Ambitious Accountants Podcast

Redefining the Accountant's Job | Jared Le Roy, Director of Embark Accounting

• Sumith Dissanayake • Season 2 • Episode 1

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Redefining the Role: Modernizing the Accountant's Image with Jared Le Roy

In this episode of the Ambitious Accountants Podcast, host Sumith Dissanayake sits down with Jared Le Roy, Director of Embark Accounting Limited in Dunedin, New Zealand. 

Jared discusses his mission to redefine the stereotypical image of accountants as boring number crunchers. He emphasises the importance of client relationships, innovative services, and leveraging technology to enhance the role of accountants. 

The conversation touches on Jared's career journey, the challenges and rewards of running a small accounting firm, and the need for financial literacy. Jared also shares insights into adopting technology and strategic hiring to improve service delivery and business growth. 

This episode provides valuable insights for accountants looking to innovate and transform their professional practices.

Got something to say about the future of accounting in NZ? Let’s chat — you could be our next guest.

Email - Sumith@brisca.co.nz

Jared Le Roy – Ambitious Accountants Podcast

Jared: [00:00:00] And so I think it's key to say to the people coming through that kind of go, oh, I don't wanna be an accounting 'cause it's boring. I'm at a desk all day. I'm just, all I'm doing is numbers. And actually that's not it. Like to me, that's definitely not it. The biggest thing is having a relationship with your coins.

Sumith: Welcome back to season two of the Ambitious Accountants Podcast. Today my guest is Jared Le Roy. Jared Le Roy the director of Embark Account Limited in New Zealand. Jared, it's great to have you on our podcast. 

Jared: Thanks for having me. 

Sumith: Why'd like to start with your LinkedIn tagline? So you say, redefining people's expectation of the Token Boring account, and talk to me about it.

Jared: Yeah, well that's a, that's an interesting place to start, but, but completely fear what? Look, I'll try and make it short story rather than a long story, but I fundamentally get frustrated with people's images of accountant, accountants, let's say. The amount of times in the last 15 [00:01:00] years that I've been told, or when I've said I'm an accountant, doesn't mean people going, oh, how boring is that?

Jared: There was actually a period of time for probably five to six years that I wouldn't actually call myself an accountant. I would call myself. An advisor, business consultant or something rather. But over the last five I've got to the point where I'm like, no, I would rather redefine the image of the accountant accounting business.

Jared: And so that, that's kind of where it came from. A bit of a bit of a hook for people to be like, what is this person doing differently? And a number of people, when they come in and talk with the embark team, or they come and talk with me. They kind of go, well, that's not what I was expecting. That's not what I expect an accountant to be.

Jared: So that's kind of where it came from. But it's really just a hope to get people thinking and being like you Actually, I. Don't know what an accountant does. 

Sumith: That's an interesting proposition. My life, I've seen this transformation in the last maybe a decade in Australia and New Zealand has worked. When I first started going to [00:02:00] the public practice, it was bit burden it as probably as what it is today.

Sumith: I. The technology world and the people are now much more savvy. Even my podcast, like I started a few years back, it's too hard to get an accountant from the podcast, right? Yeah. Of course they were resisting because they did not really sort of fear of coming and talk about themselves or talk about the challenges that they're facing.

Sumith: But now things have changed. So everyone's out there talking to people, having the meetings, the conference, you are right. I think we are now sort of, um, breaking that boring accountant's kind of perception in the market. 

Jared: Well, that to me, that's the mold that has to change. So I think the accountant has to change.

Jared: I think we are the issue, the accountants are, are the issue. And so it's not that like when people think, oh, you just sit behind a desk for day and you just work with numbers. I would hate to say the percentage of time that I'm actually working with numbers and then my team joke at how little I am actually in my office.

Jared: So I think it's key to say to the people coming [00:03:00] through that kind of go, oh, I don't wanna be an accounting 'cause it's boring. I'm at a desk all day. I'm just, all I'm doing is numbers actually. That's not it. Like to me, that's definitely not it. The biggest thing is having a relationship with your coins.

Jared: It's about, it's fundamentally about problem solving. It's, I've got some information and data here. I've got all this other data, and I'm trying to have a specific conversation with this person over here. That is the numbers that is percent behind a desk that is actually just trying to help people by solving problems.

Sumith: That's a wonderful way of explaining that because as a account is of course, either technicality and then on the other side we are running our own business. So we have to be innovative and of customer service, the relationship building, the sales marketing. So we got our own challenges as well as a small business to sort of navigate through.

Sumith: So it's not only doing that number crunching exercise behind the scene. 

Jared: Oh, totally. And I think if you, quite interesting, you bring up like running a small business versus being an accountant until you go down the [00:04:00] track of starting your own firm, you don't realize how different those two things are.

Jared: Like, I'm so glad that I've done this so that when I talk to clients I can kind of be like, I did that. Like being exact, being in your shoes. And actually at the moment I'm doing it, well, this year I'll be doing a bit of a series on our social media, which we reflecting on Embark. And so if what, when I started, why do I call it Embark?

Jared: Why is my branding what it is? How did I go about hiring? What does this mean? And so. What I'm trying to achieve there is not actually go. What I did is amazing. It's actually just trying to open up a conversation so that people can be like, oh, Jared did this and that worked, but maybe this will work for me.

Jared: Because everything's so subjective. Like it depends on what you're trying to achieve. 

Sumith: Yeah, no, it'll be lovely because people get inspired and they like to see, hear that from the people who have done it, and if people who they can relate to, because there are so many successful people in the world, but you know, you [00:05:00] can't see their world or you can't relate to them.

Sumith: Right. But we, as a small accounting firms, of course, people can release to us and then learn, and of course it is very close to the heart and it's your neighbour. Yeah. Well, well perfect. Well I know you started your journey 10 years old, so tell me how you fall into the career while you were studying at the same time you're doing some jobs and all that and also I read that you read which Dad Ford at, AT when you were 13 years old.

Sumith: So how they changed your perception about business and how we helped you shaped up your career 

Jared: Growing up, my family didn't have. A lot of money. And so I fundamentally worked from when I was about 10 and all the way through, like I was just saying to one of my team members, you're going to university, you have to put money down for your hall and it costs about 10 grand.

Jared: Like I actually paid that 10 grand, so, which is massive for me. 'cause so often you kind of go, oh mom and dad paid for that. Whatever's like, I actually paid that 10 grand from my savings. [00:06:00] So. I worked from when I was 10 all the way through high school at a period of time at university, I took a year off and then kicked straight back into being an accountant.

Jared: Where, how I kind of fell into accounting was mass was a stronger subie for me than English. I'm not very good at, with words, to be perfectly honest here. I way better now than what I was 15 years ago. Yeah, and so obviously 'cause Mass was a less subject for me than obviously that just kind of lead into accounting and economics.

Jared: And then from there I really enjoyed them. I find business interesting. Reading, rich Dad, Paul dad, there was a few concepts in the air where he couldn't go. Oh man, okay. I totally get that. That's awesome. Okay. How can I pull that into my life? Always knew that I wanted to be more successful, be successful as I could.

Jared: I know when I was early on in my early twenties, out out, out of university, obviously 20 university ended accounting because it was kind of the roll on and I always thought I'd end up being C-F-O-C-E-O of [00:07:00] large corporations. But it's amazing how your perception changes over time and yeah, so obviously do accounting at university and then just rolled into, I did internship in auditing with PBC in Wellington, not for me.

Jared: I rag on auditors all the time. I'm more a business advisory point of view, and I would say that my. Love for accounting. That sounds quite strong actually. A little bit gross when I say it out loud, but it's actually developed over time and I find it more and more interesting like it. Initially it was I was more interested in the numbers and doing the accounts, whereas now I'm not interested in that at all.

Jared: I'm actually more interested in the relationships and how I can improve people's lives, and that was really dictated when I was overseas in London for a couple of years. 

Sumith: I know it's a bit of a transformation for anyone. Who was in the commercial accounting, working for companies, and then coming to the public practice and starting on your own.

Sumith: So what were the main challenges and [00:08:00] how did you sort of navigate through those challenges at the early stage? 

Jared: So I started out in business advisory at one of live firms in Dunedin. I was there for about. 10 years, I think 18 years, shot over to London for a couple and did commercial contracting over there, which is awesome.

Jared: Like being in London is amazing. Any accountant that has their C and they haven't done it, I totally recommend it, which so many people will be cringing at me saying that. But those couple years we epic, and that really defined what I wanted to be. I'll tell you the story. So I was. At my firm and I'm a big guy on questioning everything, and there was a number on, on, on the balance sheet that I didn't like.

Jared: I had an Aussie boss, so the group financial controller was Australian, and I'd just taken over this role and I was like, man, I disagree with this number. And he was just like, Jared, just leave it alone. I was like, no, if you can't justify it to me. I was like, what's the reason behind this? And coming from like a small firm, we had to justify every number.[00:09:00] 

Jared: We on this massive corporation, like we're talking about $50 million, right. To put that in perspective, 50 million pounds. I didn't work on a firm in Dunedin that had $50 million in turnover, like it was huge. And so I just couldn't let this go. And so one day he was just like, fine, Jared, just do what you want.

Jared: Get rid of it. So I did, right. So swipe the pen hit of the keys and $50 million was gone. And so. That took our company from making $50 million for the year, projected $7 a year to breaking even. Who do you think cared? Who do you think cared? 

Sumith: That's significant number. So yeah, you entered the ball landscape of the business 

Jared: and no one cared.

Jared: Wow. My Boston Care, the CFO of UK didn't care The CFO of the U Kia. I went home to my wife or my now wife, she's also an accountant, and I was just like, I can't do corporate accounting. I cannot do it. I, I could do it in London, right? Because picky is, but when we moved back home and we were always moving back home, I was [00:10:00] just like, I have to work for a small firm.

Jared: I have to work with small businesses, small to medium ized businesses because I want to affect change by and. For some of my clients, if I can save or adjust or I always do, if we can pull small levers to move the bigger cog that save them $10,000 a year, that's a real change that impacts their lives. So that's what I'm trying to do.

Sumith: That's very inspirational because you've gotta desire out of passion for small business and you really care about them and, and you can see the impact, right? Because in bigger corporate you won't be able to see that impact. You might be like what you alluded to. People can't see any kind impact to their deepest lives.

Sumith: Right? But here, what you're doing is not just compliance, if the compliance is one of the pieces that we do, but at the same time, you're helping the small pieces of drive and then get to the next level and make their parameters happy 

Jared: to, to me, yeah, a hundred percent. It's about improving them, but it's also the [00:11:00] educational piece.

Jared: Financial literacy in New Zealand is rubbish. It is so bad. And so many people come in and they kind of go, they don't understand income tax, they don't understand GST, they don't understand profit, they don't understand revenue. They don't understand. And so it's about, I spend a lot of time, I. Talking as you'll obviously be able to tell, but the key thing behind it is educating people and kind of going, if you understand more, like to me, the role of an accountant is if we can enhance business.

Jared: Therefore, if businesses are enhanced, our economy is enhanced. So therefore, as a whole, if our economy is enhanced, New Zealand is better off. Like everyone wins if we can make business win. If I can do my wee bit in here and change a few things, and fundamentally, Otago hopefully is a little bit better off, and therefore everyone in Otago is a little bit better off.

Jared: That's what we're trying to achieve. 

Sumith: That's a wonderful talk. Let's talk about your business in bar. So I saw something [00:12:00] reading just in that you mentioned in my laws, so if you prioritize people hiring early stage than the profits or any other metrics. So talk to me about that proposition. Why and how.

Sumith: People can use that kind of, um, proposition to grow their business. 

Jared: I've worked at a few accounting firms and there's always been the comment around, oh, if we are not busy in January, February, March, being obviously March, being the end of the financial year, imagine what we could do. But you never get to it, right?

Jared: You always seem to be under-resourced. So I was at the point where I was just like, I want to over service my clients because fundamentally, if we can get, the goal is to get 80% of our work done by Christmas. 'cause you've always got a few stranglers. Therefore, imagine what we could do and in January, February, March.

Jared: And so that's the key part of my goal. So people would say that I hired early and I did. But I got to the point where I needed to for a couple reasons. One, I wanted to service my [00:13:00] clients. Two, I needed people to do the work that I didn't want to do. My first hire was admin, right? So my first hire was admin after six months of being outta my own.

Jared: And my conversation with the person coming on board was, I haven't done much for the last six months. You're gonna be real busy to start off with, but we'll get to the point where it makes sense. And so the reason why I would say to most people, I've talked to another accountant this week in regards to it, is that if you can have an extra half FTE.

Jared: Then it just gives you the flexibility to be able to take on that project or do that extra this or do that, which is really key. Whereas I feel like quite a few accountants, generally speaking, have a half less FT, E than potentially what they need. 

Sumith: I can relate to many stories because we in service, like professional service specially, so what we do is we need the time, right?

Sumith: That's the most important thing for us. That's what we sell too. And it's always good to have extra capacity. And if you want to grow, you're have [00:14:00] extra if you're happy with what it is right now. So if you want to serve that, that's a different conversation. But if you want to grow, so how do you grow? If you don't have this extra capacity?

Sumith: There's no way to grow. So when you get other new clients coming through the door and then you turn the others. On the other side because you're not servicing the at the right level so that there's a, it's a chicken and egg situation. I know it is hard, but end of the day if you want to break the cycle, so somewhere we have to break it.

Sumith: Right? I think the best way to do is like what you say, increase the capacity at least for a period of time and then fill it and then again get this capacity and fill it out. So this's the same strategy that we use at our business. You keep at pu, see people on the bench all the time. 

Jared: Well, some people say to me, what if you are quiet in February, March?

Jared: And I'm like. Awesome. Imagine what you could do with that time. Imagine if you went to every single one of your clients and said, here goes a complete tax review in regards to where you're sitting, where I think you're gonna be in the next 12 months, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We try and do that anyway, but imagine if you had more time to dive into it, or you're preloading the year in [00:15:00] terms of we've already done X, Y, and Z.

Jared: So when we come and do the job, significantly easier, if you go out to your top 10, 20%, 25% of clients and go, Hey, look, what about if we did a cash flow? What if we did that? What if you actually just went to their site and said, gimme a look around. Yeah. What are you up to at the moment? That blows people's minds when you go to 'em and say, Hey, what's that piece of machinery over there?

Jared: What does that do? And they're like, oh, you're interested. I'm like, well, what does it do? Well that can cut a pick in half, in 30 seconds, and you're going. That's the bit where I think we need to get out from behind our desk and just go and have some conversations and you'll be amazed what comes of it. I will preemt most of my conversations terms of if people listening to this podcast, they're probably already doing it.

Jared: And when I say accountants are the issue, it's probably not people listening to these podcasts. Like I'm a big Jason Sta fan, he's a accounting influencer outta the states. I'm kinda like anyone that, that listens to him. I mean, you're already 5, 10, 20 steps ahead because most people don't even know who he [00:16:00] is or they're not even thinking at the level that he's thinking, which is just incredible.

Sumith: That's so true. And now I think the small businesses, especially accounting firms, which I have noticed in the recent past that it's a bit challenging to find the right talent to attract them. Retain. Then within the small businesses, like how do you overcome this challenge in your phone? 

Jared: Super hard. I've actually just hired someone to be very honest.

Jared: Yeah, yeah. It's great timing. I actually did it. I actually did it completely differently to what you would expect. I put a YouTube video up, so rather than using secret recruiters, I put a YouTube video up and the key reason why I put that up or the key message that I was trying to put out with that video.

Jared: We're saying, I don't care about your CB in Dunedin. I probably know who you are, or I can find out who you are in the accounting industry. We can probably have a conversation with two or three people and get to a point where you kind of know Bob. So I'm not interested in what's in a piece of paper 'cause AI can do it anyway.

Jared: So I just wanted people [00:17:00] to apply. I just wanted to have conversations. So I did uh, a YouTube video. I did a whole lot of Facebook and Instagram marketing, and then I did some soft reach outs on LinkedIn and basically said, Hey look, I look for a staff member. I think I do things a little bit differently and might not specifically relate to you, but obviously you probably know 10 people as well.

Jared: So let's catch up for lunch and see what happens. Yeah. And so I think I went out for lunch with three different people, reached out to about five and had a few people reach out and it was, it was good. I got someone from that. We did end up putting a sick ad up for a period just to see what would come of it, but we tried to be a little bit different.

Jared: So going back to your question, how do you try and attract talent when you're a small firm? I think you've really got to play to your strengths, right? So you've really got to point out. How you are different and you will be different to a larger corporation. So two of the things that [00:18:00] cracked me up with the guy that's coming on board and that I interviewed in the second interview, I had him in the office.

Jared: And so our office is, we've got a, a meeting room in my office and he just open, open plan 'cause there's only four of us. And I said to him, I look as part of the package, I'll have to take over your mobile phone plan because we work off a cloud phone system. And their response was, how do you call out? Oh, you had to look, use your cell phone.

Jared: You go into this app and it's, it's not coming from your number, but it's obviously going out via our number. He was just, you don't have any phones in the office? And I was like, no, I'll just use my cell phone, man. And they're like, whoa, it's crazy. I was like, it's 22 4 and ain't that crazy? And then they're like, oh, so what other software do you use?

Jared: And I was just, oh, well we use blah, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, oh, when it comes to Microsoft, do you have server? I said that all the cloud. And he's, you're telling me everyone is on Microsoft 3, 6, 5. Although everyone's got the same tech, like no one's got anything [00:19:00] different than, I've got a couple more things.

Jared: But generally speaker, everyone's got the same. He's, that'd be so good. What do you mean? And he goes, oh, and my current place, like I've got, I don't know, Microsoft X, you have Microsoft Y, you have Microsoft Z. And he goes, I've got to Google what? Formulas I can actually use so that my boss can open up a spreadsheet that I've created.

Sumith: Wow. 

Jared: Yeah. What do you mean? Like for an extra thousand dollars a year, you've gotta spend how long Googling to see whether you can use a formula or not. That is madness. Yeah, and so it's those we things of having a nice office, having some flexible working, using some tech, like it blows my mind, but that's a thing that was kind of getting people over the line, which was cool.

Sumith: I think that's very clever and it's very interesting way of sourcing people because at the end of the day, they can't believe in you and knowing what they ever gonna need to, rather than sometimes this is one of the problems in the hiring process is there's an expectation gap. They can't [00:20:00] expecting something, but what we offer is not what we are expecting from that side.

Sumith: Well, there's a mismatch. Yeah, 

Jared: totally. 

Sumith: Yes. It just, since we were talking about the technology, I think we can, we'd know the, the trends in our market, especially the finance sector, the ai, the automation and all that. I saw something you've mentioned very interesting to me actually. It's about the automation before you do, streamline the process.

Sumith: You have putting more effort to streamline it before you think about automation ai. So talk to me more about that. 

Jared: Yeah. I love talking about ai. I think it's a circus, an interesting topic. The bit I find a little bit frustrating with AI is everyone's trying to solve this really interesting bit. There was a tweet that went out that I was like, I don't want AI to do the painting and creative writing.

Jared: I wanted to do the cooking and cleaning or whatever. And so what I find in the accounting industry, a lot of products coming out and they're trying to do this advisory bit. And I'm like, I don't want you to fix this advisory bit. I want you to fix this mundaneness over here [00:21:00] that we have. But from a compliance point of view, we have to do it.

Jared: We have to do this. But what you're doing is fixing this bit up here, where when we still have to do this, if it takes me six hours to do this, I'll do it. 'cause it's interesting, it's cool, it's epic down here. Let's streamline it. So when I left my previous firm and went it on my own, a big thing that I wanted to do was think about systems and how it was gonna fundamentally help.

Jared: Everyone, not just me, everyone in the team to shrink for time it takes to do a job and we're not talking about shrinking it so we can do more work. Yes, that is a potential outcome, but my goal of shrinking it is so that we can have more fixable hours so that can spend more time doing the interesting things.

Jared: His output increases, but ultimately it's actually so that we can be, we can have better lives ourselves. So. To me, some real minor ones like Adobe Sign, which most people would use now, but that was a big one for me five years ago in terms of people being able [00:22:00] to sign instantly and it coming back, not having to chase documents or automatically being followed up was Epic.

Jared: The other one that I use a lot is Loom, so some people have used it, some people haven't, but it's fundamentally a screen sharing product. And so when it comes to sending out accounts. Like I said earlier on in the podcast, I'm not great with words and writing an email might take me 40 minutes by the time I'll get it right.

Jared: But if I rip up a loom, I pull up the draft accounts or whatever I'm talking to and I record it and talk to that and to therefore when I'm going through the accounts and talking about a specific number on a specific page, obviously they can see what I'm talking about. And so that to me was a huge game changer.

Jared: 'cause now I can get out draft accounts and. 10, 15 minutes rather than 45 to an hour. So it's we, things like that that really change how it works and like clients have just lapped [00:23:00] it up. When I first thought about going completely digital and not printing accounts, I was just like, oh man, some people might have an issue with this.

Jared: I hadn't had a single person have any issues. People love the videos. People love that being a little bit different because. They get to understand it, right? It's more informative. It can be quicker, it could be more. Right now, it's fantastic even thinking about using a product. If you need to tell someone how to raise an invoice in Zero, and if you're doing it in an email, the steps should have to go through, man.

Jared: Just open up Bloom, open up Xero, record it, and it's way laughing. We, things like that are just epic from my point of view. 

Sumith: That's wonderful. And I also have seen that you record the meetings and then of course. Transcript done, the recommendation. There's some tick out there. There's some real cool tech.

Sumith: Yeah. And that's great to hear that you know, you are leveraging the power of the technology with your business and also to head the other businesses as well. Right. Like, looking [00:24:00] ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for accountants in the next five to 

Jared: 10 years? I'll unlimit it. You know, I'm not Elon Musk in terms of where we are gonna take it, you know, when we're not taking the space, but just in terms of enhancing it.

Jared: Incredible. It's exciting. 

Sumith: Yeah. Jared, thank you very much and a really insightful conversation and thanks again for being on the podcast and all the best with your business. Thanks, man. It's been awesome. 

Sumith (2): Thank you for joining us on Ambitious Accountant. I hope today's conversation has provided valuable insights for your professional journey.

Sumith (2): Remember, this podcast is about building a community of all Kiwi accountants who understand the challenges you face and celebrate your success. If you have enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and share with colleagues who might benefit you. And if you have a success story you would like to share on our show, reach out at.

Sumith (2): sumit@brisca.com.au.  Until next time, keep ambitious, keep innovating and keep transforming. [00:25:00] This is Sumith signing 

off.