When we developed Accounting Practice Academy, we knew we had the big picture ideas of the workshop, but we looked to firm owner contacts of ours to help us hone in on what people in the industry really wanted in a workshop. We interviewed numerous owners in the early planning stages.
Debbie was an invaluable resource. She helped us understand what challenges members would want to tackle and how we could make this workshop manageable while practitioners worked in their firm, so that they would actually be able to implement changes.
Debbie was our very first member to sign up for Accounting Practice Academy™ when it was being created in 2019. She went through the 8-week virtual workshop in 2020, and has given us a raving testimonial.
Read the transcript of the testimonial below, or watch her video recording here.
Debbie Engle Testimony Transcript:
“This course, the value that it’s going to provide is astronomically more than what you’re paying for it. And it’s difficult to imagine to get people in [Accounting Practice Academy on] the ground level, when they see the price tag, you don’t know the value of it until you’ve taken it!
[…] The changes, this is going to make in my practice, this is going to get me my life back, this is going to allow me to spend a couple of weeks in Hawaii at my condo, and not open my computer, and not feel guilty about it, and not worry about how much work I’m coming back to. I can’t put a price on that.
That’s what I’m excited about. If you’re on the fence about whether to invest the time, the money and the energy in this course, you have to do it, you absolutely have to do it. If nothing else, I think it’s impossible to go through this course and not learn something that is going to be a game changer for you. But if nothing else, you can chalk it up to professional development hours, it’s not time wasted any way you cut it. The return on investment for this program as much like the MasterCard commercials, I really feel you get to the end, and it’s just priceless.
The perspective, the tools that I’ve been provided with for this program are things that I wasn’t going to find anyplace else. [Brannon] brought it all together into this one course, you know, a person could do so much reading and so much self-learning and catch a snippet of something here and a snippet there. But I really felt that this is comprehensive. It’s hands down some of the best money I will ever spend. Because, I really feel like it’s going to get me my life back. It’s teaching me how to run my business smarter, and just have better quality of life overall.
I always felt with APA as I went through the course, it wasn’t one of these things on my list of ‘I’ve got to do this. And I got to get to that’. I was excited to say, ‘okay, what’s in here? And what am I going to learn about, you know, my practice, my habits, and how to run a better practice this week?’ I never had a mentor, you know, and I just really feel like I could have gone places in life if somebody had had been a mentor for me, and that’s what this has given me. It’s unbelievable. APA isn’t like other courses that you take, and you put the book on the shelf. The information is exciting, because you’re immediately relating it to your own practice. And as you’re digging into your own practice, I found I wanted to dig deeper. And so, it just gave me this drive to continue looking and seeing how I could use this, these skill sets within my own practice. I want to change my practice. I want to have a better work life balance, and leaving the book on the shelf and never referring back to it isn’t going to get me there.
It just felt like every module that we looked at, as we dug into it, discussed it with our cohort, I was always wondering what’s coming next. What are we going to dig into next? Just opening up a whole bunch of new ideas. So, it got me excited about my practice again.
I found APA, very useful as a Canadian practitioner. There were American practitioners in the group as well. But our firm structures are the same. At the end of the day, we were all working with small business clients, we’re all working with personal tax return. So, whether it’s a 1040 you’re looking at, or a T1, the structure is very similar in terms of the project time that it takes [and] the amount that you can build on those projects. So the fact that this is a program that’s based out of the US, makes it no less useful for Canadians. It was a fantastic program. I’m so grateful that [Brannon] thought of me when [he was] developing it. I remember that hour we spent on the phone. And I remember some of the things I told [Brannon], [he] nailed it. One of the things I had said to [Brannon] was when we went paperless the modules were nice and short, you know that each piece was you know, the five to not more than 10 minutes. And if I see a video that I’ve got to watch and it’s 40 minutes and just kind of keep pushing it off, right and so [Brannon] nailed it, [Brannon] made everything bite size. And if I can only watch half of the module kind of right now and I can come back to the rest later. [Brannon] put it together so it was really easy for practitioners to use as well.
My name is Debbie Engle. I am a CPA and I operate a public accounting firm in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.”
If you want to see how Accounting Practice Academy can help your accounting firm, check out our website: www.accountingpracticeacademy.com
