I recently had the honor of being a part of an amazing panel talking about the outsourced accounting model (and how the cloud can help.)The message was simple – in 3 to 5 years time, most entrepreneurs will be utilizing an outsourced accounting department instead of trying to piece together an in-house department.

But something else came out from the panel that made a tiny twitter tremble in the accounting world – the idea of being able to hire a piece of a rockstar accountant. Jim, a good friend and teacher of mine, hits the nail on its head when he said the following, “[entrepreneurs] can’t justify or afford to hire a rockstar accountant, but they can now hire a piece of one…” Or in DeepSky’s case – a piece of an entire rockstar accounting department.

Over the last few years – we’ve taken on so many customers who, before DeepSky, were relying on a single person (other times 2 or 3 people plus outside help) to deliver a quality accounting initiatives. It almost never worked.

In fact, I was chatting it up with an entrepreneur who owns a digital agency a few months back and I asked him – what was the final reason that made him jump from the traditional in-house model to the new outsourced model 2 years ago? He chewed on the question for a few seconds and replied, “You know what Mike? It was seeing how we’ve failed so many times trying to establish this area of our business and then seeing how someone else who’s already got it figured out.” The rest is simple. “I needed to grow my agency and my accounting support was broken – so I adopted someone else’s system – and it freed us up to grow” He adopted a rockstar accounting department.

So, what area of your business is your chokehold? Perhaps it is not broken now, but will it be adequate when the rest of your business grow? Once you identify it, you’ll have two choices. Try and hire and build your own team of rockstars or leverage someone else’s. Here are the rockstars who made up the awesome panel that I learned so much from: Jim Hart of SingerLewak, Tom Mescall of Armanino McKenna, Taylor Macdonald of Intacct, myself, and our fantastic moderator, Seth Fineberg of AdAge Accounting Today.