Episode Transcript

Please note this transcript was generated by AI and contains errors including missing and misspelled words.

Meryl: Hey Shaun, welcome to the podcast.

Shaun: Nice to be here.

Meryl: So we are here today to chat about team retreats, but before we dive into that, can you tell us a little bit about air accounting, your team, what the business is all about?

Shaun: Yeah, so air accounting started seven years ago. My wife and I started it as co-founders. We were working with Yellow Brick Road at the time. We were both looking to try something a bit different from the partnership structures that we'd been used to. So I spent nine years at PKF slash bdo sweating my way through the ranks as I call it.

In that space. So yeah, we started seven years ago with just the goal to run it like a business and less like a firm. So really strong decision making and organizational management. And then have services that are very much, fully outsourced finance team, bookkeeping through to some advisory or CFO services so that we can provide as much value as we can for the.

Small, medium business that wants to grow.

Meryl: I know that's not the topic for today, but I think the way you structure your team is really interesting. So could you explain the difference? In a typical accounting firm structure, and then how you've structured your leadership team and the different, I don't know if you call 'em divisions or departments, but the way you've structured that and how it's different to a typical accounting firm partnership structure.

Shaun: Yeah, good question. So it's functional which is a similar word to divisional, but I think there's just something about the word division that rubs me the wrong way. But yeah if clients work with us, they need to engage with each function within that business. So if they wanna work with the accountable keeping payroll, they need to engage that team and that team's called error accounts in our business.

And if they want to, If they want tax work or BAS work or compliance services that need to engage with their compliance, and if they want, reporting, forecasting future focus work, then they need to engage with our air C F O team. So the difference is that the, there's a head of each of those teams, and so their relationship exists with, if they're engaged in all three services with three people in that case.

Whereas in a lot of partnerships or traditional firms, it's their relationship is with the partner at the top. And there'll be, principal, senior manager, assistant manager, senior accountant, junior accountant, all these steps. And the work kind of filters down in a pyramid type flow.

And my experience is that creates a bit of hierarchies and the way workflows through the business and the way that the team works with each other, We keep it a bit more simple. Under each of those teams, there's prepare functions and there's reviewer functions. So what is your role with the client?

Are you preparing the work or are you reviewing the work that's been prepared?

 And then, so rather than having all these different hierarchies or levels, there's a relationship at the head level. And then the preparers and the reviewers also do work and engage with the clients as well. But not in the way we found.

Kind of mid-tier firms that I.

Meryl: And so who manages the customer relationship? So if there was an issue around scope or there was a delay or deliverable wasn't met, say within air accounts, who would handle that? And what about if it was cross-functional? So it actually. Partly was accounts, but then the bas didn't get lodged on time. Not saying that your business would do that but, but just as an example of , how would the problem get solved or who would be responsible in that?

Because this is a slightly different structure than many listeners would be familiar with.

Shaun: Yeah, so it requires a lot of collaboration to start with. So running this model means exceptional collaboration, and then tech's a big part of that. So carbons are. Solution that we're very fond of. And the way that it allows collaboration between those teams on the clients. So the clients you're normally dealing with clients by phone or by email.

And carbon allows commenting across teams on those emails where the client's not interacting with those comments, but the teams are so deliverables are really clear and , we're very strong on having, accountability to. Person for each deliverables. And they can engage teams as they like, but they're responsible for making sure deliverables happen.

So that's the key part of it. And then the second part is just that collaboration. So if there's a bookkeeping issue that relates to a badge that needs to get done, that collaboration needs to be really strong to make sure that happens.

Meryl: Yep. And the listeners might be thinking well, how does this relate to team retreats? But I think it's important to get an understanding of your team and how it works to then understand what would be the purpose of bringing people together for a retreat in the Philippines?

And that's because you have. A significant number of team members in the Philippines working across some of these different functions. So could you describe how many people you have in the Philippines and what kind of roles they have?

Shaun: Yeah, we got on a team of about 20 in the Philippines at the moment. It grows pretty quickly we're pretty much constantly hiring at this point and really trying to build strong resources around recruitment and our brand presence in that space as well.

 So Bookkeeping's the biggest part of that team and the fastest growing. Team, and that was their original focus on entering the Philippines was we wanted really good bookkeepers and did a bit of work in Australia around finding people that we wanted, didn't quite work in terms of what they wanted from us, what we wanted from them.

And so we started exploring Philippines on that basis. But now they're across all of our business. So we have administrative team members in Philippines. We have bookkeepers, we have tax compliance experts, we have reporting experts. We have a team member that runs all our business intelligence reporting internally.

Yeah, across all the business and both preparers, reviewers they engage with the clients to certain levels as well. So yeah they're pretty part of our team. And yeah, currently, we have more team members in the Philippines than in so it's a big part of our culture.

Meryl: Yeah. And just quickly, what do you look for when you're hiring a bookkeeper?

Shaun: Yeah. Interesting. So originally it was just culture and ability to learn. We now have since I was moved out of the recruitment space, so we hired a full-time people and talent partner in Australia to. To help build our recruitment business. And so our head of our accounts team does a lot of work in the recruitment space.

So we'll use, the zero demo file and during the interview just talk to the candidate about alright, so the client's now setting up a salary sacrifice program. Can you go set this up in the demo file? So just real life examples and using a live demo file so that we're not working with pre-prepared questions.

And it's really just a matter of checking. They've had experience in, Australian concepts that come up day to day in the work that we.

Meryl: Interesting. When we were hiring bookkeepers in Australia, we'd hire people with bookkeeping experience. But now in the Philippines we hire often CPAs or accountants, but then we also look for them to have worked in an Australian firm for a couple of years, ideally in some kind of bookkeeping role.

But sometimes tax is fine as well, and then we retrain them. But I think it's interesting because we actually look for a different profile of accountant when. Hiring for, a bookkeeping driven business as well. That's how we started out. Let's jump into the team retreat topic. What was your objective? Why did you wanna have a team retreat? And can you tell me once you've just explained the why, tell me a little bit more about it. When was it where all of the detail.

Shaun: Yeah, so it's a big part of our culture. So it, it's built into our whole ethos that we have an annual retreat. We'd had two of these before covid. And yeah, I three year absence during Covid. And so this year was just, just real pent up kind of willingness and keenness to really get the team together and, working with people day to day that you haven't seen in person and haven't been able to build that extra energy with the team.

We're all really looking forward to. The key parts is connection. know, As a remote business, we have a lot of freedom that's in the way we build our business currently. But there's just a level of connection that you don't get until you're face-to-face. And I always use the analogy of, on other aspects of business, like if you are doing a negotiation business and you're trying to do it on Zoom you miss a lot.

So you've got the person's face and you've got what they're saying, but. You can miss their body language, you can miss all the other aspects and, and just building connections at multiple levels that you don't get. We're certainly trying to do as much as we can in the remote space to, to build connection through the team on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.

But you're just not getting that. So was a big thing. The second one is just celebration, we run the team in a way where we're trying to teach our team members what the business is, and we treat it more like a game that, what are the rules of the game?

How do we win the game? What's the score at any point in time? that's providing really good reporting around how the business is doing and what's going on outside of their role. And then helping the team understand their role. That's all what happens during, but a really big part of running the team that way is celebrating when you have wins.

So yeah, we had a really successful year last year and we just wanna make sure we were celebrating. A big part was just getting together, celebrating, and that meant, the day we landed in the Philippines, there's a lot of travel, everyone's done a fair bit of travel, and we got to the venue that evening and that night was just a big themed party.

Wild celebrations. Just really everyone connecting, being really happy in each other's presence and spending time together.

Meryl: Amazing. And I can relate to both of those themes around connecting and celebration. We had a similar experience where during Covid we had to stop, so our last retreat was in 2019, and prior to that, we've done, I wouldn't even call em. Retreats. They were just mini meetups where we'd get a couple of team members that might live in different countries together.

 So there's an annual conference we go to in Bangkok, so we'd fly in some team members there to meet up. We've at different points. We've had our US and UK team members fly out and spend time. Spent a couple of weeks on the Gold Coast, but we hadn't done the full team event. So in 2019, pre covid, we.

Had a retreat on the Gold Coast, or it was actually, people flew to the Gold Coast and then we drove to Kingscliff and stayed in a house there, and I think there was about eight of us. So just the leadership team and same sort of thing. Just having that time together in person connecting was just fantastic there.

There's just something that you can't recreate on a Zoom call when you're walking on the beach with someone having a chat or having dinner. And so we're actually planning a retreat in the Philippines later this year, and which is partly why I wanted to chat to you. That'll be our first time running an event there, and that will be a full team retreat rather than just the leadership team. So let's dive into some of the logistics a bit more. Can you talk about where your healthy event, how many days? A bit of a rough overview of the agenda.

Shaun: Yeah, so we held it in the Batangas in the Philippines. So this is south of Manila, but on that, the main island. And a lot of that focus was around making it easy enough for everyone to get there. So we're conscious of how many different flights and. The transport logistics are making that happen. And there might have been a flawed in some ways that probably on our post retreat feedback, one of two things that we could have improved was the location could have been a bit more on the luxurious side.

Like we, it, it certainly wasn't, not luxurious, but it was like, it was more like a Bali esque beach retreat resort. But the beach was a bit more like volcanic ash kind of beach, where it's a lot more fun in games and that kind of thing, but less it's less Instagram worthy volcanic ash sand than maybe the white sands of boai or certain places like that.

Yeah. So that that was the location that we ended up on, but it still worked really well. A big part of that was having a resort. Fostered collaboration and connection. We didn't want a place where people would go to their rooms and stay in their cliques and not naturally interact and around the structure of the retreat we wanted, we're running with the kind of ethos that it needed to be planned, but fairly unstructured.

We find that just interactions between team members where it's. Just running into each other, sitting around the pool, morning walks, sitting around bonfires, just having karaoke in a bus. Those kind of things is where you are building really strong connections with two or three people rather than trying to structure so much during the retreat that it's back to back events.

People are walking away fatigued outta these retreats rather than really enliven with the connection that they've established between, fellow team members.

Meryl: Yeah, I've had a similar experience around planning too much and just a jam packed schedule, whereas actually, That's something I would do differently next time is have more of a relaxed schedule , but still a little bit of structure so that you're fostering those connections where people can bump into each other.

But it's not all structured with uh, a restricted uh, gender and, and sessions. So did you run your retreat? Was that midweek or over a weekend?

Shaun: A bit of both. It was Thursday to Sunday

This was a big part, running a multidisciplinary accounting business that's, Different deadlines, so bookkeeping, deadlines, tax deadlines, reporting deadlines, worked out well. It can't, It can't be the start of the month cuz there's too many reporting deadlines and it can't be at a certain tax period where there's so many tax deadlines.

And so we ended up the end of November, the last week in November was a really good space to run it and so we agreed on it kind of Thursday to Sunday. Sunday's pretty much just. Pack up goodbyes and travel and same with Wednesdays, a little bit just travel. But so a bit of both. Two days off work and two days just across the weekend to spend more time.

Meryl: And how did you manage if everyone in the team, was everyone in the team completely off on the Thursday and Friday, or was someone checking email or responding to clients? How did you balance that? Okay, we're on a retreat, but there's still a business to run and there's client expectations or potentially some kind of fire that needs to be put out.

Shaun: Yeah, so the intent was um, completely offline and a way we helped facilitate that was our email signatures a month leading up to the retreat was the team is going to be offline these days. Please advise as soon as possible if you were. Something's gonna be up and coming on those weeks.

So that solved a lot of things around, the air compliance team, the S C F O team, with the accounts team and the bookkeeping team. There's week year deadlines, week after week that you'd be familiar with. So that team, the head of that team gets together with team and goes, all right, these are all our deadlines, these are our work items.

Bring it up in a carbon. Dashboard that sees exactly where that is. Alright, which ones can we bring forward? Which ones can we defer? And then what have we got left? And then we work on a little bit of, just calling clients and saying, Hey, this is coming up. Is it necessary, is it not? And the only caveat to that is that we.

Two team members that couldn't come to the retreat,

And so we just did a deal with them where they covered the emergencies, which didn't end up being too much, and they had a few days off on their own afterwards.

Meryl: And I'm not sure whether it's similar with your team, with ours, but many of our team members are young moms, so they have families and young children. And so that's something we are trying to think through of, okay, if we want them to fly somewhere, how are they gonna manage the family side of things?

And that's a consideration we are having in, is it a weekend? Do partners come, do they not? Is it midweek was that relevant for your team? And if it was, how did you manage that?

Shaun: Yeah, it's relevant. Yeah, so our business is 75% female and a lot of team members in that 25 to 35 age group, so it's very relevant for us. And yeah, one of the team members that didn't come was a new mom and she just didn't feel comfortable at that time in her life. And that's fine.

One of the others was a new mom and was comfortable. So she came and we just made sure that she had the time she needed to e express milk and had a freezer that she could freeze milk and probably go in too far into it, but you know what I mean. Making sure that she felt as comfortable as she could in that space.

In being there we ended up going with a. A no partner, no families on those three days of the Thursday to Saturday. If team members wanted to extend afterwards or before and have families in and around that was absolutely no problem. We just, this time we decided, 25 to 30 team members.

We haven't seen each other for three years. We really want to connect it a deep level. And because it was really about, A lot of that connection just happens sitting around, playing cards, having some drinks or just sitting around a bonfires. There, there's even something just about sharing breakfast with your team members.

Like we do lunch and you have occasionally dinners with work, but I'm not sure what it is, but something about you just in the morning, you don't normally share breakfast with a team and I think there was a lot of good connection that happened in that space, just. Coffee and a bit of rice and eggs in the Philippines was a good place to connect to different people each.

Meryl: Yeah. Alright well, I'll jump into just a bit of an overview of how we ran a retreat in Australia that might be relevant for some listeners who were looking at running something locally. So we looked at a hotel but actually then, because we were a fairly small group, decided on getting a big house instead.

 We couldn't get individual bedrooms for everybody. So there's a few people sharing but lots of bathrooms. And the primary purpose was so that we could cook together. So we, we had a barbecue one night and just a lot of that impromptu those little breakout spaces.

So that house had a pool, lots of different living areas, the deck. And so with a small group, that worked well for us. I'd say once you'd get up to probably 12 people then a house like that wouldn't work. But for small groups, that worked nicely cuz it was a luxurious house, the private pool. And it felt like we had a lot of privacy.

We flew everyone to the Gold Coast and then had a van where we could get around, and that was actually quite fun. Being in the van and going off to gin tastings and going off to different activities. some of us lived locally and had young kids, and so a couple of us , didn't stay there and would drive back during the day.

And so feedback from the team was that they would've preferred it if everyone was staying there for all of the meals and the breakfast and that kind of thing. So that's something we would look at for next time. And probably the other main feedback was that we, the schedule was too jam-packed, so we were trying to do too many work sessions.

We had different theme topics and different discussion groups, and I think the purpose was connection, not actually trying to discuss these work related topics. And so we overdid it on that, I, and I'd do that differently. So I've put together a list of RapidFire topic questions about retreats.

Some of these we've covered a little bit already, so feel free to skip over them if we have. But let's dive in. So first up is,

Shaun: Yeah, so Battan is in Philippines, and it was a resort. We looked at Airbnb. Type options and our admin team made a call that they wanted to organize a bit less. So , the resort was small enough that we occupied the majority of the resort and had our own space.

That was really the whole thing was ours. But the team didn't have to do as much of cooking, cleaning, admin during the.

Meryl: Yeah. And that was one of the downsides that we did need to do a bit more of the cooking and shopping and tidying up. But you still can have a pretty good chat washing dishes or preparing meals. But uh, a very bigger group, I don't think that would work.

What about rooming together? Were your team members in shared rooms or did everyone have their own?

Shaun: It was a bit of a mix. Yeah. So we put out a bit of a survey at the start to get feedback on different things and we found the Philippines team really wanted to share rooms and Australian team members were a bit more indifferent. There, there was a mixture of responses. So yeah, we ended up just facilitating that and having a mix.

And I think you find when you're looking at options, a lot of resorts have those mix, you know, they'll have single people rooms, they'll have multi bedrooms, and so it of works.

Meryl: That was what I'd heard as well culturally, that it was common in the Philippines for people to share together and that they actually might enjoy that. The having someone in the room to walk to the next location with. All right. What about team building activities?

Shaun: Yeah, there was a um, there was a bit, so we had a lot of Filipino traditional team building, which was like on a beach running. Games that, , when I read the descriptions, I'm like, that sounds really corny. And when you do it it's the amount of excitement and the level of enjoyment that the whole team got and the competitive spirits that come out.

Cuz we do run. Our business like a bit of a game and everyone's quite competitive. And so it really brought a lot of enjoyment to the team. And then we had prizes and different things around that as well. We had a quiz night that we'd organized on one of the evenings. We had a bit of a photo shoot as well, which again, the Philippines team.

Got into to a, to a next level above, above the Australian team that they really loved that space and having that time. We had an auction. So one thing we do as a cultural aspect with our team is we have a thing called airco, which is a currency that we have. And so team members that are displaying our values during the year can earn airco and also just we have fortnightly team meetings and there's games at the end of each of those team meetings, and the winners get air coin as well.

So at the end of the year at the retreat, everyone has a certain amount of coin and then we auction. Items, there was, you know, various home appliances and gadgets and tech items and food items, and I think the biggest thing was a tv. And so just created a whole nother aspect and, our team just went to the next level of getting a big hammer and setting it up like an auction and giving everyone paddles with their numbers on it and that kinda thing.

Meryl: What a great idea.

Shaun: Yeah, so we did that. One other thing I'd recommend is actually we had something called open air as well, which was we got a consultant in to develop more of a relationship building, connecting at a quite a deep personal level. So you were just paired up one-on-one around the bonfire and just went off to a separate space and you were just given a card with three questions and they were quite personal questions.

But The team really embraced it and you got to understand with the person, so you did it with three different people, just things about where they grew up, what they value personally outside of work. What makes them outside of work. We're quite big on work not being your identity, and so we want to know what makes you you outside of work. Yeah, that was something else we.

Meryl: With our activities, we planned different things like yoga and some games, but we didn't do really structured team building. But I think with the small group it seemed to work well. We had a lot of laughs with, it was around Christmas time, so some secret type games and board games. And then, Doing activities together like yoga or going to the beach.

But I think with the retreat in the Philippines, we'll, I understand that the Filipino love the team building activities, so I think we'll be planning a few things like that too. We also had a, a videographer filming for two days, so our retreat started on a Tuesday and then we had full days Wednesday, Thursday, and then everyone flew home.

Friday and it was awesome getting the footage, but it actually, I think de it took up quite a lot of time interviewing different people for the video, trying to capture things and set things up. So it was good getting it, getting the video afterwards, but I think detracted from the experience and took a, there's a lot of waiting around with that.

So I think next time if we were to have a videographer, they'd just film what we were doing, but wouldn't do so many interviews and. We wouldn't have so much time allocated to that. What about different sessions or did you have any presentations or any work topics or discussions?

Shaun: We didn't have any work specific. In terms of let's get everyone together and work out what we're gonna do next quarter or next year or that. But the one thing we did have was a presentation, which was myself and Ben from our team who do less of the client work these days and act more in the kind of CEO type managing director roles.

And we just presented on two things. So one on the vision and where we're at and where we're going for next year. And two, we had an employee engagement survey, a couple of months before the retreat. And so we really wanted to digest that and. Articulate back to the team, what we'd heard from them as a group.

And , it was overall really good feedback but there were a couple things that we thought we'd done really well and and there were multiple people in team that didn't agree on certain aspects. So we were talking through what we planned to do to address those.

Meryl: Yeah, great. And I've mentioned our retreat was a bit too content heavy. It did work well in that we broke off into smaller groups to talk about particular things. So there'd be a little discussion group about onboarding, and then there'd be someone from sales, someone from onboarding, and then someone that might represent customer experience.

And so they were collaborating and so that was good. I think it was useful having some small group discussions with people that, that needed to collaborate. But yeah we did too much of that. So I'll change that up next time. I think you mentioned to me previously that music was a nice connector.

could you explain a little bit about that?

Shaun: Yeah, that was a surprising aspect. I think maybe it shouldn't be surprising that the music connects people, but just a little moment. So, you know, There is different cultures in different countries and. I think there was long bus trips at certain points. A couple hours in the Philippines it takes to get anywhere really.

So, Having spontaneous karaoke moments through the team, being able to share songs from different team members that they like, and actually finding that a lot of people actually like to say music, regardless of where they've come from. But also learning a deal, some specific Filipino.

Local artists as well. That was a big thing. At the trivia night, we had a section on music and that was playing a lot of songs and playing snippets of songs and team guessing them and just found that within 10 seconds of a song that the team just started erupting and singing the whole song and certain nostalgic things like Boys to Men or, those type of songs, you just end up just letting the whole song play out so that you could capture that moment and the team could live it.

Meryl: Yeah. Amazing. So I know we've covered a lot of ground, but is there anything that you do differently next time or any unforeseen challenges or difficulties that others might be able to learn from if they're planning to run a treat?

Shaun: Philippines specific, the transport's important I'd go to the next level of spending more money on bus transport. I'd let the local admin team organize that part because they obviously can make phone calls quite easily and arrange that. And when the buses end up coming, it was a bit, it was a bit less luxurious than the team was thinking, and it was a bit tighter than the team was thinking.

So it was a little bit too jammed in for a, two, three hour bus trip in a very hot. City. In some ways that helps everyone bond very closely and not take themselves too seriously. But it was also quite interesting to see, a lot of the Australian team members that are over six foot cramped up a little bit for a couple of hours.

So I probably pay more attention to just that aspect. That was the second item on the feedback survey that wasn't quite up to scratch. Everything else got five stars. What else differently? One thing I didn't appreciate as much that as I should have was during the hottest part of the day, Australians loved to get out and be in the sun, and I think we'd had a pretty average.

Summer or spring in Sydney. So we were just dying for sunshine and so we were all out by the pool and we'd organized like a mocktails and cocktails event by the pool. And then one of the afternoons and the Philippines team members are just very used to constant sunshine and heat and between kind of midday to 5:00 PM they're, they're much keener to be inside.

So a lot of them ended up connecting around, just having Netflix sessions in different people's rooms and. Just doing different events inside and different games, but that's something I didn't appreciate and it's not a bad thing. You just need to be like everyone's here to relax, connect, and do different things.

And it doesn't mean we all need to be together, 24 hours a day.

Meryl: Yeah. Amazing. And coming time to wrap up, so you were talking to someone and a Canon leader that's planning to run a team retreat in the next 12 months, what advice would you have for them if you've got anything to share that might be different or, or new to what you've already mention?

Shaun: Yeah I'd say embrace a bit of the diversity and everyone's being different. And, sometimes that means just making sure everyone feels comfortable in coming and participating as much as possible. So we had a team member initially. One of them said no to coming along and it's cuz they have certain religious beliefs that or, or practices where they can't attend at certain times of the day.

And they felt. I think in their own mind they felt, oh, I don't want the company to have to pay for this if I can't attend. A large amount of the retreat. Really just listening to team members, seeing what they need to bring their best self to the retreat. And we ended up having that in our pre retreat kind of survey.

You know what, just open-ended questions. What do you need from us to bring your best self to be there on the day? Because you're just not, you're just not always aware. How a change of environment can make certain people anxious and other people a complete opposite and they'll love to do anything at the drop of the hat.

 So just really hearing from people open-ended style, what's gonna make them be comfortable,

Meryl: Yeah.

Shaun: I think was really useful and could be useful for your listen.

Meryl: Amazing. And what's next for Eric Canning? Have you got another retreat planned in the future? Where do you see yourself in the business in a couple years time?

Shaun: Yeah, that's a big question. So definitely, so yeah, we'll be planning our. Retreat for the end of November this year shortly. We're beefing up our admin team a little bit to help out in that regards. I think one thing we learned was get a real committee behind this. Don't make it one or two people's job to, to organize this.

yeah, We'll definitely be doing that this year. We could be a larger team at that point. It's possible that we'll be 50 type team members at that point. That's another level up, another challenge for us. As a business, we're looking to just really work on that value proposition, what we're delivering to clients.

And a large part of that is the moment just making sure we've got really good offerings in certain niche industries and really exploring. How we can deliver value in that fully outsourced finance piece. So that's a space we're working on a lot at the moment.

Meryl: Fantastic. Well, Shaun, thanks so much for coming on. It's been great chatting with you and really interesting hearing about how you've thought about running team retreats, but also just how you're thinking about running your accounting firm So thanks so much.

Shaun: No worries Meryl. It's been really nice.