Accounting, community, and coaching with Propeller Advisory’s Katie Bryan

• Katie Bryan, founder and CEO of Propeller Advisory, is a passionate advocate for career flexibility. She strives to help both her team and clients create the life they deserve.
  

• Despite the challenges of the pandemic (or perhaps because of them), Propeller Advisory deepened client relationships through business mentorship.
  

• Through her coaching business, Propel Her, Katie provides education and support to other female business owners by offering monthly accountability.

Katie Bryan isn’t afraid to admit that Propeller Advisory started out with a laptop, a Xero subscription, and a crappy apartment.

Now, she’s the founder and CEO of a company that was labeled Australia’s Best Tax Firm in 2020.

Several years ago, Katie found it sad that none of the accounting firms she walked into were female-led. “I just saw the same thing everywhere, which was old white men,” she says with a laugh. 

The observation was enough to prompt Katie to consider starting her own firm. So she launched Propeller Advisory. It began with offering only Chief Financial Officer (CFO) services, but quickly morphed into a fully fledged accounting and tax advisory practice over time.

From humble beginnings to massive success, Katie is proud of her firm’s growth. She’s also thankful for how technology has transformed the accounting industry—in particular, by lowering the barrier for entry and creating a new level of flexibility for business owners. 

As the mother of an 11-month-old, Katie says, “Having control of your own freedom is a big motivator.” Starting out, her goal was to create a business that could support time off to spend with her family.

Now, she hopes to offer that same kind of flexibility to her team and clients.

Katie joins Karbon CEO and host Stuart McLeod on episode 27 of the Accounting Leaders Podcast to share insights about her journey with Propeller Advisory. She also discusses how the pandemic has leveled up her client relationships, the community she’s found within the accounting industry, and how she’s passing that community on to other women through her coaching business.

How the pandemic transformed client relationships

As with many businesses around the world, COVID-19 slowed growth for Propeller Advisory. But it didn’t stop it completely—in fact, the pandemic offered unprecedented opportunities for client connections and relationships.

Propeller has a large hospitality client base, an industry affected more drastically than many others. 

But the pandemic allowed Katie and her firm to focus on building relationships with their clients and supporting them. Propeller was in frequent contact with its clients, checking in to offer help.

While this relationship-building might have happened outside of the pandemic, the depth of these relationships would have taken much longer to reach.

“It was an opportunity for us to show that we're not just accountants,” Katie explains on the podcast. 

Propeller’s support throughout the pandemic fostered immense loyalty among its clients—what Katie thinks of as her firm’s “emotional bank account.” In order for long-term relationships with your accounting clients to thrive, this level of trust is critical. 

COVID-19 has helped Propeller to hone in on its ideal customer: professional services clients. Katie finds that relationships with these clients tend to be more rewarding for every party involved.

And while Katie has always known the purpose of her firm, she feels the pandemic helped to clarify and validate it. In addition to giving her clients the kind of flexibility she holds dear, she has always sought to help her clients grow. After all, forward movement is in the firm’s name.

“We've helped a lot of businesses come back from the brink,” she says to Stuart. “And that was very rewarding for me.”

Recommended reading: 10 ways to grow your accounting business by building your personal brand

Support along the way

Just like raising a child, starting a business takes a village.

She’s quick to point to the many forms of support she received when starting and growing Propeller. Technology, including Karbon, didn’t just help with Propeller’s early stages—it enabled the firm to pursue a remote working environment. 

Although Propeller has an office in Melbourne, Australia, Katie says she’s happy working from home and most likely plans to continue doing so.

Early on, Katie knew that she wanted to work more on the sales and relationship-building side of the operation than accounting work. This led her to take an offshoring approach to hiring. She advocates for careful, thorough hiring, making sure to ask all the right questions. 

“I just think that it's about making sure that you're really diligent in the interview process,” Katie says.

Another contributor to Propeller’s growth? Humility.

While it’s impossible to know everything, having a curious mindset will position you to grow more mindfully.

For Katie, this means paying attention to and learning from others’ mistakes. Networking with others in Australia’s accounting industry has taught her practical knowledge about the tools she needed—and it’s proven to be an incredibly supportive community focused on helping each other grow.

Katie believes that everyone in the accounting space has, to some degree, had the same thought: there are enough clients to go around. Because of this, they’ve chosen community over competition. 

Helping other women grow

In addition to the accounting world, women have been a massive support to Katie’s journey—and they’ve served as inspiration for her next endeavor. 

“Females are just amazing. …Everyone wants to support you and make sure that you succeed,” Katie shares. 

She hasn’t forgotten how isolating the early stages of starting a business were for her. Her mentorship with other women gave her a safe space to ask questions and someone to regularly review reports, budgets, and other metrics.

These experiences inspired Katie to start Propel Her, the coaching arm of Propeller, which focuses on providing women in business with both community and accountability.

Katie pairs similarly-sized businesses together for monthly meetings to review key metrics and keep one another on track with their deliverables. Anyone in business knows how never-ending a to-do list can be, andhow sudden demands can distract from them. Propel Her is dedicated to keeping female leaders on track byhaving someone check in with them monthly.

Its biggest challenge, Katie shares on the podcast, is scalability. She’s currently exploring the balance between doing everything related to the business herself, and having a team under her, as she does with Propeller Advisory. 

“It’s been a while since I’ve started a business, and it’s more challenging than I remember,” Katie admits. Her biggest priority: making sure the right people are involved, an age-old hiring concern for business owners around the world.

Propelling forward

When Stuart asks Katie what’s next for Propeller Advisory, she shares that her goals are the same as they’ve always been. 

“I want to keep doing great things for great people,” she says. 

Though her top priority isn’t intense growth, Katie has been pleased to see a completely organic influx of new leads. Many of these potential clients, she says, have heard about Propeller on social media. 

This is a great sign to Katie because it means that people are naturally talking about Propeller’s work. “I want people to be talking about us because that means that we are doing a great job,” she tells Stuart.

Whether it’s her team or her clients, Katie is devoted to helping people find the kind of flexibility and support that has made all the difference for her career. “If I can help them feel a little bit better and a little bit more confident about what they're doing on a daily basis,” she says of her work, “then I've done my job.”