Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Between Two Ledgers. I'm James Rose and today's guest is Meryl Johnston. I've known Meryl for a very long time. She's had some really cool businesses over the last decade or so. She's one of the few accountants I've met who prioritizes lifestyle design in their business. She's into surfing and health and family now and ensures that her business serves these things, not the other way around. We talk about lifestyle design, how you don't always get it right, the ups and downs of business productization, offshore recruiting and more topics. And now I bring you Meryl Johnston.
Meryl Johnston. So good to see you.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Yeah, great to be here.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: We've been friends for a very long time through business circles. I don't. It must go back so long.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Long.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: I don't know, I'm going to say like 2015 or something.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to say 10 years. I remember you running an agency meeting for a coffee in Brisbane a lot. This is a long, long time ago.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Yes. Makes me feel quite old. I had many businesses since then. But I think what's very interesting about you is that I know you through like online entrepreneurial circles rather than through my accounting network. Right. So that to me means like general. People in that regard are more focused on lifestyle or working less or working from wherever they want.
And so I just find that's a really unique angle with how you approach all of this. And I guess my thing is I want to talk about lifestyle today before I want to hear about what you're doing now. But random question. Did you get into this because you read the four hour work week?
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Correct.
Common path. Yeah, yeah, it's such a common part.
Yeah, that's it. And so that maybe that's the theme of the episode is freedom and lifestyle. Because that circles, like the entrepreneurial online business work remotely thing, that was so rooted in that book. Right. It started that almost.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: And I almost left the accounting industry because that was pre zero, although I hadn't heard of zero back then. And I wanted to work from anywhere in the world and not have to go into an office and use the desktop computer and be tied to set work hours. So I was looking at options and considering leaving the profession because that's what I wanted.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: Damn. So fast forward to now. What's life like? Because I know you've prioritized lifestyle more than most accountants I know. So where are you at?
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Well, we were just chatting before we recorded and life is still a bit chaotic, but it's probably more to do with having young kids and trying to be present for them. And we've just come out of the school holidays in Australia so kids at home for six weeks still trying to get work done. But that's something I'm prioritizing is trying to be there, present for them, try to have fitness and adventure in my life. There's definitely phases like at the moment when we're just a couple of weeks back into school, life does still feel a bit chaotic. But I am grateful that I can. I took three weeks off completely off over the Christmas period and then was back part time for some of it. So I'm grateful that I can have that time with my kids and be away doing things.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: That's it. Like just because when we say lifestyle doesn't mean like we're literally doing nothing and sipping margaritas or whatever. It's.
You are. You have the ability to focus on things like that are important like family and. And kids and man, like I'm very familiar to me right now we're in. Our kids are in different stages of life but mine are insane and toddlers and like I have.
I feel like my life is. Should be fairly chill. But the kids make it absolutely not chill.
But the thing is we have that flexibility and ability to focus on that when we want. I know that not that long ago you were doing lots of lifestyle stuff like surfing's big for you, fitness is big for you. Lots of. Yeah. Outside of this crazy period, what's it normally and what are your goals originally?
[00:04:01] Speaker B: So I started my first business, I will be Ninjas, the accounting firm pre kids. And so my goal there was to earn a good income so that I had financial freedom. But really it wasn't about having lots of money to buy stuff. I just wanted to have flexibility in my schedule so that if the surf was going to be good at 10am then I didn't have something on my calendar and I could go surfing or if I wanted to go and live somewhere else, I wanted to go and live in Bali for a few months and work from there. Then I could do that. And no one was telling me that I couldn't do that or telling me when I had to be at work. So that was really the driver.
So pre kids I did have a lot of that flexibility and I would try and structure my life to avoid things like why would I want to drive in peak hour traffic? I'm going to drive to work or ride to work around that. I don't want to go to the gym when it's busy. So I was trying to structure my life taking advantage of all of that flexibility. So a bit harder to do that with kids because that has a set time, school has a set time and school holidays are at a set time. And I real. That's a battle that I'm struggling with. Why are we on holidays when everyone else is at its peak season?
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Totally. I laughed when you mentioned the gym there because that's like the.
It's funny when I show up to the gym and I've mistimed it or I went a bit later because I worked a bit later and it's getting close to 5pm and I'm like, damn it. Like driving through the car park, can't get a park. I'm normally there like at a time when there's no one there. So very familiar. Being able to move times around I think is huge for a bit of like people listening from. From background. Because you've had quite the journey, right. You created a bookkeeping business and now you're in the outsourcing game.
Tell me about how you designed your business for lifestyle, especially in the beginning and then follow through the rest of the story. But yeah, how did you actually design.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Your business for this just was designed intentionally so. I worked backwards from a series of goals, but a little bit of backstory prior to that. I had a consulting business for a bit under a year that was project based. So it was difficult to build a team. It wasn't. Didn't feel scalable or repeatable. It was all on me and clients are calling me at night and on the weekend. I thought this is absolutely not what I want. Let me rethink this. So I want recurring revenue but there has to be a reason that people pay you monthly. You can't just retrofit something and expect that it's going to continue monthly. Something that was scalable. The potential global potential. So not tied to taxes in one country, so not really tax focused. And how can I build a team around this so it's not reliant on me and I want to eventually. The original goal was build this to seven figures, work a 20 hour work week. So that was what the original.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: That was almost my exact goal by the way, like 20 hours, seven figures. I think my goal wasn't quite seven figures but as a SaaS your profit margins high or whatever, that was like the original goal. So it's funny, I think a lot of us end up on very similar numbers when we're first starting out this like business slash Lifestyle design.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: He said, I just thought that was going to add $0 of revenue. But I thought, okay, that seems like a something to aim for. And then as I was building that business, I started that with a co founder called Ben. We were pretty intentional about hiring good people and pay. I was paying people more than I got paid myself in the early days, but that was the intention. I didn't need to take out money, I didn't need to take a lot of money out of the business. Back then I had no mortgage, I lived with housemates, no commitments and I wanted to build a team and systems and that takes investment. And so I was intentional about doing that and not meeting with clients face to face, saying no to a lot of things in order to protect my time.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: I still think because there's probably people looking to this who are further on in their journey and aren't living with housemates, et cetera because I was in the same boat. But I think you can balance this, right, like you could build something new with a team around it while still providing service work. So I think our accountants are in a fairly unique position here and that everyone needs accountants and people expect to pay a certain amount as a professional sort of thing. And I think you could probably make a reasonable, be able to pay yourself reasonably while still handling some of that non scalable accountant work while building a team. I feel like that feels pretty possible in accounting. I don't know. How do you feel about that?
[00:08:12] Speaker B: I'd agree with that. So I think it's just a trade off of the more that you need to pay yourself, the less money that's available to pay other people or reinvest. So if I'm. If I'm talking to an accounting firm owner or bookkeeping firm owner that wants to scale quickly, that's how they want to put more money into marketing and they want to hire senior people earlier then that might mean trying to reduce their living costs. But I think that's a good thing anyway. If you can reduce your living costs and be happy living on less, I think that gives you more freedom. But there's also definitely in your first couple of years of business if you're. If your price, pricing and packaging the work appropriately, there's still plenty of margin I think to pay yourself a decent amount if that's important to you or you've got financial commitments.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: So is there an overlap with your consulting gig and Bean Ninjas in the beginning? So people that don't know Bean Ninjas was pretty exclusively bookkeeping, right?
[00:09:06] Speaker B: It was only bookkeeping yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: So were you still doing any client work yourself or did you go straight into. I'm designing everything so that I'm not a part of the day to day or. Yeah, tell me about the first bit.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: So I was. I still was doing the consulting and I had to scale. That was covering my living costs. And I gradually scaled that back over about a year and a half as binges grew. But we only put in a thousand dollars to start B Ninja. So we had to do everything ourselves until we could grow revenue to the point that we could hire people. The intention was that we were doing bookkeeping, but we had to do that until we had enough MRI that we could hire somebody. But we prioritized that pretty early. And that was always the intention. But then of course, we had staffing challenges along the way. So it. So I think about a year and a half, two years into the business I was. When we restructured the team, I was back doing bookkeeping, which did not feel great when I compared that alley rate to what I could earn. Consulting.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I bet. I have some friends who had a bookkeeping business. I think they still do for a long time. And like some kind of similar model to you guys where it was more productized and there have been times where they've lost a CEO or CEO type role and had to step back in. I just knowing them, I'm like, man, this must be so painful. But this business, right? Like, I had to get back on support recently and like I try to reframe it a little bit and go, now I'm plugged into like customers problems and I'm going to learn. And I'm like, oh my God. So many people struggle with resetting their passwords.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: We.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: What we. This is like, we can't have you support people working on the password resets. Like, how do we fix this? So there are benefits sometimes to jumping back onto client work. I feel the client facing stuff.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: I felt the same too. It. I got into the detail of our systems, I thought, oh, why are we doing it like this? Can we improve that? So actually there was a benefit. It was painful, but there was definitely benefits. And I do try and frame it like that too.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's funny how like how much you can learn just by jumping back in for a little bit. Firstly, I feel like this so often now where because I'm not even doing customer demos anymore, I see our products less. It used to be I was in our product every day. Cause I was showing someone around or talking about it or whatever. And now it's starting to feel a little bit unfamiliar. Not unfamiliar, but. Oh, it's hard. Like I look at it and it's not. Doesn't feel like it's almost my product anymore because it's. And I'm like, this is weird, I can't handle this. But yeah, I think it is very beneficial from time to time.
Great. You had a funny journey with the productization of Beam Ninjas. Right. Like you started, I remember your prices were crazy low and eventually you. Did you get back into advisory or like higher service level stuff? Yeah, if I got that right. You started productized and then got. Yeah, tell me about that journey. What inspired it and was that painful?
[00:12:00] Speaker B: So is it. So we started super productized, then we expanded and then we brought our service offering back to become more productized over a period of about five years. So it started our. When we launched our website, we had three pricing tiers on the website and one of them was bookkeeping for 99amonth. Do not do that. That was a terrible idea.
We could not do it profitably, but we were just testing and experimenting. So we continued to change our price. We wanted to be like a software product where you could sign up online, pick the package and get started. We realized that's not how people want to buy bookkeeping or accounting, so. So we learned that and then over the years we kept on increasing our prices. There was a lot of talk about advisory in the industry even five, six years ago. And we thought, oh, my background's consulting. My, my business partner Wayne in the US comes from an FPA background which is like forecasting future focused type work. So he thought, oh, let's spend some time and build that product. So he built the advisory product and I built a financial literacy course and let's see how that goes. Let's diversify our product offering.
But then we realized he was the only person that could deliver that advisory service and, or me. And we actually want to be growing the business, not doing delivery. And so we tested it. We. He built some really great dashboards for our E commerce clients. He was having calls with them. He learned a lot about our ideal client.
But then we realized, hey, is that what we want to be doing? We don't know. We do not want to be involved in the service delivery. So we need to pare that back. And it's more of a financial controller level service that we provide where we're only reporting on what has happened historically. And there's services like accounts payable, dazzlo trend in Australia, 1099s in the US that tie in with that service that we can trust a team to deliver in a systemized way. But we still increased our prices significantly from that 99amonth, but in a way that we could do it profitably without relying on the business owners.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. It's cool like that. You just work out things aren't working and adjust as soon. Like sometimes you've got to do that other.
I. It made me think of like the sunk cost fallacy, where you get so far down like one path and you're like, oh, I spent all this time and work to be here. And it's. It can be a mental battle to let go of that and throw it all in the bin, essentially. Even though you. If you do the numbers, it makes more sense to throw this away. But you've spent all this time, so you keep going. It's really hard to do that. So well done.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: We were recording, working in public podcasts about the two new products that we were building too. So everybody knew we're doing this advisory test. This is why we think it's going to be great. This is how it's going. And same with the course need neither of them. I wouldn't call either of them a win. It's even harder when you're doing it in public and then have to retract that. But I think that I try to be aware of that sunk cost fallacy and well, this is where we are. Okay, let's. Let's adapt. We've learned something new, so let's adapt even again. Even if it is a bit painful in a way.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: I think that the public, the building in public part could be helpful because sometimes just talking it through is so helpful. Like, I've got a lot of stuff on my mind right now and I was a fairly big low like yesterday morning. And then I just had a long chat with my business partner about our, like, strategy going forward and whatever and it was like immediately turned me around. And I feel like you could record that and probably, probably be good content. But I know like, you evolved a long way from this business just to wrap up, like, I'd like to hear how you are because you, your involvement in that business is like drastically almost gone now at this point. Right.
And you are moving into a completely business movie. You've been doing it for a while now. So tell me about that transition and what you guys are doing now and why.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: Yeah, so the intention with Benages was to grow it so that it didn't need me anymore. And so that was an intentional plan that took me about six years of having names in the org chart and then gradually hiring different people to fill those roles. So at the end of 2021 I stopped working full time there and went to a part time advisory role and stepped down as CEO. So now I do marketing and I work with my business partners and then if problems come up then I'll step in to help with that too. But my business partners are running the us, UK and Australia back at that time.
And so that was an intentional plan and that felt fantastic saying okay, I'm moving to a part time role, I'm going to look at what's ahead, I'm going to take a sabbatical, take some time off and learn and try some other things.
And then it actually took me several years to figure out what am I going to do next. I had young kids at the time so I was spending more time at home. I was dabbling in the crypto world. I was trying with a software startup. We had a crack at that and really just trying to figure out, I thought maybe angel investing's for me and I started doing that and then realized no, that's not my skill set. I do not enjoy value valuing pre revenue businesses and arranging realized I don't have an edge in that space. So it took several years to figure out what am I going to do. And one of the things that I tried in investing was investing in Team up, which is a recruiting business that recruits for it recruits for accounting firms and it recruits senior accountants in the bill bids and originally I was just supposed to be an investor there and then before I post that I'm an investor on LinkedIn. I think we need a different business name and a logo and a website. Let me just help you with that. And that was really fun. I love the early stage of a business so I helped with that. And Isaac, the co founder is a great guy and we just work together really well. So I thought this quite fun. Why don't I help with some other marketing activities. And that just led to me working there part time and then eventually becoming a co founder there. So that that wasn't expected. I think that may have been his plan all along, enforce it and it's really fun.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: Is he a sales guy? That'd be funny.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: He's good at sales but you'd never know that he's salesy. So he's just in the same way, he's a great leader for the Team accepts the vision, tells the story, gets you along.
But not in a salesy way.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Yeah. I asked because maybe that was his plan all along. I just, I like just yesterday I think there was. I put up a LinkedIn post. Our sales guy and how he went from after we hired him. I went back through our message history and didn't even realize that he had messaged me so long ago asking for a job basically. And I just forgot. And I was like, oh wow. I've been on a sales process for him getting a job with us for ages and I didn't even know. Yeah. And I would back up that Isaac is a great fricking human being. I love that. Isaac, great business partner.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: So tell me about team up. Like what do you guys do for accountants? And yeah, I guess I'm also interested in. I suppose you've answered like why.
Why you ended up in that. It was just like you invested in it and then why did you want to invest?
[00:19:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'll give you the reason. So we'd had a bad experience with an outsourcing company running the firm. So we tried. We paid the monthly fees and then post. This was around Covid time. And then post Covid. Everyone had to go from remote work back to the office.
And our manager in the Philippines said come back. If I have to go back, I quit. And the BPO said they have to go back.
And we said, what? We're going to lose this team member. Can we take them out of the your employment arrangement? We'll just hire them directly and just between us, we'll do, we'll just manage them. And it was a nine month saga to make that happen with our key person in the Philippines. And we had to pay an exit fee that was enormous, over $10,000. But this is just not how the, the industry should work. And then Isaac did a post in a business forum that we're in saying, hey, I've started a business recruiting accountants in the Philippines. We're just recruiters. It's not ongoing fees. It's ethical. And yes, this is. There needs to be this in the accounting industry doing it right. It sounds like he was. He's doing exactly what I would have paid for at our accounting firm. I'm not happy with the other options. Why do I need to pay monthly fees for nothing really. I just want someone to do the hard work of recruiting a great person to work for a remote firm. Not to travel two hours a day to go to an office and sit in a cubicle at a bpo.
So I said to, I said hey, I love this idea, can we have a call? And so we jumped on a call and I said I'd be interested in investing in investing in this. And he wasn't even looking for investors.
And then it evolved from there. So that was a bit of a backstory of I thought there's an opportunity. A lot of accountants aren't happy with how with the current outsourcing and offshoring options, particularly if they're experienced and they want to have control over their team culture. They want to train their team and manage them and have it feel like one global team, not an onshore team and an offshore team.
It was something that I cared about and had experience with and thought, yes, a lot of my friends in the industry, I think they would like this service as well. So let me get involved.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: Surprise. Understanding the biggest pain points of an industry can turn into a great business.
It's so funny because like when I was planning what we'd talk about because at first I forgot you were just recruiting, I was like, hey, they're like an outsourcing and how do you deal with the bad name? But I was like oh no, that's right, they're just recruiting.
And you just outlined everything I was going to say because like out outsourcing, accounting, outsourcing companies, for lack of a better way of saying it, it's just, it's bad name. Everyone whinges about them and the spammy is usually why because they just sick of being sold to. The exit fees are another one and obviously the actual costs can really blow out. Like I think sometimes not to do all of them. I think sometimes it does make sense for the ongoing costs because like I know some people that use a VA service not I can't speak for any of the accounting services but there's this one called Athena that a lot of DC as the community we are both part of use and they're more expensive than going direct to the Philippines. But they essentially have a network of where the they're all the different easier can talk to each other to solve problems in their own internal slack. So you're getting access to and they often go to training and they're in an office where they're having a fun environment. So sometimes it's totally beneficial to have and you are getting something for your ongoing fees. But in the accounting on accounting offshoring worlds I feel like that's not the case. So I love that you've just picked like a massive pain point and just Done exactly what people want instead.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Yeah, and we noticed the spammy thing too, because I'm still an accounting firm owner, so I get hit up every day on LinkedIn, email, phone calls.
And we thought we want to do the opposite with our brand. So we want it to be a brand that people like. So how can we not be spammy? How can we make it fun? How can we. So we host events. Our main market is the U.S. so we've been hosting events in the U.S. we're about to host clients in the Philippines. So encouraging people, the clients to come to the Philippines. We'll host them, but then come and meet your team. So we're trying to teach or educate the market to say, hey, it's not an offshore onshore thing, it's a global team.
Don't put your Philippine staff at the cheap hotel and you stay at the Hyatt. No, everyone stay together.
You're getting great people. Give them a career path. So that's something that I care about, Isaac cares about. And we're trying to come to the industry in a little bit of a different way and have fun with it.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: God, I love that event thing. It's almost like you're organizing retreats for people in a way. Like, I remember because I used to have a big. Not big, like a significant Filipino team when we were in the web design space.
And actually one of the events that we went over for Tropical Think Tank, when that was a thing, I remember I brought them all together for afterwards. Like we had a little mini team retreat and God, they were so excited to be traveling and staying in a nice hotel and all that sort of stuff.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: Yeah. So we're. So we're bringing clients to the Philippines and then we're going to help them all plan their own team retreat.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: Yes. So good.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Giving different locations, budgets, activities, depending if you want, beach or city so that you get out there and you spend time with your team.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Totally. Yeah. Totally worthwhile. Yeah. Face to face time with the team is invaluable. But so tell me, what's your role here? Because you're talking about all this stuff going on in the US And I know you're not in the US So obviously Isaac must be taking up a lot there. But how do you fit in?
[00:24:35] Speaker B: So it's been a. It's, it's interesting because I started just part time helping with the brand and then also I'm an accountant, so I also run internal finance. And it's been a bit of an evolution because we have some overlapping skill sets. But we also work quite differently, so we've been trying to figure that out. So Isaac's. He looks after the recruiting team and he does a great job just empowering them to run it. And he also handles sales. One of our recruiters has been trained on sales too. And so between the two of them, they run that. But Isaac also has marketing skills, so he's run lots of different businesses, but he's got pretty good copywriting, design skills and tech skills. But I also have marketing skills, so we have some overlap there. So that's something we've been discussing recently of which bits do I do? So I'm probably more on the hosting events community, being active in the accounting community side, and then we both travel to events. But it's hard for me. I'm based in Australia, so he has to do more of the go to accounting conferences than I do. The first time I suggested that, he said what an accounting conference said, yeah, that's the industry we're in. And then he went to Bridging the Gap with one of his first conferences and he said it was actually very similar to a kind of crowd to Dynamite Circle, which is the crowd that one of the communities that we're in with good people. So he was pleasantly. Yeah. Nice shirt.
Yeah.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: So for those listening, I just showed the logo on my shirt, which is the dc, the Dynamite Circle. So.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: But it's been an evolution because we were doing a lot together. But then when you have two people having to approve everything, it slows things down. So there's some clear things. Like I definitely run finance, although it's harder for me because it's a US business. So I've had to learn US compliance stuff. And that's something we keep on talking about.
And we both do strategy together. So we've been doing our 2026 planning and trying to set KPIs, and we work on that kind of thing together and we both find that fun.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Nice. So coming back to lifestyle then, like, how do you. How does this new business work in with your lifestyle goals?
[00:26:39] Speaker B: It works well, apart from being US centric. So that's hard because I love mornings. So mornings for me, the best, my best work time. So for deep work, it's when I would surf or exercise. It's also time to get this help get the kids out the door.
And if I'm doing calls to the us, it's also the best time for me to have calls in the US time zone. So I do. I find that challenging because I do a lot of partnership calls. And so that means us time zone calls. So I find that hard. But the rest of it is a lot of async communication. So that's a lot of loom videos, a lot of Slack messages, not many meetings.
I don't actually go to team meetings at the moment just because I can't fit it in my schedule. I probably should be doing that. I'm not a meeting person. So, Isaac, every quarter realized. Do you want to come to the all hands and then still know at the moment?
[00:27:30] Speaker A: All hands minus Meryl.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Yeah, Happy with that.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: Not all hands.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: But I know at some point that's something we're working on at the moment of. Do we need to add in a leadership team meeting as the team's growing? We're 10 people now for. We probably do need a bit more of that.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:48] Speaker B: But so typically that does work well with my lifestyle. Apart from the calls, I do find it a bit of a juggle because I still have some responsibilities at Bninjes and some at Air Accounting, which B Ninjas in Australia entered a strategic partnership there a couple of years ago.
So it is a bit to juggle. I like having lots of things on, but sometimes it can be a little bit too much and I have to go back through what's on my plate and think, is this actually aligning with my goal? Because my ideal day is wake up in the morning, go for a surf with my friends, have a coffee and a chat with them, see the kids, get them off to school and not be in a rush, not racing to get to the office for a 9am call.
And so I. That was actually something I've been thinking about the last couple of days.
Are these things that I'm doing, are they aligning with how I want my life to be? Because I don't want to have a holiday. I don't want to feel like I have to have a holiday from my life. I just want to enjoy every day and not be rushed in the morning, be outside, surf, chat with friends, enjoy family, and then have fun, interesting work. And so sometimes I feel like I can focus on, oh, yeah, that will drive revenue. But is that going to take me away from how I want my day, my ideal day to be?
[00:29:02] Speaker A: God, this is great. Yeah. So good to. I feel like this stuff goes in waves exactly as you're describing, where you're like, these things are pretty good, they're chill, everything's coming together in the way you designed.
And then you take this on and you take that on and whatever and suddenly you're like, oh, good God. Like, I'm so busy, I can't do this. And I had a breaking point. I don't know. I hate saying that because not really what it was. I was just like, I am so done right now. This was like literally last week. And I wrote down a bunch of ideas and planned how I'm going to get out of it. So very similar to you in a way. And I think that activity where you're. I assume this is what you did, something like this, where what is your ideal day? What are your real goals? What do you value?
This exercise I was going to do, which is you write down like 50 goals and you bring it, you force it down to 10 things and then every decision you make has to go, like, how is it aligned with one of those 10 things? It didn't really work for me because I think I already have a pretty well defined idea of what I want. I went on to ChatGPT and explains this. I'm like, these are all the same goals. I don't know how to get to 50. And it's just actually, you're probably fine. That's why you're struggling to do this. You already have your goals and that's okay. I was like, thanks, chatgpt. But like, I do think this is so relatable that this like cyclic thing where like, we don't have our shit together all the time, our goals lose focus of our goals, and then you have to have a moment where you're like, this has gone too far and snap yourself back.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: Yeah, the same thing happened to me. So it was earlier this week and Isaac had sent me this loom video talking through. So he's giving me feedback on the strategy that we put together. 2026 strategy. And then we were refining the KPIs that we want to track. We don't want to track too many. What are the most important ones? What are the leaves that drive our business forward? And I just couldn't get to it. Like, that is an important thing that I should be working on. I enjoy that kind of thinking and I have all this other crap that I have to do that feels urgent, but it's not as important as that. And so several days went by where I just couldn't get to watch his video, have the space to think about it. I thought, okay, I have to make some changes and go back through everything on my list and I need to evaluate is it going to help me get where I want to go? And I need to Be cutting some things or delegating or just saying we're.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: Stopping that a hundred percent. That's exactly what I went through last week. And it's funny, one of the biggest realizations to me is I got, I pulled up our Slack analytics and I think I sent 11,000 messages in six months or I can't remember the number but it was incredible. Like I was so far ahead of everyone else on the team and number of messages sent, I'm like, that's because too much crap is coming through me. And also maybe I write things before I fully thought them through or something. Like there was a lot of connotations of sending so many damn messages on Slack. And so I've actually started timeboxing Slack like you time box email now where I'm like, I'm not even talking to the team outside of these hours. Like it's not super official where I'm like 11am like whatever. But I will intentionally close Slack and stay off it for several hours at a time when I need to get something proper done. Whereas before I didn't do that. But yeah, like it's just one of those sometimes it takes that real again for lack of a better term breaking point to just go, I need to make some serious changes here.
Meryl the Spinner really awesome chat. Is there anything you think we should have covered, especially about team up? Because I know we didn't dig into that too much and that's like the main thing you're doing now. Is there anything you'd like to cover at the end here?
[00:32:25] Speaker B: A common question I get asked is I'm looking to hire a senior role. Should I hire in the Philippines? And I think people have a perception of oh yeah, I've got a data entry junior bookkeeping task that's a good fit for the Philippines. And so I like to explain, actually I'll give error counting as an example.
We have our tax supervisors in the Philippines. They ran tax planning meetings for the first time this year. So they were in the meeting with a client in Australia giving advice and it also in the room was an Australian client success manager. So that's an example of this senior level talent there that if you give them a career path and opportunity and training to grow and compensate them well and give them flexibility, remote work, there's amazing talent out there. And I think that's something that is a common misconception.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: That's that fits perfectly in with the lifestyle theme too because I think it's very hard to create a lifestyle type business if you're not. If you're only trying to outsource all the junior work and you're sitting in that senior role and everything's got to come back through you. So that's a, that is a big unlock. And I was in that stage. Obviously we're a SaaS business so it's a bit different. But for a long time we were hiring offshore and I thought it was all junior level stuff, but we found so many people now where I'm just blown away at how proactive and awesome they are and it completely shifted my thinking to the point where I'm like, I can hire just someone's in Australia or the US or whatever. It doesn't mean they're better. There is a lot of rubbish people here.
There is a lot of good people there. It's.
Yeah. So that's a good observation. Especially if you're like, you have to let go of that senior level work at some point. And like I just said, sometimes it requires a breaking point too. No, I do not need to approve. Accounting is a bit different. Obviously you need an accountant to prove certain types of work legally or regulatory, whatever it is. Right. But you can probably. That's a whole other topic. You can optimize everything around that. So the accountant who needs to do the approvals, if that's you, is only doing those bits and everything else is someone else. But letting go and just being like, I don't need to touch everything in this damn process anymore sometimes takes a breaking point.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Yes, agree.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: A bit of letting go.
Where would you like people to go to find out more about you and team up?
[00:34:46] Speaker B: LinkedIn is probably the best place. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn just like you are.
So. Meryl Johnston, M E R Y L Johnston or otherwise, if you're interested in hiring in the Philippines, then team up at our website's hireteamup.com beautiful.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: And we will obviously link that up in the show notes. Meryl, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for joining me.
[00:35:08] Speaker B: Thanks. I joined the chat.
