How SYZYGY’s Accounting Helps Companies Lost in the Creative Sauce
SYZYGY is a new take on the accounting firm model in the advertising industry. The company was founded in 2020 to help clients embrace a post-covid world and offers invaluable insight and tools necessary for creative businesses to weather any storm.
Providing accounts services, job costing, cashflow management and CFO-level consulting, SYZYGY presents an ‘outsourced accounting advantage’ that allows the innovative media leaders it works with to focus more time on what they’re good at - the creative.
The firm was founded on two core tenets, says founder and COO Tyler Burr, speaking to LBB’s Ben Conway, “To empower our clients to feel both in command of their businesses and adaptable to changes out of their control, and to act as partners to our clients.” Tyler, who comes from an operations background, works alongside partner Chris Walters, a certified public accountant with a resume of financial experience, to meld their disciplines together.
“The financials aren't ultimately how we deliver value to our clients,” she says. “It's the work we do using the financials as a tool.”
After a “massive slowdown” in Q1 of 2023, where large corporations pared back their marketing budgets and departments, Tyler shares that we’re now looking at an irreversibly changed industry, despite a bounceback in Q2. “Between AI, virtual production, and increasing demand for advertising content across various channels, with linear becoming less and less dominant, production companies can no longer rely on marquee talent to be successful,” she says. Instead of talent being the product, she believes producers have now taken its place, thus demanding ingenuity, cost efficiency and novelty to stand out to brands and creative partners.
“It has never been more critical to work with smart bidders, smart line producers and smart production managers who can problem-solve creatively and find ways to bid work to win it and enable savings.” She explains that, recently, SYZYGY has witnessed clients with a proactive, organised and systemised production staff succeed even as budgets shrink - while clients who are dependent on production fees have struggled.
“Operational talent is the most critical aspect of business strategy for production companies,” she adds, sharing that the historically “old school” production industry is now finally seeing the rise of a new generation of modern, forward-thinking EPs and MDs. In turn, she says this has opened the door for disruptive vendors who think about the work differently and can provide the efficiency and automation that they’re looking for in their tools and systems.
In the context of accounting, Tyler describes how SYZYGY and others have adapted to this change with a future-facing philosophy - something that can be a challenge in a field that is primarily retrospective. “Our clients don't care about the job that wrapped three months ago. What's happening right now?” She continues, “To be a true strategic partner to an owner, you need to be able to speak to their current, immediate concerns. The accounting departments that become indispensable fixtures of a company's operational structure do just that.”
This is why SYZYGY takes an operations-focused approach.
Always thinking about the process and helping clients to improve it, SYZYGY’s founder and COO shares the company’s ambition to provide “a structured, plug-and-play offering” that shifts accounting from a concern to a strategic resource. “Infrastructurally, we're set up to service production companies and ad agencies, so we understand the transactional idiosyncrasies of these kinds of businesses in a way no bookkeeper or tax CPA will,” she says. “And because multiple team members cover our clients' accounts, their money is incredibly well protected.”
Their clients often arrive worrying about accounting and with a heavy focus on P&L, but Tyler says that they quickly unlock insights into how the company is working - and how it can work better - by making sense of, and extracting wisdom from, the numbers that companies simply don’t have the time and resources to examine. “When you're lost in the sauce and bounding from one job to another, it's tough to glean any lessons - successes or areas for improvement - on the decisions you're making day-to-day, let alone to be thoughtful and intentional about longer-term decision-making.”
She adds, “We can reveal something to our clients about how their business works and allow them to understand it better. It's virtually impossible to feel in control as a business owner, but this at least allows our clients to feel in command.”
Previously, more companies may have felt like using a third party accounting firm would mean relinquishing control. However, Tyler says that post-pandemic, many companies work remotely themselves and have opened to out-of-house partnerships. What’s more, the flexibility and scalability of an external department allow for companies to ride the fluctuations of the market and their business from month-to-month and year-to-year.
Structured and operations-driven, Tyler says that SYZYGY looks for partners who are willing to embrace their values and mesh their processes together. “We look for clients who take their responsibilities to their businesses as seriously as we take ours and understand that our work can only be as good as the communication we receive from them.” She adds, “We're not miracle workers - we're just accountants!”
Beyond that, they seek to work with clients that share their growth mindset, and who foster a culture built around thoughtfulness, communication, collaboration, humanity and, importantly, kindness. “And, of course,” she jokes, “folks we want to have a martini and a steak with.”
Looking ahead to the rest of 2023 and beyond, she concludes by highlighting the firm’s key goals - namely, the continued growth of its accounting division and the exploration of some additional new services that will align with the company’s existing value offering. “Sadly, there's a real shortage of talent who have both a great understanding of accounting and of production,” she says. So, to see one of the few companies with expertise at the intersection of both of these disciplines, watch this space.
