Have you heard? We are part of a movement. A movement that is set out to change the way the accounting industry has operated for the last 50 years – through value pricing, cloud technology and the always innovative attitude. The best part? DeepSky is not the only firm doing it. 🙂

For those of you who didn’t know, I’ve spent most of my last week in Vegas with a group of accountants at Accounting Today’s Growth and Profitability Summit. Yes. I know. A large of group of CPAs. How fun can THAT be right? You may be surprised.

We started off the week by visiting the Zappos headquarter with a bunch of other “geeks” that we’ve met through the Twitterverse. Though none of us have ever met each other in person, we felt like we’ve known each other for a long time – we were friends, not mere acquaintances.

Zappos

Why Zappos, you ask? To learn about their culture of course! Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, is my long-time entrepreneur hero whom I’ve looked up to and followed for quite some time now.

In fact, a lot of DeepSky’s inner workings and cultures are inspired by his ideas (ie. our office library.) And might I add, Zappos absolutely lived up to our expectation and then some. In fact, we’ve secretly decided that when DeepSky grows up, we want to be like Zappos. 🙂 It’s just a happy place to work.

We carried on with some food, drinks and gambling fun. And yes, we are very proud of the fact that we’ve earned our letters. 🙂

Visions

More importantly, we shared insights, knowledge and our opinion – both at Margaritaville AND at the conference. Not everyone loved what we have to say, and that’s okay. In a world of me-too CPA firms, it is great to know that there are innovative people around the country challenging the status quo. We may not all be doing the same things, but we all shared a few common vision. Here are some of them:

1. Value Pricing

GONE are the days of selling our time. We believe that our clients pay us for the value we’ve created in their business, not the time we’ve spent on it. I mean, will you pay your gardener more because he took longer to mow your lawn? Didn’t think so. WE ARE TRASHING THE TIME SHEET.

2. Cloud

Cloud is where we’ll be at. In our case, it’s not just in the clouds, but in deep sky – hey, after all, that is our name. We are taking our clients to the cloud, which means access to their numbers from anywhere in the world with internet. What it also means is that we are no longer bound by our geographic limitations – it is now possible to run a company efficiently even if the CEO is in LA, CFO in NY and COO is in Japan.

3. Paperless

Eventually this should be PaperNONE, but for now, less will do. This sort of goes hand in hand with #2 – the idea is to reduce the limitation caused by the physical presence of a sheet of paper. We’ve determined that people touch the same piece of paper way too many times in an accounting process – creating significant inefficiencies in business operations. Don’t believe us? Start tracking how many times you touch the same piece of paper next time you are running through your billing process – you’ll see what we are talking about. Besides, it’s part of our effort as a new age firm – go green, go paperless.

4. Social Network

We’ve managed to gather a group of liked minded individuals from LA to Chicago to South Carolina to Ohio to Florida to Boston through nothing more than Twitter. We connected, shared visions, helped each other with our business and now started a movement together. We are leveraging each others’ experience and expertise, we are learning collaboratively and changing fast. We’ve gotten clients halfway around the world whom we’ve never met “in-person.” It’s your traditional networking on steroids. I could go on and on about this, but I guess you’ll just have to stick around to find out more.

Finally, the highlight of our trip was when Mark Koziel of AICPA called us (#geeksunite) “a movement” in the industry during his keynote presentation on Thursday.

Thank you Mark, we really liked that; and we are running with it. This IS a movement. The industry IS changing (for the better.) No one really knows exactly where it will take us, but we are jumping in with both feet. So hop on, join us, and see how we can change the industry world together.