things go crazy or stuff hits the fan and there are things that you still need accomplish and you got to answer to people for that, it’s absolutely critical that there is a process in place and that everyone knows that, “Hey, we’re going to have this conversation. We’re going to talk about where we are.” It’s really important for you to be honest when you tell us where you are. Then we’re going to tell you, “Great,” or we’re going to say, “Hey, okay. We’re going to need you to step up on that. We’re really depending on you. You’re an important part of this whole process. We love you to death. Don’t forget we need you to hold up your part of the bargain that you said you wanted to do.”
Dave: Part of your accountability process is really cheerleading, advice, encouragement, celebration, maybe reset the parameters, give them a pat on the back, and push them out and go for it?
Don: I totally agree. I probably couldn’t have said that any better. It’s a wonderful feeling to help people do that. When you can help them reach their goals, that’s the best part of my job, to be honest. That’s what I love best. I think that’s what’s going to help the culture in any company. That’s going to help companies when they know that they got to make a change, and they have to go a different direction, or they have to work on a new super-important goal, that there’s going to be that process in place for them to follow. I think that’s the key, is to actually get a process within your company to make sure that people are working on the goals from top to bottom.
Dave: Our guest today is Don McIntosh, the incoming CEO of Rea & Associates. As we’re running out of time, Don, maybe if you could just wrap up with one piece of advice, whether it’s goal-setting or accountability. What’s the one thing you want our listener to take away with them today?
Don: One thing as it pertains to goals, I think you have to have the discipline to do what’s the most important. First you have to figure out what that actually is, and then you’re going to have to set time aside. Everyone’s busy every day, every week, and stuff happens to them that’s unexpected every day. At the end of the week, there’s something that you need to absolutely get done to move the needle for the future of your company or the future of your career, whatever it might be. You have to do that. You need to learn to schedule your time to do that. You need to learn to have the discipline to get it done no matter what. I think that there needs to be clarity. There needs to be that whole communication throughout the entire process. I think that you need to absolutely have that accountability piece into your system. I think it’s absolutely … We just talked about it. I think you need to make sure that you … There needs to be a cheerleader. You need to celebrate, because everyone enjoys being part of the celebration.
I think the last thing I would tell you is, I don’t know about you, Dave, but sometimes I’m not always as patient as I need to be. When you’re working on this process and see maybe some people, they’re not maybe showing you the results as fast as you want or just the overall goal, the results aren’t coming as fast as you want, you got to be a little bit patient there, to a point. You got to be patient to a point, then after so long, you have to start deciding whether or not, number one, that’s the right goal, or number two is whether or not you have the right steps in place to meet that goal and whether or not you have the right people in place to make sure that the steps for that goal is going to be addressed.
Dave: That’s great advice. You’re a lot smarter than you look.
Don: They make me read. They make me read now, Dave.
Dave: Before we wrap up, we always like to ask a fun question to each of our guests to get a little more insight into the minds of our guests. Here’s your mystery question.
Don: Oh, thanks.
Dave: You’re the incoming CEO of Rea & Associates, a top 100 accounting firm in the nation. You’ve been given the title of Head of the Accounting Profession for one day. What would you change in the profession? You can do whatever you want.
Don: If I could do one thing in the profession that would probably be the way that we train our people coming out of college. That’s where I would start, right there with the universities and their programs. I would have them start programs that would help people learn how to think and problem-solve. … in credits, that sort of thing is something that they can learn easier than they can learn problem-solving. I think that in today’s world, our clients are now and in the future going to be looking for people to help solve problems. I think that’s where I would go. They need to learn how to communicate, and they need how to, number one, have a desire to solve problems, and number two, have a technical ability to have a process in place to actually solve problems.
Dave: Thanks again for joining us on unsuitable, Don. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We have a great list of leadership and management resources for you at www.reacpa.com/podcast. If you have any questions, email us at podcast@ReaCPA.com. We’d also love to hear what you think about unsuitable on Rea Radio. Comment on this episode on SoundCloud, or review the podcast on iTunes. Until next time, I’m Dave Cain, encouraging you to loosen up your tie and think outside the box.