Case Study: Bob Patten, CPA

Q: What was the problem you were trying to solve?
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[00:00:00] Bob Patten: When I met you, what we talked about was something exactly what I was trying to do, and it was something that I knew was the path that I really wanted to take. I didn’t want to get into all the knits, and knats, and have to run spreadsheets and so on.

[00:00:14] Trow Trowbridge: You were a consumer of outside advice coaching. In fact, you had one or two going when we first met.

[00:00:23] Bob Patten: I did. I had a coach from a particular franchise with particular systems and so on. There was a lot of helpful things in that. Kinda ran its course after a year or so and, so it was time to move on.

Q: What was keeping you from achieving this goal on your own?
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[00:00:35] Trow Trowbridge: What was keeping you from achieving this goal on your own?

[00:00:40] Bob Patten: Not knowing how to get from here to there? How to be able to deliver, in a strategic sense, what I was wanting to deliver, which again was helping them get to their goals. I’m an entrepreneur, my wife and I both are, have been for quite a while.

[00:00:55] We know the struggle and it’s easy to hit that ceiling. And that [00:01:00] ceiling is, what got me here is not gonna get me there. I didn’t know how to get from here to there. I was really seeking.

[00:01:07] You were already connected. You already had thought through all of this. To me, it was just exactly what I’d been looking for and didn’t know how to go about finding it.

Q: Can you describe the shift you made to start advising clients proactively?
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[00:01:15] Trow Trowbridge: Can you describe the shift you made once you joined the program to start advising clients proactively versus the after the fact once-per-year type tax and bookkeeping relationship?

[00:01:28] Bob Patten: I gotta tell you, it was a gradual transformation that still continues. What has it been? Two, two and a half, three years?

[00:01:35] Trow Trowbridge: I think the biggest watershed was that event we went to in San Diego.

[00:01:39] Bob Patten: That’s right. And what I heard in that there was one presentation where a financial planner and a CPA were speaking about their experiences. And I heard the amount of money that the financial planners received from their engagements. Golly, what was that? I don’t know if you remember, [00:02:00] but that $25,000, I think it was like $130,000.

[00:02:03] I think it’s a victory to do a tax return for $2,500 or $3000? What am I doing? I remember, I was so blown away by that. I asked you after the session, is this really the numbers you’re talking about?

[00:02:15] And you’re like, Yeah. Didn’t you know that? No, I had no idea. That’s what could be tapped into.

Q: How do you work with clients now?
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[00:02:20] Trow Trowbridge: How do you work with clients now versus prior to joining the program?

[00:02:25] Bob Patten: Oh, wow. Way differently. Your very patient coaching… Over a period of time *I’ve learned to ask much, much better questions*, and I’m nowhere near there. But I’m doing a lot better at it. And that’s what it’s all about.

[00:02:37] *It’s all about asking the questions, the discovery piece. Because there’s no one size fits all.* There, there are very standard things in business that we have to address. But everybody has their own journey.

[00:02:50] *Everybody has their own perspective on things and the way to communicate, the way they absorb information can be rather different.* Very important to get that [00:03:00] so that we know that we’re communicating.

[00:03:03] One of the very large challenges I continue to have, you call it the "curse of knowledge", which is, as a CPA, I know what I’m trying to say, but it doesn’t communicate always with the clients.

[00:03:13] Because I “CPA-speak” too often. It’s not what they’re gonna be able to absorb. And so *asking those better questions and getting a sense of how to communicate is key. *

[00:03:23] Tell you what, it’s really worked. *I think we’re this year, a hundred plus thousand dollars in revenue, more. No, I think it’s even more than that. 150 thousand dollars worth of revenue and more. *

Q: What did your wife recently share with you recently?
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[00:03:35] Trow Trowbridge: What did your wife, Debbie relay to you, just what a month ago?

[00:03:42] Bob Patten: She’s stunned. She’s looking at the bank account. She takes care of our bank accounts and we have a number of businesses. *She is stunned at the amount of money that’s still in the bank right now.*

[00:03:51] Tax business as we know, big push, till the deadline. And there’s other little pushes, the corporate deadline, the personal deadline. But mostly when we get into the fall months, there’s not much income and we just hold on hoping that it’ll last until end of January when the taxes really start rolling in. And that looks like a thing of the past.

Q: How does it feel to have “breathing room”?
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[00:04:11] Trow Trowbridge: How does that feel?

[00:04:13] Bob Patten: Oh my god. It is such a relief. You used the term “breathing room”. And that was our big priority when we met.

[00:04:20] These are the priorities.

[00:04:21] Number one is “breathing room”. You gotta have enough money to where you can not have to sweat paying the bills all through the year and be able to concentrate more on building the business, working on the business. We’re not nearly where we need to be, but I do have “breathing room”.

Q: How do you cut down on distractions and keep your focus?
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[00:04:36] Trow Trowbridge: How do you cut down on distractions? As your success grows, as you’re doing this one thing, how do you cut down on distractions? Keep your focus?

[00:04:46] Bob Patten: *Number one is being very clear who my target market is, which means being clear about who it’s not.*

[00:04:53] I don’t need to be taking on clients that are using up bandwidth, not the kind of clients that I need to be working with. That’s very key.

[00:05:02] *For things that are routine, repetitious, administrative, those kind of things. It’s more about training my staff and delegating to them, trusting them, empowering them.* And that’s working very nicely.

[00:05:15] It takes some time. It takes some time. In the past I’ve thought, I’m the CEO, I’ll just go ahead and take care of it. But no. By doing that, what I realize is I’m denying them the opportunity to learn and grow. So I have to take my time in the front end to teach, I’m telling you afterwards, it’s a beautiful thing.

Q: What has been the most transformative part of the program for you?
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[00:05:34] Trow Trowbridge: What has been the most transformative part of the program for you?

[00:05:38] Bob Patten: It’s a mind shift to being very open, being more creative, tapping into the emotional.

[00:05:45] You want more profit? Everybody says, Yeah.

[00:05:48] *Why? What is your why?*

[00:05:51] Q: Why is "the why"important? How have you found that to be important to your ultimate client?
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[00:05:51] Trow Trowbridge: Why is that important? How have you found that to be important to your ultimate client?

[00:05:57] It has to tap into something deep within them, what it really means. Something of deep importance to them as to why they need that.

[00:06:06] I have kids going to college. I need to provide for them because they love their kids.

[00:06:12] I need to find out what that why is. Because now we know *as we gain the profit, it’s not profit for profit’s sake, it’s for a purpose. And now we’ve defined that purpose.*

[00:06:23] And *that’s on an emotional level more than it is on an analytical level, which we CPAs are so good at jumping into and being so analytical, we miss the emotional piece.*

[00:06:33] Bob Patten: We have clients that you and I work together on collaborate with, and they can’t stop saying how great this is for them to be able to work with us to, to achieve the things that they achieve.

[00:06:44] And it’s not just the dollars and cents which does come, and we’re doing great things for them. We’re doing really good things, but we hear the piece that says, *this is the one hour in my week that I get to concentrate on me.*

[00:06:57] Trow Trowbridge: Oh yeah. Isn’t that amazing?

[00:06:58] Bob Patten: It’s so refreshing. It just energizes me to the point that I am good to go for the rest of the week. That’s special. That’s very special.

Q: What would your number one piece of advice be to CPAs struggling with not enough money or time?
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[00:07:06] Trow Trowbridge: As we wrap up here, what would be your number one piece of advice that you would give to CPAs that are struggling with compliance work, not enough money or time?

[00:07:17] Bob Patten: You gotta connect with Trow and let him guide you through the process. It’s not one thing. It’s a series of things.

[00:07:22] We talk about what we do for the clients is “layering and sequencing”; And it’s the same way with this learning process.

[00:07:29] We became CPAs cause we wanted to help. A lot of us that do the tax and the bookkeeping, we want to help the busy business owners. And we want be able to explain things so they know what’s going on and so on.

[00:07:38] Just take it to the next level, Trow will show you how.