When Is It Time to Hire? The Subtle (and Not-So-Subtle) Signs You Need Help

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

Welcome back, everyone. We're here. We are again in the fall doing another podcast. And we did daylight savings, correct? Both of you?

We did. We did.

It wasn't that good this year because I woke up at 4. Yeah, it was a long day yesterday. I like that. I'm like, I'd like to have that extra hour every day.

Yeah. I wish it was like bouncing around, you know, just not have to do fall and spring.

But yeah, it was kind of cool. Like, I was doing stuff in the morning and I'm like, oh, it's only 10:30. That's wonderful. And then it was like, you want to eat dinner? Like, it's only 4 o'clock. Kind of like that kind of a day. But yeah, it would be nice to get like an extra hour. Every weekend day. An extra hour?

Oh, I'd vote for that.

If I'm elected, I will pick that everybody gets an extra hour on Saturday and Sunday, and we'll deduct it off Monday. How's that sound?

Well, maybe that can go into how you manage people's time when you need to hire.

Yes, yes.

Time to hire.

Oh, good segue, Sarah.

Our topic today is when is it time to hire? The subtle, maybe not so subtle signs you need. That you need help or that maybe you're thinking about it and you need to kind of, you're thinking about planning it in the future, but maybe the signs are now and you might want to—

I was just gonna say, when's the time to hire? Yesterday. For most people, 'cause you always wait.

You wait.

And then one of the questions we get asked, which is kind of interesting, always interesting to me, is that they go, I know I gotta put 'em on payroll. What's it gonna cost? It's gonna cost me a lot of money in taxes to add them to payroll. I'm like, where do you get the a lot? I mean, yes, an employee's gonna cost you more, but you get more control. So if you like control, I think that that's important. Plus there's, there's guidelines on it. You can't just— if you want to hire an outsource, or like we work out in an outsourced capacity, so yes, we do the work, but we don't tell you when we're doing it. And maybe we tell you, but you can't tell me when to do the work. You can't tell me it has to be done Monday at, you know, 8 o'clock in the morning and then become an employee. So there's guidelines around that part of it too.

Yeah, you can request certain deadlines, like clients have ports request deadline dates or demand, I should say, not request, demand deadline dates. You can have those, but I think it's that balance like you're kind of leading into Lynda is the growth. Like you said, like hire yesterday kind of thing. It's the balance of growth and capacity, which is not an easy balance to see when you're in the forest. You got to be outside of it. So Steve, what do you think on—

Well, I think it's when you find yourself doing a lot of the work that you could you know, more proactively have somebody else do so you can focus on the company. Because I think a lot of people don't realize the behind the scenes that goes on in a small business, a small accounting practice like ours. Let's just be blunt about it. But, you know, when you find yourself really buried and doing so much of the client work and not being able to focus on other things, and that's eating away at you, that's, that's a big sign right there.

That's a conversation we just had with a potential, potential client is the exact same thing because he was like, I think I want to hire because he's like, I, I'm doing the marketing. And I'm doing it. It just started and I'm going through all the lists of things and we're like, you know, you probably should hire— you should not be doing work that the paralegal can do because— Right. And do it for a lot.

That's a common mistake.

And it's very common. And when they start to look at it, and not only that, you can actually help your client out, the law firm client, because then the person's not paying an attorney's size hourly rate to do work that's paralegal work. So I think that's part of it, but it's also you need to know what it's going to cost to be able to make that step. It's a big step. We usually tell people try out, like with this case of this person, maybe try using an outsourced firm, paralegal firm, and see how if that helps you. It's kind of a bridge to the employee, I think.

It's a stepping stone.

Sure. We had a firm, I did just that. They had a receptionist outsourced or receptionist light, I should say, and then realized they needed in-house support because probably it needed to be more multifaceted. There could have been more work to be handled and then frees up the next person who is most likely the paralegal, which then allows that individual to delegate. And that's the hardest part, is the delegation.

I mentioned the story with this particular client. I said I had a hard time in the beginning when Sarah and I first started out. I was like, can you say the word delegate, Sarah? Because this was like— she goes, I said, no, see, it's real hard to say because you sit back and you go, and you go, I can do this better than anybody else.

I can do it easier myself.

Sure, absolutely. But should you be? And I remember like trying to write out a list of like, because our time was like, we were just exhausted in the beginning. We just kept grinding in all wheels. We were excited, we wanted to keep going, and it was, it was fun, and we were doing everything. And then at some points, I mean, even for me To give up the creating the little pictures and doing the, you know, giving, handing off some of the blog tasks to Tiara was a big step for me because I love doing it. I didn't want to not do it, but it was consuming a lot of my weekend.

Yeah.

It was like, can I do it? And then when I hand it over, she does better than I do with the pictures and stuff. I still write the articles, I still make the videos, but I give her the raw stuff and she makes it pretty and she's really good at it. So why didn't I do it a long time ago? I don't know. I could have. I should have. So I think you'll hear a lot of people, I should have.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, another thing to think about is your face time with your clients. You know, do you have the time to check in with them and really nurture those accounts, or are they only hearing from the contract employee or the hourly employee working the account? I'm talking from the accounting side here, you know, and how much face time do you have with them, which is marketing of your, of your your business.

But it's also a capacity thing right now, right? To the point where Sarah and I are at, as we start to add people, they have to pay for that. If they want our FaceTime, then it comes at a premium because we can't FaceTime 100 clients. It's not possible. So how do we do that? Even if we divide and conquer, you know, so we have to— but you want to touch base with them at some point. So maybe not a regular occurrence, Maybe the bookkeeper on staff is meeting with them and then we just pop in every once in a while.

Exactly.

Things are going, it's good to get a pulse on how the whole system's going. And then we can, you know, that way it's a little bit easier on us because ultimately for us, where we are now with our business, we're starting to look at our next level. Where is that and how do we get to it? We can't stay at the hands-on every single thing anymore. We're past that stage.

Right, right. Yeah, it's a stepping stone for sure. I think another piece that I'd like to have us touch on, which is we've talked about this in previous episodes, but I feel like it's really relevant to today's conversation, which a lot of people are utilizing tools to sort of AI tools to kind of go through the first round of hiring type of thing. And honestly, it's, You can't find your gem if you're gonna do that. Sometimes your gems are not meeting a criteria list that you've set forth. If you've written this out, I want this style of person, but then you find this gem from some other space. Sometimes those are the people that excel the best because they're hungry to learn the knowledge and so forth. It might be a burden of training on the front end, but in the long haul there might be a longer-standing employee there which, let's face it, the generation we're in, it's very rare for most of us to have generational, like, a longer set of employees because of the way turnover is happening.

It's not like the old days, for sure. People don't work 40, 45 years anymore at one job. They move job to job. So it's important to keep your staff happy, and that can be a source of referrals too, as you start to find your way, because that's the hard part, is All right, you see a need, where do you get the people? So I think that sometimes it's a matter of, I think really the stepping stone is to maybe outsource it to see what can I outsource easily? Accounting, marketing, these are things that you can have somebody do that don't necessarily have to sit in the office. And that's a good start. But then as the business grows, you might see that you need to have a person physically. You did the paralegal and now you're sitting there going, okay, this paralegal's got a lot of work. I need her to work full-time, maybe in the office, maybe out of the office, but they're still an employee. They work only exclusively with the firm. And I think that's part of it too, is having that first staff member that's actually a full hire. I know we made that decision to bring people on and work for us directly as opposed to outsourcing, but a lot of times they start out as just a contract employee just to see how— Yeah. It's gonna work out and see if they're a good fit, because it's a lot about firm culture, making sure that the person fits in with the rest of the staff and everybody's like happy, happy in their happy place.

Yeah, I'm, um, Steve, I don't know if you've run into this question with the firms that you're working with on how they are looking towards hiring, because I know there is a deficit with really good paralegals, and some people have conversations of a really good paralegal could really replace a junior associate in some ways, depending on, you know, how well trained that paralegal is. But I don't know what kind of conversations— because you have a few clients that are in growth mode— and what that looks like for you.

It's interesting. I don't see a lot of outsourcing still going on with the actual law firms, which surprises me. But on the flip side of that, I have a lot of friends— because I've been in it so long, I have a lot of friends in the industry who are working remotely for firms. Um, but I think that there's still some of that guarded approach from the law firm side of trust with having a paralegal work for another firm.

Yeah.

You know, conflict of interest, those sort of things. Whereas we on the accounting side, it's, it's not that so much out front. Um, there's not that much of a concern about it, but I'm not seeing I'm not seeing a lot of outsourcing going on with the clients that we have right now. I don't know if that'll change with the way the, you know, the economy is and the world is and all that. You know, attorneys tend to do well during bad economic times and they do well during good economic times. So, you know, I think that there's still going to be jobs. The one thing is, you know, folks think about the way the economy is right now. There's a lot of people looking for work. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So there's gonna be competition for the jobs out there, but I don't see a lot of outsourcing in like the paralegal side. I see outsourcing with receptionists. There's, you know, there's not a lot of law firm receptionists like in the old days to find, just as recent as 15 years ago, it was hardcore. You had a receptionist at the front desk and, you know, she was in charge of all the office supplies and everything in the firm. And then the paralegals hardcore in-house.

Yeah.

You know, and that's changing. We're seeing that changing, but I don't see a lot of contract work going on with us.

Well, you know, that's a really good point. And also, I mean, receptionists, some parts I see it mixed still myself, but really good point. I do sense Lynda and I having come out of the Clio Con conference, the workload for a paralegal is going to shift based on the amount of tools like within the Clio, the research and the availability that will be shifting. So you're going to need a paralegal that's going to be in that focused area, honestly. Because it is evolving right there in the software and we—

It really is.

In our profession. Yeah, sorry, Lynda, go ahead.

No, it really is. I mean, what we saw with where Clio's direction is, so much of that, job is going to shift because a lot of the mundane, easier, like research stuff is gonna be able to be pulled within minutes. And what are they gonna do with the rest of their time? A lot of what they've been doing now is maybe researching or doing things like that, and now that's not there. And then a lot of the forms are automated and a lot of things are gonna be pulled right outta the system. So I think you're gonna see a shift there, kind of like accounting. We have the same thing going on with accounting and we know it's there, it's coming, we can see it. Not quite there yet. Just like with the stuff in Clio, it's new, it looks great. But I mean, it's gonna take time, maybe a year, maybe 2 years where you're really gonna start to see a difference. But I could see a difference where even with our firm, we have people who do like the lowest of the low part of the job, dropping bank feeds in and reclassifying things. And then where does their job shift to? I don't think it's gonna eliminate their job. It's just gonna change their job. I think their jobs are gonna—

It'll change it, I agree.

Yeah, I think it's going to be not eliminated, which I think that's a big fear. And I mean, you see it with Amazon laying off all those people, right? They're just gonna eliminate, eliminate a lot of, they just eliminated 14,000 jobs or something like that. Yes, they did. I've already noticed the difference in getting things on the same day. It tells me one day it's gonna come, doesn't come till the next day. I've already seen that happen with them. And I don't know if that's anything to do with the big layoff that they just did, but you're gonna start seeing these bigger firms that are gonna be able to build machines that can do the things that people do. But I think those people that were there, it's, it's unfortunate to lay off all those people. Like, is there nowhere else in the firm that, that can go where those people can get jobs? But maybe to your point, Steve, now you got more people looking for work. Now you're gonna have an opportunity to maybe shift what you do to something else that's gonna be more relevant in the future. Because we're all gonna have to adapt.

Let's face it. I'm concerned with the, the excuses though that people are saying that AI, like we're saying now, like AI's gonna replace this or AI's gonna— I, I don't, I don't give a lot of— like, the AI as we know it isn't in a perfect place that it can do the replacement.

I agree.

When I hear the noise and the rhetoric of that kind of stuff, I go, whoa, okay, let's take a seat back and find out. But to your point, Lynda, exactly. People need to go somewhere. There's value in the individuals. We know that. We have gone through hires. We've gone through things ourselves. We've experienced certain levels. And I guess the big thing, the big takeaway from Lynda and I's experience is that when to hire, it's, yeah, we're sometimes behind the 8-ball, but also when to hire is also when to hire smart because we may not know or the relationship has shifted somehow and you need to let that person go to hire a new person in. And getting that right style of person in is really—

Right-sizing.

Yeah, it's a really selective thing. So yeah, I agree, like what you're saying, Lynda, it's not a replacement. It's just being smarter about how you work with the tools and how to be able to hire.

I mean, if you look at it, right, there's industries you're gonna see change. I mean, we're seeing it already. If you go all the way back to like the early 1900s, late 1800s, it was manufacturing. And then all of a sudden that all changed a lot of the jobs that were all done by hand.

Yeah, right.

That's happened in our past already. But now you look at even like, look at taxis that evolved into Lyft and Uber, and now you've got self-driving cars. That's coming. How is that gonna shift transportation? And, and is it the person that looks at, there's gonna be a demographic of people who will not get in that car and how can I upscale my service, right? It's kind of how people did it in COVID.

Well, of course.

The restaurants shifted. We all shift. To adapt.

Let's use that example of Uber. You know, remember the days when wherever you traveled, there were 800,000 yellow taxis on the street. And then it switched to Uber and Lyft and that model. And that gave those people a chance to have their own business and thrive in this—

And they capitalized on something that people disliked about going in a taxi.

Exactly.

You had a guy that didn't really talk to you or a woman, whoever, and you didn't know how much it was gonna cost. Every time you're at the light, you could see the money changing. You knew you had to deal with money. That was all the things they took and made it into Uber where you didn't have to— you had your little picture, you did it all remotely. And yet when we were in our conference, Tiara took a cab, which we— none of us thought of because we're so accustomed to Uber, and she paid about a fourth of what we paid to get from the airport to the hotel. What does that tell you?

Exactly.

She's like, I just walked up and got in a cab. And I'm like, I never think to do that anymore.

You know what? I realize that in hindsight, that's— that is actually contract— like, some of that's negotiated with depending on the cities. It's like Paris, it has— and all those things. And, you know, it's interesting, this— in looking at the current way to— when to hire, how to hire, all of that, it is definitely personal preference as well as, as maybe having a conversation with folks like us or other people in your industry to find out. I know I can say this is when, and I admit this myself, there are times where I'll just do it myself, not because I think I'm lack of confidence in someone else. It's just that I know how it will get done. That was my way of self-talk back to realize, oh, I just don't have the bandwidth anymore. I don't have the time to handle that.

And now— You're working Saturday and Sunday and every single night. You might want to consider if you're rocking and rolling, you get some cash in the bank, because, you know, even if you had to hire another attorney because you got all this work coming and you don't know what to do, uh, and you need another attorney, but you're kind of afraid because you don't want to let go— you've built this business that's got this great service, you know— don't be afraid to hire if you've got the cash. You know, it's going to take a couple months before that person actually becomes revenue generation in your firm, so plan for that.

Good.

You know, you have to train them in your way, you have to track their time, and then it doesn't get billed to the following month. And then the person doesn't pay you. So you have that couple of months buffer there. You're gonna have to cover the nut. You know, there's no other way of saying it. You're gonna have to cover it until they start to generate revenue. And then the other thing is if, if you're sitting at home and you're doing accounting at 10 o'clock, 10:30, you just saw the accountant and they're like, is your books ready? And you're like, I haven't looked at it at all since the beginning of the year when you asked me last. I just finished 2024 and here it is, 2025. And I haven't done any of it. If you're in that situation, maybe it's time to hire a professional, get it done right. Then you're not having to go circle back and figure out what's wrong and redo anything. And you're frustrated because you hate it. It's just better to hire somebody to do it if you can afford to do it.

It's—

that's a great place to offload it. Just like marketing. A lot of people love doing the marketing, but then you realize that maybe the time's better spent in a billable moment.

Well, and Steve, you've talked about this in the past. Not everyone is a billable person. Right. You have to take the— so what is, in thinking about this and what Lynda just covered, what is the best way, if you have the money in the bank, what is the best runway or planning when you're thinking about hiring, regardless of if it's gonna be revenue generation, seed or not? What's the best method in cash that you're thinking about or planning when you're thinking about this? What should you— financially think about when you're planning this? What barometer of how much money you should have?

Well, you know, to Lynda's point, when we first started this particular podcast, you know, are they contract or are they on the payroll? And what's that cost going to be? I mean, you hear me, you know, get on my KPI bandwagon. What is your labor cost? What is your return on investment? What's your marketing cost? That's usually one of the higher costs in the firm. Where are you going to go find that cash to pay for that person to have that comfort level? To your point, Lynda, to pay for the next couple months until they're in the seat and comfortable and sticking with you and, and, you know, doing a return on investment. And, and not— the return on investment is not always money, folks. It's also your emotions, your, your well-being, your life, you know.

Bravo, Steve. It's so true.

It's so true.

Because health is health. There is no price you can put on health. You've heard that before. So You know, it's more than just— it's not a plug-and-play answer here. It's more than just hiring a warm body and saying go. You know, you need to really map it out and think about what they're going to do for you and how you're going to get them there and how you're going to support them so they can support you.

Well, in the end, if it's not a revenue-generating seat, but it frees you up to make more money. Right.

There you go.

Than it is, right? Right. Yeah. So, yeah, perspective. So this was a good conversation. I'm kind of glad we had it, and I think it went a lot longer than we thought, which we like.

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Thank you everyone. Thank you.

Yes, thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.