Example Role Outline: Brewery Accountant

Thanks so much for investing in the first portion of our interview process with us! Below you’ll find a comprehensive outline of what it would be like to work with us in the role you’ve applied for, including:

How our company, team, and unique remote culture operates.
Our standardized career tracks and compensation methodology.
An overview of our current vision and accountability chart.
The specifics of the role: compensation, benefits, how we evaluate success, onboarding and training.

At this point, if any aspect of that overview does not align with your needs or objectives, we ask that you help us in our process by letting us know so that we can both pursue other opportunities, respecting each other’s time and energy.

First

If you haven’t already, please take a good look through the About section on our website, including our team page to get a flavor for the team dynamic and individual members you may end up working with. Once you’ve done that, please spend some time exploring some additional specifics on how we do things here at SBS below.

What We Do

Fundamentally, we help our brewery clients run and build better businesses. Our mission is to help them grow and help them generate profit, but also to do so in a way that enables them to do what they do best, which is brew delicious beer, to build an amazing culture, and to leave a lasting legacy.

In order to do this we break from the traditional roles that both CPA firms and consulting firms fill. We’ve instead established an integrated system that outsources the back office, completely handles compliance responsibilities, organizes and presents financial data to ownership, and then provides ongoing advisory support so that they can make better business decisions.

We currently offer two service options. Our Benchmarks Assessment is a one-time consulting engagement. Numbers Powered Growth is our ongoing full service offering.

How We Do It

We view our own business as our ultimate product. And because of that, we treat it with the same continuous improvement mindset as we approach our processes and services. It has evolved significantly over time and will continue to do so, all the while guided by a rock-solid commitment to our mission and values.

EOS

In 2019 we realized that in order to maintain our culture, operate according to our values and principles, and best serve our team and clients, we needed a framework in which to tie all of these elements together. We decided to implement EOS (The Entrepreneurial Operating System) within the firm, based on the principles outlined in Traction by Gino Wickman.

Since then we’ve used this process set our vision, identify quarterly objectives, monitor our performance, hire and evaluate performance in accordance with our core values, communicate across the organization with crystal clear clarity on who is responsible for what through our accountability structure, and document and improve our processes all within our own modified version of the EOS framework.

A Calm Company

As an outgrowth of our commitment to playing the long game, we’ve also built the business around many of the principles outlined by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of Basecamp. These are most clearly outlined in their most recent book, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. They’ve summarized this commitment best:

Chaos should not be the natural state at work. Anxiety isn’t a prerequisite for progress. Sitting in meetings all day isn’t required for success. These are all perversions of work — side effects of broken models and follow-the-lemming-off-the-cliff worst practices.

Calm is protecting people’s time an attention.
Calm is about 40 hours of work a week.
Calm is reasonable expectations.
Calm is ample time off.
Calm is smaller.
Calm is a visible horizon.
Calm is meetings as a last resort.
Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second.
Calm is more independence, less interdependence.
Calm is sustainable practices for the long term.
Calm is profitability.

A Remote Firm

Also in 2019, we made the decision to become a fully remote firm. Throughout our work with breweries over the past decade, our service delivery has been entirely remote. And so the foundation of all the technologies we use, our methods of communication, and the structure of the accounting and consulting work that we do, is all done with a remote environment in mind, including our internal operations at the firm.

We do have an official physical location in Jacksonville, Florida; however, aside from Chris, the team is entirely remote and distributed across the country. Because of this, there are a number of important implications for you to consider. Here are a few of them:

Outputs, Not Inputs: You Make Your Schedule

First, this means that we believe in the ability of our team to determine the best way to complete their work. We measure outputs, not inputs. We don’t have time sheets. We don’t track hours. We don’t pay attention to when and where our team works.

What we care about most is that we deliver on what we promise to our clients. That means submitting our deliverables on time, in all respects: accounting, consulting, tax, etc. Because we don’t place constraints on time our business lives and dies by our ability to organize ourselves around these deliverables and ensure each team member takes ownership over their accomplishment.

That also means delivering on our scope of work with a high level of quality, aligning with our core values, making sure that our work always has the client’s best interest in mind, and being available for our clients when appropriate.

Apart from those key responsibilities, it is entirely up to you how you spend your time in order to achieve those objectives. We have well-defined performance expectations for each member of the team, and so long as those expectations are met, we don’t care how long it takes or when it happens. If those are being met, we’re happy. We hope you are happy too.

Responsiveness & Focus: Eliminating The “Urgent”

With the schedule flexibility also comes the responsibility for working with your clients to determine the best way to communicate that best satisfies the relationship and serves the needs of the firm as well.

Availability to us means being able and willing to meet over Zoom, facilitate effective communication, and maintain a sense of continuity so that Small Batch Standard becomes an essential extension of their team. For example, when a client has a question, our goal is to provide a response within 24 hours (excluding weekends), although in the large majority of the cases this happens far more quickly.

At the same time, we also place a high value on uninterrupted blocks of time and focus. We’re not slaves to the inbox. If a client has an urgent need, they have a means of escalating that up the chain and coming in contact with someone in the firm. And so the best combination of these competing values tends to be found in the establishment of procedures and scheduled communication that reduces the need to continuously monitor your inbox and respond to immediate requests.

Ultimately our goal is that nothing is urgent. We’ve built the process, everyone knows what they’re doing, and so emergencies are few and far between.

Operating As A Team

As a contributor to SBS, you’ll need to have individual accountability for your own objectives. We also expect that you’ll accept accountability for your teammates’ performance as well. So for example, just because your book of clients or projects are in good shape, does not absolve you of the responsibility to help other members of the organization succeed as well.

What that means in practice is things like: being available for our weekly team meetings, being accessible through our communication channels on Front and Podio, and having an overall willingness to share knowledge, be of assistance, and go out of your way to ensure the success of your teammates.

In order to facilitate this, we have open lines of communication across the company and expect them to be utilized. You can contact anyone within SBS, regardless of role and hierarchy as appropriate, keeping in mind, again, that we want to be respectful of each other’s attention and focus, which are critical elements to success in a remote environment.

The Challenge of Self-Management

Now there is a caveat to all of this, which is, that this type of work is uncomfortable for most individuals, particularly those coming from a traditional CPA firm. This type of work will likely introduce a whole array of new challenges that you’ll have to adapt to. So while we support and foster what’s needed to succeed in our remote environment, much of the onus will be on you as an individual contributor to the firm to work through the personal productivity set up that is best for you.

This requires self-discipline. This requires habits and routines. This requires organization and scheduling. This requires the ability to balance priorities. It requires the ability to independently problem solve, to reach out for help quickly when you need it, but also come up with solutions independently with clients and execute on those without oversight. And all without the safety net of a manager in an office environment looking over your shoulder.

Our fundamental belief is that this way of working is far superior to the standard nine-to-five, commute to a cubicle farm, put in your hours, work model, but we do want to acknowledge the differences and the challenges that remote work introduces and be cognizant of those as you are considering whether this is the right fit..

Careers & Compensation

Because our team operates on the strength of knowledge, expertise, self management, and self development of independently competent individuals we want to lean into that strength in the way that we structure the career progression and pay scale for each person in the company.

Principles

Here are the principles that underlie this system:

We value learning, growth, collaboration and skill development over hierarchy.

Because we require each member of the team to be fully capable of self-directed work, we don’t need a middle layer of “managers” in order to fulfill our mission and commitment to our clients. This means our org chart is flatter than most, and so the career track for the large majority of the team will be to go deep (i.e. more knowledge, expertise, capability) rather than going broad (i.e. “managing others”). This also means that the biggest contribution any one member of the team can make to the firm is to bring more skill and knowledge to the table, each addition elevating our performance as a group. This is antifragility at its best.

We value long-term commitment over short-term accomplishments.

Our commitment to playing the long game starts with our commitment to investing in and developing our people. That means that our focus is less on any one person’s ability to come in and have “immediate impact” or accomplish short-term objectives, and more on progress, commitment, improvement, and long-term potential. That also means that while we measure and hold ourselves accountable to the results that matter most to us and our clients, we don’t live and die by those metrics and each person’s contributions are evaluated within the overall context of their role within the team.

Great pay for great work.

We don’t set pay based on characteristics that don’t matter: what you made in the past, what we can “get away with,” how often you ask, how well you negotiate, standard “percentages,” etc. All of those things lead to arbitrary and unequal pay for the same level of contribution. We do set pay based on the characteristics that do matter: position (and its market value), level of mastery, and longevity with the firm. All of which aim to ensure each member of the team feels they are compensated well and can focus on great work.

Details

Career Tracks

We’ve structured four different career tracks for our cornerstone positions within the company. There will of course be modifications and customized positions that fall in and around these, but these are the standard four currently:

Accountant
Tax Specialist
Consultant
Brand Specialist

Each career track benchmarks compensation against a standardized job role and 3rd party market-based pay scale. The specific responsibilities will differ, but the general expectations of the role are similar.

Mastery Level

Within each position we’ve established four mastery levels that represent the progression of expertise development one might expect with a consistent commitment to growth and improvement over the course of their time with the SBS team. Each level roughly corresponds to the following (however there is some variation within each position):

Level 1: The entry point into the position. This individual can fulfill all of the expectations of the role and provide significant value to the firm, but is still learning rapidly and has plenty of room for growth.
Level 2: An advanced version of the position that represents a baseline level of brewery-specific knowledge and application of skills. Generally achieved within 2-3 years with the firm, Level 2 employees contribute meaningfully to the improvement of the firm and serve as leaders for clients and other team members.
Level 3: Significant mastery achieved. These individuals are experts within their roles and can handle the standard responsibilities with ease. Beyond that they have taken on significant process ownership, improvement projects, mentorship, and training responsibilities.
Level 4: The pinnacle of mastery within the role. Level 4 employees are inextricably linked to the firm, and their contributions represent a serious evolution of our firm’s capabilities within their area of expertise. They lead the way in the development of new expertise and set the standard for how SBS operates.

Each mastery level also benchmarks against a 3rd party pay scale and represents a significant increase in compensation to go along with the expertise achieved and responsibilities taken on.

Additionally, this is by no means an expectation that each member of the team will want to follow the trajectory laid out here. Pursuing a different career track, aiming for a customized position, or looking towards something different altogether are all perfectly valid options. Remaining steady and putting in consistent, high-quality work at a particular level of mastery may also be the right fit, and that’s great with us! These career tracks are simply meant to outline how we evaluate mastery in a way that aligns with the SBS mission.

Evaluation & Pay Adjustments

Throughout the year, each team member and their supervisor will use their positional criteria to evaluate their progress and establish a customized development plan to work towards the next level of mastery at a pace appropriate for their career goals. We’ll use both objective (scorecard, client feedback, rocks, etc.) and subjective (skill and knowledge level, representation of SBS values, team contributions, etc.) to guide us. Feedback and guidance should not be arbitrarily limited to an annual or quarterly review, so this process happens on a continuous basis through regular communication, check-ins, and individual forum sessions.

Once a year (January) we’ll update all salaries to match the market value at the level we’ve matched for that position and mastery level. So for example, if accounting pay has increased 5% generally, you’ll see a 5% increase. If, for whatever reason, the market value of your position drops, we’ll hold salaries steady until it increases again.

Additionally, twice a year (January, July) SBS leadership will make mastery level promotions as appropriate and establish a plan for transitioning into those new responsibilities. Promoted team members’ pay will be adjusted for their next pay cycle to the market-matched salary established in January for that mastery level.

Earning More

So to summarize, within this setup there are three ways in which each member of the team can earn more:

The market value of a position increases (salary update).
Growth and development of skill, expertise, responsibility, contribution, and leadership (promotion).
Longevity and consistency with SBS, contributing to our overall mission and success as a firm (profit share).

Our hope is that this simplifies and clarifies pay across the company, so that we can all pour our focus into what each of us do best and share in the success we achieve together.

The Vision

Our ultimate goal with the business is to do more of what we already do, and do it better over time, aiming for as much impact on the craft industry as we can reasonably manage.

More specifically, we believe we can serve somewhere between 5-10% of craft breweries that fall within our target market (breweries producing between 1,000 and 30,000 barrels per year). Right now we work with just under 1% of that total. And so our goal is to both continue and increase our growth trajectory over the next 5-10 years in order to achieve that aim, effectively increasing the business by 10x.

Along the way we intend to:

Both maintain and strengthen our commitment to our core values.
Grow all aspects of client service: consulting, accounting, tax, administration.
Continue to build out our brand and product teams with an emphasis on solidifying our market presence through research, publications, and thought leadership; and developing technology as a core competency.
Expand to further emphasize and serve our distillery portfolio.
Have a whole bunch of fun working with great people!

The Accountability Chart

Here’s the most recent iteration of our Accountability Chart for you to reference, which hopefully gives a sense of how we’re structured and where you’ll fit into the organization.

We’re happy to answer any follow up questions you have on the details of our structure, roles, or individuals within the organization.

The Role: Brewery Accountant

To recap, the main objective of this role is to lead our outsourced accounting engagements in accordance with the SBS Core Values.

In this role you’d report to either Abbie Foster or Chris Farmand in the Brewery Team Lead seat and work primarily with our Brewery Accounting Associates, as well as the Consultants and Tax Specialist within your Brewery Team.

If we end up extending an offer to you for the position, below are the specifics you’ll see:

Compensation

Salary: $XX,XXX annual salary, payable bi-weekly. Future salary updates and promotion opportunities in accordance with our Career Tracks & Compensation documentation.
Profit Share: At 2 years of continuous service, you’ll be added to the annual profit share pool, in which a percentage of our annual profits will be distributed to qualifying members of the team based on points. The 2-year tenure starts you off with 5 points, with one point added for each subsequent year of service.

Benefits

Medical Insurance: We offer the equivalent of a “silver” level medical insurance plan administered through Gusto (provider depends on your state). We’ll cover 75% of your individual premium. If you choose to enroll, you’ll cover 25% of your individual premium as well as any dependents you’d like to add to the plan. Open enrollment is in November each year.
Dental, Vision: Similar to the above setup, we also offer 75% individual coverage of a standard dental and vision plan if you decide to enroll.
SIMPLE IRA: We’ll match payroll deferred contributions up to 3% of your salary. You’ll be eligible to participate after 6 months of employment.
Tech Stipend: We’ll also provide a $1,500 one-time hardware stipend paid to reimburse you for hardware required (computer, dual monitor, separate keyboard, separate mouse, etc.) for remote work. This is a one-time payment. You’ll be eligible for reimbursement after 6 months of employment.
Time Off: You’ll receive 3 weeks of Paid Time Off (PTO) at the beginning of each calendar year to be used at your discretion. We also observe a standard 10-day annual holiday schedule, with about half of those days observed as an office (officially closed) and the other half as flex holidays to be taken at your discretion. We don’t officially track this, so we ask that you do that on your end, and use your discretion in taking time off (let us know ahead of time, plan around any deliverables that need to be completed, let your team and clients know, etc.) Half days, appointments, and other unforeseen circumstances aren’t meant to be included here – this time is intended to truly be “time off” from work to unplug and recharge.
Schedule Flexibility: The only requirements we have are that you are reachable during normal business hours and available for team and client meetings. Otherwise, the way in which you spend your time to hit your performance targets is entirely up to you, and we encourage you to build a schedule that best fits your working style and responsibilities. We’re here to assist you in that process.
Personal and Team Development: In addition to our overall continuous learning focus, we also provide support for personal development in the form of expense coverage for continuing education (books, courses, training, certifications, etc.) as well as experiential learning (brewery visits, industry events and conferences, etc.). These are handled on a case-by-case basis as applicable to your role and objectives that support our mission as a company. Each year we also meet in person for an annual retreat with all team members, typically a few days over the summer (this past year we met up in June). No work. Lots of fun. Lots of client beer. All travel is reimbursable.

Evaluating Success

As mentioned above, we use a combination of both objective and subjective measures to evaluate success. Here’s what some of those will look like in your role:

Objective Measures

On-time delivery of accounting deliverables (monthly close)
Accounting Client Load Score (workload)
Rock project on-time delivery

Subjective Measures

Do you have or are you developing the skill level required to execute your responsibilities at a high level?
Are our clients satisfied with their monthly close and overall level of accounting support?
Are you representing the SBS values in your work and interactions?
Do the Consultants and Tax Specialist on your team feel fully supported from an accounting perspective?
Are you developing and applying brewery-specific knowledge?
Are you learning and furthering your accounting skill set?
Are you happy in your role and with how things are progressing?

Onboarding and Training

In your first 90 days in your role, the main objective will be to learn the SBS culture, and establish a baseline for your ongoing work that we can build on. This will include:

Learning the SBS systems, workflow, and communication methods.
Attending all relevant team meetings and individual training sessions.
Training under your Team Lead, Accountants, and Tax Specialist to learn our current accounting and tax processes.
Taking on 2-4 brewery clients initially, then 4-8 brewery clients with support as you progress.
A 90-day performance review to recap and begin your transition into the full role.

In your second 90 days, the focus will shift towards building competence and autonomy, and ramping up to your full responsibilities. This will include:

Continuing to train under your Team Lead, Accountants, and the rest of your Brewery Team.
Taking on additional brewery clients with some support to fill out your client portfolio.

Finally, at the 180-day mark our goal will be to have you fully self-directed with support as needed. From there you can begin to take on some of the more advanced responsibilities that go along with the role.

Next Steps

Hopefully this gives you a solid basis to evaluate whether working with us in this role is an appropriate fit for your personality, working style, and career goals. Of course if you have any follow up questions, we’re happy to answer them via email or during one of our upcoming calls.

Thanks again and speak to you soon!

– The SBS Team