We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Martin Kamenski a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Martin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Talk to us about building a team – did you hire quickly, how’d you recruit the first few team members? Any interesting lessons?
For Revel, we started out as many professional services businesses do: with the owner alone. And then eventually with some part-time contractor support. And then a first full-time employee, and then a few more, and many more… It was natural and organic growth that scaled with the growth of our client work AND with the increasing complexity of internal operations.
Over many years I made all sort of hiring mistakes. Initially I hired people that I thought my creative entrepreneur clients would get along with the best… sort of based on personality. Someone that would be a great translator of the world of business and taxes to the creative entrpreneurs we serve every day. It turns out the clients would much rather have someone exceptionally talented (technically speaking) and we could teach them how to communicate better with our clients.
Today, our recruiting process has a couple unique elements to Revel. The first is a quick video response in their initial application. Since we’re a fully-remote organization, we need to know that they’re comfortable with video! (Don’t worry, we tell them they’re not being judged on their fashion sense…) The other element is some key questions designed specifically to ensure a strong culture fit. While technical skills are table stakes, the interview process is entirely focused on making sure we’re bringing the right people onto the bus.
Martin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m fairly certain I was the only accounting-theater double major at Marquette University at the time I was there. Ever since highschool I was equally interested in creative pursuits (music, theater, etc) and the world of business (econ, accounting, entrepreneurship). After school, and a brief stint in the Big Four, I set out on my own in Chicago and–purely based on the circles I ran in–found myself attracting more and more clients from various creative pursuits. Musicians, models, actors, film production studios, web development, etc. And the deeper we got into serving these clients, the more we realized just how wide the understanding gap was. The world of business and taxes just wasn’t designed with the creative entrepreneur in mind. Not very accessible at all. So it became our journey to help these business owners understand how this game gets played and how to get what they want out of it.
Today Revel CPA provides accounting, tax, and advisory services to creative entrepreneurs coast to coast. We typically work with owners holistically, taking care of the books and reporting all year, corporate and personal tax plans, year-round tax planning and forecasting, etc. That year-round tax planning is one aspect that I feel Revel does uniquely well: making sure that our clients see their potential future tax bill miles down the road and helping them structure contributions toward that bill bit by bit all year. Our goal is to understand why this business owner is doing this in the first place. What are their goals–financial AND nonfinancial. Maybe they haven’t taken a month-long vacation even once in the ten years they’ve been in business. Maybe they’re trying to break $5M in revenue. Maybe they’d like to create an employee incentive plan to make sure that their team is directly benefiting from their growth. Whatever those goals are, we can act as proactive advisors, helping them see where they are today and what the road to their dreams will look like.
On a personal note, of all those creative entrepreneurs out there, we’re particularly passionate about serving business owners from many different “underestimated” groups out there: women, people of color, folks in the LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants, etc. Why? Two reasons: 1) selfishly, every one one of those groups is represented in my immediate family and as an entrepreneur my dream is making the world a *little bit* better for my wife and kids and others just like them, and 2) I strongly believe that entrepreneurship has an immense power to shift the realities of these owners and their families and hopefully work on closing some of the wealth gaps that exist in our country.
How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?
At Revel an important element of all our year-round engagements is a meeting we have twice a year called a GLOSS review. It’s only 30 minutes, but we ask our clients to hop on a call with us twice a year to pick our heads up out of the weeds and look at the big picture. How are we doing in serving them? Have their ambitions or has their direction changed? GLOSS is an acronym for Goals (what’s important to the client–financially and otherwise–over the next 6-12 months), Location (where are they standing today), Obstacles (what might potentially get in the way of them realizing those goals), Speed & Services (how quickly are they trying to reach these goals and what services can we provide them to help make that happen).
In a world where 90% of accountants crank out some financial statements, throw them in a portal, and don’t really care whether the client sees them or not, Revel loves to have regular conversations with our clients about their dreams and whether their business is working in the direction of making those dreams possible.
Financial statements are just numbers on a sheet of paper until they operate inside of a context. What is the lens through which we’re viewing these numbers? What does “good” look like? By aligning our understanding of what the client is trying to accomplish with their goals and treating their KPIs and financials as indicators of our progress to realizing those goals we help bring the story to life.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
Too many to list. But here’s a short list of some great ones:
Selling to Serve by James Ashford–I’ve learned more about pricing, pricing strategy, and even more broadly what it takes to lead a growing professional services organization from James than almost any other thought leader.
Salsa Soul & Spirit by Juana Bordas–finally gave me the words (and underlying history and background context) for the type of multicultural leadership that I believe in so deeply.
Built to Sell by John Warrillow–quick easy read, explains in an allegory format how to make the changes needed to create a business that gives you the *freedom* to sell your business–or not–and increase its value overall.
Patrick Lencioni–read all his books, exceptional guidance about management and leadership.
And this is sort of cheating, because it’s a pathway to so many more books worth reading, but the Founders Podcast by David Senra. It’s an immense treasure trove of knowledge, shared in an engaging way, and if used correctly, can INSPIRE you to great action in your business.
Contact Info:
- Website: revelcpa.com
- Instagram: @revelcpa
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinkamenski/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@revelcpa-thecreativescpa8835
Image Credits
Mann Frau