How to Get Out Of Your Own So You Can THRIVE

In this episode, we have a very special guest. Our special guest is an eccentric entrepreneur with the heart of a lion and the soul of a house cat. Our special guest loves approaching problems from a different perspective and always analyzing different solutions, and is why it is about empowering all growth-minded entrepreneurs and has reached to thrive and prosper.

He has a passion for working with unique personalities who also share the same virtues, empathy, and integrity in everything they do. Our special guest did the high school thing and has these credentials, but his real value comes from his questioning mind on the Accounting High Podcast and the grit to push through any adversity as an OK Rapper, aka OKR.

Our special guest lives in Raleigh and also has a beautiful wife named Juana, and they have three intelligent kids Julia, Frankie, and Arya. Before we welcome our special guests to the show, if you are ready to stop settling for less in your accounting, tax, or bookkeeping firm, then this is for you because I’ve seen it all around you. Accountants, firm owners, and bookkeeping firm owners grinding fourteen-hour days with little or nothing to show for it.

To be honest, it’s probably not the firm that you’ve always wanted to grow. You’ve wanted something different. You’ve wanted to charge the fees that you know you deserve. You want to serve clients that are high-quality and high-value paying clients. You want to have time for yourself and to do the things that matter to you.

I’ve helped hundreds of accounting tax and bookkeeping firm owners gain the freedom and get paid first, and I know our system works, but you must take that next step. Head on over to TheAbundantCall.com to book your free session. We’ll discuss where your firm is at now, what’s holding you back, where you want to be, how to get paid first, avoid all the failures along the road, and how and what you need to do to double your firm revenue. I look forward to speaking to some of you. Now, let’s welcome our special guest, Scott Scarano, to the show.

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Welcome, Scott, to the show.

How’s it going?

It’s awesome to have you here. I’ve already done your intro, but for those who don’t know who you are, can you please introduce yourself? It’s always more powerful coming directly from you.

Scott Scarano, also known as OKR. It’s OK Rapper. I do some rap stuff for accountants, but I have an accounting firm but doing this for many years. I also have a podcast, which is Accounting High. It is more of a platform. We do tournaments. We do fun stuff for accountants. I’ve only been doing that for a couple of years now. I got out of the work at my firm. I work myself out of a job.

I want to talk about how you worked yourself out of a job and how you were able to grow the firm revenue to sustain itself and step out because every client I’ve ever worked with dream about this, to the point where now you started yourself another job.

Interesting anecdote, I saw my friends from high school. It was like a little reunion that we never had. We graduated many years ago. I had been talking about doing the rap stuff back in high school. That’s all I ever wanted to do. That’s what they knew me, and they are so much more impressed with the business stuff than they are with the rap stuff.

The rap stuff is nothing to them. They like it. They had seen it online before. I had performed at another conference. I’ve been doing my dream. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. They are so much more impressed by the business stuff and what I did with my firm. Some of them are my clients, too. They’ve been paying attention to the stuff, and they never see me at the firm. I’m never there anymore. I used to be the face of the firm, and that’s what they knew. That’s why they would be clients in the first place.

You started your firm many years ago, and you stepped out how many years ago?

A couple. I fully stepped out probably about a few years.

Share with us the journey because there are a lot of firm owners who aspire to grow firm, step out, still generate some recurring revenue, take distributions, have their legacy live on, and be able to step away and trust someone to run the firm to the point where now you have Accounting High. You’re able to do what you’ve always wanted to do since you were in high school and do raps. You will be doing one. We want to hear what happened at scaling new heights. I at least do.

Do you want some hard numbers?

I do.

Most people don’t like to talk about the numbers, but I’ll talk about all of them.

I love hard numbers. I like realistic experiences because not only are we here, Scott, to provide hope to someone that might think that’s not even possible. I’ve been doing this for years. My clients only like me.

That’s a mindset.

I can’t hire any employees. There is no one that does good work. They’re all entitled.

These are all just thoughts.

Yes, but they’re real thoughts from a lot of readers.

I had those thoughts, all of them. Everything you said used to go through my head.

If I leave, my clients will lead me. They’re only here in my firm because I’ve been working with them for many years. I can’t trust any.

In order to get past all that, I had to get over myself and get out of my own way. All of those things you’re saying were me in my own way. That was me telling myself something to not do something. It was creating an excuse and a reason.

How’d you get out of your own way?

I got over myself. I realized that I wasn’t that important. It took a lot of failures or a lot of things that happened to me to get knocked down a few times to have that humility to realize I’m not that important. It wasn’t until I realized the whole team didn’t need me for me to get over myself and to realize I was not needed. It made me depressed for a little while, too, at first because that was my self-worth. That’s where I thought I was good for. Once I realized, “They are doing better without,” I’m making more money now than I did before when I was working 68 hours a week.

As you said, it’s a mindset shift. It’s a change. I know you said you have a lot of failures. What did one look like?

We were losing money for a little while. This was something that was happening during the transition. I had a huge failure that happened to me early in life, too. I’ve had failures all along the way. One of them was something specifically. In the firm, we overhired. I overestimated what people could do or what they could handle. We were losing money for a few months. As I was trying to get myself out of the firm, things were falling apart.

We had turned over, hired a couple of people, no office, and learning how to handle everything remotely. There was a lot of chaos early COVID. I made a lot of mistakes. We had to let two people go, and that was hard. That was when I started understanding what trust meant in people who work with you and your team. The two guys that I would always have said on my management team became my management team during that time.

I started to trust them with everything, which, in turn, they trusted me, too. It was through like thinking I was a failure. If you’ve ever had to let people go because you thought you were going to grow or the business was going to be bigger, you’d be able to handle that, then there are a couple of months. They took it on themselves, too. They were losing sleep over it because they knew this was a decision we all had to make. I wasn’t just doing it myself. It wasn’t selfish reasons, “I need to make more money,” because they still get a paycheck. It wasn’t impacting them if we were losing money as a company.

They don’t know the difference unless payroll doesn’t go through one day.

I would never get to that. I’m pretty good with the money aspect of it. I probably had six months reserves in there, but that’s my own problem, and so are other things, too. After going through something like that, once you trust somebody, then I realized I don’t need to look over everything they’re doing. I went from one extreme to the other.

Before, I was reviewing everything that was happening within the firm. I was looking at anything that came my way, whether it was my email box. I’ll use that as an example. Anything that came into my email box, I looked into every angle of it. If a client reach out to me, I look into it and make sure what they ask for gets done then I make sure it was the right way. I would review stuff.

You needed a pause on everything.

Everything. I cut myself off on email altogether.

You went cold turkey.

I’ve done that in real life, too, and that’s always worked out for me. I only have two switches.

Either full on or full off.

That was the thing.

Before we talk more and get more in-depth, let’s share the hard numbers. Many years ago, what was your revenue and profitability? You stepped out, and now you’re making more money. Some would assume that’s distributions or dividends that you’re taking. Can you give us some context?

When I started working at the firm, it was already an existing firm. It was at $90,000. It was just one guy, and he was hiring me as an extra hand or to do everything he was doing so he could do less and he could travel more. He also said to me, “One day, you could grow this business and probably buy it from me.” He gave me full freedom.

Before that, I worked at CPA firms, and I would get fired because anytime anybody tells me to do something, I’m going to do it differently, or I’m going to try to do it better. You can’t do that if you’re working for a firm. You got to do things their way, but this guy was letting me do anything I wanted my way. He was part of a franchise. He would send me to the franchise headquarters to do sales stuff.

I was questioning everything they were doing for sales. They were telling me to go door to door, and I was saying, “Why are we not marketing online?” This was several years ago. It seemed obvious to me. That’s what everybody’s doing now, but then, they said, “That will never work.” I started to question everything they were telling me. I’m part of a system that he is, franchise, and we’re questioning everything. We’re doing everything differently. I started to notice that was to my advantage. I was doing everything differently. I’m supposed to be giving you numbers, and I started telling the story.

Let’s get back to the numbers of $90,000 revenue at the beginning.

We changed the game and grew from $90,000 to $550,000 pretty quickly when I started changing everything. Around that 500 range is when you start running into new problems. He was absent at that point. He was not in the business at all, and we hired a couple of people. They just replicated what I was doing, and I bought it from him around that stage.

We went from $550,000 to $1.2 million within a couple of years. It wasn’t even that long. It might have been like a year or two. We grew $400,000 in one year. We kept growing like that, but it was replicating the same job, so hiring more people to do the same things. Everybody was doing everything for their clients. We thought that’s what we were supposed to do because then the client feels taken care of.

It wasn’t until later where we got stuck at $1.2 million for almost six years. We were just there. It was like a ceiling that we hit, and we couldn’t get past it. That’s because my hand was in everything. I still was the gatekeeper for everything we did and every decision that was made, all of it, even as I got out of the client work, which I still had my hand in a lot of it anyway.

Client work, email, and phone calls, you were probably listening in. You’re like the FBI of your firm.

I don’t know about that. Even then, once I get out of something, I fully get out, and they have full autonomy. They don’t call me a micromanager at all unless I’m in there and doing it. Now, they like me better than they did before to a degree because I was reviewing everything. They knew I was always looking over their shoulder, but I was also wanting to change things, too.

I would always be going running one direction then running in another, “We’re going to do this.” That’s what helped propel our growth. It was all of the crazy things I was doing and experimenting with. That’s why we grew so fast because everything was inbound. We had so many different channels of inbound leads through our tech partners.

It was so easy to grow, and it still is. There are so many different channels you could market to and things you can do to grow, but it wasn’t growth. I was hitting the ceiling. I felt like I wasn’t growing either because it was stuck, everything. We would have turnover. Business was stuck, and I couldn’t get over it until I got over myself. It wasn’t until COVID that it happened.

It took years for you to get over yourself then step out. What happened next? Where are you at now?

Nobody told me to get over myself. I was doing the wrong thing.

You had to figure it out.

I had to figure it out by making all these mistakes. Every new thing was a different thing. I could tell myself that I was out of everything. I wasn’t doing any of this stuff, but I was still fully in it mentally. I had to shift that, and that was COVID. We went to Mexico before COVID happened. We got stuck there. My wife’s from Mexico. We usually go there for a month out of the year anyway, and that was the month we were going.

We ended up staying there when everything crazy happened and everything shut down. We’re in Mexico. The village we were in was wide open because it’s a remote village. There wasn’t any thing to shut down. People were living off the land there. It’s pretty disconnected from the world anyway. We were already socially distanced from the world. We stayed there for four months, and the team went on and kept doing. They were able to work remotely because there are a couple of days a week that they were allowed to do that. They started working from home, and I would go on just the team meetings on the phone because I didn’t have internet there.

You were forced to step out.

I was. We could have flown back. There was a way, but we weren’t trying to fight that. We knew what we were going into.

I almost got stuck in Peru, but we were out through Bolivia. They started two months later doing humanitarian flights, where you still have to pay a ticket, and the US sent a plane to come get all that American.

It wasn’t like that with us. We could have got on a flight. We knew and kept pushing our flight back. Even the flight we did get on, we were the only people on the plane and the only people in the airport. That was four months later. That was crazy. I got pictures of us. The airport was a ghost town. It’s Mexico City Airport. It’s always crowded, and this was the middle of the day, empty. It was crazy.

This was a blessing in disguise for you because you got pushed out. You said, “I’m going to spectate and watch, maybe show up to the team meeting.” Since COVID, what has the firm done up until now?

We finally eclipsed that $1.2 million and got to $1.8 million. That was when I was finally out. We had probably our best year ever. I made over $500,000 profit take-home for me even after paying everybody and doing everything because of other things like ERC. It was the best year ever followed. The previous was probably one of the worst years ever. It was the year we have to let people go and lose money. Follow that up with the most profitable we’ve ever been. We’re at $1.7 million, and I cleared $550,000 or something like that. You can do the math there. That’s a pretty healthy margin.

It’s 30% or 35% something around there.

Things are coasting along. I’m probably not going to replicate that, but I haven’t done anything. I probably sit in on twenty-minute meetings a couple of times a week to see if they need me.

The most important thing to take away is that you got creative, made mistakes, and COVID, in your case, helped you. Sometimes, we have to back off from our team to let them shine so they can take ownership, and now, you can go and work on your other projects like Accounting High and rapping. You are starting to monetize the show and generate more revenue still while taking $500,000 a year from the business.

Probably going to be $400,000 after ERC-type.

Let’s just call it $400,000 with doing twenty-minute meetings every couple of weeks or once a week. You are high-level overseeing this operation.

Honestly, it’s me sharing my rap stuff with them or talking about the podcast. Whenever I’m on a meeting with them, I’m talking about everything I’m doing. I’m like, “Do you guys need me for anything?” “We’re good, but we might need to sign this or do this.” It was little things.

What would you share, Scott, from these experiences for someone who’s in their way? I feel like that’s the theme that’s gotten the growth that you wanted and that I know a lot of other people are craving. They’re craving, “I want to have a good team that I can trust and rely on,” like you had shared. Also, to realize that you’re not that important, even though you think you’re building a business all around you.

You have to create that space. For me, it was in Mexico. I had the space away from everything to understand what I wanted and listen to what my subconscious is always driving. If you do pay attention, you can connect all those dots to see what you want. You just have to ask yourself and figure that out and work backward from there.

If you do pay attention, you can connect all those dots to see what you really want.

That’s what happened with me, but I had that space to do that. If I were still stuck in here, imagine. If I wasn’t in Mexico at the beginning of COVID, I would have been the one moving from the office or telling people they had to come back into the office because I was fine doing it. I probably would have done some stupid stuff like that. Hindsight is 2020. No pun and no joke intended, but I could look back on 2020 and be very grateful for the way it went down because, as you said, I was forced into it. How do you force yourself to disconnect?

How do you work yourself if you had to do it without COVID?

How do you force yourself to unplug from that? It’s so hard. I did it again after because I kept getting in my own way even after I got out of my way in the firm. I’m getting in my own way for all this other new stuff I’m doing, the show, the podcast, and everything. In every aspect of life, you’re in your own way. It’s just layers of that. The way I got over it the next time was making more mistakes and learning from them. I don’t know anything specific, but there are a moment. I started meditating. There are a lot of things. I started working on myself, and that’s why.

Working on yourself is one way to do it, and you used a tool of meditation. That’s a great takeaway.

There were twelve things. I was tracking every day, and I was in on the habits. I have my habits in.

Let’s hear all twelve. Maybe you’re not going to track all twelve, but this is what gets you out of your way to be able to podcast or any element in your life granted. The big one was COVID, and you had to stay in Mexico and be off the grid.

I’ll admit, I haven’t been doing these. I didn’t for a year straight, and I tracked all twelve every day for the whole year. 1) Write one line. It was either a rap or write some gratitude type thing or be thankful for something. 2) Reading two pages of a book. This was the whole Atomic Habits theory of keeping it easy.

Reading two pages could lead you to read a whole chapter, but just a minimum of two every day. Three is track three habits. I go into this little book that I had and track three of the habits. If I didn’t track it, then I can’t check that box either. It feels good to check the boxes. All the boxing thing is psychological, too, to see how long you could do it for.

That is an accomplishment.

We love that, especially accountants. Four is don’t get high before 420. Each one is numbered and playing on the number. For a while, when I got out of the firm, I was getting high during the day all the time, and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t function. I could fool myself at the thinking I could do stuff, but that’s a whole another story.

Not at the level you wanted to.

Not at a high-performance level. I cut off after 420, and if I did, then I couldn’t check that box. 5) Five push-ups a day, but that turned into 30, 40, or 50 depending on the day, but at minimum of 5. Granted, I don’t do any of these anymore, I write and read but not as much as I did. These were great. 6) Meditate for 6 minutes a day. 7) I exercise for at least seven minutes of harder exercise because I also walk. 8) Eight hours of sleep. I still do that every day. Sleep is the most important out of all these. 9) Shut down at 9:00 PM. No inputs, phone, and screens. Nothing after 9:00 PM so I could fall asleep.

I do that, too.

That’s a good one. I let that back in, and now I can’t sleep. I got to keep up with that one again. 10) 10,000 steps a day, at least. 11) Being on bed by 11:00, and 12) Hit my stand ring for twelve hours of the day like if you have an Apple Watch.

I don’t have an Apple Watch. I don’t need another thing to look at.

I know. I needed twelve things to look at to keep myself on track. I don’t track any of these anymore, but I was in good shape. Everything was good.

A lot of people tracked a lot of things during COVID then it went away. These are things that are important. From what I’m hearing from our conversation is that if you’re stuck in your own way and you’re not able to step away from the firm. Let your team take control. Build that trust so you cannot work 60 or 80-hour weeks anymore and still take home $400,000 a year and have the firm keep growing its revenue without you being there because originally thought, “I’m the most important person. My clients are coming to this firm because of me.”

If you're stuck in your own way and you're not able to step away from the firm, let your team take control.

When in reality, that wasn’t the case. They came because of the experience that you created, the team that you’ve built, and the trust that you allowed to create within that team and that culture for them to take the leadership role. Anytime that you feel like you’re getting in your way, these are the twelve things that you would fall back on to say, “I’m not going to bed at 11:00. I’m looking at my phone now after 9:00,” and now you don’t have the best sleep anymore. All of these things take a toll on us on a daily basis and has the impact on our revenue, productivity, and our mood.

I’m floating right now, too. Every day, I get to choose what I want to do. Sometimes, it’s really frustrating. At first, I felt guilty about everything, like everybody’s working for me and I’m not doing anything. I feel guilty. I felt like I needed to be doing something to fill my time. Especially not being an email, and I stopped going into Slack. I don’t even go into carbon. I felt so disconnected. My mind would create these stories of things that could be happening.

When in reality, everybody’s happier than they’ve ever been, especially my team. Every day, I’ve been working on different raps. Now, I’m working on one for a new event coming up, and that’s what keeps me energized. I’m doing some crap with my kids too. I told you that on one of our episodes. I’ll lead people to that. We did a mystery with Michelle at Accounting High. Check those out, How to Make Varsity. There were some conversations in there about the raps, too. We have a video for this, too.

A lot of firm want to crochet more, spend time with family, or want to golf. I can’t tell you how many clients want to golf more.

Quit golf. I used to want to golf more.

You could go golf every day if you wanted to.

I could go three times a day every day and still have time. That’s how much time I spend on these raps, though. This one took me a lot of time. I know people talk about tracking time. I don’t track my time on this, but I know it took me at least four full days of just working on it. Probably more. I got a video for it. You could check that out at Accounting High TV on YouTube. The track is Soar the Sky.

It was like 1,500 people there, and nobody stood up like I thought they would. There are a bunch of accountants. A lot of people came up to me. I know they loved it. People did love it, but it wasn’t like they were going to stand up and go crazy. It wasn’t that kind of crowd. I bet you they would have stood up if I told everybody to stand up. That’s one thing I should have done because then they might have let loose a little bit more, but they loved it.

A lot of people sent me pictures. They were coming up to me all throughout the conference, and it was great. I got to meet so many new people because they came up to me. Normally, you’re walking around, and nobody notices you or says anything to you at a conference. I felt special. That was dope. I had some great conversations.

You didn’t feel disconnected anymore.

I didn’t know. I felt very connected.

It’s amazing what happens when we put our focus and our passion and the things that we want to do. Back to like what I was saying, there are so many firm owners that I talk to you and not doing what they want. They’re postponing vacation, not seeing and spending time with their kids. You’re doing projects with your kids now, doing this and golfing.

I’m not golfing. I’m doing this. This is the existential crisis I’m going through, do I need this country club membership anymore if I’m not going to use it? I’m paying for it, and I’m not using it. I’m not doing with it.

Some of those things are like $15,000 or $25,000 a month for a country club membership.

It’s not cheap. I can repurpose that money. I’m doing stuff for my kids, and it was going to be like, “I want to play golf with my son and spend time doing that with him,” but we’re right and raps together. We’re taking Dr. Seuss’s books and doing parodies of Dr. Seuss’s books with songs that fit it. The first one we did is Jay Z and Kanye’s Ham, but it’s like hard as a MF. That’s what Ham means in the real song.

It’s a pretty vulgar song, but we changed all the words to green eggs and ham. It plays the car parts of like my son is Sam I am, and I’m guy I am. That’s the other guy’s name, and we played out the whole book in that song. It was straight-up parody. Everywhere they said ham, they already said ham a lot in that song anyway, so we added green eggs and ham. He’s been learning how to rap. He’s nine, so that’s been fun.

That’s cool, but doing the thing instead of just talking about it. You’re spending that whole me-time.

I talked about it for a long time before I started doing it.

You had to get out of your way. For you, Mexico and COVID helped you get out of your way. For those of you that didn’t have an experience like that with COVID or every day, your micromanaging the team, and you’re in all the emails. You feel like you can’t step away from your firm because every client in your firm is there just because of you. Maybe it’s time to think of what’s your list at twelve things you want to do. What are those habits that you can start to work on to start to get out of your own way? Scott, if there are anything else you want to leave the reader with. What would be that one other thing that could help get them out of their own way so they can run the firm?

The 13th habit? The one that I haven’t written yet.

The unknown.

Be present in life if you could be present with your team or with anybody. I understand. Pay attention to where you’re at and who you’re with, and not be thinking about what you’re going to do, what you didn’t do, or what happened. If you can be present, you can give so much more, too. You’ll get so much more back, like in any conversation interaction. If you’re trying to do a couple of things at once, you’re even on Zoom calls. You got one other screen open, or you have your alerts on. Turn off your alerts. That’s another thing, too. I have no alerts for anything in life at all anymore.

Even with an iWatch?

The alerts I have are the only ones that are intentional, like my calendar I had to keep on because I kept missing meetings. I live everything by my calendar. I don’t go into email. I don’t even get text alerts. Phone calls will come through, but I don’t usually pick up my phone because it’s never anybody I know. There are nothing but a calendar thing. Sometimes I got to keep airlines on because I don’t want to miss my flight. I missed a flight not long ago. It wasn’t because I don’t have my alerts.

I did have the alerts, but I changed my phone to be on the 24-hour clock instead of the normal thing. I did it because I was with a lot of people from Europe. I was like, “This seems to make sense.” I miscalculated the time. It was like 17:00, and I thought that was maybe 7:00. It was a mess. Don’t do stupid things like me.

Be present, Scott.

That’s the one.

We’ll end it with that. It’s an honor to have you here on the show. If you have not listened to Accounting High, that’s probably something you should go stop. Subscribe to that now and start listening, especially to the episodes that we did together. There were so many. We did 5 or 6. I don’t remember. You can find them on Accounting High. Scott, thank you so much for being here with us on the show. To go from $90,000, acquired firm at the $550,000 mark, and now be at $1.7 million and working 25 minutes a week on that business or in that business is pretty impressive. Kudos to you, and thank you for being here with us.

Thanks for having me on.

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Thank you all so much for joining Scott and me here on another amazing episode. It’s always an honor to spend some time with you. A lot of firm owners that I speak to want some variation of what Scott has. For every firm owner that I’ve ever worked with, their success started from taking one major step. That major step for some of you might be heading on over to TheAbundantCall.com to book your free session so we can look at what’s holding you back. Where are you stuck? Where do you want to take your firm but avoid all the pitfalls and failures like Scott did? How can you double or triple your revenue like Scott?

By booking this call, I promise you it’ll turn into more confidence, more clients paying premium fees, less burnout, and being excited for the future of your firm. Stop settling for less. You can create an abundant firm and start living the life that you know you deserve. The time for change is now.

Scott was lucky, and he had COVID and getting stuck in Mexico. That’s when his change occurred. For some of you, the change might be going to the AbundantCall.com and booking that free session with me and my team. I hope to speak to some of you soon, and if I don’t, remember his number thirteen habit, be present. Where can you be more present in your life with your team so you can give so much more to others and feel so less pressured? I’ll leave you with that. Thank you all again for being with us on the show. It’s an honor, and I’ll see you all in the next episode.