Episode 122: It Takes A Village: Culture, Teamwork & Your Network Is Key With John Rizzo
You cannot achieve business success if you do everything on your own. If you truly want to grow a profitable and powerful venture, you need the right people at your side. In this episode, John Rizzo, Managing Partner of RDG+ Partners, tells his story of being an athlete and how his mother’s influence helped him along his career path. He shares gold nuggets with Amy Vetter on how to make the most of your network, build a stronger team, and create the right culture. Tune in as he breaks down how all of these are essential to upscaling your business, requiring you to connect with the best individuals out there.
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It Takes A Village: Culture, Teamwork & Your Network Is Key With John Rizzo
Welcome to this episode where I interview John Rizzo. He is the Managing Partner of RDG+ Partners. He was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and received his Bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, in Accounting from the State University of New York in 1995. John is an entrepreneur and his expertise includes providing financial consulting to a wide variety of commercial businesses.
He specializes in M&A consulting and has worked on hundreds of transactions during his career. He is focused on helping his clients build wealth and was very active with the COVID stimulus programs. He also assisted over 50 companies in obtaining more than $5 million in SBA disaster loan funding following the 9/11 attacks.
He was certified in 1998 and has been a member of the Entrepreneur's Organization for many years. He is also a member of the AICPA and the New York Society of CPAs. He has had a wife, Annemarie, for several years and has four children. John has been successful through hard work, dedication, and treating his clients' businesses as if they were his own.
During this interview, we talk about the influence of his upbringing in athletics, and how he learned what hard work was and dedication in order to achieve, and also the influence his mom had on him that he draws upon in calming him in those most stressful moments and success as a managing partner of his firm. I hope that you enjoy this interview. Like and share as well to help the people around you that might be looking for stories that John shares during this interview.
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My guest is John Rizzo. John, would you like to get started and give us a little background on yourself?
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I'm a CPA. I started our accounting firm here in 2005 after working for another firm for nine years and decided to take the leap and start my own business and entrepreneurial. That was many years ago now. Since that time, we started with two individuals. My original partner, Brian DiGiacco, who's still with me, we've grown the firm over those years to about 70 people from just two of us. It's been fun, exciting, stressful, rewarding, and all the words you could think of experience for us over that time.
As we sit, I’d call us a full-service boutique accounting and business consulting firm. We offer all the accounting services and tax services. We offer payroll and wealth management, and we broker health insurance. We call that employee retention solution. We consider ourselves a financial center. It is the best way to describe where our firm has gone from day one to until now.
I'm glad that you could join me. To start off the conversation, I want to get a little background on yourself, where you grew up, what town, and what your parents did for a living, if you have siblings, and we'll start there.
I had a great upbringing and a very strong family foundation. I grew up in Niagara Falls, New York. At one point, it was the Eighth Wonder of the World. It's fallen off the list for some reason. I grew up in Niagara Falls. My mom, dad, myself, my brother and sister, there were five of us. My dad was a school teacher and a coach. He's very involved in athletics and in the education system. He is a Math teacher. That's how I found love for accounting.
My mom was the rock of our family. She took care of the household and was a perfectionist and still is. She took care of us from that perspective. She was the shoulder to cry on when we needed the softer one. My dad was more the disciplinarian and he drove that discipline into us. It was a good balance to have them together. We grew up in a small house in Niagara Falls and a pretty humble environment, and there are a lot of hard knocks involved there. I learned a lot from where I grew up.
What type of team did your father coach?
He coached baseball and football. He had every season covered. He coached baseball in the spring and football in the fall. He was a wrestling official in the winter. He had all three seasons covered. He was at practice a lot. I grew up on the playing fields with him, as a five-year-old ball boy all the way up to a player myself, with him as my coach, in both baseball and football. I then went on to college athletics in that. We're a very big sports household.
How was that to have your father as a coach?
It was good and bad. It was good to be around him and learn from him, and see how passionate and dedicated he was to how he handled everything. If there's one word to describe him, it's discipline. He displayed it in everything that he did. On the flip side, outsiders would sometimes think I was receiving special treatment because my dad was my coach. That was far from the truth. I had to work harder probably than anybody to earn a spot on the team.
It wasn't always rosy because you did have these outside influences, and for me, it affects what people think, and there are different thoughts probably out there about my situation there with being around my father so much. In the classroom, he was my teacher even. You had the same thoughts there.
Business Success: When you let outside influences affect you, it will impact your thinking.
How did you deal with people making comments or that outside perception that's hard to prove who you are?
As a teenager, it was much harder to deal with than as an adult. Over time, you learn. In the locker room, I earn the respect of all the other players just from hard work. How I responded to it was, “I'm going to work as hard as I can.” I needed to prove myself to somebody because if everyone thought that I didn't have to prove myself to my father, which wasn't the truth but let's just assume it is, I felt like I had to prove myself to everybody else. The way I accomplished that was through hard work. I was the first one there and the last one to leave. That was my mentality.
How did you know that you achieved that?
Statistics is one way to know more objective things, “Here's my batting average and the number of touchdowns I've scored.” Also, the other accolades I received outside of our team and within the city, and so forth. Those are some of the ways to find out. Also, friendships and conversations with your friends that were on the team about how we're doing and performing. Over time, I found that the other players were starting to look up to me as a captain, and they respected that. It was a balance of some subjective things, some objective things, conversations, accolades, and a combination of it all.
Seeking out feedback without them being too obvious about it.
I never asked for feedback. I'm still not great at that. I provide a lot of feedback in business. My mentality's always been to prove myself and everything else will fall into line.
Did you ever talk to your mom about your internal struggles with this?
All the time. She was the safe place to talk about things. My dad is very stoic. He's more of an action person versus a word person. His actions speak louder than words, and that defines my father. My mom was the opposite. She was the very comforting person to go to when you needed to talk, get a hug, or anything like that. You felt very comfortable in her space. She did bring a lot of balance there for me.
Did she give you any advice that you remember during that time?
Most of her advice was that everything was okay. Everything was fine, whatever you're stressing or worried about. I've been known to be a worrier, and she was the one that took the worry away from me when I needed it. Probably the biggest lesson that I learned from her is that things could be a lot worse.
It's always good to know whether you have that in your life where you know that you need that offset in your gaps when you know that is an area for you or where you can at least summon that as an example in your life when you feel yourself doing those things or worrying about what people think.
When you stack on all these responsibilities with all that's going on in businesses and employees and things like that, I do find myself asking the question to myself, “What's the worst that could happen?” When you start to stress about something, I ask the question, "What's the worst that could happen?" Usually, the answer is nothing major most of the time. That calms you down. We all get stressed about different things and your definition of something stressful could be very different from mine. That's why I find myself asking that question quite a bit.
Those are great lessons to bring into your life and remember when you've got more responsibilities like being a managing partner and all your client issues and staff issues. As part of growing up, where did you get involved with the business? It doesn't sound like you had that in your background. Is there someone that you modeled yourself after or you saw? How did you end up in this field?
This is a funny story. This is back when in every state, you didn't have to pump gas. In New York, someone pumped gas for you. It was full service everywhere you went. There weren't credit cards when I was a kid, and my parents would drive to the gas station, there would be someone that would come out and they'd pump your gas and you'd pay them cash. When they make change for you, they'd always pull out this big wad of cash and they'd go through the $10s, $20s, $5s, and $1s, and get you your change back, and it needs to be the exact change. We’re always dealing with cash. My assumption, as a kid, was that it was all their money. I wanted to work at a gas station.
Isn’t that funny?
That was step one of thinking about owning a business. My parents didn't come from that, but my uncles did. I have four uncles on my mom's side. They almost all were in business. That's where I get it from, where my brother and sister aren't. That was the indication of, “What's the value of a dollar and what is the process of earning it and controlling your destiny if you're going to be in business for yourself?” I was good at math, but I didn't want to be a teacher, and the accounting business was the next closest thing for me to utilize those skills.
When did you realize that? In high school or college?
I realized it in college. When I went away to school, Accounting wasn't offered as a major. It was offered as an elective. I took the class. The first project was a software project for handling the finances of a grocery store.
That's interesting. You don't get interesting things in Accounting 101.
I took that class, and as you got through the software, Accounting is very black and white, as if you're right or wrong most of the time. This software wouldn't let you continue to the next module until you got everything right. That's what I loved about it. It all balanced, and it all was right by the end. I completed this. I went on to do that software program for about ten of the students in the class. They weren't accounting minds. I loved it. After going through that course and realizing I couldn't obtain an Accounting degree from that school, I decided to change schools just for accounting.
What school did you end up going to?
I started at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. I mainly went there for athletics. I played on the baseball and football team. They had won the Division III Football National Title the year before I got there. They had all the attention recruits that year, and I got caught up probably more in the sports athletics part of it than the education future. That's why I chose that school originally.
At least I was quick to realize after two years that accounting was more of my passion. I transferred to a state school in Fredonia in New York, and I continued to play sports there. I played baseball. They didn't have a football team and I joined the accounting department there once I knew this is what I wanted to do with my career.
What did your parents think of that?
They were very supportive. 1) It was closer to home. 2) My sister is only a year younger than me. She was already at that school. It was exciting to be at the same school as her. Maybe not as exciting for her because I was always looking over her shoulder, being the big brother. They were happy that I was closer to home, I was settling in on a major, and I was with my sister.
Do you have a close relationship with your sister?
Of the three of us, I'm the only one that moved away. My brother's first house when he got married was about four doors down from my parents, and my sister was two blocks away, and that's how tight our family was. Our relationships were much closer when I was there and around. I moved out of Niagara Falls to Rochester, New York in 1996. I've been here for many years. It is hard to maintain those relationships when you're not around each other as much. Our relationship isn't what it was back then. We all would admit that. We still have that foundation together we'll never go away. The three of us were texting about different holiday gifts and things for our parents.
Business Success: It is hard to maintain relationships when you're not around each other as much.
That's the thing, it's that foundation of growing up together, and there's nobody else that understands things like the three of you together.
I shared a room with my brother for a lot of years. There are situations and things that happen over the years that only the three of us know about, and around the Thanksgiving table, we can bring up some stories and laugh about them.
That is nice. That could go either way, for sure.
It goes well. Our family has a pretty good sense of humor. We can take it.
When you graduated then, that's when you started with the first accounting firm?
I graduated. It's funny. I sent my resume to probably 25 or 30 accounting firms. The one thing I didn't do was sign my cover letter. This is a lesson to be learned moving too fast, trying to do 10 things at once. Luckily, a good friend of mine was already working at the one firm that I sent it to in Rochester. I sent it to him to deliver to their HR department or whoever was reviewing resumes there, and he was able to sign my name on the cover letter when he received it. That firm was the only firm that called me back.
Isn't that crazy how unimportant that would be now?
Now things were email. There aren't cover letters. I received emails on a weekly basis, and I can't remember the last time I saw a cover letter with the email.
It reminded me that I had another show with Boyd Search from the Georgia Society, and he hadn't put his phone number on the resume and didn't understand why no one was calling him back. It was before email and everything.
I got saved by a friend at that firm that signed. That's where I started. Now I ended up there for nine years.
Did you audit or tax? What were you doing there?
I started in an audit. When you go into accounting, you think it's all numbers and your family thinks you're a tax genius. The truth is, I couldn't have done anybody's taxes for several years when I joined that firm. I started an audit and learned that sales is a big part of accounting. You need clients in order to have work to do. You have to bill those clients and you have to collect money from those clients so that you could pay all the bills.
That felt more like where I wanted to be than in a room ticking and tying out audit work papers with very little people interaction. I go around from client to client versus being in the industry at one company. I did enjoy meeting different people and learning about different industries. I wouldn't trade it. Starting in audit, I learned a lot, but after so many years, I got to the point where it just didn't feel that where I belonged was in an audit.
The whole point about sales and business development is not talked about enough. That's such a big part of the job of relationship building. You might not think of it as sales. It's steepening the relationship. Anything that happens with that client, they're coming to you or making new relationships and networking, and it’s not taught enough. It's not talked about from when you start things that you can already be looking out for upsells and things that are going to help you in your career.
It's taught more now than ever. We teach soft skills just as much as we teach technical skills here. I just learned it on my own. I got to meet people. Going into accounting wasn't even on my radar. This was even part of the business. I was probably too naive to think, “Where did the clients even come from?” Now the marketing is much more aggressive than it was back then. Back then, it was an unwritten rule to try to steal a client from another firm. It never went over well. Accountants don't play nice together. Even with pocket protectors, we don't. Now it's so different. Most firms have a marketing department and do offer various services. It wasn't like that when I started.
Business Success: People must learn soft skills just as much as technical skills.
I started an audit as well. For someone who is an entrepreneur or business person, it's a good foundation for all of that into the future.
For me, it was valued. Some companies wanted their audit as a stamp of approval. That’s the bank. Their bank requirements are satisfied or whatever reason they needed their audited statements for. What I learned what you pay in taxes was much more important to a client than their audit, not every client, and we're in the middle of that now. It's tax planning season. We're letting people know what we think they're going to owe for this year. Handling that reaction is a skill on its own.
It’s keeping that contact with the client all year. You can be watching for that and building that relationship and things that they can do. What made you want to have your own practice? What created that desire?
It's funny. In my interview with that firm, they asked me the popular interview question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” My answer was, “In your chair.” That was the answer I gave the partner that interviewed me. “I'm still young. I want to be an owner.” Walking in and from that experience, I mentioned, as a young kid, that I knew early on that I wanted to be a partner in a firm. I didn't necessarily know from day one, I wanted my own firm. I learned that later. I wanted to be an owner. I knew right away.
What shifted that of being a partner versus starting your own?
That firm grew very fast. it's a great firm. They did well and I would've been probably the 33rd partner. When I started, there were five partners and that felt nice and quaint. If I could be one of the first ten partners of this firm, it would be phenomenal. Through acquisition and promotions and so forth, I got close to the top after nine, and this doesn't happen overnight. After nine years, I got to the top. I realized I didn't feel that I could make enough of an impact fast enough as a 33rd partner. That's when I started thinking, “Here are my options. I either move forward with this and stay part of this team of this many partners or I start my own.”
You start pumping gas.
Having that wad lot of cash in my own pocket, it also came down to the flexibility of owning other businesses around the accounting firm. I didn't feel I would have enough flexibility to do that as one of 33 partners in a firm.
What was your process for starting your practice? Were you scared? Did you have any fear around it?
I'm very competitive. I need to get out of my comfort zone for things to feel real. That put me there. It put me way out of it. I had my partner, Brian, and he had more concerns. I was more the revenue generator. I had a list of clients that I thought would join us, and our handshake was, “If I bring in the work, are you good doing the work on day one?” We both agreed to that and we made our lists. There was timing involved before year-end and we had vacation pay coming to us and so forth.
We knew we were comfortable. We can get through our first quarter without a problem. It was just a question of how many clients would come over and how many wouldn't. Surprisingly, more than we expected came over. That was validation that they liked us. They wanted us to be their accountant. We bought two laptops from Circuit City. We always laughed that our business outlasted Circuit city because they filed for bankruptcy, but that is where on a Circuit City credit card, we bought our first two laptops. We remember that it was an ugly teal laptop. We hooked up our laptops and started in my house, my home office.
Every tech founder says they started in the kitchen. At least you're saying you started in the office.
You could argue it was the spare bedroom, probably, depending on who and how you want to use the space.
Garage or office is the two. One of the things you said is important. For anyone starting a business or working with people, you understand your lane, and the one thing you said about Brian doing the work and you bringing in the business, a lot of times, those understandings are not discussed before a business gets started. There's no job description, and then if you're the rainmaker and he's not, then there's like bad blood already in the beginning. How did you know to do that with him?
It started with a friendship for me. He was at that firm. We met at that firm. We didn't know each other before that firm, but we got to know each other and we started to have these conversations. We had a lot of the same values and we became friends. We were friends first. Others had left that firm and honestly asked me to join them to start their own firm. I didn't feel the cultural bond and the friendship. It just wasn't right for me.
Our firm now is all about culture. It started with a friendship between him and me. We had to change and adjust several times from what you said. It's not always fair that one person brings in the work and may probably get more of the credit while the other person is just doing the work. We started to combine some of that. It was still more shifted towards him to doing other work.
Now, he is running our business development team and doing less of the work. I'm doing more administrative work in running the firm and I'm doing less of the selling. In accounting, you have to do a little bit of everything. Even if you're the managing partner, you're still bringing in work and you're still billable. You're still doing work. We changed our arrangement multiple times from day one.
How do you do that? Do you have a set time? I know you have more than him now as partners. How do you recalibrate to make sure everybody's doing what they want to be doing and what they're best at doing?
If you would ask me that years ago, I wouldn't have had a great answer. As of now, we're doing a lot in that area and Cory Raggi, our Chief Operating Officer, is one of the main reasons we are. We knew enough that we needed someone from the outside to help us with that. We hired Cory after 17 years at a publicly traded company. She brought a lot of skills and human resource skills that we never had.
Our partner group meets at least twice a month and we cover all these things. We've had a lot of hard conversations, role changes, and significant things we've done in the last several years that have taken people in a role where they thought they were best and put them in a role that the group thought they were best. It was a little uncomfortable in the beginning. It's a change. Over time, everyone has come to the conclusion that they're in the right spot. In the accounting firm, we have seven partners.
As a managing partner, you talked that growing up, you worried about what people thought of you or if they thought you deserved the spot that you were in or and so forth. Have you felt that way as a leader at any time? if so, what have you done to overcome that?
I felt that a lot as a leader because I just move. Some of the partners tell you, “Rizzo, slow down a little bit. We're trying to catch up with you. We need to maybe take a little more time on this.” It's the same principles from when I was young. I just work hard and I've earned respect from hard work. They might see me here early. They might see me leave here late. They might see me messaging them and supporting them at certain times, which isn't always good for balance. That's where it becomes a problem. Over time, you gain confidence. You know that the team is behind you. The financial results can tell you some of it, but not all of that. It's the same principles that I've had in me my whole life that I continue to use.
Can you think of a time when you've had to flip into what your mom would say and say, “How bad could it be? What is the worst that could happen?”
It still happens all the time. You do think of that. It comes down to, as you have more experience, confidence. For me, we've been here now for many years, so we're doing something right. We got past the seven years, whatever they say the business hurdles are to survive. We've been through different crises and different things that have happened, and we've grown by double digits every year since we started. I don't reflect enough, but when I do choose to reflect, it's very positive. I reflect, “We're making another decision. It's a big decision but look at all the other big decisions we made and how they turned out.”
When you said you've had crises over time, how have you moved through them? Being a business owner myself, a lot of times, some hard things hit that you can't predict. Everybody else is like doom and gloom and putting their, “What are we going to do?” As the leader, you have to shoot into action. It can be lonely because it's got to be you. How have you helped the firm get through those periods of time?
9/11 was probably the first time that I said, “This is an opportunity to help businesses that are in need.” My wife, Annemarie, was in the second tower on 9/11. It had an even more of special meaning to me because of her situation and how she survived that. We're talking about life-or-death survival versus making sure a client's happy survival.
Did she survive?
I don't want to speak for her, but essentially, she worked for a firm that had their training in that building. When the first tower was hit, the second tower that she was in started to evacuate. They told everyone in the 1st tower that the 2nd tower was secure. There was no need to evacuate. Luckily, she didn't listen to that and she continued down a stairwell with a group of people.
As she was going down the stairwell, the second tower got hit. Luckily, she exited away from the first tower. She was on that side of the building and was able to get out. There was a time period for me that I was at my old firm and I was in. Everybody had heard of what happened and everyone was watching in the conference room on TV.
Her office had called me and said, “We heard from her at 9:00 something in the morning, but we haven't heard from her since.” It was between 9:00 and about 11:30 by the time I heard from her again. There was a two-plus hour window that was very stressful. I then ended up driving down there to pick her up the next day. It's just something that she went through that'll be with her for the rest of her life.
We'll get back to your story. It just reminded me. It is a lesson of what it takes to be a leader and think like a leader. I had heard this other speaker talk about this. They were in a hotel when the fire alarm went off and they were in the top floor. The message was in another language. They were in another country, but they could tell it was like, “Get out. Get your son.” They went out in the hallway and everybody was looking around, “Should we go? Should we not go?”
Everyone's looking at each other and she's like, “We get out of this building.” That's a leadership lesson at the same time where you don't get stuck trying to look around at what everybody else is doing. You listen to that intuition and you move forward. As an entrepreneur, you have to pull that strength. A lot of the times, it's not as extreme as that, but to fight the messages of stay in the building and you're like, “Who cares if I get out and nobody else leaves? The building doesn't go down. At least I'm still safe.”
I'm more practical. I probably would've been the one to go back up. My wife is very strong and I could easily see her as the leader of that group, saying, “There's no way we're going back up. Let's go.” She's a leader in her own right. She's a strong person, and I could easily see her doing that in that situation.
I just had to mention that whenever 9/11 gets mentioned. It's so much more important than anything we've done. 9/11 came out and there was a program, low-interest loans. They were 4% 30-year loans for business owners that were impacted by 9/11. This was the first entrepreneurial project that I took on myself as a non-partner at the other firm. We were able to help hundreds of clients and obtain new clients from it.
IT'S an unheard-of loan for a business. It's a mortgage for a business that doesn't exist. There's no bank that would give you that unless something like COVID happens but 30-year loans, 4%. That was the first step in saying, “In a time of need, let's not sulk about it. Let’s turn it positive and help people.” It helped us too as a business. That was the first moment and that project went well and we helped a lot of people obtain that money.
Did you cultivate that during PPP and everything?
When COVID hit and every business shut down, I have an email that I sent the whole staff that, “We will fight. We will do everything we can. Programs are coming out. I knew from my prior experience what might happen. I didn't realize it'd be trillions of dollars in stimulus. 9/11 was a loan that you had to repay. There was no actual stimulus that you kept. We sat in a war room, just our partners, and everyone else we had left the office for safety with what was happening. We launched a resource center and a webinar series within a few days. We were up and running and we were the primary source for a lot of businesses on how to get through this financially.
That must feel very gratifying for all of you.
That was just a reaction. That wasn't stressful because I had the 9/11 experience. For some of the younger partners that hadn't gone through barely alive back then, I had the experience to help us through that. The team stepped in, we divided and conquered and it went well.
I'd like to end it with just a couple of rapid-fire questions so you get to pick a category. It's family and friends, money, spirituality, or health.
Let's go with family and friends.
I thought you picked a lot of money.
I know. We already talked about that.
Things or actions I don't have that I want?
More time with the family has been on my goal sheet for way too long.
We talked about that when I was at your firm event with your wife.
As an entrepreneur, the challenge is that what you do every day impacts them positively in some ways, and then negatively just by you not being around as much.
Business Success: What you do every day impacts your friends and family.
It has to be a mental practice. It's a mental exercise to try to get through that. Things or actions I do have that I want to keep with my family and friends.
I'm very active with my kids and their athletics. it's very rare for me to miss a game or anything. My wife signed me up to assistant coach my fourth grader's basketball team, and I never played basketball. After the first practice, my son said, “Dad, you're probably going to end up being the head coach by the end of the year.” I'm like, “Paul, you're probably right. I'm not a good number two. I'm a good number one. I'm not the best wingman when it comes to helping out. I got to take control.”
You’ve got to know what you're good at. Things or actions that I don't have that I don't want to have with my family and friends?
When you have a business and you're successful, you do have material things and I can't say that I don't have them. It's not a want. Happiness is a want to be in an environment that is, most of the time, happy. We can't always be happy. To be in that environment is most important to me. I have that. It's the material things that aren't necessary.
If that starts being the goal, then it starts driving different behaviors.
You ask yourself the question, “Why am I in business?” That's a big question mark. “Why am I doing this? Why wouldn't I just work for somebody else and maybe leave all the problems there when I leave?” You carry it all with you wherever you go. Why are you carrying this?
I do find it interesting because I'm the same as an entrepreneur. Some people are very driven by money. I hope that the work that I do makes the money, but it's not like the first thing. You need to make the money to support the work that you want to do. It’s more what you want to put out in the world. It is interesting that what got you started was the wad of cash. At this age, you're like, “What I want is happiness. I need to have a base that gives me the foundation to create happiness, but how much is enough?”
Financial independence has always been a goal. Any business owner will tell you that. It allows you to do other things that give you more balance and maybe make you happier.
Is there anything we haven't talked about or that you want people who are reading this conversation to take away from it?
It takes a village both at home and at work. I have my wife, my kids, and that foundation. I have four kids. Kids are smarter than you think. They learn over time what we do for a living and why it's important. It’s the same with my wife’s work. We have a working household. Here at the office, we're nothing without the team. RDG is our big push this year that everyone is working together. If one spoke is off on the wheel, we're going to have a problem. We're going to end up with a flat. There is culture and teamwork. I can't emphasize that enough. Also, the network.
If I could point to one thing outside of how great our people are, those relationships, and our clients that made us successful, it’s the network of bankers, attorneys, neighbors, friends, wherever business comes from. It’s that network of people that now business is just coming in. A lot of it is inbound. It's a referral. That wouldn't exist without the network.
The goal is to get more clients like the clients you have and people that you like to work with.
We went through a whole process there. Our big thing there is motivation and responsiveness. We want to work with motivated and responsive people. That's how we've defined the client profile for ourselves.
Thank you so much for taking the time to tell your story. There were so many great lessons in it, and I'm sure everyone is going to enjoy reading.
Thanks, Amy. I appreciate it.
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For my Mindful Moments during this interview with John, there were many little stories and lessons that all of us can take away from this. The first one was talking about his upbringing, with his father being his coach and also his teacher, and how he had to start proving himself so that people didn't think things were handed to him starting from an early age.
Many times, he thought that people thought that he was getting special treatment. He learned early on that by being dedicated, passionate, and working hard, you were able to prove yourself beyond what people's perceptions would be. He also learned as well with his friends and teammates that as he would make accomplishments and become a leader on the team, he was gaining their respect as well.
Observing how people are treating you, what people are saying and so forth, can help with understanding that maybe some things can be in your head of what you think people think versus when you observe them or ask them so that you can better respond to it rather than allowing yourself talk to get in the way of your success.
We also talked about how he started in accounting and in college on athletic scholarships because of his talent in baseball and football. At the college that he started, there wasn't an Accounting class. It was only an elective. When he did that elective, he found that he enjoyed it so much. It's nice when we fall into our careers in a way of joy. It's something that we find we're good at versus, a lot of times, we're following in the footsteps of who comes before us.
He told a great story about the fact that when he was younger, his parents would go to get gas at a gas station. The guy that would pump the gas had a big wad of cash in order to give change. That was something that he saw, as a business owner, that you could be successful and thought that money was going to him. Realizing that those things are guiding lights that inspire us to be able to succeed, it's always interesting to look back and see that these things have worked out for us.
He started with a firm out of college and quickly learned that sales and business development was a big part of the job. We had a discussion about how much of that is not always discussed in especially accounting practices but in all businesses. No matter what level you are in a business or a practice, a lot of times, we don't have the opportunity to learn about soft skills or business development in our roles.
It might be upselling, where we scope engagements to see what are the things that they need that we can offer them without giving them for free, but putting them in the right place in the firm or referring them to the right person. Those are already sales skills that we learn very early on. Making that investment in soft skills and in the relationship is just as important as technical skills if we want to grow a relationship.
We then talked about him moving into having his own firm and the importance of starting that firm with someone that shared his values. That is also another thing that gets missed a lot. We don't talk about our values. When we do, we might write it down for corporate reasons, but we don't remind ourselves of them. We don't live them. We're not evaluating the people that work in our company by those values.
It's very important that they're always front of mind because that is what makes sure to protect the culture and the values that you're trying to create in your business. You have to be very intentional about it. I know from being out at their firm that they've got their values listed right in the front of the office. It's apparent and it's something that they are living in the way that the office is set up and the culture and activities that they do in that firm.
Another change that we talked about was that as the firm was growing bigger, they had to recalibrate what the roles are and have those hard discussions amongst the partners. Many times, we avoid hard discussions because they're hard, and we just don't want to get into them. If we're going to be successful as a business, it's important that we're having very open discussions and talking about, “Are we happy in the things that we're doing? How does everyone else evaluate the work that we're doing?”
It can be very uncomfortable, but as long as we are being authentic and bringing that into the workplace, we can often come out with a better result because we had the conversation and the hard discussion in order to do that. We talked about how important it is to have this entrepreneurial mindset as a leader. He was able to still carry on even when he might be doubting internally whether people are feeling he was doing the right things and so forth.
He knew, again, going back to growing up, that he was working hard. That helped him to earn respect, and also the team would gain confidence in who he is as a leader as well. Making sure that when you're in a crisis, you are showing leadership in those moments to keep everyone going so that people aren't having the fear that everything's going to go down.
We talked about 9/11, which was such an important discussion. His wife was in the second tower, and the decision she made, but also how you make those decisions, look at a crisis, and figure out, “With the skillsets that I have and the things that I can do, how can I make this better?” We talked about how he did that with 9/11. We also talked about in COVID, how he and the partners got together in a war room and talked about how they can help their clients be able to save their businesses, and be an important part of the future of those businesses as well. What it took was every partner taking what their best skillset is and dividing and conquering to do it.
At the end of this, we are talking about how important a community of support is, whether that be at work or at home. Understanding that we need to look out for what those relationships are that can help support the initiatives and the success that we want to create, whether that's in business or in our home life, and be brutally honest about the things that we're good at and the things we are not good at.
We look for those gaps and opportunities for people to step up in the things that we aren't as good at. We don't have to be everything to everyone. I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. John shared so many great stories that can be lessons to us all. I look forward to our next time together.
Important Links
Boyd Search – past episode
About John Rizzo
John Rizzo is the Managing Partner of RDG+Partners. He was born in Niagara Falls, New York and received his B.S. degree, Magna Cum Laude, in Accounting from the State University of New York at Fredonia in 1995. While at Fredonia, John interned with Freed, Maxick, Sachs & Murphy, P.C. of Buffalo, New York. He moved to Rochester after graduation and joined Bonadio & Co., LLP in 1996 and was promoted to Principal in 2004. After nine years with Bonadio & Co., LLP, John formed Rizzo & DiGiacco, CPAs, PLLC in September 2005 with Brian DiGiacco. By 2013, John and Brian added two more partners to the firm known as RDHB CPAs. Then, in January 2018, RDHB merged with Kroner Gamble & Company CPA to become RDG+Partners.
John is an entrepreneur, and his expertise includes providing financial consulting to a wide variety of commercial businesses. John specializes in M&A consulting and has worked on hundreds of transactions during his career. John focuses on helping his clients build wealth and was very active with the recent COVID stimulus programs. He also assisted over 50 companies in obtaining more than $5 million in SBA disaster loan funding following the 9/11 attacks.
John was certified in 1998 and has been a member of Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) for 12 years. He is also a member of the AICPA and NYS Society of CPAs. John has been married to his wife Annmarie for 18 years and has four children ranging from nine to seventeen years old.
John has been successful through hard work, dedication, and treating his clients’ businesses as if they were his own.