Best Ways to Find and Vet Accountants and Other Professionals – Episode 409

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[00:00] If you’re looking to hire good accountants, lawyers, or professionals to help you and your family, this is the episode to listen to. It sounds good. I want to listen. How about that, Kim? Yeah. Well, good. Excellent. You know, one of the most impactful things that helped me as I was going with my career was relying on people that were much wiser than me and tapping into their network of professionals. And this can be challenging if you’re relocating across the country or whatever you’re doing. And so in this episode, we want to unpack and make it possible for you to see how Kim and others go through and they vet good professionals so they can find people that are in their network. So awesome about today’s world is location no longer matters.

[01:01] And I am utter proof of this. I have had a, I guess you’d use the term virtual bookkeeper and accountant for as long as I can remember long, really even, I guess it was probably right as the internet was beginning. But even before that, I remember FedExing stacks of copies of checks and that kind of thing to the bookkeeper that we’ve used forever and ever. We’ve done podcasts on her, Sweet Carrie is just such a blessing to our family. So I think when you’re looking for professionals, two things come to mind that are really, really critical. And I’m actually happy to even share resources. Carrie doesn’t have a huge scalability, but she is a fabulous bookkeeper and I would recommend her to anybody.

[01:49] And if people even just wanted a little bit of help setting up their bookkeeping for a one-time thing, Carrie can do some of that. And then also our accountant, super valuable relationships there. I’ve got a couple of them that I’ll share as we progress here. But is your interviewing your own, first of all, acknowledging that location doesn’t matter anymore, which is super important, especially if people do feel like they live in a small town and, you know, maybe they just don’t want somebody that they know. Maybe they actually want somebody that they don’t know. And yet others feel like, well, there’s nobody here that has the capability. So I think that’s a awesome thing that we get to take advantage of today.

[02:30] And because of that, you can also be pickier as to who you choose to work with. And there’s a couple of things that I would look for. One, of course, is the ability to handle your situation plus one. And the plus one is really important. So, in other words, you want a professional that has your situation as their specialty, but they also have one level higher as their specialty. In other words, if you’re hiring an accountant and all they deal with is residential investment property, that’s awesome. But what if you want to upgrade to commercial investment property? You don’t want to have to switch accountants. So you want to have that plus one in your site. And then, of course, that begs the question.

[03:18] At some point, you may to outgrow them, in which case, fine, you switch again. But that your own area of of game that you’re playing, whatever it is, you know, if you’re a network marketer, you want an accountant that deals with network And then the plus one, and then the mindset. And this is sometimes a little harder to ferret out, but I find some quick conversations can make it happen. Plus, so many professionals these days have a landscape of activity that you can learn about them and how they think and what their mindset is without ever even speaking to them. Most professionals have a podcast. They have books. They have LinkedIn posts and maybe other blog posts that you can read and listen to, et cetera, to get a sense of their mindset.

[04:12] Because for me, I would absolutely not want a professional that had a scarcity mindset. I think it’s just a recipe for disaster. And I know that every single one of us deals with scarcity mindsets from time to time. And yet I want help pulling myself forward out of that and into the prosperity mindset as often as possible. So I certainly don’t want my professionals pulling me backwards. Very true. So you’ve had some experience with this. Do you have a set of questions that you ask or just a certain thing that you’re looking for in hiring a professional? You know, I do. You know, I love the concept of the plus one. I think that’s great. I also I’m looking at their ability to solve problems and their resourcefulness.

[05:07] That is probably one of the biggest sticking points for me. So I find and that really sticks and ties in with the mindset. But I’ll wrap up with a story. I spun up a new company last year and it was a little bit more complex because this company does work in the government space. And so I had to find a professional that had a lot of you know, I was looking for an attorney and so I needed to find someone that had a lot of knowledge in that area, but also understood the accounting world and some of the intricacies for what we weren’t doing. And there were a lot of different professionals I had to interview. And as I spoke and found out, I had one and it was strange. She is an attorney, so she’s a lawyer,

[06:02] but she also has a degree in accounting and she has an MBA. And typical, you know, I have a bit of hesitancy to work with some MBAs just in many cases, but her resourcefulness was out of control. Amazing. So she knew the right questions to ask. And then when I stumped her on a few things, she knew where to find the answers and how to find them and then followed up. I always lay a couple of tests of giving them an assignment and setting a timeline of when they will respond. And if they miss that deadline at the very beginning, then it’s an automatic no for me. Because if they miss it at the beginning, it’s probably going to happen habitually. And that’s something that I understand things do happen,

[06:57] but I want that to be the exception, not the rule. Really well said. It’s so fun that in today’s world, we can find really close matches for not only the level of capability, but the aspect, like what you said with this particular attorney. And I have similar experience. I have particular, very specialized needs from time to time in the attorney landscape. And I’m so grateful that with a couple of quick web searches and or asking around, you can get what Dan Sullivan calls a who, not a how. So what he means by that is that you’re hiring a person that can come in and do the job. You’re not hiring somebody that can tell you how to do it. Yes. Now, if I recall, and I hope I don’t botch this, Kim,

[07:56] but doesn’t Dan say that there’s a who’s, a who that who’s? Yes, there are who that who’s. And I think that sometimes I play that role. I know a lot of who’s. Oh, you do. Yes, absolutely. And I would love to connect somebody to the who that they needed in order to further their project. And I think a lot of professionals know a lot of who’s because they typically have a lot of entrepreneurial clients that are who’s that come in and do specialized work and get the job done and actually provide the service or the product or the product with the service or whatever it is needed so that the job is complete. They’re not consultants. They’re not, oh, here, just buy my course online and take it. I have learned actually now to even ask for that.

[08:45] Like I, you know, let me just stop you. I don’t want to know how to do it. I want to know who can do it. And what I love about that is that then the person doing the job is a specialist and it’s their unique ability and they love the work. And because of that, they’re going to do a better job. And if I try to do that job, I’m taking the joy from somebody else who’s better at it than me. Yes, yes, very well said. You know, I think as we kind of start to put a wrapper on the vetting and finding good professionals, you know, the touting on the geo location of people, we can organize ourselves in a way that it’s not uncommon to have, you know, a bookkeeper in the Philippines that communicates with an accountant that’s in Arizona

[09:40] that may communicate with another bookkeeper in California or whatever that looks like. You know, the world is at our fingertips and that is something that is truly amazing. And then the final wrapper for me at least is that because of that limitless possibility, we don’t need to compromise. I remember early on in my career, when the internet was just, you know, barely running past CD-ROMs, you know, I would look around and find the people that I respected the most and ask for the referral and typically go with one of those. And while that still works, we’re not limited to that anymore. Correct. And the wrapper that I want to put on today’s talk is a promise made earlier on. And that’s for the CPA world,

[10:31] because I think so many people need help in that space. And frankly, so many people actually don’t need help in that space. If you’re an employee and you don’t own any real investment or real estate, maybe you have one duplex or something like that, you don’t really need a CPA. Your situation is very straightforward and it can be done very simply online as long as you’re willing to do the work or maybe you get a bookkeeper if you don’t want to have yourself to do the work. However, if you are looking for a CPA or you want to learn more about the space because you hope someday to be a business owner or to have more real estate and so you want to do the learning now, I have a great source for the education

[11:20] of all things taxation in a very enlightening way, because sometimes this can be a fairly boring subject, let’s be frank about it. And that is Tom Willwright, spelled W-H-E-E-L-W-R-I-G-H-T. This is Robert Kiyosaki, CPA that’s fairly well known. And you can go to his WealthAbility website, WealthAbility, just the two words put together, WealthAbility.com and learn so much good information, get on his email list. He has a book that’s on Amazon that is updated. It’s not real obvious that it’s updated because they weren’t able to change enough of it to actually have it called like version two or anything, but it is updated and he continues to update it. And then of course, his emails are there and you can do a lot of good learning in the space

[12:11] until you’re ready. And then even better, you can actually use that WealthAbility site to find a CPA that maybe is in your area or not. Maybe you live in South Dakota and you own real estate in Montana and you actually want a Montana CPA, awesome. You could find that on the WealthAbility site. Excellent. I’ll make sure that we put that inside of the show notes and thank you for sharing this, Kam. This was wonderful because I think this is something that depending on our listeners, if you’re just getting started in the financial world or if you happen to be sharing this information with relatives or others that you care about, this is something that can definitely make a positive impact. So thank you, Kam, for sharing this today.

[12:58] Absolutely. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.