If you're ready to take your agency's forecasting and resource planning to the next level, don’t miss the episode with Tom O'Neill, founder of Parallax, an agency that offers resourcing and forecasting tools that aim to maximize revenue capacity. Jamie Nau interviews Tom as he explains the importance of involving the right people in forecasting and resource planning and emphasizes how this includes both leadership and front-line employees. Get the scoop on how to teach employees to think like operators and make better decisions for your business.
"We focus not only on what a project manager would think, but how we can give that project manager a wider-angle view that they'd have if they were a COO, CEO, or CFO, so that when they're making decisions closer to the business, they're doing it with the perspective that's outside of their point of view. Because, overall, I believe that forecasting as a team is going to change your business." Tom O’Neill
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intro (00:00:00) - Welcome to the Virtual CPA Success Show for creative agencies. Th e go to resource for agency owners looking to scale their business. Join us every week to stay ahead of the curve and position your agency for future success.
Jamie (00:00:14) - All right. So today's episode, I'm very excited to speak with one of my good friends, Tom O'Neil from Parallax. For those that don't know, parallax is a resourcing tool, but it's something he will call a forecasting tool. But it is one of the best in the business. I have several clients that use Parallax in the amount of information they have about their resourcing, about their upcoming projects, about everything is really invaluable. So I want all of our listeners to really understand this product and give it a try. So make sure you listen to this conversation. I'm excited with all the all the different directions we went. Like I said, Tom and I are really good friends, have met several times, so this is a really free flowing and good conversation and I'm excited to get to it.
Jamie (00:00:55) - Hello everybody. Today I am excited to announce that Jodi is not in this podcast, so I think this will be probably our best episode yet, especially because I am joined by one of my good friends, Tom O'Neil from Parallax. Tom, Tom and I have probably been to, what, ten events together would you say? Tom I think.
Tom (00:01:11) - So, yeah, at least, yeah.
Jamie (00:01:13) - The most exciting. Last November we went to Athens, Greece together and had a had a really good time there and had obviously enjoyed some good food with all the history.
Tom (00:01:22) - That was great. Yeah, it's pretty cool adventure. Lucky to be able to spend that time with you and all the great agency owners and operators out there for sure.
Jamie (00:01:30) - Yeah, definitely. So Tom, Tom is, like I said, is with Parallax. So, Tom, if you want to just give a little bit of background on you and your company and kind of how you got here and what we're going to talk about today.
Tom (00:01:40) - Yeah, absolutely.
Tom (00:01:41) - Thank you and thanks for having me again. I really appreciate it. Jamie So, yeah, about me, I spent 14 years building a consulting firm that built, designed and built custom software. So we built web applications, mobile applications, that sort of thing. And over the 14 years building that company, we grew from just a handful of nerds to over 500 and about 85 million in annual sales. And so when I left my post as CEO a few years back to Found Parallax, the biggest challenge that I saw building a business like that was this problem related to supply and demand. It always felt like we had too much work and not enough people or not enough work and too many people, and that kind of rollercoaster could flip back and forth almost on a weekly basis. That that was the biggest challenge, in my opinion, and building an agency or a consulting firm. And so, yeah, I left my position as CEO to start parallax and build a tool that ultimately I wish I had along that journey.
Tom (00:02:42) - And four years later, we're having a lot of fun and having some good success helping other founders and operators solve that supply and demand problem.
Jamie (00:02:53) - Yeah, as someone who obviously who works in a lot of agencies as well as well and goes to a lot of speaking events and talks to a lot of agencies, there's definitely you were definitely solving a problem out there. And I know early on, I can't remember how early you were into Parallax and we kind of met and you walked us through the tool and I was pretty impressed with the tool. But now I have several clients who are on it and they kind of have showed me what it's available and what it's doing, and it is very impressive. So you want to talk a little bit about that journey and like where you started and where it's at now and really the problem that you're solving with all these agencies.
Tom (00:03:23) - Sure. Yeah. You know, again, when I set out to build the company Parallax, the first thing that I wanted to do was understand the businesses that we were going to serve, because again, I had my experience then that shaped a perspective for me personally on what the problem was.
Tom (00:03:39) - But we, before doing anything, before writing a line of code, before any design, we enlisted 40 different agencies and consultancies that I admired into what we call our product advisory Council. So we did some pretty deep research into how people are experiencing this pain related to supply and demand and forecasting and and how they're trying to solve the problem, whether they were using off the shelf tools or homegrown solutions. You know, I guess the the punch line is most people didn't have a good solution for this, right? We're trying to do it with spreadsheets and what not. But the most important thing that we learned and that really has shaped our approach to this was that that nobody that we could see out there was solving the problem from the right seat, that most people, almost every single company we talked to, even some of the top performing businesses in the industry, were trying to solve the problem by having 1 or 2 people, like in a in a planning or resource management or some sort of role related to like interrogating the business to figure out where we're going.
Tom (00:04:50) - They had this like forecasting and resourcing function that was like a single point of responsibility that needed to go like pull data from disparate systems, you know, combine it, massage it, you know, interview or ask people questions about current state of projects or things in the pipeline to try to shape together an understanding of where the business was going. And that was the solution that almost every one of these companies had. Again, very manual and ad hoc and not very repeatable. And we had the opportunity that we identified through that was that again, it was in the wrong seat. There were people much closer to the business, whether their project managers or like team leads that were managing like the design team or the engineering team or whatever, or maybe people that involved in new business that were much closer to the actual work that had a much like sharper perspective on where the business was going, who, you know, weren't really responsible for providing any of that information up. They were again, interrogated sometimes, but not proactively, you know, sharing that.
Tom (00:05:57) - And so that's where we saw the biggest opportunity and I got most excited about solving it differently than any other tool out there.
Jamie (00:06:04) - So you're saying it starts with getting the right people in the room? And so I've like I said, I have a couple clients that use Parallax, and the first thing they always tell me is the onboarding is key. The onboarding is a very deep process. And again, understanding the problem, it makes a lot of sense to me why the onboarding is so important because like you said, there's so many people involved and there's so much data involved that I bet you half the time of what you do in onboarding is just throw away some of the waste of data that's not even needed. So you want to talk a little bit about that, the onboarding process and and what it takes to really understand your capacity forecasting?
Tom (00:06:38) - Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate the kind words about our onboarding process, and it's by design because I think Steve Jobs is quoted for saying from time to time, like it doesn't make any sense to hire these really smart people and tell them what to do.
Tom (00:06:55) - We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. And I think if you think about that from the from the perspective of how we forecast or resource plan, I think it's all too often that we're trying to have that like single point that's, you know, managing resource planning or, you know, building out our forecasts there, like kind of telling our people what to do, right? But those people on the front line, those project managers, those people who know what the customer is expecting, they have relationships with the people that are actually delivering the work they have a better, in my opinion, cleaner point of view of where that specific projects going to go. They can give us better information on where to focus on how to forecast the demand on our resources or the revenue or the margin we're going to make if we teach them how, Right? So teaching those people on the front line how to participate in this forecasting process is so key to everything we do. I think another part of it, though, is that we do user experience design just like any other product company would.
Tom (00:07:59) - And many of your listeners, I'm assuming, are, you know, steeped in the art of user experience design. One thing that we do is different than I think a lot of products out there is that we understand that while we hired these really smart people to tell us what to do as a business, you know, these project managers, these team leads, we also have to acknowledge that if you if you kind of follow this like thought line of thinking around people's capabilities, the t shaped thing, like a lot of the people that are project managers are like a narrow and deep T, meaning that they have a lot of experience in project management, but relatively narrow business experience sometimes outside of that. And so when they're looking at a resource plan or a forecast from the project perspective, they bring that deep experience, but sometimes a narrow perspective on how that project fits in the bigger picture for the organization or the agency, right? And so one thing that we've done to try to address that is we first acknowledge that these project managers are likely, again, smarter than we are as leaders, more experienced with that front line, more better real time point of view on the actual engagement.
Tom (00:09:08) - But they lack some of the wider angle view that someone like a CFO or a COO or a CEO might have. Like those of us who've been in the trenches a while and experienced all the, you know, mistakes and learn how to overcome them or avoid them. And, you know, the hard earned lessons, you know, that we've got gives us a very wide angle view on how to think about this project in the greater picture of the company. Right. And so. Right. Every single feature that we're designing, we try really hard to like not just think about what the project manager would think, but think about like how we can give that project manager that wider angle view that they'd have if they were a COO or a CEO or a CFO, so that when they're making decisions closer to the business, they're doing it from that wider angle view. They're doing it with that perspective that's outside of their only their very narrow, you know, point of view. That's, in my opinion, helping our employees at the front line that are using our product like make decisions on their own that the rest of the organization would
Tom (00:10:13) - think are better decisions and an approach to our user experience design that I think I want to point out because it's not just the onboarding process. It's the way that we've thought about the whole product. Like, you know, we want to teach these people who are feeding the insights, we want to teach them how to think like an operator.
Jamie (00:10:35) - Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm going to take just a quick second here to explain something to our listeners. So the the word forecast and I'm going to I'm going to tell a quick story about our Roxanne, who is the person who is the brains behind this this podcast. She's the one who keeps us aligned and make sure everything is going. We we had several conversations prior to this podcast about forecasting, right? So if you listen to this podcast, we talk about forecasting all the time. And from a financial statement point, when we talk about forecasting, we're talking about building an income statement and building a balance sheet and saying, what's that going to look like in the future? Right? So that's what we talk about from a financial statement point of view.
Jamie (00:11:11) - Now, when you talk about forecasting, you're talking about like forecasting in which way? From. Yeah.
Tom (00:11:17) - Mean in a very similar way. I think that when I'm talking about forecasting I think for most agencies, their primary income, their primary revenue is is coming from work that we're doing right. And projects, you know, we might have in our CRM a bunch of new opportunities, new projects in our CRM and maybe in the CRM. It says the new project is worth $500,000. That doesn't tell us when we're going to earn that revenue over time or what kind of people we need to do that work. We need to, like I like to say, put a shape to that, that new incoming opportunity. We need to say that revenue is going to be earned over a series of weeks and maybe not at an even distribution over those series of weeks based on if it's time, materials or retainer or fixed bid. That's based on milestones. But we want to understand when we're going to earn that revenue over time and how much effort it's going to take in people's time over that same period of time.
Tom (00:12:18) - And so when I say forecasting, I mean kind of starting at the project level, costing the revenue, the margin and importantly, the people that we need to do the work.
Jamie (00:12:28) - Yeah. So the point is that's what I was telling Roxanne, is our forecasts work very close together. Right? Like your, your forecast is really the basis of what we do because what we do and we build a forecast with the client or with an agency is we start at the we start at the lowest levels and we build it up. We just ask questions about, okay, let's build a budget for you. Let's build a long term forecast for you. But that forecast is only as good as what the actual information is telling me, right? Like I could build a forecast for you, Tom, and say, hey, you're going to make $1 billion next year. And I could put that on paper. And guess what? There's a forecast that says going to build $1 billion next year. But if you don't have the team to do it and you don't have the work to do it, then that forecast is complete trash, right? So what we do is we start with that high level forecast and then we take information like Parallax and go in and say, okay, if we think we're going to make $400,000 next month, what is the actual information telling us? And if it's telling us we're only going to make $250,000 next month, then what kind of adjustments do we need to make? And like you said, part of that is can we find more work? Part of that is what are the margins on that work we're doing.
Jamie (00:13:27) - And part of that is, is what do we do with the other people? But that's only the starting point, right? So we take that information and we could also say, well, maybe we could. Five If this is looking like a long term outlook for the next three months, there might be some cost we could cut elsewhere. Maybe we don't have a food in the kitchen for the next three months, which I know is always an answer. Agency owners want to hear, especially when they're in office. But I kind of want to talk about how those two forecasts work together a little bit more.
Tom (00:13:50) - Yeah, love it. And I, I think that's why we've become such good, like partners or friends and is that we think alike around how to solve this problem. I like to say that like forecasting is a team sport though you know like you said that each individual project or incoming opportunity is kind of like a brick, you know, in a stack of bricks that are going to like indicate where our revenue is going to come from.
Tom (00:14:15) - And, you know, I think that. What we believe fundamentally is that some at CPA, they can help the organization at the leadership level start to think with think forward, think proactively, think with a forecast you know in mind all the time and lead their business that way. And then what? What parallax can help the agency do is teach the front line employees to reflect that line of thinking, but also feedback to the leadership and to some at CPA. Their best guess at what that forecast is to measure against what the big plan is. Right. And so to see a variance between like the summit CPA, like running budget, like pro forma budget is a term I've used before to say we think that we're going to hit these revenue numbers, these cost numbers month over month for these next 12 months that high level pro forma. We can test against it with what the people at the front line, whether they're project managers, whether they're salespeople or team leads, what they're projecting from their more higher fidelity point of view on the individual projects and people and what they're going to contribute over that same extended period of time.
Tom (00:15:39) - Again, we're teaching the organization to forecast as a leadership team, but then to also like validate against that with the front line employees understanding of where we're actually going to hit based on stuff that they can see right in front of them.
Jamie (00:15:54) - Yeah. And I love what you said there, that forecasting is a team sport. You know, we build forecasts for every company we work with or any company that signs up for our higher our middle to higher level services. The first thing we do is say, let's build a forecast. But there's even though we're doing the same process there, such thing as a good forecast and a bad forecast. Right. Even if we're the we're leading the exact same process with two different companies. And I think to your point, the companies that are the best are the ones that I'm not just sitting with the CEO and saying, hey, let's build a forecast, Right? Those are the worst, right? Let's just sit in the let's sit in your office. Let's build a forecast real quick.
Jamie (00:16:27) - And that's what we're going to do. And we're going to update every month. And just you and I are going to talk about it every month. Those are the forecasts that are always kind of underwhelming. And those meetings last like 15 minutes because nothing's really changed. And as a CFO, I know nothing's something has to have has to change. Like no business runs the same every single month. And so my challenge to the CFO is to get to those questions to be like, Well, okay, something has changed. Tell me, tell me about your projects. Which projects are hot right now? Which ones are cold right now? And so I have to get to those questions. But the companies that do forecasting really well bring those questions to me. And they say, Jamie, we just lost this huge contract and I'm trying to replace it with these other three, but these other three aren't quite getting there. What do we do? Those are the type of questions that are the best, and those are the companies that get the most out of that high level forecasting are the ones that understand the logistics of the what goes into the forecast.
Jamie (00:17:14) - And again, I think parallax is a great tool for that. But you want to talk a little bit about your tool and how it gathers that, but also kind of compare it to some other tools that are out there and what's the difference between what you're doing? Because like I said, every every client that I've seen use parallax gets it more than everybody else. But you want to talk a little bit about why that is?
Tom (00:17:32) - Well, I love hearing you say that. And before I talk about like, you know, commercial for my product, I would like to kind of point out that something you said that I think is key, that things need to change in order for the agency to perform different. You know, it is the way that CEO or founder or operator like shows up to the meeting with you. There are things that need to change from the front line in order for that person, for her behavior to change and how she engages with you from a forecasting perspective.
Tom (00:18:04) - I think that the number one thing that I think typically stands in the way of that change or like the biggest problem to adoption, it really is because many of these agencies were kind of built on a principle of triage, meaning that like when they're a 4 or 5 person agency, they survived by like every single day, kind of breaking up that day into what was the most important divided among the five of them and then getting it done and then moving on to the next day. And maybe if you're 10 or 12 people, you've kind of graduated from the daily triage to a weekly triage. But very rarely do I see high performing agencies that are that I should say another way, very common. I see agencies that are showing up to the meetings the way that you described as a CEO, where they're not thinking forward, where they haven't engaged the rest of the team in this like forecasting sport. It's very, very common to see those those companies underperforming their expectations for growth, underperforming their expectations for margin and underperforming their expectations for billable utilization and ultimately profitability across the whole agency.
Tom (00:19:22) - Yet these agencies are also saying that all of their people, people feel burned out and we feel like we're super stressed. And man, it feels like we are working way harder than we need to. But then in the next breath, that CEO or founder or whatever, she'll say like, but I don't want to get it because they're only recording like 38 hours a week on their timesheet, you know, And it's like it's so common. But when you pull back a few layers of the onion, you see that they're still like running the whole agency on this like triage basis that every single week they're trying to figure out what everyone's going to do for that week. Right. It's just so inefficient. It is so reactive. And so what needs to change is that we need to start thinking beyond this week, you know? And so to get very tactical with that, forget about Parallax, you're probably doing your like resource planning in your project management tool. On a task level, you're probably assigning task by task to figure out what people are assigned to.
Tom (00:20:21) - You got to break from that bad habit and say like, you know, keep using the tasks however you're going to do them. But like, let's just all agree here. It's really hard to do that level of granularity in resource planning beyond this week or next week because it's so much work to do that, right? And this is where I usually say like precision is the enemy of accuracy. When we're trying to be super precise like that, it's extremely hard to be consistent and frequent and how often we update these forecasts right? Like it's really hard for us to get that super task level plan for the duration of the entire engagement. So we're doing it once a week or twice a week, right? But we're not realizing the benefit of scale. When we do that, we're still acting like we're five people and we need to triage every day. I think, if you like, took a step back and said, you know what, like 8020 rule here, like 80% of our engagements are probably pretty easy to plan on, like a lower fidelity saying like quarter or half full time per week.
Tom (00:21:22) - What we expect the people to do on this project over time. And if we're not trying to be super precise, meaning like 8.4 in this week and 2.6 in that week, if we're trying to be like more like half time full time, it's just so much easier to forecast out a lot further on an engagement and a person basis, right? Yeah. And that doesn't mean we can't still do the triage on the task basis as a project manager that week. You could still do that, whatever. But like having that forward look, that shows a lower fidelity, but more accurate because it's more frequently we update it, it's more consistent in the way that we update it. We can believe in like that's the fundamental that we're going for, right? Is to, to shift this like very reactive triage motion that's so typical in these agencies to something that's more proactive and planful, maybe a little bit lower fidelity than than a normal project manager would expect because he or she is. So, yeah, we're type A, we like to be very precise.
Tom (00:22:22) - Right, Right. But to back that up and say at a high level, we're trying to forecast differently, well.
Jamie (00:22:27) - That's a big part of growth, too, right? Like and I think so again, I'm going to I'm going to use it the accounting world as an example, because that's obviously the world I lead. But I obviously it's very similar to the agency world. So I think if if I, as a CFO, was the only person on my account, okay, parallax is my client and I'm the only person on your account and I have to do all the bookkeeping, I have to do everything then then I could make it work. I probably could only have two. Right. I could work with Parallax. I could work for one other company. But what these companies do to grow is they say, okay, let's separate the duties. But you can't you can't separate the duties completely. Right? So if I hire a bookkeeper to come in and take care of all that, like you said, all those details and doing all the work and they're going to be the one who's doing all the journal entries.
Jamie (00:23:07) - They're going to be doing all that. Yes, I can disengage from that, but I still need to know what they're doing it and how they're doing it. But they're going to do it day to day, Right? They're going to say, okay, I'm going to do these five journal entries today and these five journal entries tomorrow. Me personally as a manager, I don't care when they do the zero entries, as long as they're getting me the results I need. But I do need to understand what's going into those journal entries. But then as you grow even further, you know, say, okay, now I'm not the CFO anymore. Now I'm the director of accounting. Now I need to bring another CFO in. And that CFO was doing what I was doing where they're just kind of seeing the high level details of what that bookkeeper is doing. But me as a director, I don't really care what that high level accountants doing. I care what the CFO is doing and I want to make sure the CFO can have as many clients as they want.
Jamie (00:23:47) - So I think you you need people that are in the minutia. But the problem is as you get bigger, you're going to be getting less out of those details and you're going to be more from a higher up standpoint. And you need to be able to look at those details. Okay. I have nine CFOs and I have 60 accounts. How am I going to have those nine CFOs manage those 60 accounts? That's the level that I'm looking at and understanding that all that minutia that was there when I was in the weeds is still there, but it's being covered by other people and it's their job to make sure it's being done efficiently.
Tom (00:24:15) - I agree 100%. And I think that as an organization, your team, I think reflects the best practice that we should note here, Jamie, in that in my opinion, and there's a lot of writing on this, that a good professional services firm, whether you're a digital agency or a fractional CFO like accounting company, like you guys like the best in class professional services firms, they do at least 80% of their revenue out of productized services, meaning that these are services that we can deliver consistently that doesn't mean that every customer isn't super unique and that every engagement is not.
Tom (00:24:56) - It certainly is bespoke, but the methodologies that we use to like generally serve those customers. I think there's a lot of consistency and pattern to that's what makes a best practice of productized services. It's a Yeah, you're our agency partners. They need to start thinking about it that way. Like we don't need to like micromanage down to every single task necessarily on every single project. We need to, like, define a methodology that we want our teams to employ on a consistent basis, give them the training and the, you know, enablement materials to like consistently deliver on that. That might be like an Asana project with like templated tasks maybe, but like we don't need to be super precise down to the half hour increment on those things. It's a high level, right? And then we should plan on those productized services based on a duration that the people are engaged and like how many hours per week generally should that role take? That could fluctuate up and down through the course of onboarding or engaging a customer or where there's, you know, certain parts of the methodology that require more time or different roles or whatever.
Tom (00:26:08) - But starting to think about it that way, like what's the pattern at which we typically deliver this type of work? What kind of people in which roles over time, at which distribution should we deliver this work? Start thinking about those productized services more. It really helps you like break out of that, like feeling that you need to like. I call it micromanaging. I know that's not very nice way to say it, but like micromanage down to the task, down to the week, specifically what everyone's delivering. You know, I think that's it's a practice that stands in the way of growth, in my opinion.
Jamie (00:26:39) - Yeah. I think as an owner, as a leader, you need to know what level is success for you and what level am I looking at? Like again, if like I use the journal entries, if I happen to do these journal entries in order of one, two, three, four and got it done, if the person that's doing it now is doing it in four, three, two, one and they're still getting the same result, I should not care.
Jamie (00:26:55) - I should be caring that the client's happy and that the results are accurate. Right? That's what it comes down to. So going back, I know we're getting close to our timeline here, so I still want to answer you to answer the original question I asked is, okay, how is how is Parallax a little bit different than some of these other providers out there?
Tom (00:27:11) - Well, there's there's three reasons we're different. I think the first and the most important that I hope you guys take away is that we're designed to empower the people at the front line to think like operators, founders, you know, and and more senior leaders with a wider angle view, like we're trying to help those project managers team leads. Those people think like an operator. I think that's the most important thing. Number two, I think importantly, all the other products out there that are built for resource planning or forecasting or capacity planning or even project accounting are built with a laser focus and a narrow like perspective. Active on like the delivery team and meaning like they're meant to be like again, managing that delivery a little bit more closely, trying to squeeze more blood from the delivery stone to increase utilization.
Tom (00:28:04) - But in my opinion, the challenge of this business, that sine wave or roller coaster of too much work, not enough work, it's heavily related to the fact that we can't in delivery, you know, understand where that new business is going to fit in. You know, Tetris is hard because the screen is short. If we could see the shapes coming in sooner before they drop into our Tetris board, it's a little bit easier to predict what a good, efficient use of that new shape is. Right? The same applies here. These new incoming product projects. We typically don't have any understanding of what kind of resources we'll need over time or when we're going to earn the revenue. Intel It's pretty darn close to a sure thing, if not like a closed one. Deal Parallax is designed very specifically to collaborate with the new business team to start to apply some shape to those new incoming opportunities a lot sooner. That's a very unique part of our product. I'd love to show anyone how that works. That way we can see here is the backlog of work, and here's layered on top of the potential from our pipeline.
Tom (00:29:05) - Whether you're looking at that as a chart for revenue, profit or utilization. The second or the last part, that makes us really different. And I think you gave us a very generous compliment earlier about our onboarding process. We have a very hands on, very consultative process for onboarding and we're able to do it in 90 days where most of our competitors are asking you to replace your project management tool, your timesheet, maybe even your CRM or your accounting function. We're like, all of those things are related but not necessary to fixing your resource planning and forecasting and you know, the most important problems in your business, right? And so we integrate with best in class tools there so that if you're using a CRM, a timesheet of project management, we're integrated with, you know, such as common ones like Harvest or HubSpot or Pipedrive and, you know, QuickBooks and Jira. We can be up and running with our product within 15 days. And our customers have usually improved their variance between the 12 week forecast of utilization and what the actuals were within 90 days, meaning that if you're projecting a billable utilization of, say, 85 and you come in at 80, 89 today, you know, we'll we'll reduce that variance to 2 or 3% so that, you know, we think that you guys, you operators, the people that run these agencies, they know what to do when they have too much work.
Tom (00:30:34) - They know what to do when they have not enough work. You know, the reason it's a sine wave is because they keep shifting their focus, Oh my gosh, we got too much work. Figure out how to get it done before you know it. Oh, crap. We forgot to focus on new work. Now we need more, like, back and forth, right? You know, the levers to pull, You're usually just pulling them too late. And so if we can get the agency or consultancy to learn how to forecast as a team from the front line, the leaders can start to shift our focus to be more proactive, less reactive, pull those levers when there's still time before it's too late because we ran out of work before it's too late because we have so much work and not enough people and we're feeling like we're, you know, under the gun forecasting as a team, you know, whether you use parallax or not, building that forecast as a team, you know, my general philosophy is that that's going to change your business.
Tom (00:31:26) - It's going to help those CEOs, those founders, those operators, CEOs, whatever. To shift their time and attention away from the hero mentality. I'm going to swoop in and fix this thing towards the coach mentality of like, I foresee a problem six weeks out. Let me work over the next four weeks to see if I can get my team to see the same opportunity and and to, you know, take their own initiative to resolve it so that I don't have to be the hero. You know.
Jamie (00:31:54) - I think it's and you and I obviously are very similar on this page and we've talked about before. But like, you know, the job of a CEO is not to just deal with the squeaky wheel within your business. Right. You should be you should know what you should know every problem and be able to choose which one you think is the right direction for the company. And like you said, if you're constantly putting out fires and all you're doing is working on the hottest fire, you're not actually looking down the road.
Jamie (00:32:15) - And that's that's what both of our companies try to do is try to give you that insight into the next step and make sure that you're making the right decisions and not just, okay, I have to put out this fire with a decision. Can I make about this one fire that who knows what other fires it's going to cause by doing that one thing.
Tom (00:32:29) - So I'll be honest, when I'm at my worst, when I'm a bad CEO, I like I feel the anxiety based on like where I kind of feel the business is going to go in the wrong direction. I'm nervous about what I can't foresee, but I have my gut says something's something's wrong. And so then I like divert back to like my old habits that served me well when we were small, that are very reactive and very, like, hero oriented. But what that feels like to my team is swoop and poop. What it feels like to my team is I'm flying in and like thinking I can do it better, you know, But we, you know, but when I'm at my best, I can anticipate the same problems.
Tom (00:33:10) - And to your point, know which ones are the most important. And when there's still time, like. Like, have like a more, more like constructive and coaching conversation with the direct report to say, hey, you know, do you see what I see? You know, what's the plan to handle it, You know, can I help, you know, like and maybe those are three questions that asked separately over three weeks, you know, like, yeah, can I help being the last, you know?
Jamie (00:33:36) - Exactly. So let's take a quick detour here. So let's ask our fun question. So as we were talking about prior to the show, which people won't get to here, but we were talking a lot about, you know, kind of your kids and their and their hobby, which is awesome. And I know my kids are similar. Like we both very or very supportive of our kids and their hobbies. But I want to turn that around on you as you were a child when a little Tom O'Neil was running around, what was your favorite hobby and how did you like to like to kill time? Oh, my.
Tom (00:34:03) - Gosh. Well, it's not an accident that my kids love snowboarding because I was obsessed with snowboarding as a child. I'm still obsessed with it today. And that was a huge hobby of mine. Still is. I also probably got into computers for different reason than most kids that I was friends with. My parents wouldn't let us play video games. I never really got into it, but I my dad bought me a PC, you know, when it was a green screen. We had like, you know, DOS and Apple TV, right? Like I from a very early age, I was very interested in security and that sort of thing. And I think you could qualify me as a script kiddie if you're at all aware of what that means as a youth, as a teenager and college kid. So yeah, that's probably a hobby that isn't as common being into computer security, really.
Jamie (00:35:00) - I'm glad that you're still doing your hobbies and I'm in the same boat as, you know, like I coached my kids basketball and play basketball as much as I can as well.
Jamie (00:35:07) - So my answer is exactly the same. Like as a kid, it was just it was freedom for me. It was just to be out there like on the court, just shoot even by myself, just shooting sometimes. Like, I'll even go out now when I'm thinking through a problem and just like in the backyard and shoot free throws just to, just to think through it. So yeah, I think we're in the same boat that our, our passions, although I wasn't doing accounting as a kid, so I won't I won't admit that in any in any realm.
Tom (00:35:28) - So has the venue upgraded, though, Jamie? I mean, like is it is your basketball setup at home better than when you were a kid?
Jamie (00:35:36) - Um, a little better. I actually had a pretty nice court in my backyard when I was a kid. So it was. It was pretty. It's. Mine's a little bigger now, but. But now, like, yeah, we also have access to, like, every gym in the city because it's really hard to get court time.
Jamie (00:35:49) - And so like my son and I know that like, okay, if it's an evening, we have to go to the YMCA, but if it's middle of the day, we have to go to Lifetime because the YMCA has kids like we know all the gyms in the court of of where to go. So we also have like way too many gym memberships that we probably shouldn't have. So that's.
Tom (00:36:03) - Amazing. Yeah. We had last year we had season pass to two local mountains to Minnesota and then we had an icon pass that people know it's like pretty popular past let's just go out west. But yeah we the amount of money we spent on season passes for snowboarding is ridiculous. And I'm currently making a case to my wife to buy a third local pass here to Minnesota, the Minnesota Resorts aren't typically on those like icon epic passes. But yeah, so we'll if I can convince the wife we'll have three local passes this next year, next season and then I can't excuse me the icon pass again so yeah it's it's it's expensive.
Jamie (00:36:47) - I'll I'll. Children's hobbies are expensive. Like I guess my daughter's a runner that's a little less expensive, except she keeps getting hurt, so that makes it a little bit more expensive. But I think all kids hobbies ends up being expensive, so. Well, I definitely appreciate having you on the show. And as you know, we could probably keep talking because we may have to do a separate second episode here and probably bring Jody in to make him feel a little better about missing this episode. So we'll do a second one. But any final plugs? How can people get hold of you? How can they reach out and find out more about Parallax?
Tom (00:37:16) - Yeah, Get Parallax is our website. My email address is Tom at getparallax.com. You might have noticed that I tried to dodge any questions related to marketing in our product because I got into this because I love talking shop. So yeah, if you want to look at buying the product, you know, fill out the form on our website if you want to talk shop and not get pressure to buy the product, email me.
Tom (00:37:41) - Tom at Get Parallax. I just love sharing the hard lessons learned and what I picked up from surrounding myself with people smarter than I am over the years with other folks who are going through the same thing. So hit me up anytime.
Jamie (00:37:56) - Great. Well, yeah, definitely. Like I said, I can advocate for Parallax. I have a lot of clients I've seen use it and it is a great, a great tool and something that I think I'm going to after the show, talk to Tom about maybe using it for us here at Summit. So I appreciate anybody that reaches out to him. It is definitely the best in class that I've seen. I've seen a lot of tools that are in this area. So appreciate you so much.
Tom (00:38:17) - It means a lot to me. Yeah.
Jamie (00:38:20) - Awesome. Thank you. All right.
Tom (00:38:21) - Bye bye. Thanks.
intro (00:38:23) - Enjoy this podcast. Visit our website, Summit CPA Net to get more tips and strategy for achieving business success. We're here to be a resource in this ever changing industry.