Offshoring, Tech, and Bettering Lives
With Anshul Agrawal
Half of all offshoring relationships collapse within five years, and Anshul Agrawal has spent his career figuring out why. Randy Crabtree sits down with the founder of June15 Consulting on Episode 281 of The Unique CPA to unpack the real difference between renting offshore talent and owning it outright, as well as how that distinction shapes everything from culture clashes to client trust. Anshul explains why a “family emergency” means something entirely different in India than it does in the U.S., why firms chronically underestimate how long it takes an offshore hire to reach full productivity, and how AI will serve to expand the offshore talent pool, rather than shrink it. He reveals heartwarming anecdotes about everyone winning in these offshoring arrangements: what happened when one client’s new hires gave him back his evenings with his kids, and what it looked like to double an employee’s salary and watch him buy his first car. It’s a conversation about building teams that actually work for everyone, wherever they’re located.
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Today’s guest is Anshul Agrawal. Anshul is the founder and CEO of June15 Consulting, where he helps accounting firms build their own offshore teams in countries like India, Argentina, and the Philippines. Instead of renting talent through an agency, he advocates for direct ownership, giving firms greater control over our culture, quality, security and long-term success. Anshul, welcome to The Unique CPA.
Thank you, Randy. Thank you so much for having me. Excited about our conversation.
Oh, yeah. It’ll be, well, just the fact that right in that intro we talked about culture fits well with things we talk about on The Unique CPA. But before we even get into any of that, anything I missed, anything you want to add to what you’re doing out there, in the profession? And then we’ll get into some questions about offshoring, in a second.
No, I think your description was perfect. Like my goal right now is more around education, because there’s so many misconceptions, so much misinformation, so many assumptions around offshoring. So for the past year, I’ve just been on this mission to educate, educate, educate.
Nice. And now part of that, you’ve been, you’ve had a handful of articles in Accounting Today, at least that’s where I’ve seen them, if you had them other places as well?
So primarily Accounting Today. So that was an amazing moment. I’ve got to be honest, right? You don’t, you submit articles everywhere, but then you don’t know if it’s going to get accepted. But then having it get accepted by none other than Accounting Today and not just one, like several, that just feels amazing.
Nice. Well, it’s, and you’re educating obviously through the articles and education you just mentioned is a passion of yours. So let’s just jump right into educating then, because I just introduced, you know, offshoring and direct ownership or, you know, as I mentioned there, like renting or just outsourcing, you know, is the employer of those employees and you’re renting them from them. So we hear offshoring a lot, but I don’t know if people really understand what that means, because the way you look at it is probably different. The way, you know, you’re looking at direct ownership offshoring and others are doing it another way. So I guess define what this offshoring technically is, and then I suppose if we want to go further, the difference between direct ownership and outsourcing.
Yeah, so offshoring simply put is when you have some of your work done outside your primary country of business. So we’re talking U.S. right now. So if you hire somebody, either like an entity, agency, a person, to do some of your work that’s offshoring, simply put in the context of accounting. Most offshoring is happening either in India, Philippines, or now Latin America. So if you have an agency, or if you have somebody outside the U.S. who’s helping you either with accounting, tax preparation, employee benefit plans, audits, that’s really offshoring.
Now, offshoring can be done in two ways. There’s a rental model or there’s an ownership model. The rental model is what people think of; that’s the most popular model when people think outsourcing, offshoring, that’s the rental model. What that means is that you hire an agency or a BPO or a firm outside the U.S. and they assign resources to you. So let’s take tax preparation because that’s where most offshoring happens. So let’s say you want tax preparation done. You find an agency in India, and they’re like, sure, there’s this person A, he can help you during busy season for as many tax returns you want prepared. That’s one rental model. The other model is you go with an agency and you tell them, well, I need somebody all year around. So they assign two or three people to you, they work with you and only you, all year round. But it’s rental because you can only work with the resource as long as you are engaged with the agency. So you’re basically renting resources. It could be per hour per return, per month, but you are renting those resources. And when people think of offshoring, that’s what they think of.
But the other model, that’s something that I’ve been championing a lot, is the ownership model. So if you look at the top 50 firms, they don’t go out and rent. They go and build their own offices. They’ll register a local entity, and they’ll take care of everything themselves. So that’s the ownership model. But there’s two ways to do the ownership model. First is fully independent, which is what all the bigger companies are doing. But now small and mid-size firms can do the ownership model as well, but with a lot of support. So support is, they work with a consultant like me that helps them through everything. I handhold people through everything from strategy, recruiting, culture. So I mean, we’ll talk more about culture, that’s one of the biggest reasons offshoring fails. Compliance, HR, so they have this full support where they get to own the employee relationship. What that means is they could get rid of me, but they could still continue to work with that person. But they have a ton of support, they don’t need to register an entity, they won’t take a lot of compliance liability, or they can do fully independent where they’re doing everything. So that’s the basic difference between the rental model and the ownership model. It’s about who owns the employee relationship.
Got it.
Was that clear?
That works for me! You’re good at this education thing, yes. That worked for me. But one thing you did say in there that I heard is that sometimes these things just don’t work correctly. And I’m guessing it’s a planning issue or just expectation issue. But I have read, I think in one of your Accounting Today articles where you said that roughly half of outsourcing relationships fail within five years. And so, why is it that these fail? Whose fault is it and what can we do to make sure that this is more successful than the short term relationship?
Yeah, I mean, so if we want to look at it from a lens of whose fault it is, I mean, it’s usually both the vendor and the forum, but most of the times it’s the accounting firm that did not do it right, and it’s usually that they didn’t educate themselves about what could work with them. I meet so many managing partners from small to big firms who just don’t know enough about offshoring. They don’t know about the different models. They believe that, you know, rental is the only way to go. Or they believe that if I do ownership, I’m going to have to register an entity. They don’t look beyond India, right? They don’t set expectations internally. There’s so many things that need to happen before you actually start offshoring. And a lot of firms don’t do that. Like it’s education, it’s making assumptions about what would work. It’s not setting expectations internally that this is not going to be plug and play. No matter what model you use, it’ll take a couple of seasons to get it right. People don’t look into culture as much. Cultural differences are big. The way business gets done in America is so different than how it gets done in the Philippines, India, Argentina. I mean, forget about these countries. I live in Canada. The way business gets done in Canada is so different than it is in the U.S. So any firm that’s looking at offshoring, they need to look at educating themselves on these cultural differences. And then there’s training materials, right? A lot of times firms would hire entry level graduates and then focus on training them. And I’m like, why? There’s people who are already trained who can hit the ground running day one. So it’s just, I could go on and on, but there’s just a lot of these small things. But it starts with education: educate yourself so you know what you’re getting into.
Got it. You did, and I’d like to expand on this. You just talked about the cultural differences even from Canada to the U.S., but obviously India or Philippines or wherever we’re going. So the managing partners, the leaders of the firms, need to understand those cultural differences. And that’s probably an area where there is lacking. Like my assistant is in Mexico and that’s an outsource. And it was interesting, when we first started working together, I had been part of a program that the firm I was going through where she came from, we’re just talking about the differences, like when somebody in Mexico says this, you know, I may hear this, but this is what they mean. I’ll be there in five minutes, means sometime today I’ll be there. You know what I mean? Like, but those are the types of things. So what are the biggest cultural misunderstandings that you think are out there between, you know, whatever source of employee you want to cite, and the firms, and then how do the firms, I guess have to educate themselves on being able to understand those cultural differences?
So the first one, so the first one I’ll, the first example I’ll share is around asking questions. So in India and Philippines, culturally, it’s looked down upon to ask questions, to ask your boss questions, especially in like an open setting. Whereas here in North America, if somebody’s asking questions, that’s a sign of engagement. So what I’ve seen happens a lot is you’ll be on a conference call with your offshore employees. At the end of the call, you’d be like, well, does anyone have any questions? No one’s going to say anything. And you’d be like, I killed it! This was great. You’re going to hang up, and after a few minutes, you’re going to get an email or a message on teams that, hey, I didn’t quite get this, and that’s going to happen so many times. It’ll frustrate you, like, why aren’t people asking questions like, what’s happening? So that’s a cultural difference. We’re expecting people in India and Philippines to ask questions, but they’re hesitant or shy to ask questions. So I train everyone that it’s on the manager to create an atmosphere and to drill into the offshore team’s minds that it’s okay to ask questions, that I reward people who ask questions. When I’m working with my offshore employees, like I would pick and choose. I’d be like, hey, employee number one, do you have any questions or can you explain to me what do you think I’ve asked you to do? So it’s those things that add up.
The other cultural difference specifically with India is family emergencies. So I see you were at the video Evolve, right? I had somebody come up to me and she was like, we have a large team in India, and it feels like every week somebody has a family emergency. So how does that happen? Like, I’ve not had an emergency in the last 10 years, but like every week I’m batting like four to five emails about family emergencies. So now she was getting frustrated, so what I told her was, especially in India, what happens is that your definition of family is really big. So here it’d be like me and my wife and my kids, but in India it’s like your uncle, your cousin that you haven’t met in two years, everyone’s family. And the threshold of what qualifies as an emergency is a lot lower. Somebody’s about to miss their flight and they can’t find a cab, and I this is like something that happened to me and you’ve got to drive them. That’s a family emergency. But here a family emergency is, I don’t know, like medical emergency or like an accident. So it’s those cultural issues. So the India team needs to know that what you need to say is not “family emergency,” you need to say, well, I have to run a very important chore. And what the U.S. team needs to understand is that it’s not really an emergency, it’s just like a chore. So it’s stuff like that comes up.
Got it. Got it. So let’s go a step further then, ’cause that’s cultural differences and how they look at things. Well, the other thing is when I look at culture, I just talk about what our internal, almost our promise to our employees, we’re going to be a people first culture, we’re going to, you know, appreciate the diversity we have in our organization, we’re going to promote innovation and creativity and all this. When we have people from different cultural backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, whatever we want to say, how do we make them all feel as if they’re one team, that we’re all working together, especially when we’re remote as well. So from that standpoint of the company culture and the one team-ness, especially when you’re in different time zones and all that, how do you get everybody to be working together as one team?
The way you align cultures, the way you instill your culture in a foreign remote team, the first thing you need to do is make sure your goals and incentives are fully aligned with their goals and incentives. What you need to do is get rid of the middlemen for that. So that’s why I advocate direct ownership because there’s no one in the middle. There’s no agency boss telling your employee that, “I don’t care what the client says, you have to do 20 returns or like 50 returns this week,” something like that. So you need to make sure that there’s no one else calling the shots. That’s a big one. And then the other thing is, you need to make sure that you’re treating them the same way as your own team, right? So if you want somebody to feel connected, you need to invite them to your all firm meetings, you need to make sure that you provide them with the same benefits, the same help, and you need to make sure you also hold them accountable the same way you hold your U.S. team accountable.
So I’ll give you an example: A lot of times when offshore employees aren’t performing as well, they get more leeway. “Maybe they’re new. Maybe I’m not understanding their culture. Maybe I’ll give them another month or so to figure this out.” Whereas in the U.S. you wouldn’t do that. So you have to make sure that your rules are the same, both on the good side and on the constructive side. That’s when the employee starts to feel that, no, this really is my boss, and they really value these things that they’re saying. So here are some things you need to do: You should assign a buddy. So it can’t be like Randy, the boss, it has to be somebody else who knows Randy, who knows how things work, somebody that your employee can go and complain to about Randy that, oh man, you know? Sort of like a friend. So every offshore employee should have a buddy that they talk like once a month. They don’t necessarily talk about work. They get to know each other a bit. Travel is a big part of it. Depending on the size of the team, if you are able to travel to go and meet them, or if you are able to get at least the high performers here, it’s those things that help you see each other’s culture and then find common ground. But those are some things you can do.
Yep. And I completely agree with those. I want to pivot a little bit. I want to go on to like, now we talked about what this is and the culture end of it, and communication, but let’s talk about like managing success now, making sure that this is not one of those failures that you know, happens too often based on that quote you had. But I like the fact when I was reading your articles, that you actually encourage firms to measure the success. So are there some KPIs or something that you suggest people look at to watch to make sure this is aligned with what your expectations are?
Yeah, so I mean, there’s a few. So the first one I tell all accounting firms to start doing is to start tracking your margin on every engagement. Because no matter what your model is, you want to be able to track the impact on margins. So most accounting firms now, they’re looking at offshoring, not just in terms of capacity, but in terms of how can it help me grow? How can it help me improve profitability? How can it help me better compete with my PE backed competitors? So margin is a big part of that. If you’re offshoring, even if you’re not doing it for margin, you should be tracking that because that gives you some sense of, okay, where do I stand now? Is there any flexibility in my pricing? Can I provide more value to my client for the same price I’m charging? That’s one part of it.
Second, in terms of operations, you should look at turnaround time. So if we talk about tax returns, like what are your expectations? When you are having somebody in the U.S. prepare those returns, how much time does it take them? And ideally your offshore team in a couple of years should get to the same amount of turnaround time. So that is something very important that you need to track. Then you should also look at the error rate or rework rate, whatever you want to call it. Now that you have a team, they’re doing work, when it’s coming back, does it meet your expectations? Are you spending a lot of time reworking it? Are you finding a lot of errors? So it’s important to track that as well. So that, again, would give you that, okay, this person’s fast, but they’re not accurate, right? So again, the idea is you want to get to a place where it’s similar, if not the same, as the team in the U.S.
You should also look at utilization rate, so utilization rate compared to your U.S. team. So most accounting firms don’t do that. They assume that from day one, their offshore team would be as productive as their U.S. team. Not going to happen. So if your U.S. team is whatever their utilization rate is, your offshore team for the first year would be about 65% compared to the U.S. team. So if the U.S. team, for example, is doing a hundred, the offshore team, first year would be around 65%. So you should benchmark that 65 is a very good number, I have that on good authority. So if you’re doing better, great. But if you’re not, something to keep in mind. Year two, it should get to 80%, and by year three it should be the same as the U.S. There’s like quite a few more metrics, but these are some metrics that will help you just benchmark your performance and help you understand whether or not your offshore team is doing well.
So I think that’s great advice. I think the one thing that was really interesting is be patient: track these things, and you’ll see this steady progression as if you hired somebody new out of college as well too, it’s going to take them a year or two to get to a certain spot. But that’s, I assume, advice that you tell them is patience.
Absolutely.
Track these things and, you know, give it. Don’t think that we are going to get to this, you know, a hundred percent utilization in one month. It’s going to be a progression, but you will see that progression.
You will see that progression. It’s very important to be patient because we always believe that the offshore team needs to get to where we are, but you also need to improve a lot of things about how you are working. Maybe you don’t have the right training materials. Maybe you don’t have the right feedback processes in place. So every firm has cracks, right? There’s things that you’re doing well that there are things that you’re not doing well. Anytime you offshore those cracks come to the surface and firms just aren’t prepared for that. Engagement letters, something as simple as, if you’re offshoring tax work, you need to get that IRS’s 7216 form signed. And you need to get that signed before you send your client’s work offshore. Now that changes the engagement letter process because a lot of accountants, what they do is, they’ll have an engagement letter, but they’ll work on the tax returns and they’ll not worry about getting it signed, and when you send that invoice, you’ll also get that engagement letter. I know my accountant does that. But when you’re offshoring, that doesn’t work. You have to have the engagement letter signed before. So it’s these small things that people don’t realize that will change. And that’s where the education part comes in. Like if you talk to someone, you educate yourself, you’ll know what things change. And that’s why you have to be patient.
Perfect. Great advice. Let’s do another pivot then, because this is a thing you hear all the time now: hey, AI’s going to replace offshoring or it’s going to, you know, reduce the amount of employees we need, you know, so what do you see with AI? Is it impacting offshoring? Is it going to increase it, is it going to decrease it? Is it just going to change the services that we’re offshoring? What’s your take on this?
So I’ll share two points of view: One is what most people would agree with, and one what most people, even in my industry won’t. Slightly controversial. I think so the normal take is I think AI will supercharge offshoring, because a lot of clients that I have that already have teams in India, in the Philippines, who are doing a lot of AI. None of them has reduced their team size in India or the Philippines. What they have changed is what the offshore team is working on, similar to how they have changed what the U.S. team is working on. So both teams are now not doing like data entry or basic tax prep, the offshore team is now doing more complex tax returns, preparation. They’re doing more returns preparation. They’ve moved on to reviewing simpler returns. So everybody has sort of been upgraded. AI actually has reduced a lot of the issues that come with offshoring. So I don’t have that app right now, but there’s an app that’ll make me sound exactly like an American. It takes away my accent. So think busy season, you have a great offshore employee, but sometimes you just can’t understand that person. It’s one click and that person will sound like Randy!
Wow.
So it’s taking away a lot of those issues. The other thing is cultural problems. So I was contacted by a tech firm that said that they could create a layer that would go over emails, where if you’re about to say something that could be culturally inappropriate, or your offshore team is about to say something, it’ll give you a warning. So they sort of wanted my input on what those inappropriate things would be. AI is going to fix a lot of those things. There’s firms that are working on, I actually want to create something like this, like a ChatGPT-like interface. So your offshore team doesn’t have to wait till the next morning till you wake up to get their questions answered. They could just type in and they’ll get the answer. So with all of those things, right, offshoring becomes more attractive, not less attractive. I’m seeing no change in the demand for offshoring. What’s changing how people want to use offshore teams.
So that’s the common and agreed upon opinion. So I’ll also share the controversial opinion. So I believe AI would make offshoring cheaper. Let’s take India. Maybe 10% of India’s working population can speak English. Out of that 10%, maybe 4 or 5% are fluent enough to work with a U.S. firm. Now I have a bookkeeper in India. She’s part-time and I pay her about $200 a month. That’s a good salary for her, she’s very happy and she’s outstanding, but she doesn’t speak English. Works for me because we can talk in Hindi, which is the local language. But now if I were to hire somebody who spoke good English, I would have to pay them $1,500 to $1,600 per month. So with AI coming into picture, a lot of these folks, not just in India, Africa, Latin America, who maybe don’t speak English well enough or don’t speak English at all, AI is going to solve that problem. That’s going to like 10x the supply of accountants. Or professionals. Now you have, when you go to India, you’ll see 10x more people. So that’s going to put downward pressure on salaries that’ll increase and boost our margins here. Not everybody agrees with that, and I get a lot of crap for saying that, but I think that is where this is heading: AI is going to bring so many more people into the fold that, especially for the western world, for all of us here, it’s going to be a big boom. Until our job gets replaced by AI and kind takes over everything that’s different until that happens.
Until that happens. Till we’re all on, what is it? Universal basic income?
UBI, yeah.
Alright, so let’s, well, let’s talk about the future then. You know, we’ve talked about all this and what it is and the culture and everything. Great information you’ve shared so far, but let’s talk about, you know, whatever, 10, 15 years from now. Forget about the fact that AI is going to take over all our jobs because it’s not, but we’ll assume that’s not going to happen. Do you think we’ll still be talking offshore and onshore, or is this just going to be our team? You know, instead of identifying, you know, this group that I have in India as our offshore team, that’s just our team. Or, you think these terms are still going to exist, offshore, onshore. How? How do you see this impacting the future?
I’m sure the terms will still exist, but I think in real life, in practice, it’s going to be every firm is going to be a global firm, and every solo practitioner will also sort of become global, because especially if I have my way with direct ownership, even a one person firm or a two partner firm now has their own team in different parts of the world. So when you start to build your accounting firm with people from all across the world, I don’t think in practice we’re going to think about onshore and offshore. It’s going to be one team, one firm, and the roles would be divided based on time zone or competency, client comfort, things like that. But I don’t think we’re going to see as much of a division between onshore offshore, near shore. It’s all going to blend into one.
Got it. And then a major theme of, I guess, me, about this podcast and the things that I love talking about is, you know, improving the lives of people in the accounting profession. I want to talk about, just wrap up this whole conversation with how offshoring is accomplishing that, but not just for U.S. teams, I mean global teams. Because you know, I’m not going to say, oh, I just want my U.S. teams’ lives to be better, and I don’t care the impact of whoever we’re offshoring to. That makes no sense. We’re all people, we all want to have great lives. So how is offshoring having this positive impact on the lives of people in accounting globally?
So let’s look at two measures. Work-life balance and income. So work-life balance. Accountants here even now are like burned out. Like every accountant I talk to, they’re like just tired. Given the control freaks, they’re not very…
You got it!
Yeah. It’s not easy to get them to a place where they’re to give up. Becomes more popular as you have models that give accountants more control, they’re able to breathe again. They’re able to, you know, have a slightly better busy season. They’re able to spend more time on the business as opposed to just in the business. One of my clients, right, he just told me after the busy season was over, he emailed to thank me and he was like, I was so afraid that it was coming to a point where my kids wouldn’t recognize who dad was. So he’s like, if it wasn’t for the three people that we hired in India, I don’t know what I would’ve done. So that’s a tangible example I have in front of me where it’s helping people improve their work-life balance, improve their mental health, you know, focus on something else other than just the deadlines. So that’s the one way.
And let’s also talk about the global side. American firms, even accounting firms, our culture is much better than most firms in offshore locations. So things like, you know what you said, right? When you think about improving everybody’s life, you were like, I don’t want to just think U.S., I want to think everyone. Most firms think like that. They’re not just looking at improving their lives here. They’re like, well, how can I help you? How can I make sure you are living a better life too? So the work-life balance helps there as well. Most local firms would have people work six days a week. That’s pretty much the norm in India. But anytime, like I see a lot of employees move to direct ownership because they’re like, well, I get two days free now. I can like spend time with family, I can play pickleball, whatever. So outside of that too, accountants, even when they’re offshore, they want to make sure that they don’t burn out their offshore team, right? So they make sure that they give them good benefits, they make sure that they do the same things that they do for the U.S. team. So work-life balance is improving on both sides. I love that part. I absolutely love that part. So for example, health insurance, right? I tell all of my clients that, hey, you should spend $800 to give health insurance for your India employees. Now $800 for a year will buy you premium health insurance for four people in India.
Wow.
Yeah! So it’s a small amount for us, but it goes a long way. Things like that. And then the second thing is income. Accountants make more money when they have a global team because, well now they know that they have increased capacity, now they’re increasing their margins, they’re able to offer new services. So a lot of times, like CAS is becoming big now, bookkeeping is a big part of it. So earlier bookkeeping wasn’t financially feasible, right? But now with AI and offshore, it’s profitable for everyone. So not only are you making more money on your current work, you’re able to offer new service lines, you’re able to take on more clients. So that’s the money part. The money part helps the global resources as well. So we talk about, you know, you read about India and China, you read about millions of people coming out of poverty, but what does that look like? So I’ll give you one example. We had one person for our client in India, and this person was sort of like the office concierge. He was a mix of like a housekeeper to somebody to man the reception desk, he did all of that. So in his previous job, he was getting paid $100-$150 per month, but he was working crazy hours. He had zero health insurance. But when we hired him, we doubled his salary because that felt fair, we gave him health insurance, so he was able to do two things: This was the first time in his life he had health insurance for his elderly parents. And like, how awesome is that? And he was able to buy a used car. So he actually sent me a photo that like, hey, I got a used car. So that’s what it looks like. That’s the impact American firms are making when they hire people offshore. So to your question, that’s how it’s improving life on both sides.
Which is great. Alright. That’s what I wanted to hear. That this is not just a trading our health for someone else’s, our burnout for someone else’s, which is good. We’re going to go to a couple final questions, not about offshoring anymore. This was a great conversation. I appreciate the education, but, so when you personally are, let’s say, not helping organizations build these global teams, what are you passionate about? What really, you know, recharges you when you’re outside of work?
That’s a good question. I have been guilty of working like accountants: in an attempt to work with accountants, I started to work like accountants. So the last few months, like I experienced the kind of burnout accountants talk about, but I’m doing two things. I try to spend more time with my daughter, like just playing whatever she wants, being goofy. That really is the best way for me to recharge. That’s getting more difficult ’cause she is 10 now and she’s, everything I do embarrasses her now. Everything has become very difficult in the last six months, like we have gone from playing and everything to, she’s just like, “you’re lame.” So that’s a big part of how I recharge. The other is I’ve been trying to read more books, so that has been very helpful. I don’t read self-help books, or I don’t read autobiographies or biographies. I read books that I enjoy, so I love reading books about how people lived or live in different countries, different times, different situations. So I love historical fiction, I love sci-fi, I love post-apocalyptic whatever. My wife doesn’t get it, but I love that. So I just finished a book, The CEO Rust, I believe, and it’s about how when AI become too advanced, we’re not able to differentiate between a person and an AI. Somebody fights a case in the U.S. Supreme Court and gets an AI U.S. citizenship. And what happens after that, when an AI becomes a person, or gets recognized as a person. It was an amazing book. Not the result humans would want to see, but was a good book nonetheless. So that’s what I do to recharge.
Nice. Well that, those are great answers. You’ve got things, I was doing a presentation earlier this week where I asked that question to the, it was a small group, 20 people, and one person was slowly retiring, but the problem he was having and he was hoping we could help solve it during this presentation was, he wakes up and he just doesn’t know what to do with his time. And so he ends up, you know, looking at emails or anything like that. And so that’s why I asked that question. ’cause I want to make sure everybody has this outside of work passion, this thing that they can lean on that they love doing, that’s going to energize them. And that doesn’t have to be looking at my emails all day long or doing a tax return. So great information there. And then the last question. So if people want to hear more about, you know, what you’re doing with June15 Consulting, or your articles or, and I didn’t even bring this up, but you have a podcast too, right?
I do, The Accounting Trailblazers Podcast, yes.
Alright. So if they want to find out more about all those things, where’s the best place for them to look?
LinkedIn, like, follow me on LinkedIn. I post a lot of educational content. Anything I do anywhere gets tied back into LinkedIn, so follow me on LinkedIn. That’s the best way to learn more about what I’ve been up to.
Well, great. Anshul, I think we did a great job of educating on the ins and outs of offshoring and your own teams, or we’re using outside service for that. I think this is going to help clarify all of this for everybody, and I appreciate you being on this episode of The Unique CPA.
Thank you, Randy. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for having me as a guest.
About the Guest
Anshul Agrawal is the founder and CEO of June15 Consulting, where he helps small and mid-size CPA firms build their own offshore teams in India, Argentina, and the Philippines through his Direct Ownership model. Unlike agency rentals, this approach gives firms full control over quality, security, and culture—while cutting salary costs by about 50%. A frequent Accounting Today contributor and host of the Accounting Trailblazers Podcast, Anshul is passionate about educating firms on offshoring done right, from compliance to cross-cultural coaching. In his own words, he genuinely loves the work, “even the 3 a.m. international calls.”
Meet the Hosts
Randy Crabtree, co-founder and partner of Tri-Merit Specialty Tax Professionals, is a widely followed author, lecturer and podcast host for the accounting profession. Since 2019, he has hosted the The Unique CPA podcast, which ranks among the world’s 5% most popular programs (Source: Listen Notes). You can find articles from Randy in Accounting Today’s “Voices” column and the AICPA Tax Advisor, and he is a regular presenter at conferences and virtual training events hosted by CPAmerica, Prime Global, Leading Edge Alliance (LEA), Allinial Global and several state CPA societies. Randy also provides continuing professional education to Top 100 CPA firms across the country.
Terrell Turner is a 3x nationally ranked CPA, 2x Top 20 Global Finance Influencer. He is the founder of the TLTurner Group, which has been recognized in NYC Times Square and the NY Times as a top accounting and CFO firm that specializes in supporting law firms. Outside of running an accounting firm, Terrell hosts multiple vlogs and podcasts in addition to co-hosting The Unique CPA. Terrell is also a speaker and a content creator who regularly hosts and collaborates on video and audio content projects with multi-billion dollar corporations, bar associations, universities, and non-profit organizations.