It has been a month now since I had the opportunity with my teammate Janell to attend the 2023 Scaling New Heights conference for accountants in St. Louis, MO. This was my fourth year attending this national conference. The conference offers a lot. First, there is the training. This is made up of technical skills around subjects such as tax planning, cash flow forecasting and software and soft skills such as communication, providing advisory services and coaching clients (an area our accounting industry needs to improve on immensely). Next, the conference provides a one-stop shop for researching the newest technology available to our clients to improve their business workflows. We make it a point to research the vendors ahead of time and visit as many as possible to learn about how they can help our clients. Finally, the conference provides the chance to network with accountants and business advisors from across the country, enabling us to expand our views and take great ideas back into our practice here in the Midwest.  

This year was exceptionally rewarding as Step by Step Accounting had the honor of receiving the 2023 Top 50 Accounting Practices award from the Woodard Institute. The Woodard Institute gave this award to firms who exemplified being Intentional, Specialized, Efficient, Effective, Profitable and Scalable. As a firm, we have worked hard to perform at the highest level possible and look forward to continuing to provide this excellence to our clients into the future. 

I took away over twenty-three pages of notes from the sessions I attended – a sign of the enormous amounts of great ideas shared that week. Here are my five key take aways I would like to share: 

1. Business strategy is NOT optional. You must put in the time to lay this out for your business. What is your end goal? What is your vision? How will you structure it? Who will you serve? As a business owner, you are not just doing a job so you must cast a vision that your team and clients can follow. Consider your purpose, values, and passions.  

2. Businesses will have struggles and that is ok. At the conference, we heard a speaker named Amelia R. Earhart. Although she has the same name as the woman who attempted a solo flight around the world in the 1930s, she is not related. Amelia shared with us the concept that: “The only plane that doesn’t experience turbulence, is the one locked up in the hanger.” She faced real adversity as she worked toward successfully completing a flight around the world, but it was not without turbulence. Our businesses will have bumpy, rough patches, but it is something through which we can work.  

3. Cyber security is no longer an abstract threat. Cybercrime is now a bigger business in revenue size than the annual revenues of Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook COMBINED. We must move “yesterday” to put protection in place. When companies announce data breaches, public sentiment has become less sympathetic. You can follow simple guidelines published by the Federal Trade Commission here to start. Cybersecurity Basics | Federal Trade Commission (ftc.gov) Once you have the basics in place, consider consulting with a technology firm to make sure the more advanced topics are handled.  

4. Our money mindset of abundance, break even mentality or scarcity have a direct correlation to our profit margins. Spend time thinking about how you approach money. Our mindsets will be influenced by what happened to us as children, what we saw happen to our families and what we have experienced as adults. Journal about your first memories of money and the lessons and sayings that your family shared with you. Consider how those memories and beliefs have impacted where you are today. 

5. Business is spiritual – Why is it that in 2023 we can build a bridge or a car or an airplane with almost 100% certainty that it will be safe and work? But we cannot build marriages and businesses that succeed at that rate? It is because businesses are spiritual and not material. They involve people. People are messy, variable, and creative. Computers will never be able to replace us because we have an innate creativity and internal drive to live. Entrepreneurs continue the work of creation. 

I am proud we were able to attend this conference. We plan to do so again next year to continue guiding our clients to financial success.