In this episode of the SALTovation podcast, industry veteran Kim Blascoe. With over three decades of experience, Kim shares her professional journey from owning a tax and accounting practice to leading Whipley's national accounting practice and her current role at CPA.com. Kim sheds light on the importance of mentoring in accounting, the strategy behind merging firms, and how to best support CPA firms in their growth and transformation efforts. Listen as we discuss the challenges CPA firms face today, from technology adoption to talent retention.

Key Takeaways:

• Mentoring and Career Development: Kim finds immense value in mentoring young professionals and guiding their career paths within the accounting industry.
• State and Local Tax Complexity: The episode highlights the intricacies of SALT, particularly how different state regulations impact businesses in a post-pandemic world.
• Digital Transformation: CPA.com’s mission is to support firms through digital transformation, offering tools, education, and consulting to enhance technological adoption and practice growth.
• Specialization and Advisory Services: The importance of moving from generalist to specialist roles within accounting firms to provide high-value advisory services is emphasized.
• Talent and Technology Management: Firms struggle with retaining talent, upskilling employees, and keeping up with rapidly advancing technology, including the integration of AI.

Quotables

• “We hear firms are talking about pulling people back into the office a couple of days a week so that there is that sense of community inside of the firms and a continuing of building culture because it is kind of hard to build culture when you spend all your time on virtual calls." -Kim Blascoe

• “I think all the service offerings that have been added need to have career paths so that individuals feel like they can become partner, and not everybody's desire is, but if the desire is to become partner, that we give them those opportunities in these other areas of service." -Kim Blascoe

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Welcome to Saltivation.

The Saltivation show is a podcast series featuring the leading voices in Salt, where we talk about the issues and strategies to help you make sense of state and local tax.

All right, Kim, thank you so much for joining us today on the Salt Ovation podcast.

It's great to have you here.

Well, I'm very excited to be joining you as well.

So hopefully we have some really good conversation on different things that we're doing in the industry.

Yes.

And on that note, so can you give us kind of what your professional background is?

Sure.

So I'm a CPA by trade.

I still am licensed.

I practiced for a little over 30 years before I joined cPa.com last year in June.

Originally, I had a tax and accounting practice, which basically, at that point in time, had salt and payroll as part of the service offerings that we did.

So I tail coat merged into Whipley, and at that point, I actually took over the national accounting practice that Whipley had.

Now, at that point in time, Whipley was a large, regional Wisconsin regional firm.

So we were the first Illinois merger, and we had two offices in Minnesota and two offices in India.

And when I actually left Whitley, we were a top 20 firm.

So many, many, many mergers later, I got a lot of experience in adding other accounting practices to the one that I was working with.

So then why choose to leave public accounting for CPa.com dot?

What was that drive?

So I spent 30 years in practice, like I mentioned, and I loved mentoring younger associates or people that were early on in their careers.

It was one of the best things that I did.

And also I loved working with clients.

I really felt like I wanted to do something more.

And I had all this experience with, you know, everything I had done.

Like I said, you know, Whiffley was a regional firm when I joined.

I had my own small firm.

They were a medium sized firm, if you want to look at that way.

And when I left, they were a very, very large firm.

So I had done the gamut of understanding the opportunities and the challenges of being in different sized firms, and I just felt like I really had more to share.

So the cpa.com opportunity came up, and I kind of thought that my background was perfect for the opportunity, and I just jumped at the chance to make a change, which was kind of scary, because for 30 years, I'd been doing really predominantly the same thing, although in different size environments.

But I just kind of switched my mentoring, even though I still do mentoring on an individual basis, but I switched my mentoring over to firms.

I look at it just as a different mentoring challenge, an opportunity that I've been given a little bit later on in my career.

Interesting.

That makes a lot of sense though at a certain point I'm like, I'm at that getting close to retirement age and kids are almost launched and I'm like, what am I doing?

I have a firm, so trying to support the younger generation on our team to have a future at our firm and wherever that lies.

Yeah, super interesting.

And obviously encourage the younger generation to pursue these careers because they're really great.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, when you say, you know, people wanting to become partners, I think one of the things that we really work with when we talk to firms is having a career path, especially inside of the CAS practice, but even inside of a salt practice, you know, Whipley's salt didn't exist when I came into the practice.

Right.

And we did most of those services inside of Cass, it kind of more and same with our payroll group.

They were all part of Cass originally.

And then when I, by the time I left, those were all separate service lines and had matured and added advisory to all of them as well.

So it was no longer a compliance based business.

It was now a compliance and advisory based business.

So we've seen a lot of changes happen over the years inside of practices.

And I think the importance of that is all the service offerings that have been added really need to have career paths so that individuals feel like they can if their desire is to become partner, and not everybody's desire is, but if the desire is to become partner, that we give them those opportunities in these other areas of service.

Right.

It's a real great opportunity, I think, to be entrepreneurial, which is why I stayed in public accounting despite multiple offers to go into industry.

So I thought, well, once I figure out the problem, cause clearly you have one, then what am I gonna do is become rote and the same?

No, not the same, but just similar.

And so I'm like, I really love the diversity of lots and lots of clients and lots of issues and trying to figure it all out and it's a giant puzzle.

Yeah, I never did the private side either.

And maybe that was part of it.

I always thought I'd get bored working with just like one company versus the opportunity to work with many companies.

So.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're always on the curb, you're always learning.

There's always something new to learn in this and all of it, you know, new accounting practices, international national new rules, new laws, all the good things.

So it's a constantly learning profession which keeps.

I'm not going to lie to you, though.

I always tell everybody, if I had to practice in the salt space, you would probably have to stab my eyeballs.

So I'm always so incredibly thankful that there are people that love that space.

I mean, like we have.

Why many, many people hate it so much.

I mean, I think it's just a negative.

I think for me it's like, it's so like standard driven.

Like there's so many rules and regulations that you need to understand.

I was always just incredibly happy.

Like Jessica Macklin at Whipley is who I always worked with.

We were kind of in the same region.

And actually I'm going to do a session with her at DCPA on the crossover between Salt and Kaz and how you bring advisory.

So I'm excited about that because I think now it's an opportunity out there that is still very, very, it's a very underutilized practice.

Right.

So, you know, I just, it's just nothing.

We have what I have.

I'm an attorney and a CPA, which is partly why I practice in the area, because I think it's incredibly creative to look at the rules and see how they apply.

Right.

Because it's not black and white, especially with software and information services and tech and biotech.

I mean, there's just so many nuances to business.

It's not like everybody sells a thing, right?

And that's taxable.

So sales tax, very nuance.

Income tax states are very nuanced.

So the creativity aspect of like, what's your position?

Who are you in this state allows for some reattribution of income and also some, you know, obviously some compliance services that you need to manage the expectations of each of those governments to manage your business risk.

But yeah, I think that's really interesting though, because so many people do really hate our area.

And I really wish that we didn't have that negative spin because it creates like bad energy around it.

I mean, all of us on the team, like we dig on it.

Like, we don't look at it as negative.

We look at it as like, oh, it's a really cool puzzle.

We're gonna have to go figure out how to do it.

And then we have, you know, because business has one sort of rule and so we just have to apply those rules by state.

It's not that hard if you know, the business.

But we get to dive into the business transactionally, which a lot of providers don't.

They roll it up.

They do what, what is the gross revenue?

They don't look at the nuances.

We look at the transactions.

So I think it's really interesting, as you look how business makes money, and I think a lot of people, yeah.

We need all sorts to make the world go around.

That's why I'm always incredibly happy that people like to actually.

Even in the payroll space, the payroll space, the payroll tax return space, and the sales tax space.

But I also think.

Or in salt all the way around.

I think the other thing on the salt side of the house is that a lot of businesses don't even realize that there's a lot more to salt than a lot of them think of it as sales tax.

Right.

And even then, they don't know the rules from state to state.

And the pandemic has so changed the dynamics of how businesses work that a lot of businesses have become national, and they don't know what the rules are.

Sometimes they think, well, I'm not selling a product, okay, but you're sending somebody into that state for a product that you shipped.

Right.

You know, so, like, what are all the rules on that?

Where do you have to file tax returns?

Where do I need to get registered as a business?

You know, most people just skate right past all of that.

And, you know, I always look at it as is ignorance bliss?

But is it really ignorance?

I think it's more of, like, they don't even know what they don't know.

Right.

So it's fear.

There's a lot of fear of, like, overwhelm and stressed, which I find very interesting because they figured out how.

I mean, I have clients that have sell 46,000 products, right?

I'm like, you know how to, like, a plumbing company knows how to tell you this is all the things you buy in order to re plumb your kitchen.

How did you do that?

You could absolutely do tax.

Absolutely.

Because if you could figure that problem out, it's very similar, logical, you know, add the things.

But there is this thing out there of complexity, and I think tech has tried to solve some of it, but they lack the knowledge of the tax background.

I have the tech, but without the tax acumen.

So we've got this marriage happening in software automation that's not allowing both sides to be the way it needs to be to advocate on behalf of clients, which I know is why CPA.com years ago chose Vertex as its chosen provider.

I don't think that's so much the case anymore.

I'm not sure.

But because they were like, the perimeter, they've been around the longest and all that good stuff, so.

Yeah, but there are a lot of providers out there now.

There are.

Yeah, there are.

And there are a lot of choices, just like all the rest of the technology, too.

And it's, like, fairly overwhelming sometimes how many options you have out there.

But the importance of those options, I think, especially in the salt spaces, it is an area that you have to have some expertise and you have to spend some time digging into it.

And businesses don't do that on their own.

Right.

And I think the other thing, you know, the other thing that maybe has some bad connotations around it on the salt side is it's another tax.

Right.

You're telling your clients that, oh, now you might have to do sales tax, or you might have to do income tax in multiple states, and they're just like, taxed out.

Right.

They're just tax, tax, tax.

Everybody always wants money from me.

And so it's not always even a pleasant conversation.

It's not an area where you can work with clients.

I mean, you have to work through the value side of it.

Right.

And even, like, the compliance side of it, and, like, ease of mind that you're doing the right thing, or at least you've been told, like, what, you know, that right thing is I, prior to me leaving Whiffley, I actually did a wealth and asset management build out, and Cass was one of the service offerings that we did.

And when you think about what that wealth and asset management industry does, they have clients everywhere, all the way across the United States, and they're flying to all of these places.

And I used to have.

I used to bring Jessica into my conversations all the time and say, talk to them about Nexus.

Talk to them about what their state filing requirements are.

They may not have a sales tax, but they may also have a sales tax.

Some state stacks on service.

Right.

You know, so it's like they need to understand, and then from there, they can make the decision about where they want to file and where they don't want to file, you know?

Well, it's funny being at the big four.

Cause I was national, so I really cared about the big states.

Illinois, New York, California, Texas, Florida, you know, 10% of the us nation.

I care less about South Dakota, North Dakota.

But then I worked for I Bailey, and they were scientists in North Dakota, South Dakota.

So it was our biggest offices.

And the build out sprung for there.

So I went to, you know, counsel.

I went to hearings in those states.

I flew into Piers, South Dakota, to do a hearing on behalf of a taxpayer.

I mean, there are big taxpayers in South Dakota.

North Dakota, you would have never known.

You know, and also, as you get to see America, you see there's a lot happening in our country that a lot of people that the CPA community doesn't understand, which is why I think, salt, it's so important for the CPA to build that tech stack or that competency so that the CPA firms can be successful and then they're not blamed for not telling them.

Because there is this thing I feel like I've made, maybe mentioned that before.

My husband, I'm a lawyer and a CPA, and my specialty is state and local, but not income anymore from a federal perspective, right.

Even though I have a master's of tax, I've rolled away from being a federal tax practitioner.

I'm state and local, so I can't even do my own personal income tax return.

And I think a lot of people think, why not?

I'm like, because I don't know, keep up with the personal deductions and so forth.

And my husband says to me, who is a securities lawyer and litigator, he says, I don't understand why CPAs say they can do all these things when they can't.

They can't do accounting services and compilations and audits and tax returns and financial accounting and income tax.

And there's a lot of things in the CPA world that you could do for a living, and you can silo it and get that good competency.

You don't have to be a generalist.

Even you running your own practice, that was audit and tax.

I can't even imagine how hard that must have been.

Well, you know, back then, though, most practices were generalist practices.

Right?

And I think about the practices that we merged in at Whippley, most of those practices were generalist practices.

Now, I would say probably maybe ten years ago, five for sure, at the minimum.

That started to change inside of practices.

And we started doing exactly what you were saying is like maybe moving towards a focus.

So a practice focus and an industry focus that became very relevant inside firms.

And I think even in the smaller firms, they started thinking about, what are we good at and what are we not good at?

And let's focus on that.

And now you see caste practices that are really what we call to as BPO business process outsourcing practices that only focus on caste.

They don't do anything else or they have caste and they have tax and they don't do anything beyond that.

There's no a test type of services.

So I think we're seeing that that transition happen within firms.

And, but I will also tell you there are a lot of firms that are still working on getting rid of the generalist concept.

You know, we look at the caste side of the practice as an opportunity for individuals that went through accounting curriculums or maybe economics or business majors or something like that, that really thought their only option was to go into private, to go to work for a company because they didn't want to do the commitment of the tax season hours or the audit season hours.

And so cast gives them an opportunity, and potentially saltwood as well, but it gives them an opportunity to stay into or enter into public practice or come back to public practice because there is now this, you know, these consulting opportunities that didn't exist originally, and they looked at it as all compliance based and it was a drudge of ours.

And, you know, so we feel like we're transforming that whole, you know, space from the advisory aspect of it so that there are opportunities for individuals that really aren't compliance based because, you know, a lot of practices that a lot of cash practices look at the financial statement as a byproduct of this, of the service offerings that they're doing.

So if we have that mentality and we're thinking caste practices are, you know, focused on the advisory piece that do the transactional and accounting controller type of functions so that they have good data in order to do the CFO and the trusted advisor, you know, that's all really important for firms, and firms are still very much struggling to try to get there.

Well, yeah, and the data thing, too.

We actually hired someone who didn't get a CPA, but is a CPA kind of by training and decided to become a data wrangler, basically, which is not what is.

He's got some extra studying and understanding all data management so he can assimilate data with lots of different repositories to get good filing information because people roll things up at the transaction level.

Data is so important.

And so that has been an interesting pivot for our team to think that way because we're really good with Excel and making spreadsheets and all that.

But is there other things that we can do to ingest to create, what do you call it, some kind of a process that's not like us moving it into a spreadsheet and wrangling it yeah.

And I think with all the technology changes that are happening now, one of the things that, that we are very focused on in the whole discussion around AI and what does that mean to practices, public accounting firm and CAS practices is looking at the processes that you're doing manually, looking at the things that you're still doing in those Excel spreadsheets and saying, what kind of technology can help replace this?

So that I can move on to the advisory piece.

Right.

So we're trying to automate as much as we can on that backend so that the value that we're bringing to clients is the conversations we're having with them and the knowledge that we can share with them and the opportunity to help them grow their businesses and maybe potentially meet their goals.

Right.

So that's our goal, is their goal.

Right.

So figuring out how do we work with firms so that we can help our practice businesses, so that we can help them meet their goals and their growth.

So I'm not sure how much we got to you raid Meredith, but you take the rest of it.

Kim speaking with that, what is the mission of cpa.com?

Dot so cpa.com actually started as the technical arm of the AICPA.

And so we really started with a whole concept of helping firms and practices grow in a digital transformation space.

So very focused on technology.

What has been added over probably the last few years is we now have a full professional services practice, which is the caste side of the house is what I lead.

We also have an audit side of the house, which is the DAs technology that was built.

So working with, on the cast side, working with firms to help transform their practices.

Right.

So working with them on potentially what, you know, what's their vision and mission?

What service offerings are they going to have?

What clients do they want to work with?

Who's going to do the work?

You know, what does that work look like?

What processes are there?

What technology are we throwing at it?

How are we going to price it?

You know, how are we going to assess clients coming in so that we know that we're scoping that work appropriately?

And ultimately, how are we going to market all of that so that people know what we're selling.

Right.

From a, from a firm perspective?

So we're very focused on that side of it.

We have a lot of education and training that we focus on.

We have coaching and consulting programs that we do.

So we've changed a lot from just being the technology arm.

But technology is still a very big focus for CPA.com and a huge part of our mission is that, like a.

Fee for service thing as well, though, that part of it.

So, so we do a lot of different things.

So we do have offerings that there's a fee attached to them, but we do a lot of freemium type of stuff.

So we do tons of webinars that are free, and we do it on our topics that we help, you know, when we help practices transform.

Our coaching and consulting is a fee based practice.

Some of our education is free based.

The webinar stuff is free, and some of it is fee like.

We do some workshops and stuff like that that have fees attached to them.

We do tons of white paper.

If you go out on the cpa.com website, there's a ton of resources out there that are all free to firms.

And we are getting ready to launch a toolkit in our professional practices for transformation because we have a lot of firms that are DIY firms.

They like to do things themselves, but they want the tools that we use.

And it's not all the tools that we use, but it's a lot of the tools that we use in our coaching and consulting program.

So if they want to transform their own practice, we're going to give them the essential tools that they can use to get there.

Right.

But we have a lot of firms that are going through the coaching program, and we kind of took our workshop that we've always done, the Cass roadmap workshop that we've done for like 15 years.

Maybe it's only been 13 years.

I'm going to go back to my practice and I'm going to start implementing.

Well, then you go back to your practice because this was back pre Covid.

So we were on site for a few days together, so we went back to our practices, got busy with my day to day responsibilities, my leadership role and stuff like that.

And then a year later, I reached out to my cba.com rep, and I'm like, okay, what do you have for me?

Like, I'm ready to get started now.

And she goes, well, the workshop is all we have.

I mean, this is a long story that I'm going to bring around short.

It's okay.

I'm like, oh, okay.

So I took it upon myself.

So I really took that diy role, and I worked through transforming now what was a fairly major cast practice or accounting practice because we had done all these mergers, right?

So I had 37 offices.

Everybody was doing everything differently, and we're like, where do we start?

So when I came to cpA.com, and one of the reasons I joined cPa.com is they asked me to build out our coaching program, our coaching and consulting program.

When I came back and said, I've now spent a year not doing anything.

Can you help me?

And I built it with a team of people inside of CPA.com, comma.

We literally built out an accountable program.

So we took some content of the roadmap workshop and dove deep into a lot of that content.

And now it's an 18 month program.

We do a variety of group sessions and then one on one coaching sessions and roundtable sessions, and we pick a new topic each quarter, and we work through those topics, building it out with the firms.

We provide them with the tools.

They have homework.

So there's accountability.

So you don't go back to your practice and not do anything and then wonder why, you know, your practice isn't transforming.

So, you know, that was.

That was one of the big reasons why I did come to CPA.com, so that I could help other firms work through what took me two years to do.

It was a two year project.

We had a huge human capital piece of it.

So anytime you're working with human capital and change management, there's a lot of warm, fuzzy stuff.

And, you know, our HR team was telling us, you know, you just can't do that.

You have to go about it this way, you know?

So just the human capital part of it for me, because I had a team of like, 180 people at that point in time that were between India and the US.

So we had a lot of changes that we did inside of our practice, and all of that kind of got rolled into our coaching and consulting.

A lot of our freemium stuff also comes with cpes.

So if you join our webinars and stuff, you get free CPE hours, and you can get a lot of them.

And I think it's like a lot of cpas that are looking for CPE don't realize that there's so much free CPA CPE out there with really good topics and substance.

Yeah, we've really got.

We've taken advantage of it because we're a small firm.

We teach and go to things just because we want to stay current with the legal changes and so forth, but we've done it taking advantage of a lot of that because there's so much out there that's free content that'll give you the CPE hours you want and get some information.

It's very interesting the way how that shifted.

You know, I know a lot of AI and a lot of associations made their money off the CP, right?

Or I'm a lawyer, too, continually education.

But now other providers are giving it and they're being paid sometimes by a vendor or something.

So it's really transformed the way you and I get up to date, as opposed to sitting in a conference room, you can get an hour and still move on with the rest of your day and not be completely bonked down, losing several days at work.

I will tell you, though, when we went virtual with everything during the pandemic, I'm like, I missed people, I missed going to conferences.

I missed my friends like Jenny Huturi, that had the same pain points back then as I had, you know, because our practices were very similar that you can't shift that part of it, you know?

No, but you definitely can look at other opportunities, and there's so many now, you know, from a virtual perspective, there's just so many that you certainly can solve a lot of that with freebies.

So then with that coaching and coaching and mentoring, what do you see CPA firms struggle with a lot?

Or is there a common denominator of just kind of reoccurring items that just continually come up when you work with various CPA firms and leadership and whatnot?

Yeah.

So Tom Hood just put out a new slide that I thought was really, really interesting.

I asked him if I could steal it, and I told him every time I talked about it, I'd throw his name out there.

Like, what are firms struggling with?

Right.

Almost like it had never existed before.

And really, you know, I talk about it all the time.

It's like, I do a lot of work with Sage intact, and Nicole Kasich is always like, we are.

We had AI.

It's just people didn't know we had AI, right?

So now it's like a buzzword.

So we're.

That's our.

That's our current buzzword.

The other one was upskilling existing talent, which is still a big struggle with firms, even though we are making some headway on resolving that, especially in the cast practice space.

And then finding and retaining talent is another one.

So maybe we've made a little headway on it, but it's not going away.

And part of that is probably because we know that there aren't as many accounting candidates coming out of universities as much as we had, like, you know, when I came out of university.

So that's a little bit different.

And then the last one is, you know, still working through maintaining a firm culture in a hybrid environment.

I think, you know, there still are struggles with that.

We.

We hear firms are talking about pulling people back in a couple days a week so that there is some of that sense of community inside of the firms and kind of continuing to build culture, because it is kind of hard to build culture when you spend all your time on virtual calls.

Right?

So we're seeing a lot of those changes, but the people side of it is still a big struggle, and technology is changing faster than it ever has before.

So people trying to keep up with all of that is, you know, also a big pain point for firms.

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