Financial Balance
How can people attain financial balance? In this episode of Incorporating Superpowers, host Justin Recla welcomes guest Courtney DeRonde, the managing partner at TDT Financial. Her firm is doing business differently by placing people first and building relationships that matter. They are creating new client dynamics that set people before numbers starting with their team dynamics. Tune in to learn secrets on reaping the fruit of financial balance.Â
Justin Recla:
Welcome back to Incorporating Superpowers. Today we’re going to be looking at the finance world. But from a completely different perspective because my guest today is Courtney DeRonde. She is the managing partner at TDT CPAs and Advisors. She’s been with the firm for over 20 years. And what I love about what Courtney is doing is they are doing things completely different in the financial world, starting with how their business runs and what their focus and purpose are as an organization. We were talking before the show and folks, you are going to just absolutely adore Courtney because of what she’s doing with her firm and her partners and what they’re doing in the world and how they’re going about doing accounting work and financial work, all of that is completely different than anything I’ve seen because the spirit’s moving through them. Superpowers are getting activated and they’re finding new ways, better ways dare I say, of doing business, not only as an organization, but interacting with the clients. Courtney, welcome to the show today.
Courtney DeRonde:
Thanks for having me Justin. Glad to be here.
Justin Recla:
This is going to be fun because we’ve had a lot of financial conversations on the show. You know, it’s a business show. We’ve had a lot of people that they’re walking their walk, standing in their gap, but you’re doing something a little bit different. Talk to me a little bit about what we’re talking about before the show around balance and what that looks like for your organization.
Courtney DeRonde:
We are a public accounting firm, We’re CPAs and business advisors. And in our profession, there is a lot of burnout. People come into this profession and often work tons of hours, especially during busy times of the year like the tax filing season. People might be working 70, 80 plus hours per week and it’s just not sustainable. And people burn out of this profession and a lot of times they leave public accounting. They don’t go to another firm because the assumption is that all firms operate that way.
A few years back as a couple of my partners and I found ourselves in the visioning process in implementing EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, as a structure for running our business, we thought about, okay, we’re the youngest partners here. We’ve got the longest runway. How do we create a firm that we want to be in the long term? And that we can attract and retain team members who want to be in this with us. And we started down this path of really creating a vision that would flip those normal downsides of public accounting on their head and implementing some things that in a group of managing partners, in a peer group managing partners, some of the things I’ve said we’re going to do, I mean, you can visually see jaws drop, because it’s just counter-intuitive to the way our industry has always been run. And what we have seen has been phenomenal in employee engagement and impact on our clients and our team members and their personal lives. It’s just been an amazing journey.
Justin Recla:
From my understanding, because I’ve seen that sector, the financial industry and I agree with you, it’s really easy to get lost. It’s like you go to work and it’s time to make the doughnuts. It can easily become just a black hole of numbers and life sucks. Right? Not a whole lot of excitement in there, right? I mean, there are so many other things that go into it, and without addressing the things that you’re addressing, it can be easily seen how people and why people exit that industry. What are some of the things that your organization’s focusing on, what have you focused on, what do you continue to focus on that flip that switches for you?
Courtney DeRonde:
One of the things is you mentioned numbers And a lot of people, that’s what you think of CPAs business advisors, they work with numbers. We work with people, all of those numbers represent real people doing stuff every day. It’s just capturing the results of that. And so when we start to get our team thinking about that, what do these numbers mean for the real people behind them. For the business owners who are trying to grow and scale their business and to engage their own employees and serve their own customers, these numbers matter and they mean something. And if we start to shift our perspective, we can start to see the impact of our technical knowledge and expertise around financial reporting and the tax code and business process and scaling. We can start to see how that expertise and knowledge applied to those numbers can translate into insights and information that helps people make decisions that impact the future of their business, their families, their lives. And so that’s one thing is we talk about the people and the stories behind all these numbers that we’re looking at and capturing and analyzing, so that’s one thing.
Another thing is when you think about the people and not just the numbers, you realize there’s a whole other skill set that we all need beyond those technical expertise things. Emotional intelligence is something that we believe is crucial for us to be trusted advisors to our clients and effective team members to each other. We have been on a journey of better understanding ourselves and each other as a foundation for building trust among our team and for growing our own emotional intelligence. When we understand more about how we’re wired and what our gifts are and what our strengths are, and we know how to utilize them, we understand more about our other team members and our clients and why they make decisions differently, why they behave differently, what motivates them differently. It just increases grace and compassion for each other and allows us to work so much better together. And we can do so much more when we understand those things than any of us could do on our own. That’s a couple of things I’ll pause and, Justin, let you react and ask more questions.
Justin Recla:
Folks, you’ve been following the show for a while, you’re picking up, I’m loving this because everything you’re just describing, Courtney, that’s all superpowers. That’s exactly when we talk about superpowers, it’s exactly what we’re talking about is how do we better understand ourselves? How do we better understand each other? And how do we work together to have an impact on the people that we’re serving? And this is extremely powerful information. And I love the fact that you’re leading your organization in this endeavor because it makes all the difference in the world. Courtney before we go on break, where can people go find more information about you?
Courtney DeRonde:
Yes, they can find us at tdtpc.com. That’s our website, all kinds of information on there about the types of problems that we solve for clients. How we help, more about our culture, our values. And there’s an opportunity there to schedule a free discovery call where you hop on a video call with me and just assess kind of where you’re currently at, where you’re trying to go, and if we’re a good fit to help you achieve that.Â
Justin Recla:
Fantastic folks, go check that out. If you’re looking for a new CPA firm or business advisory firm, go take a look at what Courtney and her team are up to. Highly encourage you to go check it out because this is, well it’s revolutionary in the financial industry. Courtney, I love the fact that you’re doing this. And folks, if you’re looking for a community where you can learn these things for yourself, the emotional intelligence, the empathy, the superpowers, then go take a look at the superpower plus membership by visiting superpowerexperts.com. You’ll get all the information there that you need. Stay with us. We’ll be right back.
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