Transparency and the ‘Great Reshuffling’ with Acuity’s Kenji Kuramoto

• As Kenji Kuramoto’s online accounting service Acuity continues to grow, he turns to transparent communication to ensure employee alignment. 

• The ‘Great Resignation’ might be better called the ‘Great Reshuffling’, where employees can seek environments that align more with their needs and employers are challenged to make their workplaces enticing enough to stay. 

• Besides integrating recent acquisitions and automating some processes, Acuity also hopes to become a Certified B Corp this year. 

The Atlanta-based online accounting service Acuity serves thousands of companies, providing everything from bookkeeping to CFO-level guidance. Founder Kenji Kuramoto is celebrated as an advisor of multiple boards, an angel investor, and entrepreneur, receiving honors as one of Atlanta Business Chronicle’s 40 Under 40, the TiE Top Entrepreneur, and Hubdoc Top 50 Cloud Accountants.

Acuity recently acquired Catching Clouds to further fill out its offerings. With all the changes coming to Acuity, there naturally comes growing pains. One big challenge: communication. 

“There's nothing worse as a leader [than] when you interact with someone on your team, and you hear about a negative experience that they've had, and you go, ‘Oh, my gosh, this has happened because it was just poorly communicated.’ This is not who we are. But someone believed this is who we are,” Kenji says. 

But by patiently listening to his staff and acting with transparency in mind, Kenji is working through the challenge of communication. 

In an episode of the Accounting Leaders Podcast, Kenji shares openly about his struggles and triumphs in growing Acuity with Karbon CEO and Co-Founder Stuart McLeod—from facing the Great Resignation, to staying transparent with employees to maintain healthy growth. 

Always explain the ‘why’

Since Acuity has grown to 150 employees, Kenji’s become more intentional in his approach to company culture. He feels that it boils down to one central point: communication.

“I started seeing the times where we'd deploy something new—a new idea, a new process, a new technology,” Kenji recalls to Stuart. “You’d start hearing some kind of grumblings from the team or ‘I don't understand what the hell Kenji's doing,’ or ‘Why did they do this?’ You realize, ‘Oh, shit, I didn't really explain the why—why are we doing this.’”

Kenji experienced resistance toward a number of initiatives that have turned out well for Acuity. Reflecting on the lack of proper explanation surrounding them, he can understand the initial unrest among the ranks. 

As a result, he now employs a four-point method for communicating with his staff:

1. Let employees see the financials

Kenji uses a shared Jirav dashboard so that employees can see how Acuity is performing anytime. No metric is left unturned, so employees can feel secure, rather than unsure of the company’s performance and stability.

2. Weekly video updates from the founders

Kenji does a ‘Video from Kenji’ every week, even when he’s on vacation, to share what the company is working on. This helps to increase leadership visibility, and adds a personal touch to work. 

“Sometimes it's just, ‘Hey, here's where in the world I am. Matt and I hope everybody's doing well.’ So it’s little things like that that we do to help make sure people are aligned and have clarity on what we're doing,” Kenji explains to Stuart.

3. An annual all-hands in-person conference

Most of Acuity’s team works remotely. While this reduces costs, Acuity ultimately invests the amount that would otherwise go toward office space in company events—in particular, an annual conference. 

“We're actually reallocating our spend on a way to make our time together more useful,” Kenji explains. “We don't need a large footprint for an office because we don't have people in there.”

The conference, referred to as ‘Acuity Con’, is a fully covered, multi-day in-person gathering at Acuity’s home base in Atlanta. Kenji sees it as a time to connect with employees on their needs, as well as to align the company on upcoming projects and objectives. 

4. Facilitate difficult conversations

Earlier in Kenji’s career, political conversations weren’t the norm at work. But that’s changed in today’s divisive culture, with tough discussions sometimes bleeding into the workplace. Though, instead of shying away from conflict, Kenji seeks to facilitate those talks in a civil way.

“In organizations of two people, let alone the size [of Karbon and Acuity], there are going to be differences of opinion,” Kenji acknowledges. “I've learned through some other good leaders … that the way to handle some of these is to see if we can facilitate conversations internally.” 

Still, Kenji admits to being human, at times questioning how they got there. During one particular difficult conversation, he says, “I kept thinking to myself, honestly, ‘Can we just get back to helping clients with PPP?’”

Work flexibility and the ‘Great Reshuffling’

Acuity has long been a remote company, which proved especially helpful during the pandemic. Though Kenji saw parents struggle to balance their time between kids and work, he felt the company continued to perform well during a challenging period. 

Other than Acuity’s annual all-hands meeting, employees are free to work as many or as few hours as needed to manage their home obligations, so long as the work is getting done. They’re also free to work anywhere they want in the world. Policies like these are a must in today’s world, where employees are looking for more flexibility out of employers. 

Stuart and Kenji discuss reframing the Great Resignation in a different light, referring to it instead as the Great Reshuffling. 

Stuart puts it succinctly: “The reason people are resigning is because their values and the purpose that they desire from their work is not being fulfilled by the organization that they're currently located with. And all they're doing is searching for organizations where those values and flexibility of location and work environments are more suitable.”

Kenji explains, “It pushes us in a good way to say, ‘Well, how are we gonna make this a good experience? What are we gonna do to make this a better organization?’ People have a lot of choice about where they go. If they're not feeling fulfilled, or compensated well enough, those things are going to get people to move in a heartbeat. Especially accountants, [who] are going to find plenty of opportunities to work elsewhere.”

Employers today face a dual set of challenges. One is to create an environment where people feel supported and want to stay. The other is to accept that sometimes employees will move on to better opportunities, in which case employers should be grateful for having been a part of their career growth. 

Recommended reading: Why employee alignment is the key to success

Integrating ethics into values

Recent acquisitions are pushing Acuity to streamline some of its processes. With 150 people serving nearly 1,000 clients every month, Kenji describes its internal workflows as noisy. 

“We want to make Acuity easier to use for all of our team members,” he tells Stuart. “We want people to say, ‘Hey, I'm an accountant. I chose to work here because the way that you've built processes and systems make my life a hell of a lot easier.’” 

In addition to operational simplification, Kenji has his eye on something even bigger: achieving B Corp certification for Acuity. In fact, Kenji hopes to finalize its B Corp status in 2022. 

Kenji’s motivation for striving to join the certification’s elite ranks comes from a few factors. Besides the desire to do well financially, he shares that he wants to make a positive impact in his community and beyond.

“As a founder, I have to wear the responsibility of culture,” Kenji says. “And I worry about that in the sense of well, what if I get hit by a bus? How do I make sure we have a framework and infrastructure in place to make sure that things like culture continue?”

To Kenji, striving toward B Corp standards means having more accountability. 

“It's got someone coming in and auditing you on that every couple of years. It's a forcing framework that will help make sure that we're treating employees the right way, our community—certainly environmentally—that we're thinking about other stakeholders, beyond just the owners.” 

Want to hear more about how Kenji has developed Acuity’s ethos? Check out Kenji and Acuity co-founder Matthew May on their YouTube-based podcast, Drink While You Think, where they walk through many of the issues facing the accounting industry in a light-hearted way.