Episode 65 // Navigating Your Firm’s Brand Through Mergers and Acquisitions

We found out that culturally, Baker Tilly was just like Henry and Horne. It’s a great culture. The people are great, just like the people at Henry Horn are great. So to combine that was a no-brainer. So I think culture is extremely important, but also from a marketing perspective, if you are entering a new market or either way you’re going, you need to think about that brand and changing that brand and how that’s going to go and what’s that going to look like and how much is that going to cost?

You are listening to the Remarkabrand Podcast, where authentic brands win.

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Remarkabrand Podcast. I’m Mike Jones, and I’m here with,

Sam Pagel once again.

Hey, Sam. Good to hang out with you again. As we mentioned last time, we’re going to be jumping back into an interview with Jaimi Koechel, formerly principal of Henry and Horne, and now a director at Baker Tilly, two amazing accounting firms that… We’ve gotten to work with Henry and Horne in the past, and we talked about that last time, last episode. Talked a lot about the experience that we had going through a rebrand, helping Henry and Horne rebrand back in 2016, 2017. And so if you haven’t checked out that episode, I’d highly encourage you to do that. But before we do anything else, let’s do a little name 10 things, because that’s what we do around here. Have a little fun.

Yeah, yeah.

Do a little improv.

And today we’re talking about M and A’s, mergers and acquisitions, and so we’re going to name 10 Food M and A’s. Okay.

Ooh.

So 10 food M and A’s, and we’re basically just going to combine two foods together to create one food.

Okay.

So let’s give it a shot.

Broccoli strawberries.

Ooh, nice. Corn fish.

Corn fish. Beef sticks with Cheetos.

Ooh. Beef stick Cheetos.

Half beef stick, half Cheetos and they’re combined together in one stick.

Ouch. That hurts my stomach. Oh, man.

It should be hurting everyone’s stomach. To think that people do eat that way.

Yeah, it just… That would… Yeah. It’s more efficient.

You can go to the corner market or your local gas station and buy Cheetos and beef sticks in the same purchase and then consume them.

That’s great. I’m going to go with peanut belery, which is peanut butter and celery.

Peanut butter and celery. I mean that is a great combination. It does work.

But somehow they figured out how to put the strains together and just, it grows out of the ground like that. It’s just delicious.

I’m going to go with milkade.

Oh, nice.

It’s milk. It’s lemonade. Okay. It’s milkade.

Lemony milk. Huh? I think that’s just buttermilk, Mike.

I think it’s just cheese.

I think-

Isn’t that just curdle right there, instantaneous.

Isn’t if you take whole milk and lemon juice, it creates like a buttermilk substitute, so.

I think it curdles, that’s for sure. I don’t think that’s going to sit well.

Yeah. All right. I’m going to say Oreo spinach.

Oh, you’ve ruined them both.

Yep.

Cheese oranges.

Okay.

I don’t know.

The same color. Easy, right?

Yeah. Cheddar.

Easy merger.

Yeah. Orange on orange.

Yep. That’s good. Okay, let’s go with grapefruit grape. It’s a purple grapefruit.

Grape grapefruit.

Grape grapefruit.

Let’s do some pork rind tea.

Protein packed tea right there. That’s good. Oh, yeah.

It’s all the rage with the fitness people.

We got to get a bacon one in here. So I’m going to go bagon. It’s bacon and egg combo. It’s like the bacon’s somehow inside of the egg shell.

Okay. Okay.

And when you crack it, the egg comes out and the raw bacon and it just all cooks together.

Okay.

You don’t even need-

It’s so much more efficient.

You don’t even need to prime the pan because you got the bacon in there.

The bacon fat is right in there.

Little bacon grease.

Yep.

I don’t know why they haven’t done that one yet. That one kind of-

It’s just a no-brainer.

It’s a no-brainer. It’s a little-

Yeah. At least you didn’t say chicken eggs. I can’t eat chicken with eggs.

No, you shouldn’t do that. I think that’s illegal.

It feels too close.

You shouldn’t do it.

It feels too close.

Find your frequency.

All right, on that note, we’re about to get into our interview with Jaimi. We’re going to finish up part two of our interview, talking about mergers and acquisitions. We’ll also talk a little bit about some, I think, tips that Jaimi has for younger marketers, maybe newer marketers to accounting marketing, and in particular get involved in AIM. We’ll hype our friends over at AIM. But before we get there, I want to talk a little about with you, Sam. We actually have been through our own merger.

Yes. Yes.

It’s back in 2019 we inked the merger. We started talking about it in 2018. It took a full year, I think, if I remember right.

Yep.

But I’d love to hear your perspective on that process and just how did you think about, Hey, I have this brand with Pelican Media, might be bringing this into Resound. How were you thinking about that in that process if you even were. Maybe you weren’t.

I was. It’s funny, there was a guy that approached me maybe a week or two before, Mike, you and I officially started the conversation. I think we did it at lunch. And you were like, “What if we tried to do this?” Because I had a friend who approached me about doing that. He was a great sales guy. I could do a lot of the creative stuff. And on paper everything was like, “Wow, this would work. It’s like there’s no way this wouldn’t work.” Until I did a little research on, “Okay, what do you think about when you maybe are going to partner with somebody else, merge two businesses together?” And I think there were two things in particular that I found out, these are really important. Aside from the financial stuff and the work and all that, but almost the core of who you were, both companies, the core of both companies. And so one was, what do you value?

And I think these were more of a personal thing, like me as the business owner, what do I value? What do I believe in? Why am I doing this? Why am I even in business? What do I seek to accomplish? And then that led into what are your long-term goals? And figuring that out for my own company and my own self allowed me to put those up against somebody else’s values and goals and say, “Are these aligned?” And in that case, they weren’t. And it was, once it became apparent, it was like-

It’s really clear.

“This isn’t going to work, right. Nope. Okay. All right. See you later.” And that was super helpful. I’m super thankful. And so then the day came where Mike and I had lunch right after that, and I was-

“Too soon, Mike, too soon.”

I think I was telling you about it, Mike, and you were like, “What if maybe we could talk about doing that?” And I was like, “Too soon, Mike. I need to get over this other one first.” It was emotionally taxing. It was just a lot to think through.

Well, you got really close, too.

Big decision. Yeah. It was like-

You guys were pretty close to sign in an agreement.

Yeah. It got to the point where it was like, “Hey, take the weekend. We need to make a decision on this.” We were talking about it for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t very long, but it was like, “We need to move forward with this or not.” And we didn’t. So then Mike was like, “What if we we try to do something like that?” I was like, “Oh, Mike, come on.” And I remember going home that night and telling my wife, Ashley, and she’s like, “No. No, not again. We just got over this.” She was really adamant that, no-

You were just in such high demand, Sam.

No, no, no. It was just, love was in the air, I think.

Love was in the air.

So yeah, a year long process with Resound was super helpful, and I’m glad we took that long because it’s a big decision.

It was.

It’s not just your business, it’s like it affects your family and your whole life. It took a year, but I think we quickly found out, or maybe even already knew that we were very aligned with our values, very aligned with our goals. We were not seeking to go global and create this massive company. So we knew that going in. We had the advantage, not everybody has this advantage, of sharing an office space for six years.

We did. And we’d worked together too.

We worked together. We had collaborated together. Mike and I, even before that, we knew each other. So we had a pretty strong foundation. I think I even went to one of your board meetings in 2013 maybe. So-

You came to our Board Retreat.

Yeah. So I got to see very intimately the inner workings of Resound. I got to see you Mike, go from one person to a full team of 12 people or something at one time.

And now back to five.

[inaudible 00:10:07] again, but the process itself, it was taxing. It was emotionally taxing. There was a lot to think through. It was a big decision. Neither one of us took that lightly. Neither one of the sides took it lightly. But at the end of the day, I mean, when it came to we’re going to do this, there was just a piece. I mean, it was like, there’s no doubt. I remember saying, “If I said no to this, I know I would regret it.” I really want to do this. And for me it was, I could keep doing what I was doing. I was doing well, but I wanted to create something bigger. I wanted to create something that was just more meaningful and more lasting. And I saw joining Resound as a amazing way to do that alongside of you, Mike and partners and the team at Resound, and now, what is it? Four, almost four years. Three and a half, four years-

Three and a half, yeah.

Almost. It has been really, really sweet and I would say a success. What was it like from your perspective, Mike?

Probably a little less emotional, but some of that was because, and I think you knew this, David, Jeff and I had already been talking about it for a while of when we… We would often look at the people we’d worked with or were around us in our field of vision, just who’s around that’s not part of our team that maybe we would like to work with in some way, shape, or form. And obviously we did get to do that over six years prior to merging in Pelican Media. And so your name just kept popping up. It was like every year it was, and there was a resonance of values. The type of work that you were doing was very complimentary to ours. There’s enough overlap that it made sense, but not so much that it was like, “Oh, we’re just duplicating stuff we’re already doing, or people we already have.”

So that was super helpful. But yeah, it just seemed easy in some ways. I know it took a while, but that’s always how it goes when you’re making deals like that. I don’t think I thought originally it was going to take a year, but that’s what it needed to take.

Yeah.

So some of that was more the financial stuff, just figuring out how to value two companies. Neither of us had done that before. There’s a lot of learning in that. I’m thankful for some of the resources that we were able to find to help us with that. But yeah, and I think the other thing about this was the brands, and I think it was pretty clear we had invested a lot in our brand. And so I don’t know that there was a hard conversation around, “Well, which brand is going to make it, which one’s going to…”

No.

We didn’t ever go down the PeliSound route although we do still own pelisound.com.

No. I’m thankful we didn’t. No, I remember that conversation. I don’t know if it was all four of us partners or if it was just you and me Mike, but I remember there was a quick conversation. It was like, “So you should probably just keep the Resound brand and dissolve in the Pelican one. And I’m like, “Yep, that sounds great. I totally agree.” Yeah, Resound was just a strong brand. You guys had written a ton of content. You had done it the right way too. Mine was just more of, I had done, I think, I can’t remember, maybe one or two name changes over the course of my business.

And until I went through the branding process with Resound, with you guys, there wasn’t a whole lot of substance there. But it was an easy decision to say, “Yep, Pelican Media, your time is done. You had a good run, but we’re going to move everything into Resound.” And that was the right decision because yeah, Resound was the stronger brand, stronger presence. There was more meaning there. You guys had all your stuff in order. And not that I didn’t, but the brand was just clearly stronger.

And we looked at, I think some numbers just even reach, like email lists and stuff, and it was like, “Okay, so there’s a lot more reach on the Resound side, so it’s going to cost us less if we just stick with that.” I think we still had to navigate with your clients though. That was-

We did.

I think, eye-opening to me of how much they had invested emotionally in working with you. And in particular, they had an association of Pelican Media with Sam, with you. And for some that was, I think, a little bit of a struggle for them to think about, “Okay, Sam’s moving into this other brand. Am I still going to get the same level of service? Am I going to get the same level of high touch, same response level?” And in some cases, the answer was, “No, you’re not. Certainly not going to get the same price.” Pricing was a hard one, I think, for some of them to get over.

Yeah. And that was hard. I mean, there were relationships that ended, I think because of that. But at the same time, I think we talked about this-

Some of those needed to end though.

Yeah. I think we talked about this with David a week or two ago about, okay, when you do have a strong brand, it does enable you to say no, or it enables you to set a price or a scope of work that you don’t have to flex on because you know what you’re good at, you know what you’re worth, and you can have that conversation with grace and do that well. You can still serve people well when you say, “No, we’re not going to come down on that”, or “This is how it is”, and make sure that they’re taken care of. But that happened for sure, which I think we expected that to happen.

We did. You never know going into that, like, “Okay, what’s the percentage split? Who’s going to stick? Who’s not?” I think we were surprised at a couple clients who were like, “Oh, Sam’s part of this bigger team. They have more resources. Let’s do some stuff”, that maybe they weren’t really considering you for. I think more on the branding side or maybe some of the content stuff. And then we had one client who I feel like they just, they’d been a longstanding client of ours. We’ve been through ups and downs with them. And when you came on, and it was like all of a sudden, it was very clear we had video capability in-house, even though you had done video for them with me. We had gone out to their facility in 2014 in Chicago and done a bunch of video, but it was like, “Oh, now Sam’s in-house with Resound. Oh, let’s do a bunch more video.”

Now I’m on those calls, right?

Oh my goodness. Yeah. And you’re still on those calls, three and a half years later.

Yeah. Yep. Well, Mike, not everybody can share a building or an office space for six years with the firm that they’re going to merge in with.

No, they can’t.

Maybe we could just touch on real quick, we’ve done that. Obviously we’re not giant corporations or huge firms, but what are some things to think about for any kind of business who is considering either merging or acquiring or being acquired from a brand and marketing standpoint?

The first is something you already touched on, and Jaimi I know is going to touch on this too. And that’s the cultural fit. And that’s not always something I think that you get the luxury of getting right. You don’t get to necessarily pick that the other firm that you’re going to merge into yours or that you’re going to merge into or however that acquisition’s going to go about. You don’t always get to pick exactly a replica of you. In fact, I would argue there probably isn’t another replica of you. There’s always something that’s a little bit tangential or a little off. But the more you can think about that, have those things really defined for your brand, your culture, so that when the day comes to have that conversation with another firm, you’re already prepared for, okay, we at least know who we are and what if we’re going to be going into their brand, what are the things we’re going to have to navigate that are going to be hard?

Because there’s a little bit of a difference of alignment. Maybe not a misalignment, but just a difference in alignment in our culture. So what values do we have that they don’t have? What values do they have that we don’t have, or how do they behaviorally live those out versus how do we behavior? You might both say, “We really value great client service.” “Okay, tell me about how you do that.” I bet the two firms do that a little bit differently. And so if you’ve already done a lot of that homework in defining those things upfront, I think you’re going to have a better time navigating through the process of saying, “Hey, we’re going to bring ourselves into someone else’s brand, or we’re going to bring somebody into our brand. How are we going to bring along as many talented people as we can in that process?”

Because I think that’s the big concern that I have for most mergers and acquisitions is that there is a ton of people who are going to leave in that process if you don’t do it really, really well and thoughtfully, as much as you can. And the reality is you’re going to lose some people. There’s just people who are going to be like, “I liked how it was. I don’t like something new. I don’t want to deal with change. I’m out.” Or their role just is duplicated. That’s just inherently happens. I was just talking with a friend of ours recently who had done a lot of work to build her firm’s brand. They got acquired, the other brand already had a marketing director, and she lost her job.

And I was talking to her, I was like, “Man, that’s got to be really hard.” And she’s like, “Yes, in one sense, it’s really hard. On the other side of things”, she’s like, “I did my job. I built a great brand, enough that we were able to get acquired and do a really good job get in that acquisition.” She was like, “I felt like we were set up for success in that.” And I think that’s the silver lining if you’re on that side of the table of, “Hey, your role is now duplicated. We got to let somebody go. I’m sorry.” You can look at that and go, “You know what? But I did my job. We have a great brand, and it was able to be acquired at a really good price”, or whatever the negotiation looks like. So I think that cultural fit, really assessing that, not just like is it a fit, but how are we going to transition our culture to theirs or their culture to ours?

And if you want to dig way back in the archive, I highly recommend an episode with Heidi Jannenga from WebPT. They went through a number of acquisitions where they went and acquired smaller firms into their software company, and she talks directly about that, and I think there’s some helpful tips in there. I think the other part is just how do you navigate the actual brands themselves? We will get into this with Jaimi, but more likely than not, one of the two brands is well known in a specific market, and the other isn’t. So if the other one is going to be the acquiring firm, is going to be the brand that lasts, you need to have a transition plan in that market.

And I think that that’s something that maybe gets shorted a little bit in the negotiation process and the deal making, and everyone’s running really fast. You got a lot of numbers you’re crunching. You’re trying to make sense of it financially, which is its own just Herculean effort in a merger acquisition. We saw that, right?

Yeah.

That was the most painful part, was trying to figure out the financials of it. If you don’t have a brand and a marketing plan, what are we going to do with these two brands on day one or even day zero before you’ve even launched that there’s this merger acquisition happening. Are we going to put the two brands together and make a new brand? Is one brand going to take over from the other? When are we going to have that transition? Maybe run them side by side for a little bit? Every firm is in a different situation, in a different context within that merger acquisition formula. There’s probably an opportunity, and I’m sure there’s some consultants out there have done it, but there’s probably an opportunity out there to maybe build a little matrix and say, “Hey, here’s the inputs, here’s the outputs, here’s the context of the two firms and where their marketing and branding lives.”

Maybe do some surveying and that process of your deal making. Talk, not necessarily about the merger or acquisition itself with clients, because maybe you’re not ready for that, but talk about their perception of these two brands. How do they perceive your brand? How do they perceive the other brand? Maybe throw in a couple of other brands if you want to obfuscate it a little bit, not give away too much yet. Talk to clients, talk to other people on the market and get their perception on these two things. I think Jaimi’s going to talk about there’s some really key lessons that she’s learning and has learned through Henry and Horne merging into Baker Tilly, and I would love for people to think more about that, leading up to the merger.

And for someone who’s working in a marketing role at a firm, this is an interesting topic because whether or not the owners or partners of your firm have this in their mindset of this is a goal one day to either be acquired or to acquire or merge, having a strong brand is a huge leg up if you end up getting into a process like that, not just from a valuation standpoint, but think about if you’re in a merger scenario where, hey, you want to team up with another firm, maybe they’re in a different part of the country and you’ve built this strong brand that has a ton of equity, it’s put together, it’s professional, it’s seamless, you’re going to have a leg up. You’re going to have a leg up on the other firm if they haven’t done the same things. So it’s like a, “Hey, if we haven’t done this before, we should start to think about this. We should start to define who we are. We should start to define our brand.”

Because in another sense, Mike, we just talked about your values. If you have those defined ahead of time and everyone in the firm believes them and knows what they are, that you don’t have to go figure that out all of a sudden and figure out, “Wait, who are we? What do we actually care about? What do we actually believe in?” And hopefully the other side has done that too. Or you can encourage them to do the same thing real quick.

Yep. Yeah, absolutely. So on that note, I think we should jump into the interview with Jaimi, and I’m excited for everyone. If you have any thoughts on mergers and acquisitions and how brands can navigate that, I would love to hear from you maybe after the episode, if you’re done listening to Jaimi, the interview with Jaimi, reach out to us. You can email me mike@resoundcreative.com. You can find us on our website, resoundcreative.com, and I’d love to hear more from you guys. Maybe you have a story or an insight or something you’ve learned. I think those would be fantastic to maybe share in a future episode.

You are remarkable.

So what do you need to know?

Well, I think one thing you mentioned earlier before the show was just sharing about how do you launch a brand in a market because Baker Tilly’s not known here, right?

Right.

So how do you think about that? How do you think about whether it’s merged into a new brand and you’re going to have to relaunch that brand almost into a market that you have a lot of people in who have the old name equity, Henry+Horn, everyone knew that here in the Arizona area, but how do you think about that, either launching a new brand, brand new, or going through that process with someone like a new firm that’s entering into the geographic market?

So we’re working on that now. So basically it was hard to go from a firm with a lot of brand equity, like Henry and Horne was well known. We never had to do any outside of our rebrand in that, outside of that, we didn’t have to do any branding per se, because we were just so well known, kind of a staple in the valley. So to go from a firm with such brand equity to merging into a firm where people are like, “Who’s Baker Tilly? What’s a baker?” So we got our partner. Some people have heard that at conferences. “What’s a baker?” So we’re kind of-

We shouldn’t talk about how you cook the books or something like that.

Oh, ta-ra-da.

Yeah, I’m sorry. The inner dad had to say something.

So definitely we’re working on that right now because obviously when you are entering a new market, and if it’s a completely new market that you haven’t been in before, you need to brand yourselves there. So that’s something we’re working on. But why would people know who Baker Tilly is in Arizona when they didn’t?

They weren’t here.

They weren’t here, and now we are.

Yeah, and that is interesting, thinking about coming back to that idea of, okay, firms can really work anywhere. You can have clients almost anywhere. And yet at the same time, there is value in having a geographic presence and being at least present locally and doing different things. I think we were talking earlier about just different ideas for that, but one of those is just find the biggest big name events in the area and sponsor that. Put your name on it, put your logo on there, and just make sure that people are aware of you.

Just some brand recognition.

And I mean, we’ve talked about this before on our show in a past episode, just to hear internally with Resound, just talking about how there’s still value in having, maybe you might not have everyone in an office necessarily every day or even at all. Some of the teams now are just fully distributed for a lot of firms, but having a presence through some kind of local office experience, just somewhere that has you rooted in the area and gives people a sense of like, “Oh yeah, when I’m driving down the road there, I see it.”

Yeah.

Or I don’t know if you want to do a billboard, but you could do a billboard or you could do something locally. And just thinking about how to put your brand in the area in a physical way rather than just digital.

Oh, yeah. I was trying to think of what screams local, what screams you’re here. So I did come up with some of the larger events in the Valley that screams, “You’re local, you’re here, you’re from here, you’re here to stay.” So that’s part of the things we’re working on.

Not to get too far down this road, but I believe we’ve even seen it with one of our other clients who’s not in the accounting world. They’re a dairy producer here, UDA, and they do a ton of collaborations with local restaurants and with local chefs and just… I mean, obviously Arizona’s in their name, it’s part of their DNA as a organization, but really trying to like how do they showcase that they are fully local in that process? Like, “Hey, our milk comes from here, our cheeses, our dairy products are all, for the most part, there’s a little bit of nuance there, but for the most part are Arizona bread and raised.”

I said, I don’t know, being from Wisconsin, I’m definitely-

I know.

A Wisconsin cheese girl over here.

Don’t get me wrong. They all love their Wisconsin cheese too. I think some of them, I think are even from… I think some of the farmers might be from Wisconsin, but-

I wouldn’t be surprised.

But they’re a fun group. They’re really fun, and things go a little cheesy sometimes.

Ta-ra-da. Mike’s here all night, guys.

I’m sorry, I am here all night. Yeah, that’s great. So we were talking about the merger acquisition type thinking and getting into a new market. Is there any other lessons or things that you would encourage marketers to be thinking about if their firm is considering the merger acquisition route? Obviously they could be on the other side of that. Maybe they’re on the acquiring side. How can they think about that?

If they’re involved with the planning process would definitely, one of the things I would bring to the table is the culture. Is it a good culture fit? Because we found out that culturally, Baker Tilly was just like Henry and Horne. It’s a great culture. The people are great, just like the people at Henry and Horne are great. So to combine that was a no-brainer. So I think culture is extremely important, but also from a marketing perspective, if you are entering a new market or if either way you’re going, you need to think about that brand and changing that brand and how that’s going to go and what’s that going to look like and how much is that going to cost. I mean, those are some of the things to really think about because you still have your people that are going to service the clients. You still have the people that are going to go out and bring in the business, but you need the brand to support that too.

And there’s a lot of different ways to approach that. There’s looking at the two brands, anytime there’s that merger acquisition of when do we rip the bandaid off? When do we get rid of one and leave the other? Do we merge them together? Do we let them live separately for a little while? I’ve seen firms do that as well, and there’s a lot of nuance in that. I don’t know that it happens often enough. I would love to see more firms who are going through that process on either side of that deal to say, “Hey, let’s think about the brand sooner and maybe start to plan how are we going to proceed with this? What’s going to make for the best transition?”

There’s a time and place to just say, “Hey, one brand is done. The other is taking over.” There’s a time and place for both to maybe merge together. There’s another time and place for them to run side by side for a little bit. But I think knowing your clients, knowing your team, knowing your culture, and of knowing how are we going to transition these two firms, those are really important things to start asking probably sooner than later in the planning process.

Yeah. It’s funny because, I mean, even as a marketing professional, that wasn’t top of mind during the planning process. It was, “I need to help get all these documents over. I need to get our marketing in order, meet just everything but the brand.” I’m guilty of that, sure.

It was a huge checklist.

It wasn’t like… And unfortunately that wasn’t on my checklist to ask about, but yeah, there was a lot to do. A lot to do.

I bet. I can only imagine. So, yeah, I think, man, you have covered so many great things. I was just trying to think if there was something else. What would be your number one takeaway for maybe younger marketers in accounting marketing that they could say, “This would be really helpful for me to start doing in my job, in my career”, that would just make for a really great career as a accounting marketer?

I would say join AIM.

Hey.

Well, if you’re not already, I think it’s extremely important, because I’ve been a part of AIM for probably 17 years now in not only the education, but just the relationships that I built all over the US. I mean, I have a group chat on my phone and an app of I don’t know how many various marketers there are, my friends that I call my friend. They’re my friends now. And if any of us have an issue or whatever, “Hey, how did you handle this? What’d you guys, what kind of software do you guys use for this?” And somebody always responds. And we look forward to the summit every year and seeing your friends, and I would say the number one thing for young marketers to join AIM, you won’t regret it. I definitely have a lot of great memories with AIM and awesome friendships. Obviously we live in a destination state, so friends, they’re like, “Hey.” They’ll text, “I’m coming to the Phoenix area. Let’s meet up if you’re available.” “Absolutely.” So, yeah.

That’s awesome. And I can attest. AIM is really, it’s an interesting group. I think when I first got introduced to Aim through you, I just expected the typical industry group. Lots of education, lots of events, lots of opportunity to just learn from each other. But I think what I’ve really learned is there’s just a lot of friendships and comradery.

Always like close-knit friends. Absolutely.

And I think that’s been surprising to me in some regards. I don’t think that’s normal for a lot of associations, and I think it probably speaks one to the challenge of being an accounting marketer that for many, that you might even be the sole marketer in your firm, and that can be probably a little lonely.

That’s how I started at Henry and Horne. It was just me. Me, myself, and I. So yeah, it does. And even if you just want to vent one day, you have a plethora of friends to vent to because they’ve all been through it too. They’ve all heard no a thousand times and you can work together.

Yeah. “Oh, I’m not alone. I’m not alone in this.” So I’m not the first.

You’re like, “Oh, your partners don’t get it either. Okay. It’s okay.” It’s okay to lean on each other and get advice and tips and tricks and whatnot, and I still do that.

I mean, whatever the issue is or the experience that you’re going through, I would argue there’s probably at least someone in AIM who’s been through it already.

Yes.

At least once, and can at least give you some ideas of maybe how to approach that or learn from their experience. I’ve seen that over and over. And it’s a fun group too, just really fun.

Absolutely. I’ve enjoyed my membership there for the last 17 years, but I’m going to continue it. I mean besides, if they’re not in AIM already, I’d say get that seat at the table, show them that you deserve it, and don’t take no for an answer. Keep pushing for that yes.

Those are great. Thank you, Jaimi. I really appreciate you coming on.

Oh, you’re welcome. This is fun.

This has been an awesome conversation.

And I didn’t even looked at my notes once.

Yay. That’s perfect. Great.

We just chatted away.

This was awesome. We’ll be sure to have you back on in a little while. You get your feet set it.

Talk more about Baker Tilly’s brand.

Yeah. That would be really fun.

Okay.

Great.

Awesome.

Thanks, Jaimi.

Thank you.

The Remarkabrand Podcast is a project of Resound and is recorded in Tempe, Arizona with hosts Mike Jones and David Cosand. It’s produced and edited by Sam Pagel. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and at remarkablecast.com. If you’d like more episodes, subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. To contact the show, find out more about the Remarkabrand Podcast or to join our newsletter list. To make sure you never miss another episode. Check out our website remarkablecast.com. Copyright Resound Creative Media LLC, 2022.