An unorthodox path to CPA success

Nicole Davis isn’t your typical CPA firm owner. She has five children, owns three businesses, and has zero work experience in a public accounting firm. She has crafted a presence on social media including an account with more than 12,000 followers on X, formerly known as Twitter.

How has Davis done all of this, launching the firm Butler-Davis Tax & Accounting and two other businesses? And what has she learned along the way? She shares her story in this episode, a collaboration with the Small Firm Philosophy podcast, which is produced by the AICPA’s Private Companies Practice Section.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Why Davis changed her firm’s business model after the first year.
• How she uses video to communicate with clients and staff.
• How she shifted her firm away from taxes to accounting, bookkeeping, and advisory services.
• How price increases helped her firm right-size its client base.
• How she uses social media to connect with peers and land clients.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Jeff Drew: Welcome to the Small Firm Philosophy podcast, produced in partnership with the Journal of Accountancy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Drew, editor in chief of the JofA. The motto of today’s guest, Nicole Davis, is “make it happen,” and boy, does she do that. She is the founder and principal of Butler-Davis Tax & Accounting in the Atlanta area. She is a prolific presence on Twitter with 12,000-plus followers. She’s the new vice chair of the practitioners track at the AICPA & CIMA and CPA.com ENGAGE conference. As you’ll discover in this podcast, she’s innovative, energetic, and pretty much electric. Welcome, Nicole, to the Small Firm Philosophy podcast.

Nicole Davis: Thank you, Jeff. I’m happy to be here.

Jeff Drew: My first question is related to your Twitter handle, @wifemomcpa100. Is it true that “100” refers to the number of children you have?

Nicole Davis: You know what? Metaphorically, yes. We have five children, which, most people don’t believe me when I say it, but yes. My Twitter handle just pretty much speaks to who I am as a person. I’m both a wife and a mom and a CPA, and the “100” means that I don’t do them all well at the same time, but they make me who I am, which is the whole person of me.

Jeff Drew: I figured, once you get past one you’re outnumbered. Once you get to three, doesn’t matter, really.

Nicole Davis: You’re right, it doesn’t matter because they’re always going to win.

Jeff Drew: We’re going to start with some questions like, how big is your firm?

Nicole Davis: Today our firm, we serve about 300 clients. We have about 14 employees. When I say team members, it’s 12 employees and two offshore team members. And yeah, I am the only CPA on staff.

Jeff Drew: What did the other employees do?

Nicole Davis: Our business model is broken up into three primary service lines. We have bookkeeping, tax, and payroll. It’s split pretty evenly across those three service lines.

Jeff Drew: You have one office?

Nicole Davis: Yes. We have one office and pretty much we have everyone, and they’re all local to us. So we’re able to have them come into the office, and then we work with our two offshore team members, which are based in India.

Jeff Drew: Now the way you run your firm is not exactly, it doesn’t fall into the traditional audit/tax/do things/have clients come into the office all the time — it’s not exactly that. Can you talk about some of the things you’ve done that moved away from that traditional model?

Nicole Davis: Yes. I think one of the things that has worked to my advantage is that I never worked in public accounting. I initially I thought that worked against me because I started a public accounting firm and I had no idea how it worked or how to run one, but that allowed me to be creative and do things my way. For me it was all about, “OK, how do I build the firm that I want to work in?” I have high standards, so for me, first it was about delivering a superior client experience, hiring the best talent, but also creating a culture of fun.

Nicole Davis: One of my first jobs out of high school was I worked for the local Turner Broadcasting System, where I answered  prisoner mail. I answered the mail and sent them swag. I got to watch TV all day while doing this job, and I thought, “Wow, that’s the coolest thing ever.” I’ve always kept that in the back of my mind whenever I start a business or when I actually went out and started building my own firm. I wanted to create a place where it felt like, “Wow, that’s a cool place to work.”

Jeff Drew: And you’ve got more than one business?

Nicole Davis: I do. We have Butler-Davis Tax & Accounting; that’s mostly accounting tax. Then last year we acquired an local payroll company; that is the BD Payroll. Then in 2020, right when the pandemic hit, like two weeks before the pandemic hit, I started a construction support business called Groundworx contractors. So combined, I have about 26 total employees or team members.

Jeff Drew: You’ve got three businesses and five children?

Nicole Davis: Yes, and one husband.

Jeff Drew: Your children range in age from?

Nicole Davis: From 4 to 25. We have a whole spectrum of ages among our children.

Jeff Drew: I cannot believe you have a 25-year-old.

Nicole Davis: No one believes it.

Jeff Drew: Yeah, I would agree. I guess, the logical question is, how do you do all this?

Nicole Davis: That is a great question. I absolutely could not do any of this without my team. It was very important for me early on to build a team that supported the firm’s vision and mission because I knew I did not want to do the client work all the time. When I started my firm, I had that vision in mind to build a team, to build a modern firm, and then that way I can work more on the business, not in it. Also I’ve got to give a shout-out to the “hubs.” I call him the “hubs” on Twitter: It’s my husband, J.W. Davis. He really supports everything that I do. He’s my biggest cheerleader, and so he takes on a lot of the parenting tasks so that I could focus on the businesses that I have.

Nicole Davis: Now I will say, it wasn’t always like that because we have that whole range of children. I’ll call them our two sets of children. The first set, which are the older two, 23 and 25 now. When we got married, they were 3 and 5. My husband worked a lot back then. He worked in retail. He was hardly ever home, and so I pretty much took care of those children and worked at the same time. When we started having children later, I was like, “These are your set. It’s your turn.” And that allowed me to focus on my career and building the business.

Jeff Drew: When did you start the firm?

Nicole Davis: I started my firm, I would say full time in 2014. I’ve always done taxes for friends and family members, but I didn’t really get serious about it until 2014.

Jeff Drew: Where were you before that?

Nicole Davis: I worked mostly in corporate accounting jobs before that. I worked at a lot of the big public companies, and then I decided to quit those. I quit every one those jobs. I should put that out there. Then I started my own firm after I quit my last job, like within six months.

Jeff Drew: What made you say, “Well, I’ve done all this on the corporate side with these big companies. I’m going to start on my own firm?”

Nicole Davis: So for me, accounting just came natural. Tax didn’t come as natural for me because I’ve never really worked in tax before that. I’ve always had corporate accounting jobs. I wanted to start my own firm mainly to help my dad at the time. He was an entrepreneur, and he was really struggling, like most small businesses. One day I was just sitting at my desk and I was like, “You know what? I really need to help my dad be a better business owner.” That put me on the path to starting my own firm and moving away from those big corporate giants to work in more in the small business arena.

Jeff Drew: Let’s talk about some of the stuff you do that’s different. I know you use video quite a bit.

Nicole Davis: Yes.

Jeff Drew: Can you talk about how you use video and what it’s done for your firm?

Nicole Davis: We primarily use video internally for communicating with clients, for training new team members, for explaining tax returns. I just did a session at the AICPA ENGAGE conference with both Lorilyn Wilson and Jason Staats about scaling your firm to video. We each had a different way in how we use video. My way was that we scaled, using video by primarily using it just within our firm. We don’t do a bunch of advertising video, even though I’ve started doing a little bit more of that now. But it’s mainly just to, I guess you can say, set expectations with clients. We’re always talking about setting expectations, managing those expectations, and one of the ways we do that is through video.

Nicole Davis: And we’re able to scale because when we bring on new team members, with all the videos related to client work, trainings, and they are able to get up to speed rather quickly, and then we can add more clients because we don’t have to do the manual training where we sit down and walk through everything with a new hire. And we’re able to scale our clients because when they come on board, we’re usually doing the welcome video with them, and during our tax season process, we’re able to scale and do more of the high-level work because we’re not having meetings or meeting with every client to go over their tax returns. It just allows us to scale our firm more quickly versus the traditional way.

Jeff Drew: So your videos, some of them are for the clients?

Nicole Davis: Yes.

Jeff Drew: Then some are for internal staff?

Nicole Davis: Yes.

Jeff Drew: How many videos have you done?

Nicole Davis: Oh, my God. Internally?

Jeff Drew: Yes.

Nicole Davis: I’ve been doing videos since 2019, when Zoom first came on the scene. I was one of the early adopters of using Zoom, and that’s when we started to create a bunch of training videos because we work with specific niches. One of them being primarily independent pharmacies, and just being able to do the accounting, it’s a little more complex, and so with the videos, we are able to bring on new team members and train them.

Jeff Drew: When you do the videos with the clients, what are you using the videos to show them?

Nicole Davis: We use it a couple of different ways with clients. Probably one of the ways we use it most is with our video tax returns summaries, where we tell clients, if they want a live meeting with me or any tax associate that they’ll need to first request a video summary, and it goes over the return with them. It’s usually just three minutes or less, where we pretty much try to answer as many questions that we think they’re going to have so we can avoid those live meetings because it’s really hard to schedule a live meeting with every client during tax season. We want to make sure that they understand their numbers before they actually sign off on the return.

Nicole Davis: Another way we use videos, we recently published a tax season explainer video, which walks them through how to get their returns done with our office. Again, we’re trying to set expectations with that video. Then sometimes we’ll do videos just to answer emails because it’s easier for the client to understand, and they also keep your tone. Emails are hard sometimes, especially if the question requires a lengthy response. It’s much easier just to respond using a video.

Jeff Drew: What has been the client response to that?

Nicole Davis: So far, it’s been really great. I haven’t had any complaints about any of the videos we ever created and sent to clients.

Jeff Drew: Have you had any compliments?

Nicole Davis: Yes. With our video tax return summaries, clients love that because it gives them the opportunity to watch the video from the comfort of their home at any time. They can also share if they’re married with their spouse, so they don’t have to coordinate schedules in order to be on a live call at the same time. Those reviews have been raving as far as having videos for tax return summaries. We also do that for our month-end clients, but we only do it quarterly as far as quick videos where we go over their financial packages with them, and then those are also short as well. Because again, we want to give them the information in bite-size pieces, and video helps us do that.

Jeff Drew: From when you started your firm til now, did you come in with the business model that you’re using now, or how did that develop, since you were starting having not been in public accounting?

Nicole Davis: Great question. I will say no, my business model has pivoted. Because again, since I never worked in public accounting, I started to look at other public accounting firms’ owner and tried to mimic their business model — doing the traditional billing by the hour, doing the busy tax season where you’ve taken on way too many clients and you’re not charging nearly enough money. Then I quickly realized that was not going to work for me. So I pivoted pretty quickly, and that’s when I started doing things my way. I’ll probably say that was probably my first year to 18 months in business before that happened.

Jeff Drew: Let’s talk specifically about the changes you made. Number one, you had too many clients in tax season. I’m assuming that just produced way too many hours. How did you address that, and what were the results?

Nicole Davis: Yes, initially we were just adding a lot of tax clients because again, that’s what I was seeing in the industry where most CPA firms, they were very tax-heavy. They work long hours. They had their people work long hours. I even added Saturday work. I was trying to mimic their business model because to me that looked like success. Once I realized yeah, that wasn’t the success I wanted, then I started slowly changing things.

Nicole Davis: One of the first things we changed is that we dialed back our client base. We pretty much fired a lot of our tax-only clients. That’s still a process that we go through every year where we look at our client base and we’re like, “Do we want to continue working with this type of client?” One of the ways we do that is that we increase our prices, increase them very frequently. I probably didn’t increase my pricing much during those COVID years. But afterwards, we really started ramping up our price increases and then honing our messaging, trying to attract the client that we felt that we could work best with.

Nicole Davis: Another thing we changed was the communication. For me, communication solves a lot of the challenges that many firms face. Because again, they’re leaving so much to the clients’ imagination that if you don’t spell out exactly what you want, then the client is pretty much left to do what they want, and I wanted to avoid that. For me it was all about, “OK, how do we get the information we need out as quickly as possible to the client so that we can have a better working relationship?”

Jeff Drew: Is that what you do with your children, too?

Nicole Davis: I wish.

Jeff Drew: So it’s worked better with the client?

Nicole Davis: It’s 100% better with the client. The children, not so much.

Jeff Drew: What is your client mix now, individual to business?

Nicole Davis: We are primarily a CAS practice where about 60 or so percent of our revenue is accounting and bookkeeping and advisory services. The next big service mix is payrolls. That’s about 30-something percent. Then tax is a very small percent. We now primarily work, do the tax returns for our business clients which we do the bookkeeping for. Again, we moved away from doing 1040 only or those annual-only clients.

Jeff Drew: In the beginning, you had a lot of 1040 clients, and you’ve steadily moved away from that.

Nicole Davis: Yes. I would say, in the beginning, it was probably 50-50 — where it was 50% accounting and then 50% tax. I am not a big tax person again, because I didn’t do a lot of tax in my professional career. I definitely wanted to keep the revenue mix with a higher bookkeeping/accounting ratio.

Jeff Drew: You’ve had the CAS part of it from the beginning?

Nicole Davis: Yes.

Jeff Drew: You’ve been doing this since 2014 — kind of got your start — and then you went through and you’ve been gradually pricing out and weeding out the tax-return-onlys and folding the tax part more into the CAS?

Nicole Davis: Yes. Right.

Jeff Drew: Have you noticed any changes in how your staff, their work hours, their attitude, their enthusiasm, their roles — how has that gone while you’ve been going through this process?

Nicole Davis: I will say that that has also been a transformation in my firm. Mainly because when I started, again, I am trying to mimic public accounting firms that I see in social media and peer groups. I’m pretty much being a taskmaster with my team. I’m like, “You’ve got to do this this way” or “You’ve got to do it that way”, and it was almost at a micromanagement level. If you know me, you will know that I hate any type of micromanagement, but I was becoming that person, and I didn’t like that person. For me, it definitely started with taking a step back, having some self-realization and being, “Hey, you hired them for a reason. Let them do their job,” and then you can evaluate how well they did it.

Nicole Davis: That has really worked out in my favor, especially now because my team pretty much runs all my businesses. I’m there for leadership mostly. I am there to solve those high-level issues that they just want to have my thought process on, and I’m able to travel more, to do more conferences and speaking engagements, which is what I really wanted to do.

Jeff Drew: Do more tweets?

Nicole Davis: A lot more tweets. Yes.

Jeff Drew: You are always on Twitter asking questions or giving advice or maybe posting videos, and that seems to have ramped up quite a bit even since I met you, which was about four or five years ago.

Nicole Davis: Yes, it has. One of the things I learned about Twitter is that I can schedule tweets. My content days are usually Wednesdays, when I’m able to just schedule all of the personal content that I want to post on my social media accounts. Now, there are days where I do have some manic tweets. There may be days where you will see like four, five, six tweets in a row. That’s one of those days where I’m just probably sitting in the car, or my husband is traveling somewhere, or I’m standing in a line somewhere, where I’m just having all these thoughts go through my mind. I’m trying to get them out as quickly as possible. For me, it’s a bit of scheduled tweets, manic tweets. That’s pretty much my personality, too.

Jeff Drew: How has this affected the business, if at all? You being more active on Twitter and making a lot more connections and people becoming more aware of you?

Nicole Davis: It has made a positive impact on the business because the more I let people know who I am and what I’m doing, I’m able to be top of mind when they either have a podcast they want me to be on, or they want me to write an article, or they have a referral for me because they know that I do payroll. We recently had a big payroll referral from a good friend because she knows I bought a payroll company, and she just didn’t want to do payroll anymore. So if I never put that out there, then she probably wouldn’t ever have sent me that referral.

Jeff Drew: I was wondering if it brought you business. Have you gotten any clients who just saw you on Twitter?

Nicole Davis: We have. I won’t say clients because, again, we have a discovery process where we try to make sure the client is a good fit for us. Prospective clients, they see me on Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram, and they’ll want to work with me, but they still have to go through our discovery call process to make sure they’re a good fit.

Nicole Davis: I will say Twitter hasn’t produced the quality of clients that have signed on, but LinkedIn has given us some great clients, and they’re still clients to this day because we’re also very active on LinkedIn.

Jeff Drew: Well, that is very cool. Looking back over your nine years running a firm, what do you think has worked well and, I guess more to the point, what would you have done differently?

Nicole Davis: That’s a good question. What would I have done differently? Let me see. I definitely would have fired faster.

Jeff Drew: That would be the client?

Nicole Davis: That would be both clients and team members. Early on, when you’re just starting your firm, you just need money in the door, especially if you don’t have any cushion to fall back on, and that was me for the most part. We started from the bottom. We started at zero. I had a small savings, but I ran through that pretty quickly, within the first six months, so we relied on my husband’s salary just to get us through that first year in business. Now we can be a lot more selective in who we take on as a client. I would say, don’t be afraid to fire clients. It’s going to hurt short term but long term, it’s for the better.

Nicole Davis: As far as team members, I absolutely hate firing people, period. It’s like the worst job in the world to have to fire somebody because you are their livelihoods. For me, I fired them way too late, whereas I probably should have fired them 30 days before I actually pulled the trigger.

Nicole Davis: Another lesson would be that “perfect is better than done.” I say that a whole lot now, especially to my friends and other peers, but that was not always the case for me, especially when I started my firm. I felt that if I didn’t do the work or if I didn’t handle a situation, it wasn’t going to get done right, and that stifled a lot of our growth early on because again, everything relied on me, and that’s how I became the bottleneck in my company. Now we’re able to scale because I have given a lot more freedom to my team to make decisions through the client work. Whereas I have become the least important person in my firm. Whereas they are definitely way more important than me.

Jeff Drew: You call that “perfect before done”?

Nicole Davis: “Perfect is better than done.” I mean, “Done is better than perfect.” I said it backward. “Done is better than perfect.” Yes. Because a lot of times firm owners, just people in general, especially women, we will not pull the trigger on something until it’s absolutely perfect, and that shouldn’t be the case. Like get it out there, get it out to the world, or trust someone else to help you do it so that at least you have something that you can offer and then you can start making those process improvements or iterations of a better service or product.

Jeff Drew: Is there anything I should have asked you but didn’t?

Nicole Davis: No one ever asked me that. I guess some great resources for those that are looking to transform their business model would be definitely to plug into these peer groups on social media. Tax Twitter is a great community. There are so many thought leaders. There are so many people doing cool things that you are bound to learn something that’s going to propel your firm forward.

Nicole Davis: Also, go to conferences.This is where I probably gather about 90% of the creative or innovative ways to do things because I’m constantly listening to what other people are doing, especially those that are forward-thinking in modern firms. I learned so much by going to conferences and networking with people that it’s critical for anybody that is stuck in a traditional model or looking to transform their business to get out more and see the world. It’s kind of like how when you travel and you live in a very small town, and all you see is your small town, so that’s all you know. But once you start traveling and taking adventures and going out and seeing this vast world before us, that’s where your eyes start to open, your perspective starts to change, and you realize that there is so much more out there that can make you a better firm owner, a better person, and just a better human.

Jeff Drew: Well, that is a great way to end the podcast. A better human? If we could end all of our podcasts with making better humans, that would be really good. Thank you so much, Nicole, for taking time out of your crazy schedule to talk to us today and talk about the ways you’ve done your firm building. Your journey into public accounting has been really unique, and we very much appreciate you taking the time today to tell us your story and give advice to those who may be considering similar path.

Nicole Davis: Thank you, Jeff. This was a lot of fun. If anyone wants to reach out to me directly, if you have any follow-up questions, you can always find me on Twitter @wifemomcpa100.