Katelynn Minott Podcast Transcript
Katelynn Minott joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Katelynn Minott. Katelynn Minott is the CEO of Bright!Tax, a leading cloud based tax firm catering to the needs of American expatriates. She obtained her CPA license in Massachusetts after graduating from the University of Denver with a degree in accounting.
Katelynn began her career at PwC in Denver, working with Fortune 500 clients before moving to Chile in 2011, where she shifted her focus to expatriate tax compliance and joined Bright Tax in its infancy. Her strategic leadership during the pandemic helped the firm exceed 2 million in revenue leading to her promotion to CEO.
Katelynn now leads a team of more than 65 remote professionals, serving thousands of clients worldwide recognized as a 40 under 40 CPA by the AI CPA in 2021. She frequently contributes to major publications like Forbes and CNBC on expatriate tax issues.
Well, good afternoon, Katelynn. Welcome to the show!
Katelynn Minott: Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. This is so fun. I get to traverse outside of the United States today or North America anyway, I do these podcasts just about every day and you’re hailing out of the great country of Spain at the moment due to your travel, your business and all that. So, Katelynn, I really, really do appreciate you being on today.
Katelynn Minott: Yeah, it’s my pleasure.
Brian Thomas: So, Katelynn, I’m going to jump into your first question here. You started your career at PwC working with Fortune 500 clients before moving to Chile and joining Bright!Tax. Can you share what motivated this significant career shift and how your experience at PwC influenced your approach to expatriate tax compliance?
Katelynn Minott: Yeah, so when I started out at PWC, to be honest, I was somewhat enamored with the idea of working for an international organization. I had this big aspiration that I’d take advantage of their global footprint and move my career abroad someday. And within a couple of years at the firm, it became apparent to me that an international move was many years down the road in my career.
And even then, it probably wasn’t going to be to a location that I had in mind as much as where a client or the firm actually had a need. I studied abroad in 2007 in Chile. I met my partner there. And so, when I stepped back from my role at PWC, it was definitely a huge shift. And yet it was one that was very personally driven rather than professionally motivated.
That said, of course, my time and experience at PwC gave me the foundational understanding of how a traditional accounting firm works, right? And with that, I was able to filter through what worked really well, what didn’t work so well on both the organizational and the personal level. And that experience has contributed greatly over the past decade to the evolution of Bright Tax.
Though we’re not the size of a big four firm, as we get bigger, I have been able to steer us towards the highly effective traditional accounting firm practices and away from those that were detrimental in my own experience.
Brian Thomas: Thank you for the backstory. I appreciate that. And, you know, when you leave college or you leave, you know, your first time out in the world, right?
And you start that career, you never know where you may end up. You have some idea. But your story is certainly inspiring making that leap of faith is what I would call it, but I do appreciate the back story. So awesome. And Katelynn bright tax is known for leveraging cloud-based technologies to serve American expats.
What are some of the most significant technological innovations you’ve implemented at bright tax and how have they improved the client experience?
Katelynn Minott: So, I think it’s worth saying that I think we’re known for leveraging cloud-based technology to serve expats, but then supplementing and enhancing that technology with a highly personalized experience, and that’s through talented expert professionals and CPAs.
We’re currently working and constantly working on achieving that balance between technology and the personal human touch. And in our market, one that serves clients with a huge wide range of client scenarios, technology can certainly make us much better what we do, but it can’t do the whole job itself.
So, to highlight one of our earliest innovations, I’ll talk about tax organizers. Tax organizers used to be, and actually still are for some of the more traditional tax accounting firms, dozens of pages long. And it’s this exhausting process where you’re Answering dozens and dozens of questions, filling in boxes about every single possible tax circumstance that you have, and that ensures that there’s absolutely nothing missed in the tax preparation process.
But ultimately, filling in pages and pages of forms sounds a lot like doing a tax return yourself, doesn’t it? So, one of the first major infrastructure items we implemented at Bright Tax was a customized organizer. And driven by the conversation with the CPA. So, a professional that, you know, in trust, then you get an organizer specifically customized to you with questions that you need to answer based on your specific scenario.
And that in turn makes the information delivery process where the client brings information to the CPA as streamlined and as efficient as possible.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you breaking that down for us. That’s important for those in our audience that might be expats or wanting to know more about taxes or, or really what you do to help serve your clients.
So, thank you. And Katelynn, in 2021, you were recognized as 40 under 40 CPA by the AICPA. How has this recognition impacted your career and Bright!Tax’s reputation in the industry?
Katelynn Minott: Yeah, so that award, the CPA was obviously a tremendous honor to be recognized and to be able to put that trophy in my case, if you will.
But ultimately, I would say the biggest impact of that award has been through Connections. It’s allowed me to build with other forward thinking firm leaders in the industry. Um, After the award itself was announced, there were a series of networking opportunities with other accountants in the industry who were also awarded.
And that allowed me to sit in a virtual room with other innovative, reputable people who were able to highlight for me in conversations and networking events that as CEO of our firm, many of the most important activities that I do in my role. Are in fact, outward facing. So, talking to other accounting leaders, talking to the competition, the award really encouraged me to pick my gaze up and look out towards the horizon of the industry.
And that’s where the opportunity for growth and innovation lies. So, I would say that was the biggest impact and As professionals, we certainly cannot do it all and or be an expert in everything, but we certainly can put ourselves in rooms with people who will make us better. And as a result, bring new fresh perspectives to our organizations.
And I would say that award has impacted my journey in that way in particular.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And again, a lot of hard work comes with these recognitions and awards. I know how that is, but again, it really changes that trajectory sometimes, but it does put you in that room full of experts that can help and grow and move you in a different direction, but also make you more successful.
So, I appreciate the share and Katelynn, the global pandemic accelerated the adoption of remote work and digital nomad lifestyles. How has this trend affected bright tax? And how are you adapting your organization to cater to this growing demographic of potential talent and clients?
Katelynn Minott: Yeah. So, at the firm at Bright!Tax, we’ve been in the cloud since day one, since the very beginning, right after Uber and Airbnb really got their feet underneath them, let’s say the 2010, 2011 timeframe people began growing their comfort level around carrying out certain transactions online.
And at that time, our founder, Greg DeWald had the idea for Bright!Tax. Remote work. So online work was definitely quite new at that time. And I actually remember personally looking back to my first few years with Bright!Tax, a lot of friends and family members looked at what I was doing and saw it as something of a hobby, if you will.
And in the early years, we definitely organized our work effectively, but when the global pandemic struck, the rest of the world came online and that’s when we got really, really good at delivering client service remotely. And I think a huge component of that was the increased adoption of zoom. That allowed us to turn on cameras for the first time with our clients and really see the lives and hear the stories of the people on the other side of the zoom screen.
And they, on the other hand, saw the human tax accountants on the other side too. So, it really solidified our relationships in a new way, leveraging the comfort level with, with zoom or online video meetings. And beyond that, we noted, of course, that the relationship building we were seeing with our clients.
Motivated us to become a camera on organization internally in 2020 as well. So that allowed us to further solidify the work culture that we had spent, you know, years working on an end building, but with many accounting firms asking their teams to come back into the, in the years since 2020 being fully remote has really given us a competitive edge for talent and our talent pool has become much larger, much more competitive since 2020.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And we did see an acceleration of adoption, of course, in the remote work and the technology, which is great. There have been some challenges with hybrid teams, we know, but in your business, particularly having the advancement in technological platforms and obviously remote work, you’re able to hire some great talent from around the globe.
So, I appreciate you highlighting that and what Bright Taxes went through. And Katelynn, last question of the day, looking ahead, what are your visions and goals for the future of Bright!Tax? Are there any new services or expansions that clients and the industry can look forward to?
Katelynn Minott: Yeah, so of course everyone’s talking about AI right now, and with AI and machine learning reshaping various sectors, Bright!Tax is planning very cautiously, I’ll highlight that, but certainly optimistically to integrate these technologies and enhance tax services for expatriates.
And we manage large volumes of extremely sensitive taxpayer data. That’s just a fact. So, our firm approach has been to explore ways that we can enhance interactions with potential clients to start people. We don’t even have any sort of data and information, you know, not even their names with necessarily before they’ve shared anything with us.
So, we’re working on a tool right now that leverages the hundreds of blog posts that we’ve created over the years, coupling that with IRS resources and to create a bright text AI, if you will, where clients can get answers quickly. And in the tone and manner that we would normally interact as, as human professionals with our clients.
So other ways we’re using technology right now, we’re using AI to do high level tax research, which of course does not operate fully independently without, you know, the human fact checker, but it certainly does make our jobs a lot faster and easier. My philosophy as the leader of our firm, though, with respect to technology and AI in particular, has been that we should consider using it in very small everyday ways.
So, for example, asking ChatGPT, what’s the best formula to use in Excel? Or asking it for a link to an IRS web page? And By doing so by using chat to BT or AI and small ways every single day, it’ll become part of their second nature. And once a much bigger change does come, we’ll be more comfortable about the use of AI.
And of course, once the security and accuracy are there to allow us to fully depend on it.
Brian Thomas: Thank you and I appreciate you highlighting some of the things that we should adopt on a regular basis during the day little things will slowly get people more comfortable with using the technology as it of course accelerates by the minute as you as you’ve seen in some of the press releases around Google and Microsoft OpenAI, etc. that are really advancing this technology so I appreciate that and Katelynn it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Katelynn Minott: Wonderful. Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Katelynn Minott Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
