106 The Wrong Way To Set Goals in Accounting Firms

Team, let's talk about goals. I have had a complex, not particularly constructive relationship with goals. But leading Internet think person Andrew Huberman recently did an episode around goal setting and the right and the wrong ways to do it that just has me rethinking goals. And reality is, I need more goals in my life. As much as I don't like the constraints, that's just where I'm at right now. But I'll tell you what I don't want to do is take it too far and, I don't know, like, shackle myself to my own sort of notion of this path that, like, ought to be rigid. And I don't know, I worry about trying to take the wheel too much because so many of the best things in my life have happened when I could have never expected it. And had I not had the flexibility and, like, if I didn't have my head up, I would have totally missed those really cool things. So come on in. We'll talk a little bit about goals and, like, how to balance that stuff and specifically how to set goals through the lens of your firm, but also to make you a better person that is more fulfilled in what you do. Come on in. Gimme a big hug. Let's set some goals. Okay, so the Huberman Lab podcast. I'll put a link to the specific episode that got me got my wheels turning on this, but he's done a few different episodes on podcasts and interviews with big brain science folk. And so what I like about his stuff is all based in scientific study and all that, but this was sort of a roundup episode of best practices and some stuff that deviates from the traditional goal frameworks, like, you know, the smart framework and ABC and stuff like that. But a lot of the stuff that's the same, and it was helpful for me to be more comfortable with goals. I can tell you. My main blocker has always been, like, I shared how it gets in the way of discovery, but also how the ways that I see many people set goals, the things that we're actually trying to do are wildly outside of our control. So I want to get my accounting firm to a million dollars in revenue. Well, that's dependent upon, like, being able to find the right people. It's dependent upon that super key employee not, you know, getting sick tomorrow. It's dependent upon you not getting sick. So I've always been more of a habits person. Like, I want to design my days in a way that will ensure that I am taking the behaviors every single day that set me On a path that I think that I will enjoy and not thinking too much beyond that. Like, that's always kind of been how I've approached it. But there's some limitations with just doing that. These are kind of the things that I've been working through. So I want to talk about this specifically through the lens of, like, being an accountant running an accounting firm, but also working for somebody else within an accounting firm. So to kind of set some context, I'll run you through the main takeaways from this podcast, particularly around best practices for goal setting, best practices for goal pursuit, and then some myths around goals that have kind of almost been like, accepted into general goal wisdom. So goal setting first biggest thing is prioritize. You can't do a whole bunch of different goals at once. The fewer the better. Realistically, just at any given time, have a single goal that is hard, requires effort, but you're still excited to pursue it. He actually talked quite a bit about the value in the frustration of that thing being hard and pushing through. That frustration actually induces neuroplasticity or your brain's ability to continue learning and adapting as you get to be super old like me. So don't overdo it. Prioritize. Really one that's gonna take up the majority of your attention. And it has to be hard. Define the verbs. And this is like the. Honestly, like, the one thing I've ever really heard about goals. Like, whenever you talk about goals, people are like, measurable, blah, blah, like that whole thing, right? But it's still, like, it's not enough for me. Like, I. I don't know. I still struggle with the ambiguity of goals. So for him, number two, define the goals. It can't be a, like a state. So you can't want to be rich or be proficient in a language. It can't be, I want to be fit. You got to focus on the behaviors. So what's the major block of action that's required to get you where you want to go? And this, this feels good to me. This feels more like what I think of as a habit. You know, the things that I'm going to do that are going to get me there. So he said, run X miles per week, graduates, or go to the gym three times per week, but get even more specific than that. So, like, go to the gym three times per week to lift weights for a minimum of 60 minutes. And at least 50 of those minutes have to be like, hard work, like, not, you know, warming up, that sort of thing. Specificity and measurability and this is kind of coming back to like the ABC method or the smart method or the smarter method that you may have heard of around goal setting. Whole idea there is just being more specific and being able to measure the stuff that you're trying to do. I talked a lot about writing this stuff out on paper to embed it in your knowledge system. It just works a different part of your brain. He said. When you're thinking about Time Horizons, Quarterly seems to be the most backed by scientific literature. If you're trying to do something meaningful and hard, try to think about that stuff on a quarterly time horizon that aligns with eos's approach to this. The whole idea of quarterly rocks. Ultimately you need to be defining, you know, how many hours per week, hours per day, which days of the week, the like. You're setting all of that. And that is going to define the success of your goal, like your ability to execute like two to those expectations. Most pursuits aren't as clear as saying, like, I want to run a five minute mile. Like, most things are more ambiguous than that. And that's why he says it's particularly important to get back to like, what is the verb, the actions associated with that goal. And ultimately your goal is not going to be run a five minute mile. It's going to be all the things that are the thing that you do, like in the pursuit of that goal. Like that verb, ultimately is your goal. Like, sure, there's a higher thing there, like I want to be healthy. But the best way to think about that is not in a big abstract way. Rather it's what is that specific thing you need to do? Now on the subject of goal pursuit, so that is setting goals, but what about the actual execution of goals? And I'll be honest, I'd never really heard anybody talk about this. I'd heard about this around habits, so I really like atomic habits. We did a video on the main channel about it a while back. The idea of kind of hacking your brain with the visuals that you see and the reward system and what is going to trigger a habit and. And before you know it, you just do these things every single day without even really thinking about it. I love that sort of thing. But through the lens of goals, I'd never heard anybody talk about like the actual pursuit of goals and like how to best manage the time spent executing on that stuff. He talks about assessing your daily motivation. So he talks about actually visualization a lot on his podcast. So visualizing positive and negative outcomes around your goals. So if you're struggling with motivation, try spending a minute visualizing the end, the positive outcome of where you're trying to go. That can initiate motivation. If that doesn't work, he said he can also try visualizing what failure looks like and feels like. So if the positive side isn't getting you going, you can also focus on the negative side of what if I don't do this? And that's a little bit more of like a fear based thing. But he says for some people want to work one day and the other will work the next day. When you're within a training block or, or a thing that you're doing that is helping you to get to that goal, Just be really mindful of what is in kind of your, your cone of visual attention as you're doing it. Evidently the back of your eyeballs are actually like a detached part of your brain. And what we're seeing and like what is being fed into our eyes, it kind of goes without saying has a really big impact on your focus. Turn off phone, remove distractions. And when it comes to rewards and this is something that habits, atomic habits didn't get into, he said. You need to have the ultimate reward of meeting the goal in the end is not enough of a reward. There need to be rewards along the way. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Do you hire accountants? Bless your little heart. Not the best part of the job in my opinion. Not something I ever enjoyed. Well listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work 100% full time for your firm. Their accountants aren't freelancing or contracting for multiple firms. They're all yours. They work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not going to get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said you know what, we're going to build our own pipeline in the Philippines, going to pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the story. I've been talking about a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines at like totally red pilled me to like oh geez. Like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out. Link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com Hey, I wanted to tell you, this episode is sponsored in part by the lovely folks at Copilot. Oh, you know what keeps me up at night? This is probably going to trigger some of y'. All. What if you move your whole firm to a practice management system. You train the whole team, you move all your organizational data in there, you train all of your clients on how to work with you in the client portal, and then you don't like it or they stop developing it or something like that. You know how sticky these things are and what a mountain it will be. To retrain your whole staff, that's one thing. But to retrain all of your clients and say, hey, just kidding, we actually want you to come use this system over here now. Yes. Sorry about that. Let me tell you, you know, a solution to that is to separate your client experience from all the systems that you use to manage your firm. Right. Think about it. So, Copilot, one of the things they do really well is they are just laser focused on the client experience. They just want to be the client communication layer. And why I can appreciate that the value of that is it gives me the power to change all the paperclips and bubble gum and strings behind the scenes that are holding everything else together. So if there's a super cool new AI this or that that's going to do my work better for me, I can pull that in without having to change the client experience. Pretty darn good argument for the apps that are just that client communications layer, right, Copilot? You've probably heard me talk about it before. A super flexible client portal layer where you can, like customize what each of the clients see and even embed stuff from other apps into that portal experience. To learn more about Copilot, check out the link in the show notes. I mean, if you're watching on video, I've got this fly that is just been an unbelievable nuisance today and it's too small and fast for me to catch. And he keeps landing on my face anyways. The ultimate reward of like meeting the goal in the end is not enough. You need to have rewards along the way, but they need to be, interestingly, not the exact same every single time. So they need to be random, intermittent rewards. Not like my wife when she was in college, she would go to 24 Hour Fitness with a friend and then afterwards they would walk across the street and get McDonald's every single time, which I just love to tease her about. Still, we all have those things that we did when we were younger. Right. That we're like, that didn't make any sense. That is an example of a reward, probably not a good one, but if you're going to reward yourself at the end of every single session the exact same way, it loses a lot of its value. So he says it needs to be at different times. Got the fly? Get out of here. Yes. Okay. The reward needs to be at intermittent times, like not the same time every time. Could be during a session, could be after a session, could be before a session. And you need to not know if you're going to get it or not. So he says literally flip a coin. And that ultimately makes that rewarding on a long term basis rather than it just becoming part of the process. He talked about the middle problem. We oftentimes have plenty of motivation at the start and the end. The hardest part is the middle part. So we got to chunk out the middle part to make that actually almost feel like at a smaller scale you have starts and ends like on a shorter time horizon. It's one of those things where I think just being aware of that is good. The fact that the middle is always going to be the hardest part. Kind of having a plan for that. And then he talked about circadian peaks in motivation. So in our days we have peak in motivation 30 minutes after we wake, three hours after we wake, and 11 hours after we wake. Interestingly, those are kind of the three peaks throughout our days. And subjective feelings of energy often super impacted by how positively we perceived yesterday's efforts or recent in the past efforts, as well as how we foresee future days efforts. So if you crushed it yesterday, that actually has a really big impact on your motivation for today. And the opposite is also true. And I can totally like a good example of this on the future side. For some reason it's really hard for me to work out when I know that the next day I won't be able to work out due to travel or something like that. Which is odd. Like it's. I'm like, well I'm going to, I'm going to break the streak. I'm not going to be in my routine the next day. And somehow that makes it harder to do today. So the perceived success of past and future days, like just be aware this has a big impact on your motivation today. And obviously the more you can block that out and just focus on today, the better. Those are some best practices for like increasing the likelihood of success. But also don't get super fixated on the perfect timing or Conditions ultimately focus on completing tasks. That is what matters most in the end, not like doing it the perfect way every single time. So that is goal pursuit. A few myths he acknowledged here. That whole notion of posting it on the mirror, increasing the likelihood of success. He says it's not true because we actually adapt to our visual environment. And so once you've seen something a few times, you just ignore it. Totally true, right? Man, I've got a thing that's been on my mirror and I don't even know that I could tell you what it says, but it's been on there for like three years. And that, like, that's not even an exaggeration. I can't even remember what it says. But we just blocked that stuff out. He said the alternative is he's talked a lot about writing stuff out. He said, instead, write it every day and put it in a new place. Like if you want that to actually be meaningful, you have to write it out every day, put it in a different place so your brain's not constantly adjusting to it. Another myth, the value of accountability. Specifically, he calls it the don't tell the world goal. So a lot of people like to announce what they're going to do before they do it. And the result is usually you get some positive feedback from folks when you do that and it activates a reward system that actually makes you less likely to go out and do the thing. And I've done this before, I've made this mistake before and I have learned like just in general, and this happens a lot on social media and with business ventures and stuff like that. Like you announce this big exciting thing that you're gonna go do and like, I don't know that that actually makes you any more likely to do it. In fact, he said there's some studies that show that it will actually make you less likely to do that thing. So myself personally, I just do stuff like I always have projects we're working on and stuff like that. And these days I'm just like, I'm just not gonna talk about it till it's done, till it's ready to ship. And then you're like, ta da, look at this cool thing that we made. And it turns out there's actually science to back that. Like that will increase the likelihood of you getting it done. Now, he is not anti accountability in general. And even through the lens of goals, he says there is value in like, if you have that sort of one person who will give you that tough love accountability to get you to keep re engaging and all that. He says that's useful, but the whole, like, announce the world approach is not. So where my mind first went is, you know, something I've really struggled with is how do you do this in a really big, messy, complex machine like an accounting firm, where there are so many factors outside of my control, clients coming and going that I can't plan for, staff coming and going that I can't plan for. I think this style of goal setting to me makes sense through the personal lens. But when you have a big machine like a business, a more comprehensive framework is required. Something like eos. So EOS originated from the book Traction. That is something EOS does exceptionally well, is the value of getting in alignment with your team of individuals, having metrics that they're responsible for driving, like, quantitative yardsticks of success, and then chunking out in what they call your quarterly rocks, or everybody having responsibilities of the goals they're trying to accomplish over the next quarter. EOs, to me, like, is really just like distributed goal setting. So the best version of goal setting I've seen within a big complex machine is eos. And eos, like, it has a sweet spot in terms of company size that honestly is, I think, is bigger than most of the folks firms are who listen to this. I think that's around 50 people or something like that. But I will tell you, even for like solo firm folks and people who are like, how do I pull in my first contractor or my virtual assistant? Like, how to think through this? I think there's still a lot of value to be gleaned from EOs and how they talk about setting expectations for team members and stuff like that. I know big struggle with beginning to pull people into your team is how to set them up for success before they even start. And sometimes there's a lot of trial and error there. I think EOS is a big helper there. Even if you're not running a big org and even if it's just you and you don't even plan on building that team, it gives you a helpful framework for how to manage your business goals in a way that makes sense through, like, I don't know, business KPIs and stuff that may not necessarily look the same as your personal goals. Now, how you set goals for yourself, whether it is to reach some personal thing like losing weight or being healthier, or if it is to drive, you know, some aspect of business success that for me is much more tangible, like something that you have direct control over. You know, if I want to build an audience on social media because I kind of believe in the benefits of that. That's much more helpful for me than I want drive the profit of my business by $50,000 this next year because there's just so many inputs to that. Or you know, having the goal of working five hours less each week so that I can go to my kids soccer stuff. There's certain things like that that are to me and tell me if I'm wrong here so abstract or almost more of a goal of not doing something rather than the goal of doing something. So like if I'm going to work five hours less, there's so many things to me that go into that. Like giving yourself permission to work less, of letting those things slip through the cracks as a result of you working less. And oftentimes that's just fine. The willingness, like developing the willingness to let down a client instead of letting down your child. That's a pretty hot take. We like to put on the hero, we like to put on the cape at work. But oftentimes the people that pay the price are the people at home. All of the business, like operational things that go into you getting time back, like that's just such a big messy calculation to me. That sort of stuff. It needs to be driven by a more holistic framework but also more high level. Like what are ultimately the goals of the firm, how much profit does the firm need to generate each year and then work backwards from that? That's a much more big sort of complex thing as opposed to something that you personally can be the driver for. And if it's tied to the business, like you still need to have those big picture goals and ensure. Is this actually plugging into what we want to do? Big picture. But let's run through like a. A few examples like practical things that I can drive and like what are good and bad versions of those. Those goals to me. So let's start with the whole social media thing. Cause I know that's something a lot of people are thinking about right now. It's one of those like, yeah, I can understand why this seems like a good idea, but you can just never seem to find the time to do it. Team this episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Client Hub. Where AI isn't the future, it's now. It's here, I guess is both the future and now. But it is happening in the present. They're shipping cool stuff every day. Not just talking about it, they're doing it. They got a new landing page Your firm on GPT where they kind of outline their vision for the stuff they've already shipped and the stuff that they're working on. Starting to get firms in on like early access to provide feedback on this stuff. Leveraging AI everywhere in client hub and yielding. How's this sound? 90 plus percent time savings in many aspects of the work in your firm. The three core concepts they're building this around. One Generate it Using AI to generate stuff that normally you would have to do yourself. Think emails, tasks, that sort of thing. Answer it. Don't just search by text. A more intelligent version of text that sees into your meetings, your emails, all that stuff. A lot of the stuff we've been talking about on the show and third uplevel it summarize meeting notes, tell you what's inside a file without having to open it. Sentiment analysis, whole bunch of cool stuff. In the coming weeks we're going to be talking about like the actual stuff that they've shipped so far and the stuff that's coming soon. That is Client Hub. To learn more about that and what they're working on, check out the link in the show notes. So to me, like a bad version of this is to say I'm going to add 500 followers on LinkedIn over the next three months. You know, the beginning of my YouTube days, I could have set this goal of I'm going to reach a thousand subscribers by this time horizon. But ultimately there's so many issues with that. Like, subscribers and followers for one, is just a total vanity metric. It doesn't ultimately mean it's going to be helpful for me. Or it can help me build a business around it. Like for me today, for example, if I wanted to double my social following or my YouTube following overnight, I would just start posting stuff through a more mainstream lens. I would say instead of here's X more ways to make your accounting firm profitable. I would instead say here's day in the life of an accounting firm owner. And it would attract not firm owners, but big picture, all people accounting, which is a hundred X the number of people as opposed to those who are firm owners and leaders, right? Or I would post educational content about accounting that like, you know, small business owners could do. So if you look at a channel like Hector Garcias, he posts a lot of great stuff for firm owners, but he also posts like here's how to do QuickBooks stuff and that stuff gets astronomical views because it's so widely accessible and valuable and so somebody needs to do that stuff. But like, for me, if My goal was just to increase my number of followers. Like, I could just change the game and do that. But is it ultimately getting me where I want to go? I don't know. Probably not. I think for most people, when they if in their head, their goal is to add 500 followers on LinkedIn, in their head, what they're really saying is they need to more post stuff. They're more consistently and just more consistently engage. So that is like an extrinsic thing that I don't have control over how many people will follow me. And that can kind of be gamed in a way that isn't helpful. But for most people, what is the blocker that's keeping them from posting each day? I would argue it's writing. It's taking the time to sit down and really learn for yourself what you have to say. Like David Perel always says, you don't write necessarily to say something, but you write just as much to learn what you have to say. And you'll find as you write, it gets easier to write and you find more nuance in the thoughts that you have. And it's such a helpful forcing function for kind of coalescing all of the contradictory concepts that we have bouncing around in our head. And I always feel most clear of thought when I'm in the habit of writing. I have the most to say. It's the easiest to produce videos and post online when I'm chunking out time every single day to write. So if you struggle with, well, what do I even have to say on social, your blocker's probably writing. So the best goal for you there is probably write 30 minutes every day. You know, get specific about when you're gonna do it. Thinking back to that circadian rhythm thing, maybe free. That makes sense. Thirty minutes after you get up, up, you're gonna write 30 minutes a day. That's when I'm at my best, is in the morning. For some reason, when I had kids, it flipped. I went from being at my best at night to in the morning. It's also the only time I can get that time totally alone to myself before the rest of the animals wake up here. But that is a helpful goal to me. Like that writing. When you're doing the writing, posting to LinkedIn gets really easy. The issue is you just haven't made the time to write. Another example, let's say I want to decide whether to launch my own firm firm over the next quarter. Like, that's not a good goal in my mind, whether I want to do it because it's not like a binary thing where you're just going to decide one day. It's a thing that ought to be developing to a point of, you know, inevitability. Or you're building that client list and you're like, okay, this is the right time to do it. So coming to that decision is more about self discovery and learning. Is this a thing that I'm actually going to enjoy doing or not? Which probably means investing more in developing your client list. Right? If you haven't gone out and started your firm yet, I usually just, just means like putting more effort into finding those clients. So that goal could be, you know, every morning you're gonna shoot somebody an email that says, hey, heads up, I'm starting a bookkeeping practice. Let me know if there's anyone in your network that's looking for this. I'm specifically trying to solve these problems. So sending an email like that every morning, that could be your goal. Maybe you wanna attract a certain type of business owner. So the goal comes back to posting on social media, in which case, you know, writing about X, that's probably your goal. How much time you're gonna do that each day. Maybe it's developing your skills to get you to a confidence level where you can confidently put your shingle, do that thing. Your goal's then probably tied back to what is going to give you confidence. Maybe that's strictly education, maybe that's getting experience, doing that for someone else. And that could look like, you know, a contract gig of spending 10 hours a week doing tax work for a firm where they're gonna review that work and give you feedback, that sort of thing. If you don't have that engagement right now, then maybe what you're doing is you're actually emailing a firm every morning and saying, hey, here's what I'm looking to do, I would love to help. Here's how I think I can contribute to your firm. And then third example, I jotted down developing on camera confidence. So being able to get on camera comfortably, the bad version of that goal, get better on camera over the next quarter. Right? That's not like specific. That doesn't actually come back to what are the actions you're going to take every single day that'll lead to that outcome. So instead, let's say you're going to spend 30 minutes practicing each day and the first 10 is, you know, putting together something to present. Maybe it's summarizing a news article or something that you wrote and the rest is shooting. And obviously a lot of things go into shooting it is like getting ready to shoot, like getting the software going, actually doing the delivery and then watching that, that back and giving yourself feedback. And I would recommend probably actually like writing down that feedback as you watch it. Have a sheet of paper in front of you and say focus on X, Y, Z, this and that. And that's going to increase the likelihood that that stuff sticks with you. And then each day when you do that, you're going to be getting a little better. And you're not necessarily publishing it in a big scary way though that's a whole other conversation where I would still encourage you. You can publish pretty bad stuff. That's still going to be really helpful to people. But if your goal is to get better on camera, then the goal really ought to be Monday through Friday. I'm going to spend 30 minutes doing this. And I think that's why the whole like the notion of habits always resonated more with me than goals, because it feels more actionable. That being said, I don't want to be goal locked. Like at the end of the day, I think there is a balance to find in life between executing in the direction that right now you're most convinced will lead to success and happiness. But still leaving the door open for the fact that I would argue most of the best things in our life happen to us by chance. You know, we are not all set up the same way. We are not all optimized to the same level for chance and luck. Right. So like increasing your luck surface area, being visible, posting online, stuff like that. Those people are much more likely to be quote unquote lucky and find a person who has an amazing opportunity for them or collaboration or something like that. But oftentimes those things take you in a direction that you couldn't have planned that may be even more fun and better than you could have expected. And so I don't ever want to be, you know, a hundred percent locked into just executing to goals. To me, the fun and the freedom of entrepreneurship is the agency to be able to explore like he's still going to have responsibilities. And that's the goal side. But I love the flexibility that comes from it. And I think my struggle with goals, I've been in such a rigid firm framework for so long. Coming out of owning a firm last year, I didn't feel like I had any of that flexibility. And it was all about execution. Trying to be as tactical as possible and explicit about like, like what are we trying to do And I think part of my disdain for goals has been just sort of the rebound from that environment. I wanted the opposite, like, I want to know obligations. I didn't want to have to go in and be the hero for a whole bunch of people every single day. And so that was why this year, I really felt allergic to that. But I'm coming back around, I think, and now finding an appreciation for the structure that will make it so that you can look back and it not just look like this total meandering. Like, what just happened? Like, how did I just waste the last six months of my life? Right. It doesn't feel that way for me. But that's when you're totally rudderless without goals. I think that can sometimes. That can sometimes be the case. So a hundred percent of your life dedicated to goals and executing to the. To your plan. I don't think that's the right answer. But also 0% of structure and executing to a plan. That's probably not the right play either, both for you and for your team. If all your team is ever doing is, like, they're just machines in the grinder of getting work done and 100% of their time is just locked into that, I don't know that that's leaving space for critical thinking, a lot of the things that lead to the big meaningful steps, rather than just sitting there and doing the work all day. Right. Goals. I don't know what's. What's your take? Do you have any? If you have goals you're actively working on personal artwork, I would love to hear them. I'm actually. I get super inspired by other people's goals. Oftentimes I'll see that and I'll be like, oh, that's a great idea. Like, that's. That totally makes sense. But for whatever reason, goals have always been kind of hard for me. So feel free to share thoughts in the comments. Thanks for coming to hang today, and I'll see you in the next one, Sam.