An Accounting Firm That Runs Without You? Here's How (with Alexis Kingsbury)

Alexis Kingsbury, which is a serial entrepreneur, public speaker, have built 2 software businesses and a consulting firm, and it's currently building a playbook for accounting firms to build a practice that doesn't rely on them. So thanks for coming on, Alexis.

That's an absolute pleasure, Isaac. It's really good to be here and good to be talking to you.

All right. So, you know, one of the things that really caught my attention when I saw you on LinkedIn is that you phrased your endeavor, your entrepreneurial venture as a research project, as opposed to, you know, I'm building another software or a consulting practice. I thought that that was very interesting to sort of like first go talk to other people and figure things out. What was the, I guess, the reason behind doing that in the first place, as opposed to saying, hey, this is software we're building, this is a consulting building, and just kind of do what I say as opposed to, hey, let's figure it out. What's actually going on?

Yeah. So, I mean, my background, so I started out my career, well, if I go way back, I was a 12-year-old wannabe entrepreneur starting up businesses, doing a variety of different things, whether it was e-commerce or publishing, or at one point doing software development, at one point building computers and selling them to local businesses, like I've done all sorts of weird stuff. And then, but really struggled to grow the business beyond me. So then became a management consultant after studying management science at university, working with organizations, you know, large organizations on how to improve their ways of working and grow and so on. And what was really interesting to me is that when working on all of these businesses, whether it's businesses I'd started or then as a consultant working with these businesses, is whilst the, like, whilst the nuts and bolts of how things work is different, a lot of the challenges are often shared. You know, there's, there's some common challenges that everyone has around, for example, attracting and retaining talented people. There's common challenges around working in consistent ways or improving your efficiency or, you know, your specialty around automation. There's a lot of those sort of common challenges that every business has. And yet I know as a management consultant that everyone thinks their business is special and different and, you know, can't be possibly like anyone else's.

Yeah.

And so one of the experiences that I had as a consultant was you have to listen, you have to go in. And in fact, that's one of the things that is good and bad about the management consulting industry is as a consultant, I developed a really good ability to go and ask questions and really, really listen and dig and keep on asking why and so on until I could surface what's the real problem here. Because when you've got the real problem, like the root, root, root, root cause, then you can come up with a solution that actually solves it rather than just solves the symptom. But you have to listen. But the criticism of the management consulting industry is, well, they, they come and they borrow your watch to tell you the time and then they keep the watch. And, you know, that's essentially, I go in, I ask a load of questions, but then I'm playing back what I've heard from the people in your business. But they knew it anyway. And it's like, well, yes, you do, but you haven't been able to distill it to what actually matters. Because of course, yes, you can get 100 ideas of how the business can improve, but you can't execute on 100 ideas on how to improve the business today. Instead, you need it distilling to really work out what's going to have the biggest impact and what's the real root cause and so on. And so whenever I've started a new business since that point and You know, I've got 2 software businesses now, but over the years I've started various things. I always went in with that inquisitive mindset of going, let me really understand this.

Let me—

when we're talking about, like, in the accountancy bookkeeping industry, when people are talking at these accounting events about the talent shortage and this gap that's there, what's the real problem there? What are the businesses that are not having this problem? What are they doing differently to the ones that are? And when I compare it to my own experience with my own businesses and other clients, what is it that's different? And so that's, I've found that that's a better way to come into a business. It's like, it's like something I've learned when doing startups is don't go in with, hey, I've got this amazing solution. It's go in with a passion for solving a problem for someone and then work out what the solution is. And so I think that's, that's a big part of it. I think the other part is I genuinely just find it fascinating. And I love speaking at events and podcasting and doing those things, just like exploring and sharing these sorts of problems. And so the conversations I get to have with amazing people, it's just so fun for me when you go in with a research thing rather than, hey, I'm going to tell you what you should do. It just, yeah, it completely changes everything. Yeah.

And I think it's so much more approachable too when you're going into a firm owner and saying, hey, I have some questions for you and kind of want to dig into this particular problem. Is that something you're facing? As opposed to, hey, here's the product we have, you know, and kind of being a hammer looking for a nail. That's probably one of the most common challenges of early entrepreneurs for sure. And I've had my fair share of those experiences. Now, part of your goal is really trying to help the firm, kind of like the firm owner step out of the day-to-day and kind of not be as involved. Based on your research and what you've learned up until now, why do you think firm owners are so involved in the day-to-day of their firm, do you say?

Yeah, great question. So I think there's a sort of phenomenon that kind of exists in all businesses, but is felt much more acutely by accounting and bookkeeping practices. And that's that when you start any business, you have to do a lot of the graft. You have to do the work. You have to, you know, sell the product and also build it and then do the accounting afterwards and so on. And then you start growing and you start hiring to try and free up some of your time so that you can be more strategic and that you can scale and so on. But for any business that starts in that way, there is a period where you're having to do a lot of the things. And so a big challenge and something that's like written about by Michael Gerber in The E-Myth is how do you do that? How do you, how do you get so that you can work on the business rather than in it? Now with accounting and bookkeeping, that is made even more tricky to get out of because often the people that are starting accounting and bookkeeping practices have been accountants and bookkeepers. And so they are the service and that they are selling themselves and their ability, their insights, their client advisory skills is what they're pitching and selling in the same way as When I first started management consulting, I'm selling me going in and facilitating workshops or doing research or whatever. And so that makes it even more challenging than say a business that's making and selling widgets, because at least with the making and selling widgets, they're buying a product that isn't you and that you're not a widget, even if you're an expert in how they're made. Whereas the accounting and bookkeeping, you're actually in it. I think the other challenge, so you've got that, but then the other challenge is that as an accountancy bookkeeping practice grows and you start to bring that talent in, in, in my experience of lots of different industries, there is a lot of complexity in this industry versus many others. There is a lot of, there is a lot of processes and different things that need to happen with lots of steps and complexity and knowledge of both the technology, but also laws and also Sector knowledge, even client-specific knowledge, and you've got to have all of that. And then we expect that team member that you've brought in, who by the way isn't a super senior accountant because you can't afford them, you've had to probably bring in some almost administrator level, and you bring them in to do these things, but then also you kind of want them to add the value add and not just do the doing, but ideally they could be able to ring up the client and address a query or, you know, unpick some problem that meant that they couldn't reconcile a particular account.

Right.

And do all of that in line with your brand and your values. And you can see quickly, there's so much in this role. I often refer to it as you end up looking for a unicorn. You're looking for someone out there that is so rare in terms of their ability to do all the things and do them in the way that you want in the business that it becomes very difficult to hire. It becomes very frustrating because often the hires that you do make don't work out. And so you end up deciding, oh, it's just easier if I do it myself. And so there are particular roles where you just end up not being able to scale and grow. And so I think that ends up pulling the accountant, the bookkeeper back into the business when they really should be letting go and growing it. So those are some of the trends I could see, and I can happily talk about like, so what makes the difference and how you get out and all this sort of thing, but that's a starting point.

No, definitely. I like that. And under delegation has always been a challenge, right? Especially in a technical career as it is. accounting, because to your point, there's so much context to do a particular piece of work. And often it's, you know, unreasonable to expect that a— sometimes even another senior accountant that might come in needs to be kind of trained over time. So I'm curious to get your thoughts, like what would be, if you had to summarize before we get into the details, like what are the top 3 to 5 things that are required to solve that problem, whether it is process or hiring or training? And if you can organize them in order of priority, at least from your point of view.

Cool. Yeah, love it. So I'd say at the, if we start at the very top level, essentially, if we accept that that's the challenge that you've got as an owner of a practice, and that ultimately you're, the first thing that needs to happen is a mind shift. You need to switch from thinking that as the owner of an accounting and bookkeeping practice, you're— the business that you're, you're operating is not really about doing the books for clients. It's not even about, oh, helping my client to grow and solve their problems. That's still the job of an accountant or bookkeeper, right? That's often what I see is they go, oh yeah, no, we're not about just doing the books, we're about helping them solve their problems and grow and whatever. And that's true, and for the purposes of marketing sales, that's absolutely right. But actually, as a leader, as an owner, that's not even what the business is, because that's what an accountant does, and that will leave you trapped. Really, you're— when you're owning a practice, you're in the business of creating a packaged-up service of expert people and administrators and automations, a system of production that delivers value to clients in a coherent way. that clients can understand and don't get overwhelmed. For example, if you go, oh well, I've hired a load of bookkeepers and accountants, and then the client's like, right, I was dealing with Jane last week and now it's Steve, and then Paul's emailing me, I've got no idea how all this works together, I'm confused, and everyone's asking for different information. Like, you've got the component parts of a functioning practice there, but you've not done the job of the owner of organizing that in such a way that it works as a coherent, value-adding, you know, smooth, great customer experience. That's what you're really in the business of, is designing and building that over time. And initially, you're part of that resource, you're in that pool, and your journey will be continuing to build it while kind of stepping more out of it. And even if you decide that there's a part of it you really like, maybe you really like having the the client meetings, or maybe you really like doing the tax returns or whatever, that's fine. But you've got to imagine yourself putting that hat on within the system you've designed, and you happen to be resourcing it that day rather than defining yourself as a business leader that does that. So I think that's the very first thing, is shifting your mindset around what you're even in the business to do and what's the important things being a business owner. I'd say once you've realized that, the next thing is realizing that if you're going to build a business that doesn't rely on you, that has a way of working, you've got to make it easy for your team to do things the way you want them done. Because if you don't make it easy for your team to do things the way you want them done, then don't be surprised when you get frustrated that everyone does things slightly differently, that people don't do it quite in line with your values, or they don't do it in your brand, or they don't do quite what you had pitched to the client, or they don't hand over to another team member at the right time, or they forget to do a step. We've just talked about how complex accounting and bookkeeping businesses can be. You need to make that easy. You need to make it easy so that, yes, you want to hire A-players, like awesome people in your business that fit your culture, your values, and are passionate about what they do and great to work with, But you want a business that can succeed even when they're on their off day and can succeed and that people can do these things, even if they're not the world's best user of Xero and your practice management software and Excel and great at having conversations with clients and happen to know all about the medical industry that you happen to have a sector specialism. Like, don't make it so difficult for someone to be good at their job. So that's the second thing. So you've got your mindset, now you've got to make it easy. And when we talk about how do you make it, how do you make it easy for your team to do things the way you want it done, essentially it comes down to guidance. It comes down to how easy it is to get those processes captured and being done by the team and how quickly you can do that, because it doesn't work to say, oh, well, I'm going to spend the next year documenting all of my processes. And it's like, Your business moves too fast for that. By the time you've finished documenting them, they'll all be out of date, right? It needs to be more agile. You need to be taking a specific problem, perhaps client onboarding, or maybe it's recruitment. Maybe it's what's the recruitment process that means that we end up with these awesome people. Take a specific problem, get that documented and being in place and using automations where appropriate, make and make all of that easy. And I can talk about how you do that, but that's one of the first things. If is if that's not easy and you're not doing that in minutes, really, like minutes to single digits hours, because a lot of people think it's like days and days of work and it shouldn't be, then everything else falls over. Because if you can't do that quickly, then you'll always think, well, I'm so busy, so I can't, I definitely can't document what I'm doing and hand it over to someone else because I'm so busy. I'll never get the time to do it. And it's like, well, if you'll never get the time to do that, then you'll never free up the time and you're just stuck in the cycle. So you need to make that really easy. Then once you've done that, the, or as part of that, you also need to make it easy to use the various systems. So your guidance needs to not just cover the, you know, here's the steps that you go through. It needs to explain how you use different systems as part of it. Because the truth is with businesses, like you're not gonna just use one tool for absolutely everything.

Right.

You've got to give the guide rails of how you use technology and how you use automations so that your team aren't terrified of screwing things up and doing the wrong thing and breaking it, right? You don't want them to have to be world's best Xero expert when they join the business. You know, I've hired finance administrators into my internal finance team who have come with a maths degree and that's it, right? And I've hired on the basis that they're, you know, good with numbers and like detail and can follow processes and things, not that they've done any financial stuff. And then they follow processes and as a result, basically become my entire finance function. And doing everything right the way through to manual journals and doing my R&D tax returns and all these sorts of things. And it's like, so how have they done that? Well, they've taken a process that was built based on experience, based on expert input and so on, and they're following it. And it's easy for them to use these tools to get the stuff done. You know, even my wife has got her own consulting business. She was terrified when she first set that up of the admin involved, of sending invoices, of credit notes and so on. And we just created some simple checklists for her to follow so that she could use Xero to create the credit note and send the invoice and reconcile the bank account. And suddenly she's like, oh, oh, this isn't scary anymore. I can totally do it. So even someone who's like, had no interest in doing it, can, can be supported when you've got that. Third thing, in terms of how do you make it easy for your team to do things the way you want them done. The third thing is you've got to use self-service onboarding. So often what I see is business owners who, they hold back from hiring when they're busy because they worry about how long it'll take to train someone to do the work. And it's like, when you're busy is when you need to be hiring, right? That's the market signal to you to say, you need to hire right now. And if you're thinking, oh, well, I couldn't possibly, 'cause it'll take me weeks or months to get this person up to speed and I'll be spending all that time, I'll hold back, right? There's not a magical time when you're suddenly not busy and then you can go, oh, now I'll hire. Hire and do the training. So you need to make onboarding self-service so that most of the learning is something that they can pick up and run with, and then you can focus on value add. And that completely changes the way you approach growing your team because suddenly you stop being afraid that if I suddenly had 100 more clients coming in the door, what the hell am I going to do? Because you go, well, I just kick, you know, kick off the recruitment process, kick off the onboarding process, and I get amazing people in the door learning how to add incredible value. And then the final thing is you've got to make it so that making mistakes is hard, right? If you've got a business where actually your team are making mistakes on a regular basis, it's like you need to attack the process, not the person, because we all make mistakes, we all forget things. And if you're going, oh, Susan, you know, you're applying the wrong VAT rate again, or, you know, you've, uh, you've forgotten to send this to the right client or whatever, or you know, you've sent this to the client, but you've missed out these questions. Make that a hard thing. Make that a hard mistake to make. Like, provide email templates in your processes and in your guidance. Provide them with checklists that they can tick off as they go along so that they don't miss anything. You know, a common one I see is like in the sales kind of area, like doing discovery calls. Lots of people are having discovery calls with potential clients, And they've got no structure of how they're having that conversation. And so as a result, firstly, they're not able to test and improve the way in which they have it and build best practices into it. But it means that any good questions that they could be asking, like, you know, why did you start out in business in the first place? And what's the current obstacles that you're struggling with? And why are you currently considering moving from your existing accountant? Really good questions that make the sales process so much easier. If you've not got that in a checklist that you're ticking off as you go along and that you're capturing those notes, then your likelihood of getting sales is gonna significantly reduce. If you haven't got a documented, thought-out script for how you then pitch your unique offering as part of that discussion, once you've understood their needs, if you haven't got that ready for you to go and that you can deliver it naturally, and it's been practiced because If it ends up being different every time, you're gonna get different results, worse results. Whereas when you've practiced it and you've got that, like, you will get better results, you'll get more sales. If you've got a part of the— if you're, as part of your sales conversation, if you're not clear on how you smoothly transition to a close, then you won't close as many sales. Whereas if you've got your checklist where you're like, okay, I check these things, I say, okay, so based on what I've described, Which of these packages feels like the right fit for you? If you were to go ahead, when would you want to start? Where should we send the invoice for that first thing? Who needs to be on the onboarding call? Like, you might have specific nice questions that you ask that aren't like, so are you going to go ahead with this? Like, which is awkward. You need to have a smooth transition as part of your sale. That's like genius, careful stuff that you have to think about and test and practice. That should be how you do every single discovery call, both for you and then any of your team that do it. And that's all about making it difficult to make mistakes, right? And so those are the things. So it's first mindset, then understand that you need to make it easy for your team. And then the 4 things about making it easy for the team: make it easy to get it out of your head, make it easy to use all the technology and the automations, provide self-service onboarding so people get up to speed quickly without you having to spend a load of time, make it hard to make mistakes. Nice.

Okay. Well summarized. You mentioned something as you walk us through that, uh, those principles that I feel a lot of owners kind of get trapped in, which is like, hey, I have to document everything before I delegate.

Yeah.

What is your typical response to that when a firm comes to that with that, I guess, objection on their mind that they have to document before they delegate? Is that something?

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a really, really, really interesting one because the level that of, or what the level of work that people, some people assume is required for you to delegate and hand over is so out of whack with what we do, like when we work with our clients, right? So I remember I was speaking at an event and someone who I'd met at a previous event came up to me and said, oh, I'm really keen to work with you guys. And, you know, I definitely need AirManual in my business. And I said, oh, Cool, that's fantastic to hear. Out of interest, why aren't you— like, have you spoken to the team? Are you already— Oh no, no, I need to— I'm super busy at the moment, um, so I'm figuring that maybe, maybe early next year or maybe March of next year when I've got more time. Now of course, one of the biggest problems we solve is you're busy, you need to free up time, so let's get some stuff off your plate and give it to someone else. So I was like, so out of interest, like you said that you need, you feel like you need a load of time to like document and delegate and whatever. How much time are you thinking that you kind of need? And he was going, well, I suppose minimum like 30 hours. Like if I can find 30 hours over the course. And I was looking and going, oh my God, we have failed you massively. Because if that's what you think it takes to start freeing up your time, like we're, I need to go look at all of our communications. And so, because the reality is I've worked with business owners where I remember one particular one who's working 70-hour weeks, completely stretched, like overwhelmed. He knew that his effectiveness in his business had gone to pot. He knew that the relationship with his partner, with his kids was at significant risk, but he couldn't see any way out of it and felt like, you know, so busy he couldn't make himself less busy. And he said, oh, I know, Alex, I know I've got to document and delegate it, but I can't just, you know, I don't know how to find the time. I figure it's probably gonna take me, in that case he said 8 hours, so significantly less than 30, probably take me just 8 hours just to document it. And I just can't find, I just can't find that time. And I said, well, we've got 45 minutes left on this call. Let's see what we can do. And in less than 30 minutes we got, we took a particular process, which in his case was quoting, and he was doing all the quotes and it's taking 3 hours per day. So over 5 days of 15 hours per week. That's 780 hours per year. And he was doing all of that. And in less than 30 minutes, we got the entire process end-to-end documented, including all the detail, including the little warnings around like often common mistakes, all the little sub-steps and make sure you do this and whatever, end-to-end in less than 30 minutes. And then he was in a position where it's like, you can hand this over now. And so we then Arranged a follow-up call, and in another less than 30 minutes, we got his account management team. And we just said, you know, the temptation is sometimes with this is you document it and then you tell the team, you're like, okay, let me now take you through it. It's like, no, no, give them it, get them to follow it, and you watch. And if they're about to make a mistake, you know, if they make a mistake or they ask a question or whatever, yes, answer it, solve it, but update the document and make sure that they then are looking at it.

Yeah.

Ideally, they update the document. So they're like, okay, yeah, this now makes sense to me and get them to walk through it. And so we did that on this call. And so they get to the end and they're like, there we go. And they did it for a real example of a real quote that needed to be prepared. And as a result, they go, okay, there we go. We've got the quotes. And of course there were steps in there. Like if it's above this sort of value, then we still, we want the head of sales to see it and it's above this value, then we want the business owners still to see it.

Yeah.

But for the vast majority, it's just, it just needs to be handed over. And what was awesome is immediately, so in an hour of time, we had freed up 3 hours per day, 15 hours per week from that 1 hour and forevermore for every week after that.

Yeah.

And then of course you like go, okay, what's the next thing on the list? And you keep going and, you know, you can do onboarding and all these sorts of things. But what was amazing is when I talked to him, we do an impact review as part of, you know, working with our clients. I said, So what's been the biggest impact? Presumably it's the time saved. And he said no. And I thought, that's weird because we've saved so much time. I said, what's been the biggest impact then? He said, well, previously when I had to do quotes, it typically took me about 3 days to get back to a client, whereas now my account managers get back to our clients within about an hour of having had the conversation or, you know, being asked for their quote. And he says the impact on the conversion rate has been so huge, it's changed the business. And he just goes, oh my God, I hadn't even thought about that. And so that's amazing. You know, we were aiming to free up his time and actually we're like doubling the conversion rate in his business, which of course is huge in terms of what it means for how you scale and grow. And so I think that's the right attitude is to say, let's take a problem, not every problem, and solve that and get that really working and hand it over and getting the impact and then go, okay, now what? And keep on going through that. Because I've got clients that have now got, you know, workspaces with like 1,300 documents and so on. That shouldn't be your starting goal. You know, start with like the 1 or 2 processes that are going to really make the difference. And of course, you get there eventually after like 9 months or a year. You're, as a business owner, completely extracted. In fact, this particular business owner I was talking about with quoting, after 9 months, he wasn't required day to day in the business. at all. And so he was either on the golf course or working on new sort of property venture he'd got. And it's like, you can get there and you can get there in 9 months. You can get there in a year, but it doesn't start with a journey that says, let's create 100 documents. It starts by solving individual problems, your biggest problems, and just going through that iteration. It gets easier and easier every time.

Definitely. And actually, we've heard that a lot too. The fact that, hey, sometimes time savings, it's what you come Kind of wanting, but ultimately there's just so many other benefits to processes and automation beyond that. Whether you kind of deliver faster, both in the sales process, but also when it comes to like your actual deliverables, which can kind of improve the client experience and so many other things that efficiency can help you with. So I really like that. This is something that I've been playing with. When clients come to us to automate a particular process, we have to understand it.

Mm-hmm.

So we have to, in a weird way, also walk through the process of documenting it. Now, much easier to sell, you know, let's automate than let's document. What I've found is like, process of automating, we're still like trying to codify the rules, the unwritten rules and unspoken rules of how the firm operates. Curious to hear about like how much automation plays a role in the work that you do.

Yeah, really nice. And that, and that's interesting because I, I agree that, um, in, in certain, particularly in certain areas of the business, if you like selling the you need to automate and this is going to, you know, reduce your costs and so on, is easier. However, what I see and the processes that we tend to focus on, start with, are the ones where actually automation probably isn't your starting point. So for example, Quoting for a customer, doing sales calls, new team members, resolving poor employee performance. Those are things where we all know that there's gonna be big human elements to that. And whilst there might be awesome automation things, like there's a lot of time just spent in having the conversation or doing the thing, like, and some, so you wouldn't want to automate some of those things. And so I think that's probably where we sit on the other side. So that's, that's really interesting. Yeah. In terms of where it comes, I think you're absolutely right. Like before you can automate, you need to codify the process. You know, we're, we're now in a situation where AI is incredibly powerful and becoming more and more powerful all the time. And, and in increasingly subtle ways, which I can talk about, but the people to make use of AI and automation ultimately needs to be encompassed in a human process. Somewhere there is a starting point and a trigger, whether it's, okay, I have a discovery call with a customer, I've captured the notes, complete this checklist, and now you might have an automation that puts it into the CRM, that shares it in the Slack channel so that the rest of the customer success team can see it, that sends the customer satisfaction survey to the customer, and if they've decided to go ahead, sends them the quote or the invoice, and sends the customer operation— the client operations team the details of how they're gonna get started. Then you can have your automation. But at the beginning, there needed to be a human aspect. And equally at the end, there needs to be a human aspect because otherwise, if you entirely rely on the automation, the same way as if you just assume that AI has done a good job, you can get some very terrible results and that will ultimately hold your business back. Like if you, you know, if you just set an AI to just send all your social media content marketing stuff, don't be surprised that no one ever engages with it and it just gets worse over time. Mm-hmm. Because it, you need, you can brief it. You can say, this is what I want to cover. These are the questions that my customers are asking. And so this is what I want in my social media content. And you can use it to even, you can brief it and prompt it on, here's my brand and here's some examples of some great posts in the past. But then you still need a human to then be checking it and going, okay, you know, oh, that's a slight weird wording that doesn't work for us. Or at least reviewing What's the impact? Like, if I can, I, if I look back over a week of these social media posts, what's working best? And how can I feed that back into our system so that we're improving it over time? Like, you still need that. And that's, that bookending is, is a good way of looking at a lot of those processes. And I think, as you say, you have to start with the codifying, like of a quoting process, before you can then say, ah, okay, so now I understand that it's not just a picking the number out the air and that's what we're going to charge. Here's the steps you go through. Okay, now I can go through a process of where am I going to capture the data? How's this going to then be calculated? How's that going to feed in? Where's that going to go? And, you know, then you can, then you can do that. So I really like that because often it's interesting when you say like it's easy to sell the automation. Often we have clients that go, oh yeah, I really want to automate this process. You know, I need to do that. First, or, you know, I want to, I don't want to document a process that actually should be automated. It's like, you, you're not going to be able to effectively automate this until you've worked out the, the, the process that you're going through. So yeah, that'd be my experience.

Yeah, definitely. I think we're aligned on that. And reminds me also of, I don't remember if it was Dan Martell or someone else that talks about like a 10-80-10 sort of like ratio. In the context of delegation or automation or otherwise, kind of having always, if you want to be involved, try to get yourself to only like the 10% initial briefing, clarifying of the requirements, and then the last 10% of the last double check, the last human touch, and make sure that your system, the system you've built, hopefully over time, handle everything else essentially.

Yeah, I often talk, so, um, um, as many recently, but I, I, um, used to get asked to do quite a lot on, I'm speaking about AI and all that kind of stuff. I say like, uh, treat it as a junior employee, like do the, the 10-80-10. Like you wouldn't go to an AI and just go, you know, or you say you wouldn't go to a junior employee and say, yeah, can you do a whole PR campaign and strategy and whatever, like you'd give loads of briefing and guidance, or at least you should. And so I think that that principle, that 10/80/10 applies to employees and it applies to automations and AI. You have to have that bookend, that 10/80/10. So I think if you don't do that, you will get very frustrated at poor results. And I've seen plenty of people write off either junior employees or AI as being, ah, it's not that good, missing the opportunity. You know, I've even seen team members, smart team members of, you know, big organizations, small organizations, my own organizations, where they make that, they fall into that trap of going, oh, well, it's not as good as what I'd have put together. It's like, true. Like the same as a brand new junior employee that you've provided very little training to. What's the guidance that it needs So that they can do a better job and iterate on that until you're getting something really good. And then, wow, now you're getting real leverage, whether it's from AI or automation.

Yeah, definitely. That reminds me of another saying, I think it's the same author, so I don't know if you're familiar with him, Dan Martell.

Dan Martell, yes. And also I think Ray Dalio talks about some of this sort of stuff as well, which I'm a big fan of.

But he says 80% done by someone else, it's 100% freaking awesome. And I think that's a mindset that I personally like. I'm like, hey, sure, they won't do it as well as you can, but if they can do 80%, you're doing well.

I agree with that. Although my experience has been that's where you start. And over time, typically I've got to a point where they do it better than me.

Yeah.

That's something which actually in my early days, I wasn't getting anywhere near like even 80%, frankly. And so I was finding that a very frustrating process and feel like, you know, particularly as you go up the value equation into sales and, you know, essentially advice or consulting type stuff, yeah, I'd be better off just doing this myself. Found that it came down to that iteration on that guidance, like continually going back to it and just going, Okay, I'm not happy that they've asked questions or they've described what we do in this particular way, or that they've missed checking X or Y. It's like, okay, great. So attack the process, make those changes, and now it won't happen again. Or if you've got a performance issue and that they're just not following the process, like you get what you tolerate, raise the bar. Like set an expectation of, no, I'm expecting you to follow this every time that you do it. In fact, I was talking to an owner of a really amazing fast growth accountancy practice. They're now at 55 employees. They're looking to double within the next few years. And, you know, they were, they were talking about how the biggest things for them has been like making sure that their team are actually following the process. And in fact, even the owner was saying when he was leading the sort of the sales side, this kind of client sales side and so on. he'd always follow a checklist for every single time he's having those lead conversations. And that's the, this really experienced owner of the business. He's like, I don't understand why anyone wouldn't. Like, it made it so easy. You know, I never forgot nothing. And, and it's that attitude has been so amazing for how they've then been able to, to grow really fast and make sure that they're delivering amazing value to clients and doing that consistently. And being able to, in their case, And now have a culture where they have people all over the country and actually also in other countries as well. This awesome service that some businesses go, oh no, unless I'm in the office, I couldn't possibly imagine my team performing at anywhere near 80% of what I could do. It's like, no, absolutely you can.

Definitely. Well, I have another question for you. I don't know if we'll have time to cover it, but I know that the last time we spoke, you talked about research and your discoveries, you were kind of putting together like some sort of like growth phase of like 5 stages, uh, something along those lines. Is that finished yet? And can you share kind of what those stages are?

So it's, um, it's interesting. We're, we're currently in the process of essentially compiling that with a, um, I guess a playbook of best practice templates for accountancy and bookkeeping practices. So if people are interested, um, in that and getting individual processes perhaps solve a particular area, um, please do email me alexis.kingsbury@airmanual.co.uk and tell me, like, particularly ideally, because you don't want to start with like dumping 40 processes on you will not help you. What you need is like one and guidance on how to implement it in your business, and then you can, you can carry on. So tell me, like, what's the process that's causing you most pain and why? Because email me and I can send over part of that playbook. But yeah, in terms of the stages of growth, essentially what we looked at is as you grow as an accountancy business, so when you first start and it's just you, the first challenge that you've got is just getting clients, right? You don't know how to get your clients and you don't know what you should be offering and how to package it and so on. So you're kind of stuck there until you kind of work that out. And what we, as part of the research, have realized is each stage of growth has one or two kind of defining challenges of what you need to get over. And typically that then relates to some process in the business that you need to then create and implement before you can then move on to other areas. So for example, that first thing is all about how are you going to find your ideal customer? How are you going to sell to them? And so that involves the process for defining your ideal customer and iterating on that, because you don't just do it once. It's something that evolves over time. You've got running your discovery call to really understand what it is that your customer needs and be able to describe what you offer in the most powerful way. You've got your process for reviewing and setting your pricing and your pricing model so that you can describe what you're doing in a way that's not gonna be crazy complex for you because you've got every customer on a slightly different pricing plan and so on. And you need to be able to grow the pricing with the clients because otherwise you're gonna end up not being able to afford to hire anyone. So it's like those sort of 3 processes are some of the first ones that you need when you first start. Then when you kind of get second stage of growth, now you've got to a point where actually you've got some clients and you need some of the admin work off you, right? So some of the actual doing stuff. And so your next processes there are typically very tactical. They're very, you know, it's like literally processing bank, you know, bank reconciliations and setting up a new bank rule because you need that stuff off you and being done by someone else. But you don't want to just outsource a problem. You need them to be doing it and continuously improving the work that's being done and automating the work that's being done. You don't want to find that suddenly they seem to have so much work and yet you're not charging very much and you would've dealt with that stuff, right? So those are typically the next kind of processes that you have at that stage. Then when you're taking on more members of staff, this is when you start to get into that, okay, now I need my recruitment processes, I need my employee onboarding processes, because otherwise you're going to find it so hard to spend time training people and getting them up to speed. And you need them to be like delivering value and you need it to be consistent and you want them to be working on culture. So you kind of end up with these processes here and so on. So it's like there's different, at each stage you've got these sets of processes of where you get, you start to get stuck. And basically you get through to like final stages where you're then talking about processes around leadership and management, right? How are you making sure that your team are able to within the business and how, what are their ways of working, working as leadership team? How are they continuing to innovate and improve their ways of working? And so it's really interesting when you look at these businesses as they grow that I see a lot of them kind of get stuck on these stages and fail to address the fundamental obstacle and kind of the process, the how we do this in that stage. And it just keeps on biting them. Like even if they then have a bit of a surge in their sales, they find that, oh, but then we struggle to bandwidth because we haven't got good recruitment and hiring and onboarding and training and whatever. And so they kind of fall over again and lose some of those clients that are a bit upset about the fact they've not been looked after very well. And so I've seen some businesses where they'll get to a certain level and just sort of cap out at that. And until you then fix that problem, then you suddenly jump. You know, I think people look, if they look back at their revenue and profits in their business, typically it's not a steady line that just keeps on growing. It kind of has jumps. And it's when you kind of overcome one of those obstacles, you suddenly jump to that next level. So yeah, I'd highly invite people, you know, email me. I can send you over a process that's dealing with your particular level of growth. In fact, particularly if you want something super relevant, let me know like how many team members are you at currently? And that's normally the biggest indicator of kind of where you're at in the journey.

Where you are.

But yeah, and what's the, what do you feel like is the biggest problem that you've got in business? So share that. Send over specific things, or my team will, as you might imagine.

Right.

I do read emails. It's just that they tend to action them.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience?

Another thing to highlight is I've got my own podcast, De-Stress Your Business, because I'm all about like one of our 5th core values is enjoy the journey. Like the biggest mistake that I see a lot of business owners making is that they think, oh, when I get to this level, then things will be easier, better. I'll have a better standard of life. It doesn't work that way. It's a marathon, not a sprint. You have to enjoy it all the way around. In fact, it's not just a marathon, it's like an ongoing— it's like life, it just carries on. You don't, you don't get to a certain point in your life where everything's perfect and will be forever. You have to build it in. Like, you don't one day in your life suddenly have enough free time that you can suddenly do a load of exercise. Like, you have to do that stuff and looking after your health. all the way along. And so the same thing goes for your business. Don't make the mistake of thinking, oh, once I get to this particular level, then I won't be as busy, or then I'll be able to hire or whatever. Typically, most people wait too long to start bringing in team members and freeing up their time. They wait too long to start documenting and delegating. They wait too long to sort out their recruitment, their onboarding, performance management. And so they end up with aren't good culture fit and don't align to values and their worst performers stay and their best performers leave. Like, I've seen it too many times. So yeah, don't fall into that trap. Check out our podcast, De-Stress Your Business. We talk about these sorts of challenges. We talk about the bottlenecks people hit, the stresses and how they overcome. So we interview some amazing people on the podcast, people like Mike Michalowicz. If you know Mike, he wrote Profit First.

Profit First.

I was just with Mike Ball yesterday. He's absolutely fantastic. He's been on, I think his podcast episode 93, 94. I was talking to him yesterday. He's gonna come on the podcast again. We've had amazing people like Amanda C. Watts, who's all about how do you make advisory work really well and how do you make sure that you're charging for value, not for what you think you're worth. We've had, I interviewed, who was the CEO of one of the biggest accountancies in the UK. that was in over 100 sites and they'd done like over 50 acquisitions. And we talked about how in 3 years she 3x'd the value of that business, which was already a like, or took it to like a billion dollar accountancy business. And we talked about like, how do you make like hard decisions including exiting team members that need to be exited and so on. Like there's some really great people there. So I highly recommend go check out De-Stress Your Business, the podcast, which you can find at destressyourbusiness.com, which is on YouTube, which is fun because sometimes I put in little Easter eggs in the video. Or you can check it wherever you get your podcasts. Perfect.

All right. So I'll make sure to have that link to your podcast and your email address on the description so people can check you out. And thanks for coming, Alexis.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure. And indeed, Isaac, you're going to be on my podcast as well. So if you can go check out that episode. So I don't know when the scheduling dates are going to fall, but hopefully it'll be soon in relation to whenever this is. But I think I'm really looking forward to that conversation. And of course, if anyone wants to kind of learn more about documenting processes and how to make that easy, then do check out airmanual.co. We've got a load of resources like on, you know, how to systemize different parts of the business and what great onboarding looks like. Because this stuff is nuanced and not always obvious. And I think that's an important point because I think a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking, oh well, you know, it's just a process and every process is, you know, all SOPs are the same. It's like, no, actually how you do this makes a huge difference to whether your team can do things the way you want them done. And when you get it wrong, you'll end up fed up and deciding, you know what? It's just easier for do it myself and then learn and grow.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. All right, so feel free to check out the links in the description. And, uh, Alexis, thanks for coming again.

Absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.

All right.