018 What You’re Most Excited To Change

I'm learning. Even though I don't do taxes anymore and I don't run a firm anymore, my brain is, like, mapped to this cycle that I still have not recovered from. It's getting sunny outside, spring is here, and I am in, like, change management. Like, anything is possible. It's like you get past that deadline and your brain opens up and you're like, oh, man, we can change all these things. And we're just bustling, bristling with ideas. So that's where I'm at right now. Been having a bunch of conversations online with people about what are the aspects of your firm that you are most excited to change right now? Heard back from, like 80 people, something like that. So today we're just rapid firing through. What are we excited about doing better, about changing. This is where I usually steal all my good ideas. I can see that firm. That's like, they were further down the journey than I was. And I was like, oh, what a. I would love for that to be my problem. That's like an aspirational problem to have to make a change for versus the people that are, you know, early on and still kind of figuring it out. Let's run through that stuff, share some knowledge, and come away with a couple ideas. Let's do it. Jason Daly. All right. I put this out on Twitter and LinkedIn. Basically, what is the change you are most excited to make in your accounting firm right now? Let's share some knowledge and steal a few ideas. A lot of the usual, like, oh, I gotta fire a bunch of clients and improve our systems and sort of generic stuff. I always like the stuff that goes, like, what is the step past that? What's the more nitty gritty version? Brad Nelson shared SOPS scripts for the front desk to mitigate things falling through the cracks that later become client requests. I think whatever you wanna call it, the admin team, the front desk, the ops team. Killer firms have killer admin teams. This is one of the things for me that always seemed hard about running a solo practice is I got so much value out of that assistant or that admin that could do so many things. And I think there are firms who lean into this and there are firms who don't. There's firms who use, you know, there's a person that answers the phone, and that's all they do. They're kind of like a switchboard, a human switchboard, and they just pass that stuff through. I think the way better version of that is the admin team that actually become, like, killer Operations people, because with a little bit of training, there are so many things that they can help with. One thing Brad brought up here is like scripts for how to handle those calls. I know a lot of people these days are moving towards, no, no, like you can't just call me. You got to schedule a call, we got to have an agenda, that sort of thing. And that works for some types of firms, doesn't work for others. But either way, even if that's you and say, you've got to say you're a solo firm runner, but you've got a, you know, a phone service that like that just takes your inbound calls and maybe they all go to voicemail, maybe they come back to you as some sort of message. But using that as your first line of defense for getting a copy of a tax return, getting a copy of some financial statements, answering the really basic questions, that's one thing that, where we tried to build out kind of this tree to mitigate some of those requests that maybe we didn't need to handle, but to also standardize the expectation of the folks who answer those calls because different people would do it differently. And it's very easy to be like, oh, person A does it better than person B because you know, it's one of those old like, well, they're just, it's common sense, they're able to do this and that better when really it's not common sense. It's probably years of experience and expertise, but I think we, we under leveraged those support teams. I've seen tax firms going as far as that admin team being the one in charge of gathering all of the tax information before it ever even hits a tax pro's desk. Same thing with monthly closes that doesn't even actually hit the accountant's desk until you have complete information. And the admin team is in charge of getting everything in from the client so that that pro isn't even bothered until they've got what they need to do the work. You compare that to the other end of the spectrum where you don't have that support team doing much for you and you're having to do all the follow ups, you're having to get all that stuff from them. It's a huge draw on the professional. So I love the idea. Maybe there's a more meaningful conversation to be had here around maybe how you start using VAs or how you build out that admin team for larger firms. I think that's a kind of an untapped source of productivity of well Being particularly as you put more barriers to reaching you, and you see the benefits of that. And maybe that's not taking calls. Maybe that's lessening the expectation of, you know, maybe I used to respond to emails same day, but going forward, it's gonna be more like 48 hours or something like that. For me, what always enabled that was there being another layer of support where those people could get quicker support than I was able to provide. So how can you empower those people to enable better client service in a way that isn't ultimately going to put more pressure on you? Mike Doane had shared, had to step into doing client work because of capacity issues. Now the capacity's finally freeing up. I can step back into my role of focusing on the business. Boy, I was talking with somebody else about this lately. Getting sucked back into the work that you used to do. Like, man, there is nothing more demoralizing than that. When you find yourself preparing that 1040 or doing bookkeeping, and you're like, how did I end up back in this place again? Like, and how do I. Sometimes if you run a team, it can feel like you're, like, the bottom of this filter of, like, any given day, something's gonna fall through the cracks, and you're just gonna have to come in and fix it. And you find yourself doing that over and over again. And that can be really frustrating. But especially when it comes to, like, a staff departure or something like that, where you then have to pick up somebody's job and do it for them, that's really, really frustrating. But I don't know that anybody learns the value of, like, redundancies and how to avoid those problems. I don't know that anybody learns those lessons without just, like, getting sucked into it and being really frustrated about it. Um, I. I think there's a lot of aspects of oftentimes in our firm where we are, like, one key person or one issue away from, like, the whole business being in jeopardy. And that could be you getting sick. It could be losing a key staff member. And it is really hard to build in redundancies so that you're not super exposed. But what's the alternative to just, like, go through life where you're, like, one event away from that, just totally turning your business on its head? One of the reasons why I talk a lot about different types of staffing, like, from contract to traditional to outsource groups, like, different ways of getting the fulfillment done and diversifying across those, so that if any one thing goes sideways, you're able to Flex some of that across through different ways of getting the work done. Much like my worst memories of firm running usually comes from something going sideways and having to step into something that I didn't want to do. And that can happen anytime. It's a really stressful aspect of firm running. So, like, what is the more resilient version of your firm that can accommodate that stuff so that you're not subject to things outside of your control? Thinking of sending engagement letters in fall for upcoming tax season specifying price. Do it with debit authorization on specified date. Do it and specified date on which to send all documents. Otherwise, fear extension. Also thinking of quitting tax forever. I don't know that anybody goes through tax season without thinking about quitting tax forever. I think that's probably a healthy thing. I say that in jest. There's. I know people that, like, run tax firms where they don't work any. Any overtime in tax season. It's absolutely possible. It's usually a question of boundaries and client expectations. In terms of giving clients pricing upfront. Yes, this is generally a good thing. It's easier in some situations than others. It's especially hard in situations where you've got multiple partners and larger client bases that are used to one thing and then you got to change to something else. I navigated that with about 1600 clients where it was a traditional firm that just always build after the fact. I hourly for that work. You've got different partners that work different ways, and we're able to get everybody on board with a change that moved that pricing to be upfront. And so if that's a really hard thing in your circumstances, my advice and what actually worked really well for us was you put that pricing out ahead of, you know, beginning the work, and they have to sign that engagement letter. And like, the big pushback here in the more traditional firms is always like, you don't even know the scope of work yet because you haven't gotten the work in. How can you price it? The reality is, the vast majority of the time, the scope is largely the same. Not always, but you set those prices with a very clear disclaimer that says, we're assuming here that the scope is the same as it was before. And if there's other more like, systemic things, like additional complexity that all clients are going to have, like, you know, PTE or something like that, you build that into the price that you're proposing upfront before you start the work. But then what we did is we got everybody on board with a certain Percentage threshold where as long as it, as long as the final output came in within a certain percentage of our expectation of how much work it was, then we would just auto bill it. And so that was like in our case, you know, if it was within 120% of what we expected or something like that, we just build. It went out the door. That was how it was 95% of the time. Like it was pretty rare that we had outliers there. And it saved a tremendous amount of time from the people that manually build all of that stuff. So if you're in a more traditional firm that's looking for a way to start the transition, that's a good place to start. And then from there you can start looking at things like taking deposits up front, looking more at like a portfolio type profitability analysis that isn't going to be quite so tied to time. Like that's a, it's a good first step to getting organizationally getting you to like a more helpful framework for how you price things. Firing a bunch of clients. So many people said this, just, just do it. I think we sometimes overthink this and think like, oh, I haven't, like we gotta sort out a scorecard and this and that. Like the guiding light for me was always how excited am I to talk to this person if I get that phone call and I'm like, oh, grown. It's this person. As opposed to. There were certain people that I get that phone call and I was really excited to talk to them or get that email or. That was kind of my gut check test. And that's something that probably works for smaller firms. Ultimately you're working off of like a, a finite amount of energy and patience. And honestly like that's what I was generally charging for was that energy and patience more so than anything else. When you get into a bigger team, it gets a little more messy than that because you have to, you need a feedback loop for who are the clients that maybe just total a holes to your team or your team may not enjoy working with them. Maybe it's an issue with your client. Maybe it's just a bad fit where there's a different staff member that could support, support them. But when you get to running more of a team, I think you do probably need a little more of a scorecard approach so that you have a way of capturing the staff's input in addition to all the other factors of what may or may not make that a good client. But do it. We, we, we fixate on what we're losing by firing that client because we can't see the better thing that's on the other side of it when you fire those clients. I don't know that you ever regret that. Likely you are always fundamentally in a better place on the other side of that. Easier said than done, because that's a hard, squishy, human thing to do, but just do it. Find somebody that can support you through that process too. Like a peer that understands what it takes to do that. Just rip that band aid off. Better way to manage engagement letters for accounting and corporate tax returns. Yeah, I think right now your best bets when it comes to engagement letters are either a dedicated proposal tool. So that would be like ignition, or what's the other one? Go proposal. That's the other one I'm thinking of. So, yeah, either a dedicated proposal app or a system that will like mass generate engagement letters in the accounting space. NULA is probably the best bet right now. K N U U L A They've basically let you like templatize those letters and even include like payment links and all of that and then like generate them at scale. My firm is strictly cast. I'm excited to hire my first high level employee to get me out of the doing so I can focus on the big picture. Man, that was like the most fun thing I ever did and is really, really deceptively hard. Not just to find that person or to upskill that person from your team into that role, but to then like rebuild a business around your team rather than yourself. And we ran into this with the cast team that I developed. Like, it's probably worth going deeper on this at some point, but going from zero to one, starting from nothing to filling up your own capacity, that is a wildly different business than going beyond one. Right? Because when you're at zero, like you're doing pretty much anything for anybody and it's all based on your expertise and how well you work with people and the things that you enjoy doing. But as soon as you move past that, and not everybody wants to move past that, but if you are getting to a spot where you're like, I really just, I wanna manage the business, get out of the client service. That is a completely different business generally than the one that you're at the center of, where you are the core, like point of contact for all those clients. In the case of my cast team, what my cast team was capable of and would enjoy and what I was capable of was totally different. So when we got to the point where we had to make that change and pull me out of it. Really had to step back and rethink what that business was, what the ideal client was for my team rather than me. How you price that stuff and just kind of how to reset expectations there. If you want to get out of the work, like, there's no. Like, you just have to do that. You gotta rip that band aid off. Just recognize that your business on the other side of that may look different, but ultimately you're trying to get it to. To a better place that will scale better because it's not always gonna be tied to what you can do for it. Right. Uh, Jacob Shorter shared realignment to our ideal clients. Having let go of about 20% of our revenue, we cut a few at the end of the year. But really looking to make the plunge. Couple people share this. I think Beth Loxley Shared Shared has cut chopped the client list down a bunch. I've heard from a lot of people who are doing this sort of big repositioning, doubling down with greater specificity. I think it's absolutely worthwhile. Blake Meester pop a comment. And he's the guy that's got me super turned on to this. In the beginning. He did it in like a mega drastic way, like cutting 80% of his clients just to double down on. We are only going to work with people who will do the accounting and the tax for just the business owners. These are the best people for us. I think a lot of people are like getting turned on to that greater level of specificity. David, is it Koran? Can you tell me the right way to say that? I've always wondered. Top initiatives this year are either capacity planning with delivery windows, like the sound of that, or to an earlier start to bespoke client checklists. I think David is just pandering to the things that he knows I like. Cause those are like my two favorite things. Scheduling your work, not that cutoff. Don't give them a cutoff. Because then if everybody gives you their stuff before the cutoff, you're hosed. You can't get it all done. But like, tell your client you're gonna get me all your stuff within this time range and we're gonna deliver it within that time range range. Truly the only way to like take the urgency out of the work that we do is just schedule it out. Just like you're a manufacturing plant or something like that. You know, I don't like analogies, but that's the only way to take control of your capacity planning is to actually schedule out when the work gets done. Otherwise people just turn up and give it to you whenever and then they just expect you to be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time. And that's obviously not realistic. Raising fees, firing clients, fine tuning, automation, hiring a full time assistant. Patrick Dieter mentioned MPS surveys. Brandon hall talks a lot about NPS surveys. And that's like their main driver of staff incentive compensation is the MPS surveys they get back from their clients. So that is like the how did we do one to ten? Sort of thing. And I think there's good ways to do that and bad ways to do that. I think the way most people are introduced to it is like, oh, after you deliver a tax return or a set of financial statements, that sort of thing, you just send this follow up email or you use a service to automate a follow up email that says, how did we do? And 95% of people won't take the time to respond. And the people that do are usually only the ones that have the good things to say. Maybe could also go the other way, but you don't actually know that. That's like the normal distribution of your client base because they're not required to reply. You don't actually know if all the responses you get are good or all of them are bad. You don't know if that's like a representative yardstick of all of your clients. So the only way I know to do this right is to make that feedback a mandatory part of either delivery or the info gathering process. So for example, let's say you do somebody's monthly accounting. There's a few things you got to collect from them, a few requests that go out every single month. They have to get that stuff back to you. One of that could. One of those requests could be, hey, how did we do last month? 1 to 10, just give us some feedback real quick. For last month, they have to complete that in order to get you the info you need to do to close the books or say you're delivering a tax return, you need 8,879 signatures. Or, or you know, they need to make a payment to release the tax return or something like that. You build a mandatory question in there that very explicitly asks, how did we do? And all you're asking for is like a 1 to 10. You can give them the option to give you more information, but unless you make that a mandatory part of the stuff they have to give to you, then I don't know that that number is particularly helpful. The worst version of this is when like you know, there's some sort of other preceding question. And only the people that are happy are then taken to like giving you give you a score, right? And you see this a lot with Google reviews and all that. If they're happy, you ask them to leave a review. If they're not happy, you ask for their feedback. If you're actually going to do meaningful things around NPS to assess how happy your clients are, I think it has to be a mandatory part of the things that they give you. On a recurring basis, John Sanchez says, an intentional, deliberate, systematic content creation plan. Like the sound of that. I think everybody should be making content. And I think where everybody's stuck is they like, well, who am I making it for? And well, what webcam should I get? And what should the tone of my writing be when we all just gotta embrace the suck and recognize you're doing it really badly with the goal of in the future doing it well. Before I had ever made a video, this was three or four years ago, I had never recorded a video. Loom was like brand new. If you would have told me that someday I would do a daily show, I would be like, that is insane. Cause I have no idea what goes into that. I don't know how to talk on camera. I don't know any of that. But the reason I'm able to do this is because I started doing that stuff really, really badly a long time ago. And none of you suckers ever saw that. So like, if you're afraid of like, oh, what if people see how bad my stuff is? Ultimately it doesn't matter because you need to be thinking about, like, who are you and how are you different on the other side of making that investment in yourself, that's the most important thing. So get to sucking. Don't be afraid. Like, don't overthink. Like, who exactly is this for? Like, when the reality is like, you're concerned about who this thousand word blog post is going to be for, when you haven't written a thousand page paper since like your junior year of college, it's going to be bad. Nobody's probably going to read it. That is what it is. But to ever be prolific at anything, you got to start by like doing it badly. Like, that's just how you gotta start. And in the Internet age, when we have this unbelievable amount of reach and you can put something out that reaches, you know, millions of people, a big part of your job becomes, how do I find the people for whom the problem I solve is more painful than the People who are on my client list today, like, you can't just go through life assuming the best clients that could possibly be on your client list are just going to stumble into your lap if you don't put yourself out there. And content is that lighthouse. Content is like how you rally people around a certain point, a certain pain point, a certain interest to then attract a higher level clients to you. Not enough of us are doing that today. Cause I think we're just overthinking what version one of that looks like when we just gotta come to terms with the fact that hey, version one's gonna suck. That's just how it is. Greg o' Brien finished rolling out internal advisory training to our team. I had a good start last winter, but put it on pause for tax season. Okay. I'm so hot on AI tooling for internal use cases. I talked a bit the other day about personal AIs, how you could even use a personal AI for, for your team to use as like, let's say your team wants to ask you a question or you've got new hires and they're afraid of asking those dumb questions. Think about a ChatGPT type experience that is connected to documentation, to training materials that you've developed that can serve as that first line of defense. Not as a replacement for talking to their manager or an actual human being, but just as a resource for them to help them get easier access to helpful information. What Greg's talking about right here, internal advisory training. Oh my gosh. Like your own little custom chat GPT experience that talks through how your firm delivers advisory that you could even plug a set of financial statements into and can, it can look at that and say here's some common things that we look for and does this apply to any of these financial statements to help you like start generating some talking points as a killer use case for AI. Let me just roll this into my shower thought for today because these things are very related. Shower thought. I'm an absolute potato beyond like 3:30 in the afternoon. And it's because I get up too early. I'm usually up at like 4 or 5. But when I get to like middle of the afternoon, I am operating at like less than 50% of the efficiency that I operate at first thing in the morning. So what do you do? Do you just keep working for longer because you just want to get, get stuff done and so you work until the end of time thinking that's going to get most stuff done? No, what I do is I like, I try to front Load my days with the stuff that I absolutely have to do and to a degree, the stuff that I'm maybe not excited to do because in the morning, that's when the old noodle is sharpest. And that's like, that is when I'm working the most fast and efficient. But if there's something I'm super excited about, like I have today, I save that to the end of the day because right now I'm like, ooh, I can't wait. I can't wait until X o' clock when I get to work on this other thing. And today that thing is a way to build like custom ChatGPT experiences that I think is exactly what I've been looking for. I'm gonna share the details about it in my newsletter. Let's see when you're hearing this Thursday. I think you're hearing this Thursday. So if you're not in my newsletter. Newsletter. Jason cpa. It's a great example of how like I'm gonna be totally out of steam by mid afternoon today, but by working by then, transitioning work to something I'm really excited about, that feels a little more like play. But man, I'm gonna be jacked. I'm gonna be at like a hundred percent working on that because I'm excited about it. So shower thought. How can you kind of hack your own energy levels and motivations throughout the day so that you aren't just like slogging at half efficiency and are making the most of your energy kind of as you go throughout the day? I guess I kind of made a video about that, didn't I? I can link that in the show notes. I did at one point make a video about how to kind of optimize the tasks you do throughout the day. But I've just been noticing lately with how many things there are out there to play with and just with the rate of software change and how many new apps there are every day. Like if you're a tech nerd like me, there's just now perpetually an abundance of just things to play with. Lately I've just been really looking forward to my afternoons where I just turn work brain off and I'm like, this thing is cool. I wanna go have a play. And it's actually teaching me a lot. It's how I've learned almost all the things I know about AI simply by giving myself permission to go do that thing at a part of the day where I otherwise wouldn't be that productive. Right. Are you letting yourself play? I don't know. That's how I stay plugged into new stuff and, like, ensure that, like, at least I got to do something that I enjoyed each day. Thanks for coming and hanging. If you got something you're really excited about changing in your firm, drop it in the comments. Would love to hear it. And there's probably gonna be some other people who are interested in similar things. And I'll see you tomorrow. Toodaloo, Sam.