Incorporating A Low-Code Workflow with Chad Davis, Co-founder & Partner at LiveCA LLP

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Chad Davis, co-founder and partner at LiveCA LLP, and we discuss how Chad incorporated his borderless lifestyle into the company, how a low-code workflow allows ideas to come to life, and LiveCA's approach to building remote work infrastructure and culture before it was mainstream. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:34) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) First thing I want to ask you about is the RV stuff because I saw your LinkedIn banner image. I want to know if that's your actual setup or an advertisement because it's beautiful.

(Chad Davis at 00:00:54) The banner is true. We've been traveling for the better part of five years now. Started in 2018. That has been the precipice for a lot of the fun stuff we get to do as a family. So we tend to spend six months in Canada and six months in the US. There's definitely some sensationalism out there about living in a van or living in a trailer. Kind of roll your eyes at some people who make it seem like it's the best thing in the world. There's no such thing as the best thing in the world. There's just whatever is right for you at this time in your life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) That's awesome, man. So tell me a little bit about your background. How did your career get to where you're at now?

(Chad Davis at 00:01:34) So the bullet points are a CPA in Canada, moved to the Cayman Islands to make more money because when you get designated, that's kind of what you do. Spent half a decade there, came back, created a company that helped companies in Canada move to the cloud from an accounting and finance perspective. That turned into a larger company, which is 110 people now. And over the course of that decade, my business partner Josh Swag and I have had lots of exposure to things that we never had in other parts of our lives, and we've never done this before. So it has been really fun being able to not just experiment, but give other people a lot of opportunity along the way to do what they were sort of called to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) That's really cool. So you're at a company called LiveCA today. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

(Chad Davis at 00:02:30) Sure. So that's our chartered accounting company, LiveCA LLP up in Canada. What we're trying to do is be the finance team for scaling or growing companies that are a little over $2 million in revenue or have some complexity, and we're essentially their finance team. So if you were to put it into a bite-sized audio chunk, it's a finance team for less than the price of a full-time hire.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:59) Very cool. So is it kind of like outsourcing the CFO role, or is it more than accounting?

(Chad Davis at 00:03:06) Yeah, a lot of tech companies have different needs when it comes to accounting. So some need a lot of tax, cross-border work, international tax work, bookkeeping, accounts payable, payroll. I mean, this is riveting stuff, but it's all necessary. So there's a group of a lot of forward-thinking accountants that are trying out new tools and being able to offer services in a way that they haven't been able to do in the past. And we latched on to a few of them, and I'm hoping we get to talk about that sometime on a tech podcast. But we've done that, and it's been able to allow us to work with some pretty forward-thinking companies that need a little bit more sophistication in their back office.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:52) Well, I got good news for you, Chad. We're on a tech podcast right now. So what are some of these cool tools that you're utilizing at your company?

(Chad Davis at 00:04:03) Yeah. So some of the things that we're helping companies out with is their core accounting, but also reporting, working with automations. Hopefully, one of the things we get to chat about is the fact that we created a development team right inside of the accounting firm so that we're able to offer custom applications and automations and new workflows that we haven't been able to do in the past. So if we're throwing in some things like that, we're heavy into the low-code world with Bubble and Airtable and Integromat and Zapier and all that kind of fun stuff. But also from an accounting perspective, we latched on pretty early to a company called Xero, and that has allowed us to sort of focus in on one tool. And from there, we were able to double down on the expertise that it requires and make sure that our team members are trained up and it's all just on sort of one platform. So you're kind of looking at a team that has deep, deep, deep knowledge into this sort of global international accounting tool, which allows us to serve companies in different countries and across different industries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:18) Yeah. That's really cool because I got to interview Xero's CTO a little while ago, and that was one of the things we were talking about, like the international reach and what an advantage that was. So what does it look like building your developer team within an accounting firm? So when you say you're able to double down on the expertise of Xero, does that mean you've been sourcing developers where it's a prerequisite having worked with the Xero API before?

(Chad Davis at 00:05:46) It's almost the opposite. So I know this is a highly technical audience, so I might get a little flack for this. But being able to not be a .NET or a Python or just any type of traditional developer and pick up some tools and be exposed to so many issues amongst our customers and being able to say, "Okay, I actually just need this data from this one tool and push it over into the accounting system like this because the company that built the integration missed the bidirectional nature of it, or they missed the attachment, or they don't allow for custom notes, or they don't allow for custom tax stuff." We are able to now take our accounting expertise and that deep knowledge of Xero or any tool really that relates back to finance and move things around using Integromat incredibly easily or n8n or Parabola or Zapier. And anything that we can't do or we want to turn into a program, our team will create an actual application inside of Bubble, and we'll have all of our API calls from the right systems right in there. And we can use all of the data completely filtered however we want to filter it if the API doesn't allow for some filters. And we now have this dataset that we can do whatever we want with. And without getting into too much, it allows us to create new revenue cycles, new relationships with customers, and our team was actually able to pick up the skill set because they were highly technical. And sort of the first hire for this department was a bookkeeper to start and then moved into a trainer on Xero and Dext and Fathom and all of these other financial tools. And he was able to pick up Bubble and pick up how to make API calls. And now we've got hundreds of automations and apps that we release out to our customers and actually maintain and use as a different revenue source.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:58) That's awesome. I mean, it makes sense that the department started with a subject matter expert that would usually be the person that the developers need to consult. But just doing it the other way around where they started it and they're now training the developers seems like, while not the norm, a pretty logical workflow to me. That's really cool. So what was, time-wise, when did you start building out this development team within your company?

(Chad Davis at 00:08:27) It's funny how things happen because one person gets an itch and they scratch it by trying a whole bunch of stuff. And that lasted for probably six months. And I was lucky that that was me because I don't think if I had a boss per se, they would let me spend six months and learn a whole new skill set. But when that happened, it was during the pandemic. And whether it was in 2020 or early 2021, I sort of forget. But we've been able to ramp this up to five people on our team that are sort of dedicated to building now within a year, about a year. And it just is a testament to this idea of low-code work. And there are a ton of issues that we still have to work through. And there's all kinds of platform risk and other things that people a lot smarter than me are aware of. However, validation and checking to see if something is possible and then maybe doubling down later on something in a more traditional development environment is totally possible. We just haven't hit there yet because everything that we've tried has been enough for the clients to not have to spend half of a full-time body on an admin task, or now they can get things quicker. It snowballs into some pretty good efficiencies, and I think you'll see more service-based firms getting into product like this because there is almost an unlimited source of problems to solve in a service-based company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:12) Yeah. Absolutely. And talking about trading half of a full-time employee's time for just a product solution, that's absolutely where I've been spending my time thinking about recently doing the podcast production services for companies. I'm a big believer in outsourcing anything that is not your company's core competency and just doubling down on what you are actually uniquely equipped to do.

(Chad Davis at 00:10:44) Do you have any experience in the work that you're doing now in the podcast production around that kind of low-code, no-code automation work that you're either excited that you're using or about to be excited about because you're just waiting for the right time to try it out?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:03) Well, I set some up a while ago as far as automations for, you know, using Zapier when a meeting is booked to trigger a bunch of different other things that happen within the company, so everyone's notified, added to it, those kinds of things. That's kind of like a little bit of fun coding logic, I guess. But honestly, my exposure to low-code, no-code has mainly been on the podcast because we talk to people about it every once in a while. Recently, I got to interview Vaughn Thurman at a company called HighGear, and he was so passionate about the space. It was a really fun conversation because they make a no-code configurable software, which he educated me on the differences between a low-code platform, no-code platform, and no-code configurable software, and how a couple years ago there was all this hype that suddenly everybody's going to be a citizen developer making software, and the results didn't quite come out to that. It's still not everybody's cup of tea to have the engineering mindset that it takes, even though you're not actually writing code. And so there's this space in the market for no-code configurable software to empower people to customize and design processes for specific tasks that used to be a developer's job and not a fun job for a developer. So it's a little more focused than the broad platforms. But sorry, you had a short question. I have a long answer. I do like low-code, no-code. I think it's pretty exciting.

(Intro Narrator at 00:12:45) No.

(Chad Davis at 00:12:46) That's good. You reminded me of a topic. You don't know what you don't know, and sometimes if you do think you know, you really don't know. And the person that kind of bridged the gap, and is still bridging and we're really happy we're still working with them, is a company out of Pittsburgh called Lost Sheep Advisory, and it's run by a man named Brian Alderman. And what Brian's been doing for us over the last year is sort of building out our internal tools in what we call our hub, which allows us to have a sales process and a marketing process and an onboarding process and client portals and tools that we need to run the firm on. And he's sort of building that infrastructure, teaching our team how to use it. But he has a very security, privacy, rules-type mindset, database design and optimization. And he came from the background of product management and API management and stuff like that. So he has a very broad skill set that when introduced into this sort of low-code world of Bubble, he's able to take an idea and quickly not break things. Whereas if we took an idea, we would absolutely be breaking things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:07) Because he's put in the work of breaking things before. So that's how you learn how to not break things.

(Chad Davis at 00:14:13) And he's a developer. Right? He's a programmer, and he's lived that life. And he kind of—I don't know if there's a switch you make, but he, similar to the gentleman you just mentioned at HighGear, incredibly excited about the space. And every day we're making changes that I can only imagine would take a lot longer in a sort of traditional development environment. And we're able to iterate and add new pages and add new floating groups and new database types just in an instant and test it and make sure it works. And yeah, super, super happy. So I'm curious, where do you get the sort of inspiration to come up with ideas for what you want to do in the podcasting space, the tech behind it? You mentioned you did some Zaps. How did you get to learning about that type of stuff?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:06) I mean, honestly, it's just being frustrated about something and wanting to not be frustrated about doing that task every day anymore. You know, researching, finding a way to automate it. So if I'm good at making a podcast and I have to spend a bunch of time on some monotonous task that's not that, that's kind of losing money for the company.

(Chad Davis at 00:15:34) Yeah. I was in a similar situation, and there's no substitute for just trying to build something and then just getting completely frustrated. So I took the mindset of, "Okay, if I could hire somebody off of Fiverr or Upwork to teach me one specific skill that I'm running into from a roadblock, I'm going to be that much further ahead because the worst I'm out is $50 or $100 or $200. Best case, I figure it out myself, and it takes two or three days." I'm like, "What a waste of time that would have been." Right? So I bet I probably paid $2,000 for education of doing these quick $25 help sessions with people in Ukraine and Pakistan and Russia and Belgium and Romania and India and the UK and the US. And actually, Metz, Australia. Xero is really big in Australia. So one of the issues I was running into is how do I actually use JSON and iterations in Make to put line items on an invoice? And I'm like, "I don't know. There's not that many resources out there that teach you how to do this completely customizable." So I literally paid $75, and this guy from Australia walked me through how to do it. And it's just cool that there's so many different types of resources for education. And when I was kind of also searching during that time, I was like, "There are a bunch of automation podcasts, and some of them are very Airtable-focused, and some of them are great YouTube channels, and some of them are interviews with people that are running those platforms." But I couldn't find a ton that were like, "Give me a specific problem, and here's how you can possibly solve it and riff off of ideas with somebody." So I'm not a professional podcaster by any means, but I did start one up with a buddy of mine named Jason Stats. And on the podcast Automation Town, just one word, that's what we do. We take a problem, and then we surprise each other with the topic. And one person knows exactly how they fix it, and the other one just riffs and tears the other one apart and makes fun of them or comes up with a better idea. So we're doing a few episodes so far, and I have a lot of fun with that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) That's awesome. Yeah. I love that concept for the podcast. I really like just the concept of one person coming in knowledgeable and the other person coming in cold, just like a tried-and-true fun thing on shows.

(Chad Davis at 00:18:22) Yeah. And we're—I know I'm not an editor. Jason's got some skills there, but we ended up hiring someone to do the editing too. So I can really appreciate the service that you're offering. And our editor, Paul Amara, works with some pretty cool other things on the internet.

(Chad Davis at 00:18:39) And just when you listen to it, you'll see like, this dude wants to be an audio engineer, but then play around with podcasts. It's really fun. And it's not super serious, but he puts a lot of effort into it, and we really appreciate it. He does a great job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:54) That's awesome. That's really cool. So I want to talk to you a little bit about this leadership topic that I am curious to hear your perspective on because I'm pretty uneducated on it, where I've seen you've talked about being borderless at your company. And so does that mean being international as an organization or just not siloing your teams? Or is it both, like a broad high level idea? Can you educate me a little bit?

(Chad Davis at 00:19:23) Sure. So when Josh and I first met, my business partner there, we both didn't want to have an office. He was overseas and I was in Canada. And being remote these days is nothing special. But in 2012 and 2013, for a CPA firm to be remote, there were a lot of legal challenges related to that when there are provincial borders or state borders with licensure issues. So we've worked over the last ten years with those people and with the government bodies to be able to operate above board. And that is a really great position to be in when you're sort of pushing the profession forward and sort of helping other accountants that want to do the same thing have the legal means to do that. So now we're able to work with accountants all across the country. And again, the spreading out of where people are pretty much follows the population graph of Canada where, you know, the majority are either in British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta, and then the rest are kind of spread out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:36) Nice. That's really cool. So you were remote before the pandemic. Did the past two years functionally change much at your business?

(Chad Davis at 00:20:45) Yeah. I mean, it functionally changed much for probably everybody. You know, we had lost a lot of revenue because companies were no longer alive or they couldn't afford it or something. But then there was this whole other group of companies who maybe were with more traditional CPA firms that would use desktop systems or something that wasn't online like Xero is. And because they would be researching online accounting tools and they would maybe pick Xero over, you know, other ones in the market, they would see that we were sort of right at the top of the list of larger firms that were using it, and they would reach out. So there's an advisory partner search that you can go on to the accounting website for Xero and kind of put where you're at or what type of accountant you want, and a bunch will pop up. So I think with some research, you can tell that, you know, the typical firm that uses Xero is a little bit more forward thinking because they want everything online, and they want access to the API, and they want the integrations with all the other tools. And that's probably why people were seeking out us and our services because there was this element of, hey, you've been doing this for almost a decade. You've probably figured out how to do this because you have a larger team than maybe just a couple. Could we possibly discuss what it's like to either take what was an in-person job and switch it to an outsourced position, or could we switch firms? And what does that switch look like?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:25) That's really cool that by being good at using Xero and your partnership there, that was like a strength during the pandemic. So, I mean, how did that driver of wanting to be able to work from anywhere impact the way you wanted to structure your business?

(Chad Davis at 00:22:43) Yeah. It was super selfish, right? Because, you know, in the beginning, it was like, I work from your basement. Then it was, oh, I could probably work while I traveled a bit. Then it's like, oh, wait. That's not healthy. Probably shouldn't work while you're traveling if you really tried to disconnect. And then you're like, oh, wait a minute. Probably do extended trips. Okay. Let's do an extended trip. And just because it's what I wanted doesn't mean that it's not what anybody else wanted either. I think that was a huge draw before the pandemic was being able to say, hey, you can take longer trips. You can work from anywhere, you can move. So we were really popular with spouses that were in the military or with companies that moved people around a lot, and families needed some stability, academia, that kind of stuff. And I think what happened was when the experience isn't horrible and it's something new, you get a sort of reputation. And that reputation is like, oh, maybe this is a place worth trying because there's opportunity for people because you get to work with some pretty interesting companies. There's opportunity for career progression. There's remote. There's really supportive people. And really, that's what keeps people in jobs typically is opportunity and good people to work around and not a toxic boss that's making you do horrible things. So, you know, the bar is kind of low, but at the same time, it's kind of high. And that's what I kind of liked about the pandemic was that it pushed everybody into this mindset of what is right for me? And if the company isn't right for you, then you make a decision to move on. And companies could no longer ignore remote. And I remember for years, we would be touted as, like, oh, look at this one company who's operating remotely in accounting, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:35) Yeah. Especially in accounting.

(Chad Davis at 00:24:37) In accounting. Right? And then you're like, oh, yeah. Well, that's just a fad. They'll get an office eventually. And then the pandemic hit, and, you know, we're the ones that were—we just had the infrastructure in place. So employees who were looking for something stable, we now became the stable option in a world where we were the unstable one, you know, six months prior. And that just boggles my mind when you think about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:06) Yeah. And to the point that the bar is raised, I mean, I never want to go back to not remote work.

(Chad Davis at 00:25:12) Yeah. The stuff that we were able to do inside of a year is mind boggling to me. And with a little bit of focus and time, I'm super excited to see what sort of the next year or two looks like. And right now, we were able to take a company that was—they were already on Xero, and they were using, I think they're using something called Spotlight Reporting or something like that. And they had a good relationship with their accountant, but they couldn't make things work because they had hundreds of developers. That's kind of why I'm sharing this because they're kind of developer friendly. Yeah. They had a ton of developers, like hundreds of them, submitting invoices in their own different ways on different timelines. And they needed a way to manage where the developers were working. So they would essentially place developers in different Fortune 500 companies. And the old accounting firm would do accounting, but they wouldn't think about the operational side of what it looks like to build something that works for the people. So what we ended up doing was inside of Airtable as a proof of concept, we created tables for customers, tables for projects, tables for vendors, like the actual developers. And now—the developers, we turned this into a Bubble app eventually once the proof of concept was good, but we were able to have them be reminded of when they needed to submit their bills for what projects. We were able to control the billing so that if their invoices were not according to the project specs, it would calculate and tell us. It would send off the copy of the bills plus all the right taxes and information into the accounting system. And then we could automate the bill pay based on project completion and due dates. And then we were also able to automate the creation of invoices inside of Xero based on timelines of the project in Airtable. And then what that ended up doing was it removed their need to have a few employees, and then they ended up putting those employees into sales positions. Their sales increased, and they didn't have to worry about that sort of infrastructure of managing all these bills and invoices. And now they have the ability to forecast out, but also have a direct line of sight between their accounting system and the back end stuff. And all we did was use Integromat or Make now, Airtable, and a little bit of Xero's API stuff that we kind of custom built from their API docs. And we're sitting on a customer now who's there for life, and they have a huge appreciation for bridging the gap between just standard compliance service stuff and actually caring about their problem and being able to build around it. And I just wanted to share that because it's super developer related. It's quick to implement. And I bet you it was built inside of a week and just iterated and iterated and then turned into an app once they realized how powerful it could be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:33) That's really cool. So that's a strength of your service that you offer, or do you sell that Bubble app as a product?

(Chad Davis at 00:28:42) Yeah. I think the short answer is yes. We sell the app to them, but then we can also sell it to other companies in similar positions. We haven't done that yet. But that's the goal, right, is to put infrastructure into place that is repeatable. But to be able to identify the problems and actually care, even though you might not be getting paid specifically to care, I think is the difference between how we're able to work with bigger companies and not tend to work with smaller ones because we do want them to be able to pay for these types of services and not feel stretched. That is another whole conversation around ability to pay versus need. And a lot of smaller companies when they're starting up have a lot of tech needs and maybe just use the accounting system for what it was meant to be used for. And then as soon as, you know, you want to start investigating stuff, they can play around with Zapier and Integromat. But eventually, having some people on your side that know accounting and tech is pretty powerful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:46) Well, I think that's a really cool success story to wrap up on. Before we close out the recording, is there any extra shout out you want to make for your company or your podcast or anything you want to get out to the world?

(Chad Davis at 00:30:00) The website for our firm is liveca.ca. And again, we're trying to be that finance team for less than the price of a full-time hire. And the podcast is—you can make fun of it all you want. And please tell me how we can make it better. It's called Automation Town. And again, that's one word, and it's on all the podcast players. And that's hosted with Jason Stats and all of the links to that kind of stuff you can find in the podcast players. And again, just I know we've mentioned Xero a lot here, but that's what the firm was built on. And a lot of the success here is owed to them for being able to just consistently innovate. And that's what I hope, you know, the next decade looks like as well. And we're just excited to be along for the ride and kind of be that Xero firm that bigger companies can use.

(Intro Narrator at 00:30:59) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.