Practice profile: Ready Player One

Matthew Walach recalls a colleague passing along a valuable lesson a dozen or so years ago, when he was pressured to dress in a suit for a video meeting with a big video game client in Vancouver. The client joined the call in a cowboy hat and immediately teased the employees in suits and ties. While they had followed their company’s directive, they were out of sync with this valuable client.

Getting in sync became the defining philosophy of the accounting and financial services company Walach has since founded, Insert Coin Accounting.

“You have to mimic your clients, and be real,” Walach explained. “That’s the thing — people generally work with who they like. If you’re like them, and still have the knowledge, they respect that knowledge and know you’re real.”

Listening to clients led Walach to co-found Insert Coin Accounting with experienced CPA Muddassir Mahmood. Based in the burgeoning video game markets of Montreal and Toronto, it was originally established in 2015 as Cumulative, a cloud-based accounting firm where Walach and Mahmood leveraged their past experiences helping startup technology companies utilize the Canadian government’s industry-specific funding and tax credits. But Cumulative’s handful of video game clients quickly, and enthusiastically, discovered that the duo’s experience was much more specialized to their industry.

“We had a lot of contacts out there in the gaming industry, six months to a year into it,” Walach shared. “What we knew, the advice we gave them, was stuff they heard nowhere else. [Insert Coin Accounting] was dictated by them. No one in this industry understands gaming. A lot of veteran video games companies [are treated] like startup tech companies. They look and feel the same, with the work-play culture. But from all the things around financial funding, they couldn’t be further from the same.”

Unlike the traditional funding for technology companies, Walach explained, video game companies are funded, whether by the government or their publishers, on a project-by-project basis, requiring “very, very different strategies.”

Cumulative still serves the wider tech industry, but this eager client base of video game studios, today numbering nearly 100, required the core business to pivot into a whole new identity.

“We had clients tell us what our expertise is,” Walach explained. “On that side, early on, we were building out our sales story, to understand ourselves, explain ourselves. We interviewed clients, asked questions of what they found most valuable, and why they liked working
with us.”

Walach, Mahmood and team were also attending copious industry events, pre-COVID, and created and joined advocacy groups pushing for a more streamlined tax-credit process from the government, even though that simplification could cost them hours of client consulting work.

Second life

Walach was attending one of these conferences, for online software provider Xero, when the idea struck him to undertake a strategic rebranding. He watched as nominations were announced for a best website awards category and a simple but effective company name flashed on screen: Food Truck Accounting.

Walach registered not only the company’s cool factor but its practicality.

“We were constantly explaining that Cumulative was just video games,” he said. “Especially when you’re niche, you should tell in your name, and everything, exactly what you do.”

Insert Coin Accounting was born, and with it, a sleek website that mimics the neon colors and pixelated style of classic arcade games, with illustrated avatars of Walach and Mahmood and dynamic animations and quirky metrics. (The headlining row of text reads: Steam games owned: 84, Games actually played: 12, Hours spent gaming at work: 0.)

And while Walach and Mahmood lament that, as those numbers reveal, they are too busy serving their clients to indulge in their creations, even presenting these non-accounting figures on their homepage speaks to another philosophy of theirs — distancing themselves from the traditional accounting firm.

Insert Coin Accounting provides traditional accounting and bookkeeping services, but also focuses on year-round consulting services around tax credits and conducting the audits of these credits required by the Canada Revenue Agency.

“I’m not a fan of the Big Four,” Walach shared. “And prospects are not fans of no transparency in billing — it seemed like a broken system.” Insert Coin Accounting offers packaged pricing at a monthly rate, with essential consulting services built into the cost, and audits at a fixed fee.

“The consulting elements — we’re talking to them about everything, anything financially related to the business,” Walach explained. “Even if they think it’s not tax-related. No. 1: It probably is. And even if it isn’t, [it’s still important].”

Leveling up

As Insert Coin Accounting grows, Walach and Mahmood are seeking to add to their staff of 15, but find it challenging to recruit the accounting expertise without the profession’s older conventions.

“We are looking for new CPA students, but don’t want to go the traditional route,” Walach said. “It’s a different territory, with people more experienced in the industry, but with that baggage of old-world views. Even when they think they want to do it differently, they are still stuck in that way.”

Walach acknowledged that Insert Coin Accounting faces these same hurdles when trying to attract clients away from larger accounting firms. “We have some of the typical challenges many smaller-tier accounting companies face, of a natural bias,” he shared. “Some people have the belief that the Big Four are by far the pinnacle. But by and large, there are enough examples of companies let down by larger accounting groups.”

And as Insert Coin Accounting targets more of these larger studios, Walach notes that their clients not only dictate the services they need, but also their value.

“We did a different approach — we thought we were competing, and sometimes were competing, on price. But we realized we are so different, we don’t need to compete with them … We can charge rates even in excess, providing value for that rate. Now it’s not tough, as our name is quite well known across Canada, especially in Ontario and Quebec. A lot of [business] comes to us. We’re moving up in our average client size. And we make sure we’re providing value.”