Why I’m Starting a Blog!

Sup y’all!

I’m Ryan Lazanis, a CPA from Montreal, Canada who’s passionate about technology & disruptive business models. While I’m a CPA, and while I have my training and education in accounting and tax, that’s actually not what I’m passionate about.

In fact, after leaving the small firm I worked for back in 2012, I actually never thought I would go back into public practice. I threw out all of my accounting and tax books and went to start the next step of my career as an accountant in industry, as an assistant controller at a medical company.

That lasted a whole 6 months.

I couldn’t take the repetitiveness of what I was doing and just felt that what I was doing wasn’t “me”.

I knew my training and education was in accounting and didn’t want to throw that away. But I also knew that I had a desire to create something from scratch.

So I decided to take my training in accounting and combine it with my passion for technology to create an entirely new kind of accounting firm back in 2013. The firm stated with just myself, I didn’t have a precise plan, but I knew I wanted to modernize accounting service delivery as I thought the old, traditional accounting firm model was severely outdated and not meeting the needs of the new generation of business owners.

Xen Accounting started off as a firm that would provide accounting services completely online, only use cloud accounting software and be completely paperless. At the time, this kind of service didn’t really exist and was an unproven model in Canada. Some CPA’s I spoke with thought it was crazy and that it would never work. Well, 5 years later, I can confidently say that they were wrong 🙂

The idea was to really break the culture that had existed in accounting firms for so long. Forget the fancy suits, forget the fancy offices and instead, just focus on making accounting easy and painfree. If you can achieve that, in my mind, customers would choose an easy experience over everything else. Just look at what Uber, Airbnb and Amazon have done by flipping a traditional industry on its head. They make the experience easy. And that’s what I wanted to achieve in accounting as well.

Connect online, eliminate the paper, automate as much of the day-to-day accounting as possible, charge a predictable fixed monthly price and essentially, focus on reversing many of the pain points that small business owners have experienced when dealing with their accounting and their accounting firm.

What will this blog be about?

In this blog, I plan to document my journey in a quest to help modernize the accounting profession and to share information and resources that I think are important and interesting to those interested running a modern accounting firm. I plan to talk about what’s going on in the industry, where I think things are heading, what technology is hot and everything else in between, on the topic of firm modernization.

Not all of the content will be original (ie. created by me), though some of it certainly will be.

Just like when I started Xen Accounting, I don’t have a precise plan for this blog, but I’m curious to see how things will morph over time as there are a few directions that I would certainly like to see this head in. More on that some other time!

Why?

So why am I starting a personal blog?

A few reasons.

First, as I initially believed back in 2013 when founding Xen Accounting, I believe that the accounting profession and the accounting firm model needs to modernize. I believe I can help play a role in this. In the last 5 years, we have seen drastic changes take place in accounting services delivery and, due to technology, this will only intensify as the days, months and years progress. My experience comes from creating a new kind of firm in Canada and I think that more can be done.

Second, I believe that CPA’s in Canada looking to innovate are very poorly supported. CPA Canada, in my opinion, is severely behind the eight ball. They should be pushing cloud accounting and new ways of serving the public and they should be pushing this… hard. One of the main arguments of the CPA merger a few years back was to help CPA’s stay competitive globally. This doesn’t happen if you’re set in doing business the old school way. With CPA Canada showing little signs of being that voice, others need to stand up.

Third, I also believe in branding. Whether it be from a corporate or personal perspective, branding is important for one’s professional career. I carved my path and created a successful accounting firm not by being the best accountant in the country, but for standing for something different and for making it known.

The journey ahead

Hopefully the above gives you all an indication of why I’m launching this blog. I’m excited to share my journey with you and if you’re curious about staying up to date with some of the changes that will be hitting the industry and receiving resources on the subject of helping you with your modern accounting firm, then please sign up to my newsletter to stay in the know!