This tax season, BaCo is proud to co-sponsor the 2018 Bike Giveaway, by Today I Can! In conjunction with Richardson Bike Mart, BaCo Group is helping our friends at Today I Can give two free bikes away to a CPA or accounting professional and the person who referred them.

You can read more about the giveaway on the official page, but the idea is simple. Today I Can is encouraging all CPAs to make a fitness or health-related goal by February 15, and keep it until April 15. It doesn’t have to be a big goal, just something you can make progress on. As you are aware if you have read our blog or visited our careers page, we think it’s important to have a healthy work-life balance at BaCo, and this is a great way to invest in our own industry.

If you head to the official page above, you can enter yourself and your favorite CPA (if that’s not you!) to win a brand new bike from Richardson Bike Mart, and Ford Baker will even help you customize & set it up! Ford not only serves as the owner & principal at BaCo Group, but he’s also the founder of Today I Can, which he uses to encourage others to make healthy life choices.

We’re so proud of the work he’s doing over there, so go check it out! And don’t forget to recommend your favorite accountant for the competition, it just might change their life.

Christmas is always such a fun time of year around our office.  While we are busy getting year-end tax planning done, we plan our annual party and bonding time for our team.  This team building always comes with great timing – as we hit the ground running on busy season projects typically just after the Christmas trees are being taken to the curb.

This year, we ‘Escaped the Office’ and got locked into a mystery room at ESCAPE THIS – and if you haven’t been involved in an escape room experience, it should be added to your bucket list.  It was so much fun and such a different experience than we expected.  Our task was given to us by Thomas Gardner, the in-house counsel of ISG Corporation, who has been accused of stealing millions of dollars and wants our team to clear his name.    

The room itself contained pictures, books, trinkets, drawers, furnishing, papers, and SO MANY LOCKS!  We were charged with sorting through so many clues to get combinations which opened the locks and led to more clues and evidence.  We did a good job of assigning tasks to our team and working through problems in smaller groups, but we probably should have used our ‘phone a friend’ lifeline sooner than we did – because we did NOT meet our goal of beating the fastest time to complete the room (which was under 43 minutes!) but we did finish successfully and we ESCAPED!

Our important takeaways from this fun experience:

• We are a competitive bunch…
• Being locked in a room with a problem to solve is a great way to spend an afternoon.
• We are better at finding actual stolen funds than stolen ‘gemstones’ and our training is better suited to looking at actual debits and credits than missing volumes of 1975 encyclopedias! 
• Growing closer as a team makes us all more productive!

This holiday season, we are thankful for so many blessings – and our clients and business partners are at the top of that list.  We are always trying to find interesting and creative ways to serve our clients better.  The old model of the disappearing accountant who is only seen on April 15^th is not one we love, and we are thankful for our clients unfailing support of our vison.  We wish you a wonderful and prosperous 2018!

As a mom of three teenagers, I have been to at least a million football games, from pee wee to Varsity and everything in between. I have cheered from the stands in games when our team had the clear edge, and have nervously cheered when our team was literally facing the giants. While all that time in the stands has not made me a football coach, I have learned a great deal about the game – about good leadership, facing seemingly insurmountable odds, and having success no matter how big the obstacles
seem.

What are the factors that play into great outcomes on the field? In my experience, it boils down to about three very important key factors:

1. Great Players…
To a rookie fan, great football players would probably be defined as the biggest guys, the fastest guys on the field. There is no doubt having raw talent is an important element. All too often the intangible component goes unnoticed – finding a player willing to commit, to do the work, be
there when needed, to be coachable. Recruiting is so important, not just grabbing the same kind of player everyone else wants, but looking for the potential, the longevity of someone who can join the team and grow. Finding someone who can have a vision to make the team better and not just promote themselves is essential to long-term team success.

2. Great Planning
You could put a team full of pro-bowlers on the field, and without a coach, without a game plan – they would fail. Planning for different scenarios, giving each player marching orders, assigning roles – this ‘game planning’ makes all the difference in success and failure. Without a game plan, the game is chaos. Chaos is stressful for the players, and even for the fans.

3. Great Buy-In
Great planning falls flat if the team doesn’t know and understand the plan and believe in possibilities it represents.

In a nutshell, greatness from a team perspective comes from recruiting players with great potential, meticulous planning and getting everyone on board with the plan. So how is a football team like a CPA firm? These elements of success are exactly the same. Recruiting talent is about hiring more than smart people, it is about the intangibles. Finding people that are smart, driven, who want to learn and grow. People who want to be on a team, to play a part and to work hard to contribute. At BaCo, we have learned that the best way to recruit, as an organization, is to
remember who we are – our core values – and stick with them. We strive for excellence in work and personal lives, which means we have balance and our employees have the benefit of not working nearly as much as the industry average during filing seasons. We have added team members skilled in communications that have helped us with delivering this message through all media, so that candidates will know our vision and develop a shared passion for it before they even arrive at our door.

Just like with football, planning is the name of the game. A CPA firm – or any business organization really – must commit time and resources to game planning. Sometimes this feels daunting, so many projects at our feet and taking time to stop and plan can be frustrating and feel wasteful. We have learned unequivocally from many successes and some failures that this step is essential. No matter the team, the number of hours, number of projects – we always fail without a game plan. Planning has been a huge area of focus the last 2-3 years, and remarkably – despite the time investment which has been substantial – we have had four consecutive tax filing deadlines where the work was done at least 4-5 days early. Why does this matter? Last minute filings mean last minute communications with clients, stress for the client and our staff and stress for our systems. Finishing early means we avoid stress, gives us time to handle unexpected last minute issues – and gives us the ability to reward our team with additional days off.

Getting the team on board is important – and candidly at BaCo, hasn’t always been an easy part of the process. Accountants often prefer to get their list and marching orders without much conversation, seemingly creating efficiencies. However, those conversations about ‘what happened this year’ – or ‘watch out for this tricky transaction’ ultimately educate and grow our staff and make our team better and stronger. The buy-in hasn’t always been easy, but history has shown our team that doing it right pays dividends, reduces stress, and produces better outcomes. That is a plan that sells itself.

Everyone is buzzing today about the proposed Trump tax plan. The plan would slash the corporate tax rate and dramatically increase the standard deduction and child tax credits for individual taxpayers. It would also greatly simplify the tax brackets for individual taxpayers. Another key provision is the elimination of the estate tax paid by high wealth estates. There are still many questions on this proposal and its impact on business of all types. Here is a great article summarizing what we know about the proposal now. We will monitor the situation and post updates as new information becomes available. 

Good Fences
Good fences make good neighbors … a friend told me that one time and I am not sure I really bought into it. In fact, before I moved into my current house, I spent almost 20 years living without a fence. We opened up to golf courses and creeks instead of an 8-foot-tall privacy fence. I liked that wide open view.

The crazy thing about it was that lack of a fence though, it’s why we moved off the golf course lot. We didn’t have a good neighbor, and a lot of the things that made for it not being a good neighbor situation would have gone unnoticed if we had just had a fence. I love that neighborhood so we moved back a few years ago, but the golf course view for an 8-foot-tall privacy fence. The view is not as nice, but we have great neighbors, as far as we know.

Make Good Neighbors
I had another bad neighbor in my fenceless life. This one would show up completely uninvited during dinner with a quick question or something he needed help on. He wouldn’t knock, he just kind of showed up while we were eating. He would apologize, ask if he was interrupting and when I replied that I was eating dinner, he would apologize and let me know it would be quick. He would then laugh as if that was all funny. He would show up while I was watching TV and followed me around while I did things with my family. 
It was like he knew my every move, he was a real live stalker and he made my life unbearable. If I just had a better fence, maybe he wouldn’t have asked that first time and felt comfortable asking for help. That fence would be really nice.

Living Life, Interrupted

I am sure a lot of you are reading this and thinking that I should have called the police when he started following me around but the problem was that I brought him along, so I couldn’t really blame him. You see, he was my job and I gave him this instant fenceless access to me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through my smart phone. He could call me during dinner or shoot me a text and ask me to look at something he just sent by email. It didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing, as long as I brought that phone along, I was living life, interrupted.

I figured something else out, I actually owned my business, and we all own our careers. I didn’t have to run it like that, I didn’t have to invite all my clients into my home via my phone. I also realized something else, that smart phone made for my personal life being a bad neighbor for my work life. My personal life showed up at work with group texts about a ride this weekend, it showed up as a really funny Facebook post that I just had to comment on, a game I could play, things that had nothing to do with work barging into the office.

The Good Old Days

In the old days my work life and my personal life were neighbors on my daily calendar, separated by a fence called my daily commute. Nobody knew my home number, therefore that commute was a really good fence. The thing is that now I don’t even have a home phone, so work follows me around all weekend on my cell phone and my personal life follows me to work and I became less effective at both of them.

So I did something about it, it was pretty simple, I just got a second phone and moved my personal stuff to it. I installed Facebook on that, and my games and all my cycling stuff.  I put my personal email on there, but not my work email. Then I took my old phone and uninstalled all my social networking apps, my personal email, games, etc. I just had work email, texts and phone, that was it.

Putting a fence around those devices, made them everything they could be for the purpose they needed to be but when they shared one device, they spilled over into each other, notifying me of things I didn't need to know based on what I was doing at the time.

Let Smart Phones Be Smart but We Have To Be Smarter

I realize the reader of this post very well could be a potential client and that client is thinking “I would never hire someone I couldn’t reach whenever I needed to” and I would ask why? Does that make you happy? Is your home life thriving because you need to text the CPA on a Saturday?

Wouldn’t you rather work with a CPA that thinks ahead and plans, that helps you do the things he does well so you don’t have to work on Saturdays to catch up some work that you don’t know how to do because you never planned enough to do it? Isn’t a CPA that thrives with time off the exact kind of CPA you want? He is not working at the last minute because he is done, you have no surprises. 

If that answer is still no, I need 24 hour a day access, then return to your Google search and go after that next hit, we are not for you. 

Because that’s what we try to be at BaCo Group, a different kind of firm, we aren't perfect, but we want to pursue progress, we want to do better and we want to provide excellent service to our clients. We understand that we can be an annoying neighbor if you let us, so we insist on a good fence, here and at home.

The staff here are not required to print their cell phones on their business cards, they don’t set them up to get work email if they don’t want to, I don’t text them, I don’t call them at home. I send them a note at their work email to see me in the morning about a situation.

By maintaining that type of environment, we can get away and recharge, we are better when we are there because we have a chance to disconnect. That is why balance is a core principal of our firm. It makes us better accountants, it provides our clients with better service.

If you are a CPA and are looking for a different boss, if you are good at what you do and you are willing to make a good fence a two-way street, we might be a good fit for you. We aren’t for everybody, just the ones that believe you should take some time away from work and live life, uninterrupted. Visit our careers page for more and an online application.