Watch this interview with Scott Trevethan of Go Global Bookkeeping covering remote work and his remote team.
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In this interview we answer the following questions:
– How does building a remote team help a business in moving overseas?
– Where do bookkeeping/service businesses go?
– How is he handling staff in the office?
– How will COVID change businesses?
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Transcription:
Pete: All right. G’day guys Pete Moriarty here. I have my good friend Scott Trevethan with me.
Scott: Hi everyone.
Pete: Good to have you here Scott.
Scott: Good to be here.
Pete: We’ve had a bit of a journey together. We met through Business Blueprint. You became a customer of ours. We did the bike ride together in Thailand, that was pretty cool. 500 kilometers in five days, hands across the border. I’ve watched your accounting business grow and out of what you’ve transitioned into this amazing new bookkeeping business. Go and move over to the Philippines and really just transforming a lot of areas of your life, which is pretty awesome. Scotty, great to have you aboard mate. Thanks for coming along.
Scott: Great to be here. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.
Pete: Let’s have a chit chat. What’s going on in your world right now, man? This is a pretty informal chat. What’s been happening?
Scott: I don’t know if you’ve heard of this Corona thing, it’s impacting us a little bit. My whole world shifted. Just over a month ago, I was having a look at some extra space because our business was growing very well. The landlord was very keen to keep us and we had a look at 400 square meters of space just over a month ago. The world changed a little since that point in time. So we’ve been dealing with I guess clients dropping off and getting team members settled and they’re working from home for their safety paramount. Getting them set up and making sure that they’re working well from home. Then trying to work out what’s going to work in this new mid, hopefully mid, crisis scenario that we’re currently in.
Pete: You mentioned clients dropping off. Tell me, what kind of business is feeling the pain? I think my business, like yours, we’ve got a broad set of other small business customers. What kind of businesses are having trouble at the moment?
Scott: Bookkeepers, which surprised me a lot.
Pete: Interesting.
Scott: Especially those that specialize in hospitality industry. Those clients, a lot of them knee jerked. I think their clients said, “Okay, no more book keeping. We’re closed.” A lot of them did that from minute one. [inaudible 00:02:33] we’re done. Pull our people, which I think is really interesting because I would say most of those businesses by now would have pivoted to a delivery type of service to keep going. I don’t know whether those businesses just thought that this close down was just going to be for a week or two, or how that was. I walked past a popular café in [Glen Iris 00:02:57] tonight. They’ve got a sign on the door that says they’ve had since day one, which was due to Coronavirus, we’ve decided to, in the interest of public health and safety, close down. They’re the only café around here that’s closed. Everyone else is open for business and they’ve pivoted to a different model.
Pete: Wow.
Scott: In any case, the book keepers certainly felt the pain early on. To be honest, it was really anyone who wasn’t quite making that transition to off shoring their booking or accounting work in any case. So they were the guys that were struggling a little bit with that. So they thought, rather than persist, we’ll just cut out and we’ll press on. Accountants have kind of … we’ve had some new accounting clients that have dropped off; some of them due to safety concerns. We prided ourselves on being an office environment because we had financial information. It was a little hard sometimes for us to pivot to that and say, “But it’s okay. We’re going to work from home for a little bit.” But that’s the new reality, isn’t it?
Pete: Yeah. It’s definitely.
Scott: I had a large accounting firm in Sydney. I’m talking large accounting firm, household name that we had some team members working for us. They were all working from home. That’s in north Sydney, but every single one of them were working from home. They refused to let our team member work from home based on security issues. No matter what we could do, they said, “No, no, no. Our security committee have said you have to be office based or we’re not interested in helping you out.” Since I have to give my team or I want to give my team the flexibility or the option to say, “Yes, I’m happy to go in the office” or “No, I want to work from home during this period”, we lost them as a client. All over the place to be honest.
Pete: How are you pivoting? What’s your plan there?
Scott: Well, at the moment we’re headstrong. I’ve just launched a book on Conquer the Crisis, which was [inaudible 00:04:56] put on a couple of weeks ago.
Pete: Nice.
Scott: Started Facebook advertising around that book, which is called Unfunk Your Business Finances.
Pete: Great.
Scott: Trying to get out there and saying to people, “We can help.” We can help if you’ve got problems with your numbers, you need to go to a bank to get some more money. This is when you need bookkeeping and accounting advice, making sure that you get the most of the government benefits. So we’re really going out there, strongly advertising that kind of view. With that landing, it’s not exactly having a lot of cut through at the moment. I’m also doing, which it’s funny the way that you pivot. [inaudible 00:05:39] since I saw my accounting firm, I wasn’t going to go back into compliance. But I found myself taking on the odd compliance client here and there and thinking, well maybe we should do more compliance work as well. Doing more tax and annual accounting stuff, and helping people with the full gamut, which I can do. I just didn’t want to get sucked down that rabbit hole once again.
Pete: That’s interesting because we’ve considered, we asked the question. Have you guys got accounting services internally? Is that something you can offer with? I was curious why you may not have offered that through this business. Do you think there’s challenges scaling that business? Is it just something that you were sick of from your previous business and you didn’t want to go down that road again?
Scott: It’s something that requires an Australian presence. Since I’m the only Australian member of Go Global, it would just mean a massive more bigger workload for me. So not only was I living the life with Go Global and making sure that I was out there selling and telling people the good stories, and all that sort of stuff which I love. I absolutely love to do. After the compliance world of Scott Partners, I was a bit loathe to get pulled back into that, but desperate times. It’s like I know there’s a need and we’re certainly trying to help our team members to be able to assist in doing that. But it still would require me to do a lot more work here. Until I can get to a point where I can take on someone locally to do that work alongside me, which could well happen. That’s just something that we’re dabbling in at the moment.
Pete: I think any business that’s a service business has opportunity with the global workforce play. Especially anything that’s repeatable, something that provides value through a specialized skill, which is not readily available. Me as a business owner, I’ve got zero interest … well, I do have a little bit of interest in doing a tax degree, but I don’t have the time. I’m interested in it, but I don’t have the time to do it. It’s just not a good use of my time. So I think until we get to the stage where everything is completely happening with AI and zero switches on their AI book keeping, which I don’t think they’ll ever do because they’re too embedded with the actual book keeping industry. I think there’s still going to be value in that always.
Scott: I was recently at a conference. The last accounting conference we think in the world up at [inaudible 00:08:07] a couple of weeks ago. It was called The Future Advisor Conference. We had CEO of [Zero 00:08:14] actually speaking at that conference.
Pete: Cool.
Scott: It was only about 100 of us in the room. It was quite intimate and was great. He was really, really good about that. But we’re talking about book keepers as the canary in a coal mine. It’s really when the book keepers drop off, then we know that AI is really truly here. We’re not sick just yet.
Pete: How long do you think … by the way, I want to say hi to a couple of people who have joined. We’ve got MP, Mr. [Michael Pearson 00:08:40] here. We’ve got Neal who’s joined us. Thank you. Tanya is starting to comment, “Knee jerk is spot on. I believe some businesses freaked out prematurely. Same thing happened to us.” Yeah, it’s really interesting. We had a couple customers do freak outs.
Scott: [crosstalk 00:08:54] we’re compassionate about it. Tell them to come back.
Pete: Look, the thing is, don’t be the restaurant that closed their doors and now we’re probably going to be in pretty chill mode for six or 12 months. Let’s be real. Don’t be the restaurant that’s closed its doors and had to disappear. Be the cafes that have pivoted and put the bench by the door and are still serving stuff over the counter or are doing phone orders, or whatever.
Scott: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:09:28]
Pete: I’m interested. I want to ask you a tough question. We’re talking about the AI coming up and that kind of stuff because this has always fascinated me about Zero and whether someone else may disrupt them. How long do you think the business got? Bookkeeping business I mean, in general. Is that five years? Do you think it’ll stretch ten years? I’m always looking five or ten years ahead. Are we going to be around in our business? Are people going to still have email? Yeah, they’re probably going to still have email. Eventually I think my business unless we pivot to more valuable services around the applications that we sell, we won’t have any value because you can go and click a button with Google and you’ll just have email, and a domain name, and you’ll be done. What do you think your business is at in five years or ten years?
Scott: It’s interesting just on that too. I’ve got a mate who runs, I think he’s an email server. They provide email services to a whole bunch of companies in the US. I’m amazed that he can still be there. I don’t understand why that business still exists, but it does. He says, there’s only a couple of people in Melbourne. They’re making all right coin. Never overestimate the ability of every business to take advantage of the current day technology or willingness to do that, especially in the US.
Pete: Good point.
Scott: You need more clients in the US. I’ve always been of the view that it was like a ten year window. I think we’re probably three years into that now. I am. Three and a half, nearly four years into that. I reckon somewhere in five to six year, I could be well within a margin of five or six years. That doesn’t really help, but that’s what I’m thinking. I’ve got five years to build a business of business advisors, rather than bookkeepers doing high level work. We’ll see it be picked away progressively from the bottom. It won’t be all of a sudden there’s an AI to come in that takes over the CFO type of advisory role. It’ll be we’re seeing with [inaudible 00:11:31] coming integrated into Zero now that a lot of that accounts payable processing has been done away with. That’s great. That’s saved time. We just add more onto the top of that. It’s like, great. Now you guys have got more time to do more reporting. Now you guys have got more time to do analysis on accounts or change them, or make them more meaningful for the business owner.
Scott: My challenge has always been, this is coming, this is real. Where you’ve got a very small window, five to ten years. I’m saying I’m going to put my money on six years. If we don’t get my Filipino staff ready for that, then they’re going to just get washed away in that tidal wave. I think we can. I think we can make them the CFOs of the future. By then, we’ll have a truly global workforce anyways, if we don’t already.
Pete: When I think of international team members with all of the cultural differences and I think of account management, and advisory services, and consulting, that’s in my opinion, an uphill battle. I know that we’ve had that same kind of journey in our business of transitioning from our team just setting up new users in G suite, doing very basic support tasks. To now, we’re starting to implement tools like Asana. We’re implementing CRM tools and a lot of it is still I would say framework and process-based. Our customers are demanding let’s say strategic business direction, not just, hey fix this thing. We haven’t done hey fix this thing, it’s broken, for like five years. It’s more than just here’s a ticket type thing. It’s like, hey I want to have a conversation. I want to have a chat about what’s right for my business. I want to tell you what my business process challenges are and see if you have a solution for those. What’s your perspective on that, on serving? I assume most of your customers were Australian based, but I don’t know. Your customers may be more spread out.
Scott: Yeah they are. Australian and New Zealand.
Pete: Cool.
Scott: New Zealand is very quiet at the moment.
Pete: Keeping to themselves.
Scott: They have shut down completely.
Pete: What’s your opinion on that? On building that skill set in your team?
Scott: My opinion varies on this. I absolutely believe that the Filipino team didn’t have the ability to really apply that knowledge outside of the box. Every single day I interact with my team, I challenge that held belief to the point where I’m now thinking they are truly giving advisor and they’re very keen to give advisory type of advice. Everything we do in bookkeeping because we don’t have AI and the reason that AI struggles or machine learning in any case struggles with the accounting and bookkeeping field, is because every business is unique. Every business is like its own finger point. No one has the same chart of accounts. No one has the same systems and process. Even among franchise owners, they’ll all be different. It’s a challenge always to try and corral people to do things the same way, especially entrepreneurial business owners. They got into it in the first place to do things their own way and not get told how to do things.
Pete: Unique little snowflakes.
Scott: Exactly. Our guys have always had to deal with that. It’s always our onboarding process is bespoke. I say that because it’s like, we’ve got broad processes that are the same. But we really have to say, okay well we need to know exactly what you do and how you do it to try and streamline that. I think they’ve surprised me constantly. That’s why I started Go Global in the first place because I recognize their ability to do that high-level consulting work. They just need more experience and some more training.
Pete: You mean the Philippines team?
Scott: Yes, absolutely. The Philippines team, yep. I was disappointed. My first in depth trial, that was going to be late May through to early July when I was going to base myself in Cebu in the Philippines, just with the team so I could really give them that next level of deep dive. I’m thinking now that might not happen. I spoke with Jeremy from [inaudible 00:15:45] in Cebu today. He was quite confident that Cebu will be open for business by then. He’s still expecting me over in that time. Could still happen.
Pete: I’m curious and Michael Peterson as put a really good comment in here that scaling business advice is really difficult. What’s your scale plan? I’m curious because we’ve put so much work into this in the past year. I’m living it. Well, I’m not living it. My Scott is living it, my GM. What’s your plan there to scale that?
Scott: I guess for us it’s more of a, okay this is what we’re doing for our clients currently. This is what more we can do for our clients. It’s still going to be working individually. We’ve got the base of accounting, maybe we add compliance into that stream. I’m not sure. We’ve got that basic stream of your internal company accountant. It’s just that your internal company accountant is going to deliver you more value. The internal company account is going to become a financial controller. The financial controller is going to become a CFO. The CFO is going to become an integral part of your management team helping you to grow and do whatever you need to do. It’s still going to be client by client basis. The more value that we can give, the more clients take us on in that capacity.
Pete: I found that certainly when as we went from being a small business to maybe a bit of a lifestyle-y business, to what I would consider now performance business. Processes are in place, we’re reaching scale, we’re scaling up. What I found was as the more and more that I increased my financial competency, the better the business went. Me, as the CEO, because I was able to lead that financial control, financial literacy across the business. Then put the right people in place to make sure that, that was followed and a part of what we do. What do you say then to the business owners that have not broken through that ceiling? They’re still in the la, la, la, la, la. I don’t do the numbers stuff. I leave that to other people. Are they just going to get wiped across the floor?
Scott: I love the Warren Buffet quote that “you can only see who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out.” Another quote that he has is that “it’s not bad times that kill bad businesses.” Sorry. “It’s not good times that kill bad business”, whatever that was. The point is, business owners focusing on the stuff that they do and the value that they bring to the world and that’s all they focus on, that’s fine in good times. We’re not in good times. It changed like that, didn’t it?
Pete: It was one weekend.
Scott: Like that, boom.
Pete: I was at a festival for the weekend. I came back and I thought, what the fuck has happened?
Scott: You know what? I reckon GFC did the same thing. I was at an army training, of all places, and the captain that was in charge of us said … because we didn’t have access to any media or outside news, or anything like that. He said, “I just want to let you know that the world as we know it has ended. But it’s none of your business. You just carry on doing what you’re doing.” [crosstalk 00:19:09]
Pete: Keep training maggot.
Scott: I don’t know what he means, found out a week or two later. That’s how quickly it can change. I think now we’re getting into this era or this specific timeframe where business owners are saying, “That’s okay. I know the value that I bring to my world and I’m just going to keep doing that, and just keep my head down.” The real danger here is what they’re doing is going to get them killed. They can’t lift their heads and say, “What else is going around?” It’s exactly those businesses that did that knee jerk reaction of, let’s sack all our staff and let’s get rid of all of our supplies. Let’s go into hibernation mode. [crosstalk 00:19:49]
Pete: Just take all the wind out of the sail. It’s just gone.
Scott: I think in the hard of times, financial literacy is absolutely an essential tool in order to help you survive. I’m not saying otherwise if I had the analogy of an emergency room and every business is in the emergency room at the moment. You don’t need financial reports or you don’t need the heart rate monitor, and the pressure, and the oxygen, all the blood oxygen, all that sort of stuff. If you’re a skilled enough doctor, you can save someone’s life. All I’m saying is that the mortality rate is greatly decreased if you’ve got access to all of that information. The chances of surviving this thing are a whole bunch higher if you have more financial literacy or people in your corner that can help you with that.
Pete: I’m so glad you mentioned dashboards. We happened to build custom dashboards for Zero. So if you’re interested in having that data in front of you, Scott will tell you what numbers you need, and we’ll make the numbers look pretty. I wanted to circle back. The point you mentioned about businesses just wanting to put their heads down and just do what they’re good at. It’s really, really, really important to deliver well. That is absolutely important. If you don’t have sales and marketing on the front end to bring customers in and you don’t have some kind of financial literacy to make sure that you’re actually making profit on the way through, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby that maybe people give you some money for, but you might be earning two dollars an hour from that hobby. I think that was the thing that got us from being just a small business that was just surviving or just doing okay, to actually becoming a scaled and performance business. Is we worked out sales and marketing is what matters here. The product does not have to be perfect and I don’t have to deliver it all.
Pete: That was the other thing that I had to go through my own process. We’ve got seven people watching. Sherry has just joined us as well. Thank you Sherry. I’m really curious what are your guys’ questions for Scott? If you haven’t caught us already, Scott is the founder of Go Global Book Keeping, previously ran an accounting firm. They do have some accounting services in Go Global as well. But I’m interested to know, what questions do you have for Scott around online teams, around working in the Philippines, around accounting or book keeping, or what the current situation is at the moment? Your staff have made the move to home. MP as said that the service has still been absolutely amazing.
Scott: Thank you MP.
Pete: So you’re doing something right.
Scott: Thanks Mike.
Pete: You’re doing something right there. That’s really cool. It’s so important. Michael also said that he’s able to make important decisions fast in the current climate. That’s just so important now, isn’t it?
Scott: Absolutely. If you don’t know exactly where you’re at and you don’t have that ability to forecast forward, at the moment I’m very much on the every business should have some sort of weekly cashflow forecast in place maybe going out for 13 weeks, which I think is probably a good timeframe to be looking at where we’re at. We’ll know in six, seven weeks exactly how long we think this thing might go on for. A 13 week cashflow forecast on a weekly basis is an awesome tool. Having the numbers at your disposal absolutely let’s you decide, well what can I do? Especially, it doesn’t help because I think the government … I want to say the government are doing an amazing job. I would not want to be them for anything. I don’t know how much sleep Scott Morrison is having.
Pete: Over the daily press briefings, it seems pretty intense.
Scott: Really intense. By selling things like the job keeper allowance and announcing those, but not really having any details and those details are coming out tomorrow. A whole bunch of us as accountants have been advising people, but really we don’t know the details until they actually go through Parliament tomorrow. We don’t know how it’s going to work and people are like, “Well, should I sack people or not?” Hang on, we don’t know. It’s really important to understand exactly the financial impact that you’re going to have to survive this period, absolutely.
Pete: The challenge is that so much uncertainty breeds the problems that we’re seeing. The slow down of consumer spending and all of the follow ons that happen from that. I was about to sign a commercial lease and I put my hand back in my pocket and went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I’ve got a big question mark on the next three months. I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m just going to keep the cash close to home. That’s a challenge. What I am happy about is how quickly the updates are rolling out. Yes, it might seem like we’re finding out something new every day, but at least the updates and the stimuli are rolling out. It sucks for everyone who let go of their staff a month ago before the casual packages and what not came out. But it is good to see that things … they’ve been surprisingly quick. I was 20 years old when the GFC happened. So I didn’t really understand exactly what was going on. I started my business that month. I was like, okay well people needed viruses taken off their computer, so I was okay in that moment.
Pete: But I didn’t really understand what was going on globally. But now to actually experience it, now that I’m no longer basically a child, it’s been interesting to see, okay I can see how this is effecting our customers. I can see how this is effecting the income of those in our society and in our space. MP has got a good question here. Oh and we got one from Tanya as well. Controversial question. Now all your staff are working from home, why go back to the office?
Scott: Really, really good question. Really good question and it’s something that was challenged to me today.
Pete: Because you’re probably out of there for six months.
Scott: What’s that?
Pete: You’re probably out of there for six months, right?
Scott: The current view is, as I was talking to Jeremy today from [inaudible 00:25:48] His view was no. He doesn’t believe that the Philippines, the economic cost would outweigh the health costs by ten fold if they keep things as they are. He’s the biggest pessimist I know. I was like, what an interesting conversation because he’s like, “We’ll be back in by the end of April.”
Pete: Interesting.
Scott: [crosstalk 00:26:14] which is very interesting. I think this period is going to give us a lot of capabilities in terms of managing the staff remotely. We’re continuing to work on those processes to make sure that everyone transitions to that well. It’s going to be hard to keep everyone. Everyone’s got a taste of … I put on a business shirt this morning just because I felt that I should. I took it off at lunch time because I couldn’t stand it anymore. I needed to put a t-shirt back on. It was absurd, but it was really tight. I think everyone is going to be the same. It depends on how long this goes for. Trying to get them back into the office could be a challenge. I guess the real answer is we believe that we still need to provide this. As I said, we’ve still got some team members in the office because that’s what their clients absolutely insisted on. We’ve got some level of data security that we need to have an office based environment to manage. I was speaking about one of the large financial planning BPO or KPOs [inaudible 00:27:30]
Pete: What’s a KPO?
Scott: Knowledge process outsourcer. The difference in the terminology, so small or medium sized businesses don’t typically have business processes. They don’t have it. So you can’t outsource them because you don’t have them. So you’ve got to say, this is how I do things. And can you do that? That’s why KPOs give people more ability to grow and be more able to be consultants, rather than just doing the … I think they’re less able to be replaced by AI, going back to that conversation. The financial planners have basically said, you know what? We can’t have you working from home. Well some of his team have gone so they can have social distancing, but the majority of his team are still in the office, which we’re allowed to do as BPO/KPOs in the Philippines. I think it’s the data security issue that we’re still … it’s the physically being able to make sure that no one is standing behind them looking at the screen, which we can’t really control. We can control everything with the help of IT Genius and others to make sure that they’re not doing bad things.
Pete: It’s not leaking.
Scott: Yes, yes. But we can’t see that there’s a person not standing behind them with a mobile phone taking photos of the screen. Why they would want to do that, I don’t know. Obviously all our people are well vetted and that sort of stuff. That’s what we [inaudible 00:29:01]
Pete: Look, there is risk there. Customer databases, if you’ve got someone’s name and their date of birth, that might be enough to get some scamming happening. I understand it is a challenge. I think for the most part, I think people do the right thing. Sometimes you have to play to the lowest common denominator, which is a challenge. Tanya has asked a good question here. “Do you recommend any cashflow forecasting software?” I had this question too. Or scenario planning? Do you just do it out of Zero? Do you do it on a spreadsheet? Or is there something you can drop it into?
Scott: It completely depends on the complexity of your business. There is some really, really good tools. There always have been. Like Castaway was one of the early ones. Spotlight reporting and there’s Fathom, and there’s [inaudible 00:29:52] those ones, which are really good at being able to present, and help you with your scenario forecasting. One thing you’ve got to remember is that every single forecast is always wrong. There’s not one account that will say we can build you a bulletproof forecast or budget in any way, shape, or form. A really, really good plan is only as good as you get the first bullet gets fired. Or as Mike Tyson says, “Everyone has got a plan until you get punched in the face.” That’s the true with our scenario now. [crosstalk 00:30:24]
Pete: Or until someone eats the wrong bat in a Wuhan market.
Scott: [inaudible 00:30:27] I’m more of in favor certainly for most small or medium sized business to keep it as simple as possible, to really boil it down to this is the margin we make across the board. We’ve got a couple of tools on that, which people are quite welcome too. There’s a little tool to just say, well this is what my fixed overheads are. This is what my margin is current pre the crisis. If I’m going to pivot slightly, this is what I think it’ll be post crisis. I think you need some form of accounting knowledge or assistance to help you with that. But then you can see, oh I need to cut my labor by 10%. Well then that’s a great tool to help you make that decision. Or I need to cut my subscription costs, or I need to cut whatever. My rental cost by 10%, can I go to my landlord and see if I can do that? Because across the board, this is what I’ll need to do to survive the next three months.
Scott: I boil that down to a really simple spreadsheet, rather than an offline tool. But there are many, many tools that will take you really, really down the rabbit hole, help you with three way forecasts and [inaudible 00:31:45] balance sheet to cashflow statements. You’ve got to just remember that end of the day, they take a lot of time to put together. Someones going to be very proud of them at the end, but they’re always going to be wrong.
Pete: I get that. It’s an educated guess at best, right? Hey Cody is here. G’day Cody. How are you doing buddy?
Scott: Hey.
Pete: Tanya is back. Angel is on as well. Good to see you guys. And Megan as well. Hey, haven’t seen you in a long time. I’ve got an interesting question for you. So I saw this great post on LinkedIn and Bret Kelly actually mentioned that if you’ve got any dead wood in the business, now’s the time to promote them to your competitors. I liked that. The real question is, I’m curious are people asking their staff to take a salary cut across the board, like a 20 or 30% salary cut? Or are they just letting go of one or two people that they don’t have spots for? What are people doing?
Scott: I’ve seen both. I’ve certainly seen one of our clients who was very big in the financial modeling. They do live seminars, live workshops is the main thing that they do. They do it for McKenzie, so they’re doing it all over the world. They’re big, big players as well as right down to schools and other places. All of that stuff requires them leaving the office and going and delivering something in person. As soon as Corona hit mid January, they were straight into, let’s go into scenario planning mode. They were well down the track. They all decided, okay, we’re just going to put everyone on a four day week because that’s all we can afford. Then we’ll just test everything on a monthly basis or on a weekly basis really, to see how it’s traveling.
Pete: Interesting. I guess it’s better to have a job than no job.
Scott: [crosstalk 00:33:25] what’s that?
Pete: Better to have a job than no job. If you’re sitting at home, you probably got less discretionary spend anyway.
Scott: This is the thing, partly I saw Brits come in as well. Partly, it brings up that old quote that I think came out of a Harvard Business School review. Which said that, “You should always hire slowly and fire quickly.”
Pete: I like that.
Scott: I was thinking about that the other day and I thought, that’s the most stupid business advice I have ever heard. The amount of time that goes into training … the slow hiring might mean that you’re going to die while you’re waiting for the perfect candidate in the first place. It’s that lady that never finds the perfect match, so never gets married, or [inaudible 00:34:11] The other thing is you spend so much time, so many hundreds of thousands of dollars go in to every employee. If you’re going to cut them at the first sign of trouble, what a waste that is. What a waste of resource it is for the business. So I would be cautious about it, but I have seen both. I’ve certainly seen people close down completely, make everyone redundant or at least on some form of force leave. Then I’ve seen other people that have taken pay cuts and other people that have just reduced those days.
Pete: Interesting.
Scott: I agree with Scott Morrison on this, our Prime Minister. I think Scott Morrison was a little bit casual. Scotty [inaudible 00:34:53] Prime Minister to me, when he says on the other side of this we’re really going to want to have connection with our team, we’re not going to want to be able to turn around. I’ve got to consider that for our team as well because we’ve got ten of them or so that are now on what we call no work, no pay. But we still pay their medical expenses and we’re working out how we can funnel them as much cash as we possibly can to survive. Because if we keep paying them, we won’t survive and that’s no good. As soon as on the other side of this thing, we don’t want to say, okay everyone back to normal. They say, [inaudible 00:35:29] they don’t love you anymore [inaudible 00:35:31] when we were in our desperate need.
Scott: I think that Australian businesses need to be very mindful of that as well. The other thing I’d say though is when you look around at our current restrictions on businesses, we’re definitely talking hospitality has been massively impacted. I understand that. And gyms, but gyms don’t employ I would’ve thought that many people. Maybe I’m wrong, but I wouldn’t have thought that, that many people would get employed to gyms compared to hospitality. You can correct me Cody, I’m sure. It’s a few other industries that-
Pete: Getting a massage and those bodily ones.
Scott: I’m disappointed but … I have to self massage. Where’d this million and a half unemployed come from? I’m thinking they’re mainly casual bar staff. So interesting.
Pete: And casual retail I’d say as well, like Cotton On and everyone. It’ll be interesting to see where that goes. I hope that we can have some kind of restart. If the reality is, and from what I understand, at least the social distancing is here until vaccines happen, which is going to be 18 months. I went to the local Stockland today because I needed something from JB Hi-Fi it was packed. I couldn’t get a park and I was so surprised. Everyone’s done such a good job at the beach, super quiet. Roads are mostly super quiet. Tuesday afternoon, it was packed at the shops. I thought, wow that’s just really interesting. Thankfully in most of the stores, people were practicing the social distancing, keeping away from each other. That’s probably the reality, but I didn’t feel unsafe going into JB Hi-Fi and buying a cable for my computer, and then coming back. I felt okay doing that. I tapped and paid instead of cash. Maybe this is just the thing that kills cash and moves everyone to online delivery for everything, which I think is great.
Pete: I’m millennial, so I’ve been on Amazon and Ebay for every and ever. I walked into [inaudible 00:37:38] Electronics and there was an older guy there who wanted to have a chat. I was just standing there thinking, wow this is one of the businesses that when everyone moves online, this is just needed anymore. Everyone was too busy having a chat with each other to serve me. I actually walked out because I thought, I can buy this [inaudible 00:37:57] and I might have to wait a couple of weeks, but I won’t have to deal with this. Anyway, I think we’re just about out of … sorry, go on.
Scott: You’re absolutely right. It’s a changing environment everywhere we go. I’m going to be interested to see what happens on Thursday. Traditionally, the busiest circuit market shopping day of the year, the Thursday before Good Friday. Mom said, if you’re going to do your shopping, make sure you don’t do it Thursday. I’m like, it won’t be the same this year. I guarantee it will for no reason. I think the supermarkets are open on Friday, aren’t they?
Pete: Yeah. Well I’m out of food, so I need to do a shop. Scotty, it’s been a great chat. Who do you look after? What kind of businesses are you really out to help and how can people find you?
Scott: So I guess we’ve got two sides to our business. Definitely any small or medium-sized businesses that use cloud accounting that are looking for bookkeeping services. As I say, not just data entry, but also right up to the reporting and really going hand in hand, helping business owners through this difficult time. Anyone who’s on any sort of cloud accounting, we can handle that. If they’re using a local person and they love and trust, and they’re getting all the value out of that, I encourage you to stay using those people. If you’re thinking you’re not quite getting the value, we’re about half the price of a local bookkeeper. That’s where we’re market positioned. We’ve got plenty of capacity at the moment, which is great. The other side of our business is we serve accountants and bookkeepers in giving them staff as well.
Pete: Wholesale.
Scott: I’m a full-time manager. They’re the other people we serve, which I think we’re going to start to see because accountants are one of those bulletproof industries that seem to go, well no matter what. Or at least not necessarily well, but exist. We don’t like to say well in accounting terms. We’re just driving home in our Mercedes. Not that I have a Mercedes.
Pete: Don’t need one Cebu.
Scott: Oh, no, no. I guess not. I guess not. Little scooter would be fine. Any SMA really that’s looking for some sort of bookkeeping support, and bookkeeping on up support is what we do.
Pete: Awesome. Goglobalbookkeeping.com.
Scott: That’s it. Yep.
Pete: Go Global Book Keeping, cool. Scott, thank you so much. It’s been wonderful to have you here.
Scott: Thank you mate.
Pete: We will catch you soon.
Scott: My pleasure. Thank you very much man.
Pete: Awesome. I’m going to do a little sign off now and then we’ll finish up our stream. Thank you so much for joining in. This has been a bit of an impromptu interview with Scott here and talking about his business and everything that’s going on at the moment. So if you’re interested in getting in touch with Scott, please go ahead and check out his services. We’ve been doing business together for a number of years. I love him. He’s a really great gentleman, but also he’s got a good business as well. He’s not your normal accountant. He’s the only accountant that I know that rides a motorbike, has tattoos, and he’s a good man Scotty. So if you’re interested in having a chat to us about getting your team working more productively remotely, about outsourcing, working with international teams, around the underlying business technology, your automation, getting your dashboards right, pulling your data out of Zero, putting it up on dashboards in the business so you can monitor the right numbers when Scott tells you the numbers. We’ll make them look pretty.
Pete: Then let us know. Drop a comment below. Send me a message or otherwise you can message our team itgenius.com and we’ll catch you soon. Until next time, take it easy. Cheers.
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