So many of us are taught a false hope by professionalism. To be the best, you need to go get another certification or another degree or memorize all the tax codes of be the best technician in your field, in your profession. But this simply isn’t true if you want to get ahead in business, because it’s still a human-to-human interaction.

Professionalism preaches that people with passions outside of work are less dedicated to their job or maybe not as good at their job, yet when people ask what this week’s guest, Garrett Wagner, what he does, his answer could easily be “I’m an accountant and a cyclist.” They’re both really important and make up who he is, but it’s the “and” – his cycling – that really strengthens his business relationships.

If you’re listening to this and think “Hey, I’ve got a hobby or passion that I love to talk about at work”, please reach out to me, because I’d love to have you as a guest on the show or maybe someone who would be a good fit to share their story. Just go to greenapplepodcast.com, send me quick message. Or you can hit me up on Twitter @greenapplepod.

But today, it’s all about Garrett Wagner, a business therapist with Thaney & Associates, CPAs in Rochester, New York. We met just a few weeks ago at the Rainmaker Companies SuperConference in Nashville. Garrett, I’m super excited you’re able to take the time to be with me on the Green Apple Podcast.

Garrett: John, thank you very much for having me. I’m very excited to be here today.

John: Oh, I’m excited. Your first name’s Garrett. My last name’s Garrett. It’s like we’re colliding into each other. We just need to find a John Wagner, and then it’s all over.

Garrett: Right? It’s a weird little mix with the first name and last name, for sure.

John: Yeah. I’m excited to have you on the show and to share your story with everybody, but before we get into that, I gave everyone a little bit of your background, but maybe in your own words, kind of what you’re up to now and how you got there.

Garrett: You know, for me, a lot of people, they had to go to school, they had go to college. What did you want to be? Hey, I guess I’ll go into accounting. People said it’s very broad. You can do a lot of things. Sure. Here I go.

I get there, didn’t really like it to start with, but I thought “Hey, I graduated with a BA in accounting. Let me give it a try.” I had some good jobs, some bad jobs, but overall, I loved this profession. It gave me a tremendous career, not just a job, to help clients and work with people.

Then a couple years ago, I felt that as much as I loved helping the firm I was at and helping the people there, I wanted to do more for the profession, so I got more involved with speaking at conferences, events, seminars, social media, helping the profession roll the ball, which has been incredibly rewarding and exciting for me. I’d really say there was transition from after school to a job to a career that I loved.

I get so much passion and enjoyment out of my calling. It’s amazing. We have a tremendous profession, amazing people, amazing clients. It can’t be beat. I want to encourage more people to stay in public accounting and get involved.

John: Yeah. You chose accounting just on a whim? Or what made you want to pick that one? It started with A, and it was the first one in the book?

Garrett: Just, hey, I have no idea what I want to be. I don’t even know what it would mean to be an accountant. I have no idea. It’s hard to explain now what we do, but people said “Go into accounting. It’s very broad. You can get a job in a lot of things afterwards.”

John: So true, though. Yeah.

Garrett: Anything with business, you can do with accounting. Sure. Start there.

John: That’s great, man.

Garrett: I said “Okay. I’m 18. Sure.” I had no idea what it meant to be an accountant or a CPA, and there I was.

John: That’s great, man. Good for you. I know that clearly when you’re speaking and traveling and helping firms as a consultant and what have you, that keeps you really, really busy, but when you have some free time, what’s that big passion that takes up some of your nights and weekends?

Garrett: You know, my big passion is not work-related, which is very important, because I am a savage cyclist.

John: Yeah?

Garrett: I love to cycle, have been doing it since back right out of college, something I kind of picked up. I had a buddy that he did it. He was very big into it. He was very competitive. We hung out a lot and kind of just got started and just picked up the bug, because it’s like when we were kids. It’s amazing to get on a bike and that freedom you feel to just kind of go anywhere and be away from your parents when you’re ten, 12, 13, and really that just pure joy of – where am I going to go today with the freedom of the world?

It’s still there now that I’m in my mid-30s. It’s still there. Where might I go today? It’s just me, my two feet, two wheels, and I’m just going to go out and enjoy the world. Push myself, challenge myself, experience the outdoors, hang out with some friends, and just enjoy like, especially nowadays with technology. It’s a chance to disconnect, relax, unwind, and destress.

John: Yeah, man. That’s so great. I remember when I was a kid Huffy and I think Team Murray I think was the bike I had. You’d just get on your bike and go. You’re the king of the world type of thing. That’s cool that you’re still doing it.

Garrett: Yeah. Really, it’s that same feeling of you’re the king of the world at 12, and you still feel that even as an adult. A lot of the guys I ride with now, their kids are out of college going off and they’re in their early- to mid-60s, and they’re still going, because for them, it’s that same joy they had as a kid of “Where am I going to go today?”

A lot of guys that I ride with are older like that, and they’re just as excited as a 20-year-old. “Hey, like, this weekend, where are we going to go? What’s the new route going to be this weekend?”

We pull out the map and “Okay, let’s go over here. I think there’s a really big hill over here. It’s like two-and-a-half hours that was to ride this really big hill”, and we’ll bike that.

It’s that same joy. Where can we go? Just like a little kid. “Hey, I heard there’s a dump. Two miles from the house, there’s a dump over here. There’s an old car.”

John: There’s a ramp.

Garrett: Yeah. There’s a ramp. Some guys built a ramp. Let’s go check it out. It’s that same thing at an older age where it’s that pure joy of just freedom.

John: Yeah. What are some of the cooler, more rewarding things that you can think of from cycling? Do you do races or is it more just recreational?

Garrett: Yeah. I did a lot of races after college up until my daughter was born two-and-a-half years ago.

John: Oh, wow.

Garrett: Very competitive. Since then, it’s more just a casual, recreational, de-stressor, but before that, yeah. I raced in some triathlons and duathlons, all that stuff. I’d sometimes travel around the US to do bike races, bike rides, different challenges. A hillier course here, a hillier course there. The East Coast, Texas.

Once again, it’s that freedom of “Hey, what am I going to do? I’ve got a free weekend. Let’s fly down to Texas, to Austin, and ride the hills. Let’s fly to South Carolina and go on the green mountains.” It’s that freedom, and it’s that immense challenge or reward to say you conquered it.

I did a couple hundred-mile bike rides, six, seven hours out there, just going. I’ve done some really hilly kind of adventure rides where it’s not timed, but it’s just “Can you finish this 60-, 70-, 80-mile path where you’re just climbing constantly. I’ve been lucky enough to go to Europe a couple times and ride to the big mountains, riding a tour in the then ride the Giro.

John: Sweet. Yeah.

Garrett: Those things are just – it’s breathtaking. It’s phenomenal. There’s a mountain in southern France called Mont Ventoux. It’s called the Giant of Provence. It just sticks out like a sore thumb. You just climb to the top of this barren wasteland that looks like the moon, and you just look out over the vast landscape with nothing there.

It takes…what’d that take? About an hour and a half of climbing. We’re talking about an hour and a half of just pure climbing, going up from – it averages 10%, so you’re just in your lowest gear, just cranking it out, but it’s magical. It’s moving. It’s amazing. But it’s just you. There’s no other factors. It’s just simply you and what you can do as a person. That ultimate challenge and that optimal effort of how far can you push yourself?

John: Yeah. When you fly, do you bring your bike, or do you get one there? How’s that work?

Garrett: Oh, yeah. You’ve got to bring your bike. It’s just like –

John: Right. It’s like golf clubs, sort of. Like “I don’t use other people’s.”

Garrett: Yeah. You’d rather not use somebody else’s golf clubs unless you really have to. It’s just so personal. Some people love their old, vintage sports car. Some people might love their golf clubs. I love my bike. I know my bike inside out, backwards and forwards, the pieces, the components. I take care of it. I tune it up. I look after it. I wash it. I clean it. It’s my very own.

John: That’s cool, man. I think it’s fantastic. It’s so encouraging to hear. My quads are burning up just hearing your stories. I think I speak on behalf of everyone to be like kudos, man. That’s impressive.

I love how you said that. It’s just you and what you can do. There’s no someone out there pushing you or pulling you or anything like that. It’s very encouraging to hear. Would you say that from doing all your cycling that any of that translated over to the office? Any skills or anything like that from being out there?

Garrett: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. For me, especially being on the more competitive side when I was racing, it’s the planning. It’s the training. It’s the training program. It’s the coaching. It’s the nuances, the details. Your success is really just tied to how much effort and smart work you can put in.

It teaches you to be very smart and very efficient with your time. It teaches you especially to just push yourself and to be okay pushing yourself. If you’re in a bike race and it’s 60 miles, you’re going to be about 60 miles of just pain and discomfort.

Your body’s going to say “Stop” from the get-go, but you’ve got to push through it, which is no different than when we get busy at work and we have a difficult challenge. Part of you says “Hey, let’s just stop. I don’t want to do this anymore. Let’s throw in the towel.”

John: Yeah. Around the end of March. Around the end of March, I think most of us are like “Yeah, you know what? I give up.” But the end is right there.

Garrett: There is no giving up.

John: You’ve just got to push through.

Garrett: At least if you want to be successful, you can’t give up. You’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to keep pushing. There’s no way around that. You will learn that if you do it every day.

The other part, too, is that – I got into cycling more before I got out of college. Right afterwards, before my career really took off, cycling, when it started, it was very, very hard. I wasn’t very successful right away. It took me a lot of time and hard work to be successful, which is the same in the job.

Coming out of college, you’re not a rock star to start with. You’ve got to put in a lot of time and hours to learn these skills to get better. You take a lot of bumps along the way.

For me, with cycling, when I first started, new, getting into it, wasn’t just naturally good at it. Took a lot of hard work. There were nights when I’d wake up in my quads and just be like standing and shaking. But that passed. It wasn’t fun, but it passed. Part of that bump to get over it is you’ve got to go through that.

You’ve got to push yourself harder every single day, plus, in cycling, there’s so much data and numbers that can go behind it between heartrate and power and time and watts and it feeds that accountant with the numbers thing. I can do a ride and get home, and there’s charts and graphs and statistics that I can look at and analyze and go through.

John: Nice. Nice. Yeah. That’s exactly it. You know that you can push through this, because you’ve done it before. While it’s not busy season accounting, it’s cycling. You equate it to you’re not in a book or you’re not studying for the exam, but there’s CPE that’s happening out there while you’re riding. There’s a different muscle group that you’re exercising that will help you in the office.

It’s an excellent way to disconnect and get out there and feel that freedom, but it’s also something where you’re accidentally also getting better at your job, which is a cool side effect.

Garrett: Yeah. Our jobs are not just those technical skills, the gaps, the tax code. Our jobs are really often what our leadership skills or emotional intelligence, what we bring to the table is really what drives it. You’ve got to work on those outside of work. It’s not always work-work-study. You can do other skills that help increase those and give you other talent and make you a more rounded-out person.

John: Yeah. That’s exactly it. The cycling – did you talk about this when you were at work after you graduated and started your accounting career?

Garrett: Oh, yeah. I talked about it at work to my co-workers that happened to get into it or who wanted to get into it. We’d talk about it, or I’d be at a race, and I’d be like “Oh, there’s one of the partners. What are you doing here?” “Oh, yeah. I race, too.” “Really? So do I.”

It’s a small world. You never know who you’re going to run into. Same thing even sometimes with clients. You’ll do their audit, next thing you know, you line up, you’re in the middle of a bike race or a bike ride, and you look over – oh, is that you? What are you doing here? You were just in my audit yesterday. Now, we’re riding together, and we’re building a connection with something besides work.

John: Yeah. Something outside of work.

Garrett: Something we’re passionate about together. Cycling’s a great community of great people. It’s like a lot of sports and activities. It’s a great community of people to get involved with to make a connection and share some interests.

John: Yeah, for sure. Something outside of the office. You’re more relaxed and in your natural environment. That cycling passion is inside you before you had that job, while you have this job, and even after you have this job. It’s still inside you.

You’ve got to let it out. I think it’s hilarious though where you’re lining up and there’s a partner, and it’s like, well, at some point, do you think that it’s on a partner to maybe disclose what their passionate about in the office rather than waiting till you’re lining up?

Garrett: Absolutely. In any office, you want to know something about the people you work with and what they’re passionate about, what they do, and you should know where to share that. You’ve had these conversations with people, whether you’re eating lunch with them or just interact with them or talk with them. We all work together whether it’s in work or a social setting, in church, school, a chamber you’re involved in. You get to know each other, and you share those stories, and you build a connection. The connection isn’t what you do. The connection is why you do it.

John: Yeah. There you go.

Garrett: Some of that connection is through why you do these things you’re passionate about. It’s not what you do in your daily job. It’s what you’re passionate about outside your job. Those are the connections and the relationships you can build and foster and help.

The other thing I did with work is it helped me just network, as well. It gave me a network of people that I network with outside of work that – some people that cycle happen to be business owners. If the conversation comes up – “What do you do?” “Oh, yeah. I’m an accountant and a CPA. I help business owners be more successful.” “Oh, I need a new one of those. Who am I to call?”

I whip out the “Go to Google and search ‘CPA’, and there’s a lot. I’ve been seeing Garrett every Wednesday and Saturday for the past two years. Let me give him a call.” It’s not like I have to go to a networking happy hour thing that I don’t really want to go to, and it’s an hour of my time, and I don’t enjoy it. I’m doing something that I love, and I am making connections that I can use in the workplace.

John: Yeah. That’s such a great story. It benefits your career directly. It benefits your firm. It’s business-generating. You’re making connections there that are more than that. If it’s not them, it’s a friend of a friend. It may not be immediately, but good things happen when you just open up a little bit and share. I think that’s cool.

Garrett: Yeah. I mean that’s when I’ve seen and talked a lot of firms about is there are people that work at the firm will say, “Well, I don’t do any networking. I have no networking sources I interact with.”

You say “Well, what do you do? What are you passionate about? What do you do?”

“I’m in a baseball league.”

John: There you go.

Garrett: “Okay, do have other people you play baseball with?”

“Yeah.”

“What do they do?”

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

“Okay, there you go. Now, it’s a networking group. You’ve got kids, right?”

“Yeah. They’re in dance.”

“Well, what do those parents do?”

Everyone we meet’s a networking group. You don’t have to look at it like a purely you meet someone you have to get business out of, but it’s that – but it’s useful. What’s that connected social network where we meet people and share connections? It’s really everything we do that drives those passions.

I’ve found with people that if you share that passion, they’re more apt to say “I want to hire you because we share that passion of cycling or softball, baseball, bowling, book club, chess club, whatever.” They’re going to hire you more than you met them at a happy hour and they said “Oh, my firm provides the best tax service in town.” No one’s going to hire that. That’s – so what?

John: “Yeah, so did the other 30 guys right before you.”

Garrett: Yeah. They’re not going to hire that. They’ll hire the “why”, which is that shared passion. You both really care about bowling or book club. You’re both comic book nerd fans, and you see each other in a comic book shop at a comic book convention in town.

John: Totally.

Garrett: They’re going to hire you because you can joke about you’re Batman, he’s Superman, and as corny as that is, it’s the connection that you need.

John: Totally. They’ll love you forever. That’s exactly it. Are there ways that you maybe would go about…? I know that you were at a couple of firms. When you would start, were you reluctant to share this, or was it, hey, it’ll come out eventually in conversation when someone asks me what I did this weekend?

Garrett: You know, I think early on, it was more reluctant, kind of like the first time I was out of college. I was like “Oh, my God. What do I do?” The more I went and did it, the more I would, because it’s how you can make a quicker connection with people.

Whether you’re a new firm right off the bat or a new firm two, five, ten, 15 years out, it’s still that awkward growth phase of getting to know people. So get to know people over something besides just a tax return or an audit. Get to know them for what they do, who their significant other is, who their kids are. What do they do in their free time besides work?

Find out. Make a connection. Especially if you’re in more of a leadership role in the organization or looking to move up to a leadership role. If you can understand what someone’s passionate about and you show an interest in that, they’re more likely to put a hard effort in working for you. They want to work for you because they feel like you believe in them and you’re interested in them. They want you to succeed.

Where if you just go “Hey, Bob. Here’s the changes they need in that audit report. Good job on that tax return”, it’s very superficial.

John: Totally. They don’t feel connected. They’re going to quit easily. Then you’re not retaining talent, and that’s expensive.

Garrett: Yeah.

John: It’s a lot more expensive than someone wasn’t chargeable all eight hours because they were doing something on the side or whatever. That’s for sure, man. What do you think it is that – we’ve all been there, and a lot of people are still there. Even partners that have been with a firm for 40 years are still there. What do you think it is that makes people not want to share? What is it that holds people up?

Garrett: You know, I think some of it is the mix of the stigma of the anti-social accountant. They’re nervous to do that. Part of it is that for some firms that innate drive on all they care about is billable hours, and you are expected to be – you’ve got an eight-hour day. I want you to be available for seven-and-a-half hours, and the other half hour is eat lunch and you can cram a couple bathroom breaks in there.

It leaves no time to do anything else, because they feel like, well, your only value to me is how much you bill, because that’s how much revenue I generate. That’s how much more money I get in my pocket. That is an actually broken, failed business model, which is why a lot of firms in our industry are struggling, because that’s what we focused on is how your staff, your managers, your partners bill, bill, bill, bill, bill. How many hours did you bill today? That’s your value.

That’s not their value. It’s not their work. It’s not their contribution to society and to your firm, to your people, to your clients. It’s one arbitrary number that doesn’t measure the whole picture of what you do and what you contribute.

But so many firms focus on that. They stick on it. It creates that negative culture where people don’t feel like they can share and talk about things. They feel like they need to get in, work, work, work, work some more, and then work some more.

John: Yeah. I just say it’s professionalism. It can suffocate you. You can be professional and be good at your job, but too much of it, it’ll really suffocate you. Then you have these passions, and then they go dormant because you’re not doing them or talking about them anymore, and then eventually, they’re extinct.

I’ve talked to some people that are about to retire, and they’re like “Yeah, I’ve got nothing. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my time.” That’s probably the scariest thing to me is if you’re putting all this blood, sweat, and tears into this firm and into this career, and then you’re going to step away, and you’ve got nothing to step to. That’s really scary. Really scary.

Garrett: That is. The other side I see a lot all the time was there was staff or the partners will say, “Well, they don’t think enough. They don’t put enough effort. They don’t do more.” And then you look at what happens and the culture, and you teach them they need to bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, and that’s it.

You want a robot. You want a robot. Then you complain when the robot doesn’t – you question what it’s supposed to do. No, you built the robot. You built someone that’s just going to put numbers down, hit cal, hit print, and be done with it, because you want it done quickly. That’s what you got.

You don’t want a robot? You want that? Then you talk to them. Do you know what anybody here does? “Oh, well, no.” Share some passion.

John: They don’t.

Garrett: Yeah. Be interested in your people.

John: It’s free. That’s the best part about it. It’s not even like food during busy season or whatever.

Garrett: Yeah. Having a great culture is really free. The same thing I hear a lot of firms talk about with this same topic of “Millennials are so hard to work with, so hard to understand” – well, what did you do? “I bought them water bottles, more happy hours, and I gave more money.” How’d that work out? “They all left.”

John: They all left. Exactly.

Garrett: Did you talk to them? Did they say they wanted those things?

John: No. That’s so good.

Garrett: Did you talk to them? No.

John: That’s such a great example.

Garrett: Okay, so congratulations. You continue to do what’s not working. Millennials especially, they want to be, more than anything. I’m a millennial. I’m proud to be a millennial. We’re not the worst generation ever. We’re a little bit different, but we want to be passionate about our jobs. We want to have passionate careers. We don’t just want to go through the motions every day of punching the time clock.

When we don’t have that, yeah, we struggle to go through work without passion and purpose more so than generations before us.

John: Yeah. It’s just a human thing. I think the other generations wanted it but they were afraid to speak up. It’s not a weird thing. It’s not out of the blue. What? Where? You guys are speaking another language. You guys want a hug? What’s going on? It’s not that at all. It’s just – create the firm that you wish you had when you started. It’s that easy.

Just care about people. It’s not all about the billable hour all the time. Certainly, there are times when you need to get in the trenches and knock some work out, but all the good will that you’ve built up before that – suddenly, busy season isn’t so painful, because you’re doing it with your friends and people that you genuinely care about and that care about you. It’s not as brutal.

When you’re doing your bike ride, you’re with friends. Your legs are burning up, you’re tired, you’re sunburnt, you’re sweating like crazy, you’re dehydrated, but you know what? You’re loving every minute of it, because you’re with your friends.

Garrett: Some of the bike races are a team thing, so you know your teammates. You know they sacrificed. They worked for you. They put you in a place to win or to be in the top. You don’t want to let them down. They did all that hard work.

Speaking of this reminds me of another story you kind of asked what did bike racing teach me. One of the greatest life lessons I’ve ever learned was from my cycling coach and friend. His whole philosophy was “Race smart, and then race hard.”

I bring that with me. Everything I do in life is smart first, then hard. Everything we do doesn’t need to be hard. Everything we do needs to be smart about how we do it, and then after you’ve made it smart, then you’ve got to put in the hours and it’s going to be hard, but first and foremost, it’s always be smart about it. Don’t do something in 20 steps you can do in five. Always be smart first and then hard.

John: That’s so perfect, man, and what a great way to wrap it up. Really, really great, man. This was really cool. Really fantastic, Garrett.

Garrett: John, my pleasure.

John: Yeah. Absolutely, man. But I do have a rule that before I throw on some spandex and those weird clicky shoes or whatever you guys wear and come out cycling with you, I do have to run you through my 17 rapid-fire question.

Garrett: All right. I’m ready.

John: Just to make sure that we can hang out. All right. Let me fire this thing up here. All right. Here we go. I’ll start you easy. Start easy here. Do you have a favorite number?

Garrett: Seven.

John: Seven. Why is that?

Garrett: I was born on the seventh of March.

John: Oh. There you go. It was destiny. How about more Sudoku or crossword puzzle?

Garrett: Sudoku.

John: Okay. All right. How about do you have a favorite color?

Garrett: Blue.

John: Blue. All right. A least favorite color?

Garrett: Green.

John: Green. Oh. Interesting. Same family there. How about do you have a least favorite vegetable?

Garrett: Cucumbers.

John: Cucumbers. All right. More Star Wars or Star Trek?

Garrett: Star Wars.

John: Yeah. There you go. How about do you have a favorite band?

Garrett: Favorite band is going to be O.A.R.

John: O.A.R. There you go. Oh, wow. Nice. Do you have a favorite actor or actress?

Garrett: That’s a tough one.

John: Or do you have a favorite comedian?

Garrett: John Garrett.

John: John Garrett. There you go. You know what? That’s what they all say. Then they come back with a real answer. I’m going to make you stick to that one. Are you more of an early bird or a night owl?

Garrett: Early bird.

John: Early bird. All right. How about a PC of Mac?

Garrett: PC.

John: PC. Yeah. When it comes to a mouse, are you more click or right-click?

Garrett: Click.

John: Click. Yeah. Getting stuff done. How about more jeans or khakis?

Garrett: Jeans.

John: Jeans. All right. Do you have a favorite ice cream flavor?

Garrett: Peanut butter and chocolate.

John: Oh, wow. Yeah. Nice. That’s a good answer. When it comes to financials, more balance sheet or income statement?

Garrett: Income statement.

John: Do you have a favorite movie of all time?

Garrett: Star Wars: A New Hope.

John: Oh, wow. Okay. All right. We got two more. When you’re reading, do you prefer Kindle or real books?

Garrett: Audio books.

John: Audio books. Nice. Last one, the favorite you own or the favorite thing you have?

Garrett: My wife and my daughter, by far.

John: Cool, man. That’s awesome. Well, this was really, really great, Garrett. Thank you so much for being with me on the Green Apple Podcast.

Garrett: No problem, John. Thank you for having me. Thank you for sharing this idea of passion and bringing them to the workplace and talking about what you do with the rest of the world. You’ve got a great story. I’m glad people are listening to it.

John: That was really, really fun. I particularly loved how Garrett said the connection isn’t what you do at work, it’s why you do these things you’re passionate about. I couldn’t have said it better. Don’t let professionalism suffocate your personality.

If you’d like to see some pictures of Garrett cycling or connect with him on social media, go to greenapplepodcast.com. The show has its own Twitter handle, like I said at the beginning at @greenapplepod, so follow us there.

Thank you for sharing this with your friends so they get the message that we’re all trying to spread, which is to go out and be a green apple.