March 2003 Interview
How did you get started in accounting?
Numbers. That was the main reason. I’ve actually thought about other professions like medicine or law. But working with numbers was something that I liked from the beginning. I was always good with numbers.

What made a big difference for my direction was career prep. In high school we had career days where you can pick one week out of the school week and work voluntarily for a company to get experience. During my years at Simon Fraser University, accounting was a bit dry and I was thinking, ‘should I decide to keep doing this?’ At point I was thinking, ‘you know what? Maybe I should become a lawyer. But then, I just want to finish off my CGA’. At that time, I also noticed a lot of my colleagues were dropping out of the 200, 300 and 400 level courses. Another thing that kept me going with Accounting was the Co-op program. This helped me get practical experience from different organizations while studying and that made a difference. Experience helps because I think you have to go out and see for yourself what the world has to offer before making a final decision.

How has helping clients with their growth issues helped you with your own growth and expansion?
I like to see clients grow because it feels good to be part of it and that I've made a positive difference in their lives. Growing in my business is difficult at times because first of all, there are so many of us accountants around. Secondly, there are a lot of people out there who have businesses but they don’t have that much money and resources to really hire an accountant unless they find that they really don’t have time to do their paper work. A lot of my clients mostly come from referrals. If you line up 5 accountants, who do you choose? If you have a friend who says, ‘hey I know this guy’ chances are that you’ll lean towards that guy. It’s a trusted profession that’s why you have to be a trustworthy accountant in order to succeed. Ever since my dad started this business, it’s been growing since.

In one year, we’ll probably lose about 8 clients. Out of 8 clients, 2 would go bankrupt, 3 would move elsewhere, 2 would sell their business to pursue other opportunities and one because of other reasons. For those clients that do actually leave or depart because they plan to go back to Asia or they decide to sell the business for whatever reasons, chances are that a few years later after they’ve taken their break, they come back and look for us. We also grow because we don’t treat clients as business individuals who are capable of paying money for our services but we treat each one as friends. If you sell your business, that doesn’t mean you still can’t see us or go for coffee. Five years later they’ll come back and say, ‘you know what? I’m starting a new line of business. I’m in the shoe business right now’.

So why do you think a lot of your clients start up another business after taking a break?
I believe that once you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur, it’s really hard to go back to working for someone else. If you've always been working for yourself it’s really hard to work under someone else’s philosophy on how to run things. The restaurant owner, or the auto mechanic would not sell their business and then go work for someone else unless they are totally in debt. They go to the bank, borrow some money and then start up again. Their spouse may go work for someone else but they themselves don’t have the mentality. They just can’t listen to other people say, ‘you know what, this how you’re supposed to do this’.

For the average 55-year-old guy he’s not going to go back and start from the foundation and build back up. At that age you look back and you say,’ wow I’ve been through so much. I don’t really want to go back to square one'.

What issues keep occurring with your small business clients?
They don’t like new taxes. They don’t like changes. They like things simple so they don’t like complex cases. They don’t want someone knocking on their door whether it be a Revenue Canada official or a health inspector coming in. They don’t like changes, but who does? They also don’t like price increases because they know that in Vancouver you can’t really change prices. It’s pretty competitive as is. They need to control expenses a lot. Expenses are usually increasing per unit cost whereas their sales per unit are held constant or in some cases, decreasing. I find that a lot of my clients say if they increase their price by a small amount people will go elsewhere. They can’t really do anything but absorb it. It’s different compared to gasoline. If you have a monopoly you can always pass off any cost increase to the consumer. But for these small business owners, it's really hard.