The Future Digital Customer

Tell us your name and a little bit about your role at LiveCA?

So the bullet points are I’m turning 40 next year, I started a firm ten years ago, fast forward ten years, and there are about 110 people, all based in Canada. We’ve been remote first since day one and have played a pretty large part in reshaping regulations in Canada around working remotely, legally. live in an RV full-time for the last half a decade with two dogs and two kids in under 360 square feet, and I hitchhiked part of the journey to get here. I have a business partner. His name is Josh Zweig. He lives in a house. He currently lives in Argentina but has lived in Columbia, Tel Aviv, and Brazil. He lives all over the place.

The company's name is LiveCA and we’re longtime Xero customers. Essentially, we are a full financial back-office team for less than the price of one full-time hire.

A few years ago, we created our own internal development team to also stay on track and on top of how we can also help our customers. So we'll build on top of Xero's backbone for our specific use cases that maybe an app doesn't exist yet for, and that's innovation in itself, right? LiveCA has just taken traditional compliance and advisory and really worked at pushing the boundaries of what that looks like by not only just using the Xero technology but using the whole ecosystem that connects. And then we take what we learn and we throw it into a really silly podcast called Automation Town.


1. What does innovation mean to you?

It means making time outside of your day-to-day responsibilities and trying something new that will help more than just yourself, whether that's your team or your customers, or your future team or customers.

2. How does your team generate new ideas?

We provide opportunities for everyone to showcase ideas, and they don't have to be fully fleshed out through our own internal tools. So you're getting ideas for problem fixes every week. And then we have a team that we call the Product team, which is inside of the services compan – which is really weird – that works through these ideas, flushes them out, and then prioritizes them so we can figure out what we're gonna work on next.
What's worked for us is having two co-founders with very yin and yang personalities. I am not the fit-iron-man-going-through-Everest kind of guy. I'm the opposite one, but I've focused my entire last ten years on coming up with new ideas and living on the fringe. He, on the other hand, has lived sort of in the business, making sure it runs. And I live on the fringe, keeping us thinking fresh.

3. How do you identify trends? What resources does your team use to spot trends and consumer insights?

So identifying trends is born not just out of what you find online, but out of clearly identifying the problems that you're currently having and looking for solutions. Sometimes it's working to keep up on trends and having someone with free time to do that. That's architected into their job and the way that we're able to then share it publicly with our team.

So while some people are encouraged to share items publicly, there are actually almost full-time jobs for people to understand what's coming down the pipe in terms of new products or new ways of operating a firm that can then be shared with the right people inside of the company. Again, it's about creating the right space and opportunities for people.

4. What is the biggest challenge you face when innovating?

Our largest challenge is less related to the technology and more related to the business model. So we're not sure which problems we have to fix until we know who we're fixing them for. We have the luxury of serving a specific type of customer, and that has changed over the last decade. As that's changed, so have our innovation priorities, and we're at a point now, ten years in, where we can clearly articulate who our customer is, what problems we're trying to solve for them, and then go out and seek those solutions.

However, the problems now at this sort of hundred-plus person range is related to the buy-in as it relates to the budget. It’s incredibly important when it's not in the millions and billions of dollars. Making sure that there's an ROI on that investment, even though it might be right for a customer, it may not have the ROI that we need in order to move the firm forward. So that frustration exists because we're not able to do everything we want.

5. Looking to the future, how will LiveCA continue to be a leader in innovation?

By surrounding yourself with the right types of partners. So for us, Xero has played a tremendous role in showing us what is out there through the Xero app store. And when we've built-in notifications, when new applications are launched, that helps us keep on track of what's coming down the pipe. There's also a deep relationship that you can have with the actual company and not just their website. So being able to form those partnerships, and having a sort of like an ear to the ground of what's coming down for them also helps you stay a little bit more ahead of the curve than maybe others that don't have that.