September 16, 2024 • 23 mins
In the latest episode of the "Get Off The Treadmill" podcast, host Chuck Blakeman chats with Clayton Achen, founder of Achen Henderson, a cutting-edge virtual CPA firm. Clayton, a passionate advocate for small businesses, shares his unique journey from a sales career to becoming a significant force in accounting, focusing on tax, cloud accounting, and technology.
The conversation explores the seven stages of business ownership from Blakeman’s book, “Making Money Is Killing Your Business:”
- Startup: Excitement without practical challenges.
- Survival: Financial struggles and time constraints.
- Subsistence: Breaking even but with high risk.
- Stability: Profitability with a sense of incompleteness.
- Success: Balance of money and time, offering more freedom.
- Significance: Established leadership and systems for even more freedom.
- Succession: The business operates independently, providing maximum freedom.
Clayton discusses his personal transition from stage four (Stability) to stage five (Success), emphasizing the role of clarity and intentionality in achieving this shift. He highlights the importance of building the right team and realigning financial and operational strategies to strike a balance between time and money.
Despite facing setbacks and revisiting earlier stages, Clayton remains committed to creating a business that supports freedom and sustainability. He invites listeners to connect with him for further insights or to join his mastermind group, the 3to5 Club.
Listeners can reach out to Clayton at clayton@achenhenderson.ca or visit AchenHenderson.ca. Chuck Blakeman encourages subscribers to stay tuned for more valuable business growth tips and strategies.
Check our special offer for the Making Money is Killing Your Business: https://bit.ly/m/3to5Club
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
Welcome back to the Get Off the Treadmill podcast for
small business owners and entrepreneurs, where we show you how
to build a successful business and to have a life
too.
We're going to dive into another topic that helps us
make more money in less time and to get off
the treadmill so we can experience a life of significance.
And now your host and the author of the number
(00:25):
one bestselling business book, Making Money is Killing Your Business,
Chuck Blakeman.
Today I'm talking with Clayton Achen.
He is the visionary driving force behind Achen Henderson, a
modern virtual CPA firm that focuses on helping small businesses
succeed.
Clayton is a small business advocate, a tax ninja, cloud
(00:47):
accounting and technology enthusiast, and a lifelong student of culture
and leadership.
His dream is twofold, to be at the forefront of
the evolution of the accounting industry and enjoy his life
while helping other clients enjoy building their businesses.
And Clayton also hosts a three to five club CEO
mastermind group to help business owners get off the treadmill
(01:08):
and make more money in less time.
Welcome, Clayton.
It's great to have you with us.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Chuck.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Yeah, I'm excited about it.
And tell us just where you live and how you
ended up where you are.
Has this always been home for you?
Yeah, I've been in Calgary for 42 and a half
years that I've been on Earth with a short stint
(01:29):
down in Lethbridge, which is pretty close to the US
border for university.
I think I was voted the least likely accountant by
all my friends when I made the transition from, you
know, I kind of went from being, when I was
18, I wanted to be an avionics person, work on
airplanes, did a year of that, and I ended up
in a sales gig.
(01:50):
And I really enjoyed sales.
And so I dropped the avionics thing and just went
and sold stuff and, you know, cell phones and sort
of consumer electronics and built really high performing teams in
that area.
And while I was doing that, I decided to move
down to Lethbridge and go to university.
(02:11):
And the company that I was working for in Calgary
actually chased me down there and said, listen, I want
you to open a store down here to sell, you
know, cell phones.
And I said, well, I'm going to school full time.
They said, well, what do you need?
I said, well, I need you to pay for university.
And they said, sure.
And we built out of this little, you know, rural
town in southern Alberta, built one of the highest performing
(02:33):
teams in Canada.
And we were getting flown to Toronto to ride on
yachts and stuff for like our, you know, for our
sales accolades.
And I thought, man, this is really great.
And I ended up in accounting through university just because,
you know, I just threw a dart at business and
I happened to be best at accounting because, you know,
I have a logical brain and all that.
And yeah, here we are today.
(02:55):
And what I've come to realize is this is actually,
you know, accounting and law is actually the ultimate backstage
pass in terms of helping business owners.
Right.
And so, you know, but it took me until about
2017, which was 11 years after I started the journey
or 10 years after I started the journey in accounting.
But four years after I started my business, it took
(03:16):
four years of grinding away before I finally went, you
know what, I had my daughter, which was our second
child.
And what else happened?
The government sort of ripped the carpet out from under
us on a bunch of tax planning we'd been doing.
So I had a lot of phone calls to make
to angry people who'd spent a lot of money on
tax planning with me.
(03:36):
And I went, you know, I got to start doing
things differently here because I'm just grinding and I don't
like grinding.
And then I read your book.
And then things started to change.
We hired you guys and here we are, right?
Fast forward a few years and now I'm doing everything
I can to advocate for and help business owners sort
of, you know, go through the stages that I've gone
through.
(03:56):
Well, you did a great job of it with the
impact you're having with your three to five club with
business owners up there and being able to take over
Canada.
So we're excited about you continue to grow there.
I hear what you said you had what Michael Gerber
in his book from 1985, The E-Myth, called an
entrepreneurial spasm.
And at some point we, you know, we just get
(04:19):
sick of doing this for somebody else and realize I'm
making those people a lot of money.
I wonder if I can do this myself.
And overnight we have this spasm and we end up
in our own businesses.
So today I wanted to, you had mentioned walking through
the seven stages of business ownership, which is in the
book, Making Money Is Killing Your Business.
(04:40):
It's my first book.
And how those seven stages of business ownership impacted you.
So to get our listeners started, since this is also
a visual video podcast, I'm going to bring up a
visual.
And for those who aren't watching, we'll run you through
it quick.
The seven stages of business ownership, very quickly.
(05:05):
A startup is the first stage and startup is that
emotional, hey, this is really fun.
This is great.
All the vision, none of the problems.
And then you print a business card and you're in
stage two, survival.
And survival is where you're losing money and you're losing
time.
It's taking all your time and all your money.
And the operative emotion in stage one is what's fun.
(05:27):
This is fun and operative emotion.
Stage two is, I didn't think it would be this
tough.
And then stage three, we get to stage three at
some point where we're breaking even consistently.
And the operative emotion there is, well, this is great
for a moment, but it's kind of like living on
the edge of a cliff.
I could get blown off of this break-even thing.
If the business stops, then if I stop, the business
(05:51):
stops.
But at least I've got something.
And then stage four, stability.
And stability is where we would have in the past,
I think you and I would have called this the
American dream or even the Canadian dream.
Your business is making money.
It's profitable.
And you can buy a hot tub and go on
vacation.
But there's something missing from your business in stage four,
(06:13):
even though you're making money.
So I'm going to stop there.
We'll go through stages five, six, and seven as they're
appropriate.
But I'd love for you to give your thoughts on
first, maybe why this thing is helpful to you or
how it impacted your business as you walk through those
stages from startup to survival to subsistence to stability.
(06:33):
Yeah, I think, you know, just to go back to
the real basics here is I didn't realize this until
later, but entrepreneurs typically aren't good at business.
They're usually craftspeople or, you know, and I was there,
you know, I was a pretty good salesperson, you know,
still am reasonably good salesperson.
I'm a reasonably good tax person.
(06:54):
And so I got to blow through stages one, two,
and three really quickly.
We bought a business early on.
And so that business produced income.
It didn't cover costs for maybe six months.
We were, you know, we were dragging.
But in the business I'm in, you know, most of
the capital is what's in your head and your experience
in life.
Right.
And EMIF was, you know, you talked about EMIF.
(07:15):
EMIF is another good book at explaining this, but not
in this systematized way of stages and where am I?
And it was really a nice barometer to check in
and go, where am I here?
Like, where am I here?
And where do I want to be?
Right.
And I'm always, I've always been a goals focused person.
But when you're starting your business, you're not thinking about,
I want to have 25 team members and 10 weeks
(07:36):
a year of vacation.
Like, that's not what you're thinking about.
You're just thinking about paying the bills and getting going.
And, and so just seeing the seven stages really helped
me identify where I landed in them, which helped me
go, you know what?
I don't, I don't like being here.
Right.
I don't like being here.
But furthermore, and this is really particular to our industry.
Most big firm accounting partners are stage four people.
(08:00):
They just are.
And they're never going to get out because that system
of big accounting firm, and I'm talking like the big
ones, right?
Where there's hundreds of partners.
It's all about making money.
You get into stage four and you don't get to
leave.
You do not get to leave stage four.
And that was my future at the old firm.
So it was.
A lot of money and no time.
A lot of money and no time.
And so that was really my, it affirmed why I
(08:22):
left there four years ago.
But it also gave me something to point at and
get started on building something bigger.
And so, yeah, I, I, I only just got out
of stage four.
Probably a year and a half ago.
Right.
I think, you know, we always need to ask why
it's the most important least asked business in question.
(08:44):
Why don't most business owners ever get past stage four?
I think in some cases they don't know any better.
I didn't until I put this thing together for myself
and realized, hey, I don't know where I am.
What are the stages of business?
So we developed this over a few years with a
lot of help.
And, and you get to where you find these things.
(09:05):
And to your point, now that I know where I'm
at, I either like it or I don't.
Yeah.
But before I didn't know if I liked it or
if I didn't know if I, I didn't know if
I didn't like it because I didn't know where I
was.
So it's been super helpful to me over the years
to realize, because you never stay in one stage.
You never just go neatly from this stage to that.
You go backwards, you know, the world hits you with
(09:25):
a punch and you go into stage three again.
But at least I know where that lets me know
what the next thing is I need to do and
whether I'm happy or not.
And it gives me those other stages to shoot for.
This is where I want to spend most of my
time.
Stages five, six or seven.
So, so you just got out of stage four.
What was it that, that, that worked for you to
(09:46):
get you out of four, where you're just making money
to get into five and five is where I would
say that's the first one we would call that stage
five success.
And the reason we call that success is because it's
the first time in our business where we regularly can
get time, not just money, but we get every Friday
and the business still makes money without us.
(10:07):
So we don't just shut the business down or we
take Wednesday afternoons off or we, we regularly get time.
The business is providing us time as well as money.
That's stage five.
So how did you get to that place where you,
you recognize these stages, you didn't like stage four.
What did you need to do to get to stage
five?
Yeah, it was, what was it?
(10:28):
Yeah, it was resources.
So for until 2017, 2018, George and I, my business
partner at the time and Carol was here as well,
but we went, you know, no bums in chairs as
in, we're not going to hire staff.
We're just going to do this all ourselves.
We've got a target income that we want to make.
And we got there and that, and it was just
us and we outsourced some of our work and whatever.
(10:48):
But what I realized was in order to move beyond
this, I need leaders here and a team here who
can actually do work to, to, to get me out
of the doing, you know, where I can actually focus
on strategy and growing my business and growing our business.
And then once you start, I'm an accountant.
(11:09):
So once you start reverse engineering that you go, okay,
I need whatever it is.
$900,000 a salary, or if you're, you know, you
can bring a rate down and go, okay, I need
a person.
I need one person.
I need $60,000 worth of salary.
Okay.
Well, I need to go and get 150,000 more
sales for that to work out with, you know, covering
their overheads.
And, and so you start reverse engineering this math and
going, my team that I think I need to be
(11:33):
in stage five looks like this, this is what that
costs.
And how are we going to make them the revenues
match the match the cost?
And it's not a cost.
It's an investment and having these, having people around sufficient
to get you out of stage four.
So it's funny because I've had a few people join
(11:54):
our three to five clubs as guests, and they come
out of it going, you know, I'm just not going
to grow a team.
I'm comfortable in stage four.
I like just doing my thing.
I'm well-insured if I get hit by, you know,
that's always my question.
Are you insured?
You know, and, and they go, yeah, I'm not, I'm
not going to grow a team.
I don't want to do that.
So, so this stuff is completely unapplicable to me.
And, and I go, yeah, that's fair enough.
(12:15):
You, you know, so for me, it was growing the
team.
Yeah.
Well, and you said something really important in that, in
the middle of that, you said you were reverse engineering
and that immediately took me to Stephen Covey's one of
his seven habits.
Start with the end in mind with the end of
mine.
I was, I was privileged.
We were just beginning to get to know each other.
He quoted me in his last book before he left
(12:37):
us.
And I've always been a big fan of that one
habit in particular, because it goes to the question, what
do you want?
Yeah.
What do you want?
And we never, we don't ask that.
I, you know, even when I, I've started 13 businesses,
I don't think it was until the last two or
three that I actually asked myself, now, what do I
want from this?
Because we kind of make a lot of assumptions about
(12:58):
what we want.
Well, of course we want money.
And then we assume a lot of things will come
as a result of having money.
So in stage four, you had money, but you didn't
have time.
Yeah.
And getting to where you understood what you wanted, either
stage five, six, or seven, or a combination of those,
that gives us the clarity to have the, to have
(13:19):
the hope to take the risk to grow the team.
Yeah.
And it was a risk, you know, that's a risk.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
In my mind.
Yeah.
When we have clarity about what stage we're in and
then what stage we want to get to.
And we say, I want to be there.
I have clarity about that.
Then we can be reverse engineering.
Well, how do I get there?
(13:39):
Here's where I am.
Here's where I want to end up.
Here's the Delta.
Now, what do I do about that?
So it's so powerful to start with the end in
mind in so many ways.
And I love that you emphasize that and getting from
stage four to stage five.
Well, and I had a, I had a three to
five club member, Peter Mitchell, great guy.
And he'd retired.
He's retired.
He's in his seventies.
(14:00):
And he came and joined our three to five club
just because he really, really liked.
He saw this presentation that I do.
I do a talk, your talk on the seven stages
and it's attracted a lot of people because it gives
clarity, a lot of clarity.
And when I hit stage, he was there in my
club when I hit stage five.
And, you know, the next thing in your book is
(14:20):
to start working on sort of lifetime goals.
And I'm still having a really hard time with that,
right?
Like what are my lifetime goals?
Because I'm so buried right now.
And I just want to be at my breakfast table
and my dinner table.
I want to take a day off a week and
go mountain biking with my kids.
And that's all that matters to me right now.
And later we'll worry about later.
And Peter, during our club said, you know what, Clayton,
(14:40):
you don't need to have it all figured out right
now.
You've got the important stuff figured out right now.
Don't worry about you.
Just relax on yourself about your life for now.
You know, like just take it easy on yourself.
That is so smart.
You know, I've done that so often when you have
three things to work on, you tend to get all
three of them 30% done.
When you get one thing, you get the one thing
done and it pushes you 30% closer on the
(15:02):
other two.
This is it.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and so the other thing that I'll mention
is, you know, I spent three months this year back
in stage four.
I just, and I do like compliance season in a
tax firm.
I'm needed.
It's all hands on deck, you know, and we've got
some complicated stuff that moves through the office that, you
know, maybe it's me and one other person that could
(15:22):
sign off on it.
And so I admit to my club every, every time
we have, every time we hit this time of year,
you know, team, I'm going back into stage four here
for a little while.
And so my next goal, it really is, is to
bring in the competence into the firm so that I
don't have to dip into stage four for three or
four months a year every year.
But I'm still, you know, so when I say I'm
in stage five, I'm in stage five for most of
(15:43):
the year.
Yes.
And I think that's really important for people to understand.
I said this before, but I'll say it again.
These stages, they do come consecutively, but it might go
one, two, three, four, five, four, five, four, five, five,
six, five, six, six, five, six, seven, you know, and
then you continue to work with that.
Life is not, doesn't fit neatly in a box.
And my businesses have always been strung out across basically
(16:07):
all the, all stage five, six, and seven.
Bits and pieces of them are in seven.
Parts of them are in six and parts are in
five.
Let's give people that so we can, people are probably
saying, well, what are these stages?
So Clayton, you went to stage five and that we
call it the big mindset shift where you're not just
making money, but you're building a business that makes money.
Stage five success.
(16:27):
And we call that success because it's the first time
that we get to where we both have time and
money.
I think like 5% of business owners ever get
there.
And it's not because it's not possible.
Everybody who decides to get to stage five with rare
exceptions gets there.
It's just that we never thought to do.
We never intended to do it.
So you intended to do it.
(16:48):
Gee, what a surprise you got there.
And you will float back into four, sometimes three, but
this is an encouragement to get as high in stages
as you can because the thing I've experienced is if
you're in stage five, you can float back into four
or three.
You can go five, four, three, five, four, three, four,
three, five.
You can do that.
But if you're at stage seven, you go seven, six,
(17:09):
five, five, six, seven.
It's a different floating.
So stage six, five is success.
Stage six is, and stage five is where you're really
putting processes in place.
So that other people can take the business and run
it at least one day a week.
And stage six, you're now putting leadership in place.
And we call that significance.
When you've got other leadership in place, now you're taking
(17:31):
maybe one day off, maybe two days off a week,
and regularly taking a week off in your business because
you have other leaders in place who can handle the
business for a whole week or maybe two weeks or
maybe a month.
And then stage seven, we call that succession.
And we think of succession very differently than we traditionally
do.
Whenever you hear succession in a business, we think, I'm
(17:52):
getting the heck out of here.
I'm selling this thing and it's going to be off
my back.
But if we build a business that is giving us
this kind of freedom, stage seven succession looks more like,
you know, I think I want to work one day
a week and that's it.
Or I don't want to work in this business at
all.
I just want to show up once a month and
have a meeting with the leaders and see how it's
going.
We don't have to sell it because it's not an
(18:13):
albatross on our back.
We've gotten freedom in our business, not from it.
So you're in stage five, four, five.
I'm guessing there's parts of you that's floating into six
as well.
I can give you an example of how one place,
one of my pieces was in stage seven when I
went to New Zealand a number of years ago for
my business maturity date.
When I got back, I actually had to call somebody
(18:34):
and say, where do I go for work?
Because I knew they were going to do this, but
while I was gone, they found a new office and
moved into it.
That's a stage seven business.
I'm not involved in that and don't need to be.
And then there's other parts that are in stage five.
So just for our listeners, can you see where floating
four, five, and six, you might be doing some of
that?
(18:54):
Well, I mean, it's interesting because I am regularly now
getting, I don't know if you've watched what's happening in
my industry and the accounting industry, but private equity is
taking over.
Private equity is scooping up accounting firms like crazy right
now.
Grant Thornton US, I think BDO, I think it was
BDO or RSM.
I can't remember.
One of them sold to private equity.
So I'm getting calls from private equity firms.
(19:16):
Kind of all the time now.
And I've got, and I've had two merger conversations with
mid-market firms.
And I'll always have the talk.
I'll, you know, I want to know what my options
are.
There is a price.
And I talked to, you know, one of the mid
-market firms that's probably the closest aligned to our firm's
values called me yesterday and said, and this was just
(19:39):
yesterday and said, hey, where are we at on this?
I'm like, well, I'm not, here's the thing.
You know, I'm not working 55 hours a week.
I've got a great team and a great culture here.
And I don't want to disrupt that.
And frankly, my infrastructure is better than yours.
And they're like, yeah, well, we could get you out
doing BD all day and you wouldn't really have to
do file work.
And I said to him, and this kind of blew
his mind.
(19:59):
I said, I've spent the last five or six years
building a web engine where work just falls on my
lap without me having to do BD.
I don't want to do BD.
Like, this is like, I want completely automated.
I want a full pipeline with me not having to
work for it other than creating content like this.
Well, you know, it's like, and so, you know, having
(20:20):
those conversations though, makes you go stage seven, stage six,
like where do I want to be?
And it's really eye-opening to have those offers at
the doorstep.
And I'm blessed, I'm very blessed to have those offers
at the doorstep, but it makes you think about where
do you want to be, right?
And it's pretty good where I'm at.
Yeah, and one of the things that has helped me
to have offers like that in the past was to
(20:40):
realize that the business somebody wants to buy is one
I shouldn't sell.
Yeah, exactly.
Because they don't want to buy a job.
If you have a job and they see you as
the owner doing a job, well, if they buy it,
then they've got a job.
But if they see you as not having a job
and having freedom in your business, and it's still bringing
you the revenue you want, they want to buy that.
(21:02):
And why would I sell it?
And why would I sell it?
Yeah, so I think that's the beauty of being able,
again, to have utter clarity on where you're at.
And building a business that gives us that freedom, which
is why we call it freedom mapping to get these
things done.
Well, we've just touched the tip of the iceberg here,
and there's probably 20 other things we could talk about,
(21:23):
but I would rather leave our listeners and our watchers
a little frustrated so they can get ahold of you.
Where can they get ahold of you for more information
on this stuff and how to get ahold of you
for accounting and as well as for your three to
five club and just helping them learn how to go
through these stages?
I mean, I love entrepreneurs and business owners, and I
(21:44):
would welcome a personal email from them, Clayton at AkinHenderson
.ca. That's A-C-H-E-N Henderson.ca. You
can go to our website, AchenHenderson.ca. It's probably the
best accounting website in the world, but maybe just Canada.
And so you can check us out there or you
can find me on LinkedIn, Clayton Achen.
(22:04):
I post a lot of stuff.
A lot of it is sort of anti-Canadian government
stuff, but I try and do some leadership stuff and
some tax stuff and all that.
So great.
Well, I'm excited for you.
Keep going.
Let's get you as far up those stages as you
want to go.
Appreciate your work.
I appreciate your influence in the world around you.
Chuck, I appreciate your book, man, and how it's changed
my life and the seven stages are so important.
(22:26):
So thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
That wraps up another episode of the Get Off The
Treadmill podcast.
If you found this podcast helpful, please subscribe and hit
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tools you need to grow your business and to get
off the treadmill.
If you want more information on the 3 to 5
Club, the Crankset Group, or to book Chuck as a
(22:48):
business advisor, speaker, or workshop leader, you can contact us
at grow, G-R-O-W, at cranksetgroup.com.
Until next time, have a great week.
Welcome back to the Get Off the Treadmill podcast for
small business owners and entrepreneurs, where we show you how
to build a successful business and to have a life
too.
We're going to dive into another topic that helps us
make more money in less time and to get off
the treadmill so we can experience a life of significance.
And now your host and the author of the number
(00:25):
one bestselling business book, Making Money is Killing Your Business,
Chuck Blakeman.
Today I'm talking with Clayton Achen.
He is the visionary driving force behind Achen Henderson, a
modern virtual CPA firm that focuses on helping small businesses
succeed.
Clayton is a small business advocate, a tax ninja, cloud
(00:47):
accounting and technology enthusiast, and a lifelong student of culture
and leadership.
His dream is twofold, to be at the forefront of
the evolution of the accounting industry and enjoy his life
while helping other clients enjoy building their businesses.
And Clayton also hosts a three to five club CEO
mastermind group to help business owners get off the treadmill
(01:08):
and make more money in less time.
Welcome, Clayton.
It's great to have you with us.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Chuck.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Yeah, I'm excited about it.
And tell us just where you live and how you
ended up where you are.
Has this always been home for you?
Yeah, I've been in Calgary for 42 and a half
years that I've been on Earth with a short stint
(01:29):
down in Lethbridge, which is pretty close to the US
border for university.
I think I was voted the least likely accountant by
all my friends when I made the transition from, you
know, I kind of went from being, when I was
18, I wanted to be an avionics person, work on
airplanes, did a year of that, and I ended up
in a sales gig.
(01:50):
And I really enjoyed sales.
And so I dropped the avionics thing and just went
and sold stuff and, you know, cell phones and sort
of consumer electronics and built really high performing teams in
that area.
And while I was doing that, I decided to move
down to Lethbridge and go to university.
(02:11):
And the company that I was working for in Calgary
actually chased me down there and said, listen, I want
you to open a store down here to sell, you
know, cell phones.
And I said, well, I'm going to school full time.
They said, well, what do you need?
I said, well, I need you to pay for university.
And they said, sure.
And we built out of this little, you know, rural
town in southern Alberta, built one of the highest performing
(02:33):
teams in Canada.
And we were getting flown to Toronto to ride on
yachts and stuff for like our, you know, for our
sales accolades.
And I thought, man, this is really great.
And I ended up in accounting through university just because,
you know, I just threw a dart at business and
I happened to be best at accounting because, you know,
I have a logical brain and all that.
And yeah, here we are today.
(02:55):
And what I've come to realize is this is actually,
you know, accounting and law is actually the ultimate backstage
pass in terms of helping business owners.
Right.
And so, you know, but it took me until about
2017, which was 11 years after I started the journey
or 10 years after I started the journey in accounting.
But four years after I started my business, it took
(03:16):
four years of grinding away before I finally went, you
know what, I had my daughter, which was our second
child.
And what else happened?
The government sort of ripped the carpet out from under
us on a bunch of tax planning we'd been doing.
So I had a lot of phone calls to make
to angry people who'd spent a lot of money on
tax planning with me.
(03:36):
And I went, you know, I got to start doing
things differently here because I'm just grinding and I don't
like grinding.
And then I read your book.
And then things started to change.
We hired you guys and here we are, right?
Fast forward a few years and now I'm doing everything
I can to advocate for and help business owners sort
of, you know, go through the stages that I've gone
through.
(03:56):
Well, you did a great job of it with the
impact you're having with your three to five club with
business owners up there and being able to take over
Canada.
So we're excited about you continue to grow there.
I hear what you said you had what Michael Gerber
in his book from 1985, The E-Myth, called an
entrepreneurial spasm.
And at some point we, you know, we just get
(04:19):
sick of doing this for somebody else and realize I'm
making those people a lot of money.
I wonder if I can do this myself.
And overnight we have this spasm and we end up
in our own businesses.
So today I wanted to, you had mentioned walking through
the seven stages of business ownership, which is in the
book, Making Money Is Killing Your Business.
(04:40):
It's my first book.
And how those seven stages of business ownership impacted you.
So to get our listeners started, since this is also
a visual video podcast, I'm going to bring up a
visual.
And for those who aren't watching, we'll run you through
it quick.
The seven stages of business ownership, very quickly.
(05:05):
A startup is the first stage and startup is that
emotional, hey, this is really fun.
This is great.
All the vision, none of the problems.
And then you print a business card and you're in
stage two, survival.
And survival is where you're losing money and you're losing
time.
It's taking all your time and all your money.
And the operative emotion in stage one is what's fun.
(05:27):
This is fun and operative emotion.
Stage two is, I didn't think it would be this
tough.
And then stage three, we get to stage three at
some point where we're breaking even consistently.
And the operative emotion there is, well, this is great
for a moment, but it's kind of like living on
the edge of a cliff.
I could get blown off of this break-even thing.
If the business stops, then if I stop, the business
(05:51):
stops.
But at least I've got something.
And then stage four, stability.
And stability is where we would have in the past,
I think you and I would have called this the
American dream or even the Canadian dream.
Your business is making money.
It's profitable.
And you can buy a hot tub and go on
vacation.
But there's something missing from your business in stage four,
(06:13):
even though you're making money.
So I'm going to stop there.
We'll go through stages five, six, and seven as they're
appropriate.
But I'd love for you to give your thoughts on
first, maybe why this thing is helpful to you or
how it impacted your business as you walk through those
stages from startup to survival to subsistence to stability.
(06:33):
Yeah, I think, you know, just to go back to
the real basics here is I didn't realize this until
later, but entrepreneurs typically aren't good at business.
They're usually craftspeople or, you know, and I was there,
you know, I was a pretty good salesperson, you know,
still am reasonably good salesperson.
I'm a reasonably good tax person.
(06:54):
And so I got to blow through stages one, two,
and three really quickly.
We bought a business early on.
And so that business produced income.
It didn't cover costs for maybe six months.
We were, you know, we were dragging.
But in the business I'm in, you know, most of
the capital is what's in your head and your experience
in life.
Right.
And EMIF was, you know, you talked about EMIF.
(07:15):
EMIF is another good book at explaining this, but not
in this systematized way of stages and where am I?
And it was really a nice barometer to check in
and go, where am I here?
Like, where am I here?
And where do I want to be?
Right.
And I'm always, I've always been a goals focused person.
But when you're starting your business, you're not thinking about,
I want to have 25 team members and 10 weeks
(07:36):
a year of vacation.
Like, that's not what you're thinking about.
You're just thinking about paying the bills and getting going.
And, and so just seeing the seven stages really helped
me identify where I landed in them, which helped me
go, you know what?
I don't, I don't like being here.
Right.
I don't like being here.
But furthermore, and this is really particular to our industry.
Most big firm accounting partners are stage four people.
(08:00):
They just are.
And they're never going to get out because that system
of big accounting firm, and I'm talking like the big
ones, right?
Where there's hundreds of partners.
It's all about making money.
You get into stage four and you don't get to
leave.
You do not get to leave stage four.
And that was my future at the old firm.
So it was.
A lot of money and no time.
A lot of money and no time.
And so that was really my, it affirmed why I
(08:22):
left there four years ago.
But it also gave me something to point at and
get started on building something bigger.
And so, yeah, I, I, I only just got out
of stage four.
Probably a year and a half ago.
Right.
I think, you know, we always need to ask why
it's the most important least asked business in question.
(08:44):
Why don't most business owners ever get past stage four?
I think in some cases they don't know any better.
I didn't until I put this thing together for myself
and realized, hey, I don't know where I am.
What are the stages of business?
So we developed this over a few years with a
lot of help.
And, and you get to where you find these things.
(09:05):
And to your point, now that I know where I'm
at, I either like it or I don't.
Yeah.
But before I didn't know if I liked it or
if I didn't know if I, I didn't know if
I didn't like it because I didn't know where I
was.
So it's been super helpful to me over the years
to realize, because you never stay in one stage.
You never just go neatly from this stage to that.
You go backwards, you know, the world hits you with
(09:25):
a punch and you go into stage three again.
But at least I know where that lets me know
what the next thing is I need to do and
whether I'm happy or not.
And it gives me those other stages to shoot for.
This is where I want to spend most of my
time.
Stages five, six or seven.
So, so you just got out of stage four.
What was it that, that, that worked for you to
(09:46):
get you out of four, where you're just making money
to get into five and five is where I would
say that's the first one we would call that stage
five success.
And the reason we call that success is because it's
the first time in our business where we regularly can
get time, not just money, but we get every Friday
and the business still makes money without us.
(10:07):
So we don't just shut the business down or we
take Wednesday afternoons off or we, we regularly get time.
The business is providing us time as well as money.
That's stage five.
So how did you get to that place where you,
you recognize these stages, you didn't like stage four.
What did you need to do to get to stage
five?
Yeah, it was, what was it?
(10:28):
Yeah, it was resources.
So for until 2017, 2018, George and I, my business
partner at the time and Carol was here as well,
but we went, you know, no bums in chairs as
in, we're not going to hire staff.
We're just going to do this all ourselves.
We've got a target income that we want to make.
And we got there and that, and it was just
us and we outsourced some of our work and whatever.
(10:48):
But what I realized was in order to move beyond
this, I need leaders here and a team here who
can actually do work to, to, to get me out
of the doing, you know, where I can actually focus
on strategy and growing my business and growing our business.
And then once you start, I'm an accountant.
(11:09):
So once you start reverse engineering that you go, okay,
I need whatever it is.
$900,000 a salary, or if you're, you know, you
can bring a rate down and go, okay, I need
a person.
I need one person.
I need $60,000 worth of salary.
Okay.
Well, I need to go and get 150,000 more
sales for that to work out with, you know, covering
their overheads.
And, and so you start reverse engineering this math and
going, my team that I think I need to be
(11:33):
in stage five looks like this, this is what that
costs.
And how are we going to make them the revenues
match the match the cost?
And it's not a cost.
It's an investment and having these, having people around sufficient
to get you out of stage four.
So it's funny because I've had a few people join
(11:54):
our three to five clubs as guests, and they come
out of it going, you know, I'm just not going
to grow a team.
I'm comfortable in stage four.
I like just doing my thing.
I'm well-insured if I get hit by, you know,
that's always my question.
Are you insured?
You know, and, and they go, yeah, I'm not, I'm
not going to grow a team.
I don't want to do that.
So, so this stuff is completely unapplicable to me.
And, and I go, yeah, that's fair enough.
(12:15):
You, you know, so for me, it was growing the
team.
Yeah.
Well, and you said something really important in that, in
the middle of that, you said you were reverse engineering
and that immediately took me to Stephen Covey's one of
his seven habits.
Start with the end in mind with the end of
mine.
I was, I was privileged.
We were just beginning to get to know each other.
He quoted me in his last book before he left
(12:37):
us.
And I've always been a big fan of that one
habit in particular, because it goes to the question, what
do you want?
Yeah.
What do you want?
And we never, we don't ask that.
I, you know, even when I, I've started 13 businesses,
I don't think it was until the last two or
three that I actually asked myself, now, what do I
want from this?
Because we kind of make a lot of assumptions about
(12:58):
what we want.
Well, of course we want money.
And then we assume a lot of things will come
as a result of having money.
So in stage four, you had money, but you didn't
have time.
Yeah.
And getting to where you understood what you wanted, either
stage five, six, or seven, or a combination of those,
that gives us the clarity to have the, to have
(13:19):
the hope to take the risk to grow the team.
Yeah.
And it was a risk, you know, that's a risk.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
In my mind.
Yeah.
When we have clarity about what stage we're in and
then what stage we want to get to.
And we say, I want to be there.
I have clarity about that.
Then we can be reverse engineering.
Well, how do I get there?
(13:39):
Here's where I am.
Here's where I want to end up.
Here's the Delta.
Now, what do I do about that?
So it's so powerful to start with the end in
mind in so many ways.
And I love that you emphasize that and getting from
stage four to stage five.
Well, and I had a, I had a three to
five club member, Peter Mitchell, great guy.
And he'd retired.
He's retired.
He's in his seventies.
(14:00):
And he came and joined our three to five club
just because he really, really liked.
He saw this presentation that I do.
I do a talk, your talk on the seven stages
and it's attracted a lot of people because it gives
clarity, a lot of clarity.
And when I hit stage, he was there in my
club when I hit stage five.
And, you know, the next thing in your book is
(14:20):
to start working on sort of lifetime goals.
And I'm still having a really hard time with that,
right?
Like what are my lifetime goals?
Because I'm so buried right now.
And I just want to be at my breakfast table
and my dinner table.
I want to take a day off a week and
go mountain biking with my kids.
And that's all that matters to me right now.
And later we'll worry about later.
And Peter, during our club said, you know what, Clayton,
(14:40):
you don't need to have it all figured out right
now.
You've got the important stuff figured out right now.
Don't worry about you.
Just relax on yourself about your life for now.
You know, like just take it easy on yourself.
That is so smart.
You know, I've done that so often when you have
three things to work on, you tend to get all
three of them 30% done.
When you get one thing, you get the one thing
done and it pushes you 30% closer on the
(15:02):
other two.
This is it.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and so the other thing that I'll mention
is, you know, I spent three months this year back
in stage four.
I just, and I do like compliance season in a
tax firm.
I'm needed.
It's all hands on deck, you know, and we've got
some complicated stuff that moves through the office that, you
know, maybe it's me and one other person that could
(15:22):
sign off on it.
And so I admit to my club every, every time
we have, every time we hit this time of year,
you know, team, I'm going back into stage four here
for a little while.
And so my next goal, it really is, is to
bring in the competence into the firm so that I
don't have to dip into stage four for three or
four months a year every year.
But I'm still, you know, so when I say I'm
in stage five, I'm in stage five for most of
(15:43):
the year.
Yes.
And I think that's really important for people to understand.
I said this before, but I'll say it again.
These stages, they do come consecutively, but it might go
one, two, three, four, five, four, five, four, five, five,
six, five, six, six, five, six, seven, you know, and
then you continue to work with that.
Life is not, doesn't fit neatly in a box.
And my businesses have always been strung out across basically
(16:07):
all the, all stage five, six, and seven.
Bits and pieces of them are in seven.
Parts of them are in six and parts are in
five.
Let's give people that so we can, people are probably
saying, well, what are these stages?
So Clayton, you went to stage five and that we
call it the big mindset shift where you're not just
making money, but you're building a business that makes money.
Stage five success.
(16:27):
And we call that success because it's the first time
that we get to where we both have time and
money.
I think like 5% of business owners ever get
there.
And it's not because it's not possible.
Everybody who decides to get to stage five with rare
exceptions gets there.
It's just that we never thought to do.
We never intended to do it.
So you intended to do it.
(16:48):
Gee, what a surprise you got there.
And you will float back into four, sometimes three, but
this is an encouragement to get as high in stages
as you can because the thing I've experienced is if
you're in stage five, you can float back into four
or three.
You can go five, four, three, five, four, three, four,
three, five.
You can do that.
But if you're at stage seven, you go seven, six,
(17:09):
five, five, six, seven.
It's a different floating.
So stage six, five is success.
Stage six is, and stage five is where you're really
putting processes in place.
So that other people can take the business and run
it at least one day a week.
And stage six, you're now putting leadership in place.
And we call that significance.
When you've got other leadership in place, now you're taking
(17:31):
maybe one day off, maybe two days off a week,
and regularly taking a week off in your business because
you have other leaders in place who can handle the
business for a whole week or maybe two weeks or
maybe a month.
And then stage seven, we call that succession.
And we think of succession very differently than we traditionally
do.
Whenever you hear succession in a business, we think, I'm
(17:52):
getting the heck out of here.
I'm selling this thing and it's going to be off
my back.
But if we build a business that is giving us
this kind of freedom, stage seven succession looks more like,
you know, I think I want to work one day
a week and that's it.
Or I don't want to work in this business at
all.
I just want to show up once a month and
have a meeting with the leaders and see how it's
going.
We don't have to sell it because it's not an
(18:13):
albatross on our back.
We've gotten freedom in our business, not from it.
So you're in stage five, four, five.
I'm guessing there's parts of you that's floating into six
as well.
I can give you an example of how one place,
one of my pieces was in stage seven when I
went to New Zealand a number of years ago for
my business maturity date.
When I got back, I actually had to call somebody
(18:34):
and say, where do I go for work?
Because I knew they were going to do this, but
while I was gone, they found a new office and
moved into it.
That's a stage seven business.
I'm not involved in that and don't need to be.
And then there's other parts that are in stage five.
So just for our listeners, can you see where floating
four, five, and six, you might be doing some of
that?
(18:54):
Well, I mean, it's interesting because I am regularly now
getting, I don't know if you've watched what's happening in
my industry and the accounting industry, but private equity is
taking over.
Private equity is scooping up accounting firms like crazy right
now.
Grant Thornton US, I think BDO, I think it was
BDO or RSM.
I can't remember.
One of them sold to private equity.
So I'm getting calls from private equity firms.
(19:16):
Kind of all the time now.
And I've got, and I've had two merger conversations with
mid-market firms.
And I'll always have the talk.
I'll, you know, I want to know what my options
are.
There is a price.
And I talked to, you know, one of the mid
-market firms that's probably the closest aligned to our firm's
values called me yesterday and said, and this was just
(19:39):
yesterday and said, hey, where are we at on this?
I'm like, well, I'm not, here's the thing.
You know, I'm not working 55 hours a week.
I've got a great team and a great culture here.
And I don't want to disrupt that.
And frankly, my infrastructure is better than yours.
And they're like, yeah, well, we could get you out
doing BD all day and you wouldn't really have to
do file work.
And I said to him, and this kind of blew
his mind.
(19:59):
I said, I've spent the last five or six years
building a web engine where work just falls on my
lap without me having to do BD.
I don't want to do BD.
Like, this is like, I want completely automated.
I want a full pipeline with me not having to
work for it other than creating content like this.
Well, you know, it's like, and so, you know, having
(20:20):
those conversations though, makes you go stage seven, stage six,
like where do I want to be?
And it's really eye-opening to have those offers at
the doorstep.
And I'm blessed, I'm very blessed to have those offers
at the doorstep, but it makes you think about where
do you want to be, right?
And it's pretty good where I'm at.
Yeah, and one of the things that has helped me
to have offers like that in the past was to
(20:40):
realize that the business somebody wants to buy is one
I shouldn't sell.
Yeah, exactly.
Because they don't want to buy a job.
If you have a job and they see you as
the owner doing a job, well, if they buy it,
then they've got a job.
But if they see you as not having a job
and having freedom in your business, and it's still bringing
you the revenue you want, they want to buy that.
(21:02):
And why would I sell it?
And why would I sell it?
Yeah, so I think that's the beauty of being able,
again, to have utter clarity on where you're at.
And building a business that gives us that freedom, which
is why we call it freedom mapping to get these
things done.
Well, we've just touched the tip of the iceberg here,
and there's probably 20 other things we could talk about,
(21:23):
but I would rather leave our listeners and our watchers
a little frustrated so they can get ahold of you.
Where can they get ahold of you for more information
on this stuff and how to get ahold of you
for accounting and as well as for your three to
five club and just helping them learn how to go
through these stages?
I mean, I love entrepreneurs and business owners, and I
(21:44):
would welcome a personal email from them, Clayton at AkinHenderson
.ca. That's A-C-H-E-N Henderson.ca. You
can go to our website, AchenHenderson.ca. It's probably the
best accounting website in the world, but maybe just Canada.
And so you can check us out there or you
can find me on LinkedIn, Clayton Achen.
(22:04):
I post a lot of stuff.
A lot of it is sort of anti-Canadian government
stuff, but I try and do some leadership stuff and
some tax stuff and all that.
So great.
Well, I'm excited for you.
Keep going.
Let's get you as far up those stages as you
want to go.
Appreciate your work.
I appreciate your influence in the world around you.
Chuck, I appreciate your book, man, and how it's changed
my life and the seven stages are so important.
(22:26):
So thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
That wraps up another episode of the Get Off The
Treadmill podcast.
If you found this podcast helpful, please subscribe and hit
the like button to ensure you are receiving the latest
tools you need to grow your business and to get
off the treadmill.
If you want more information on the 3 to 5
Club, the Crankset Group, or to book Chuck as a
(22:48):
business advisor, speaker, or workshop leader, you can contact us
at grow, G-R-O-W, at cranksetgroup.com.
Until next time, have a great week.
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