“Why are you doing it?”

There are a lot of noise in my industry right now as CPAs flock (okay, maybe not all at once, but there certainly are noticeable movements) to the attempted practice of “client accounting services” while utilizing the latest “cloud technology” and adopting a “monthly fixed fee” approach – information they’ve gathered from their latest conference. Hundreds of pages of “best practice white papers” are being written to teach firms how to differentiate themselves from, well, everyone else that’s reading the same white paper. Interesting.

How is DeepSky different?

It starts with one simple question I ask all potential customers, “Why are you doing accounting?”

You see. I founded DeepSky to do one thing – to help entrepreneurs achieve greatness in the service business. And I need that same buy-in from all of our customers. I need alignment. I need to know that you are doing accounting because you believe that it can help you (your business) be great (however “great” is defined by you – to have a peace of mind, to make more profits, to buy that new office, to build a happy workplace, to change the world. Your choice.)

Sure. We live and breathe technology. We love the cloud too. We price on value (not cost plus). We don’t have time sheets. We love entrepreneurs who happen to own an agency. We have a ton of fun at work. We work in a loft above a warehouse [update ’14:] local bar. We have talented accounting ninjas. We’ve got the best corporate t-shirts the accounting industry has ever seen. But these are just “how” we do things differently. Some are easier to copy than others. They are not “why” we are different.

And I think our “why” is truly remarkable. And guess what? It’s pretty darn hard for other people to copy that.

We’ve built a company to help entrepreneurs be great. It’s our “why.” We want to be on the same side of the table as our customers. That’s why this is all we are – a radical outsourced accounting department with a tech-savvy spin – no compliance work, no attestation work, no noise. And we demonstrate our why at the beginning of each potential relationship with a simple question. “Why are you doing it?”