122 Delegation Opportunities in Accounting Firms

There's a lot of things that keep us from delegating, from evolving to the next version of us. And we're going to dive into what is maybe the biggest issue. The fear of losing touch with being an expert on a particular thing that you do today if you no longer do it, If I don't do that anymore, how am I going to become an expert in it? And it's like the fear of walking through a door and becoming something else that's like an unknown. Like you don't yet know the nuance that's on the other side of giving up this thing. And so let's talk about a bunch of different situations where that rears its head inside of accounting firm running and why it's probably the thing that is keeping you from getting to, like, a more fun, more sustainable version of what you do. Let's talk about it. Come on in. So the fear of losing touch with that thing that you do now that you're an expert on, because if you don't do it anymore, how could you still be an expert in it? Thusly challenging your value as a professional and your value as it's currently defined. I think this is actually a really big part of it is we define our worth professionally and to our businesses as like the collection of tasks that, that we do. This is a big cornerstone of the AI replacing jobs sort of thing too. Is this really, like, bad notion that all we are is the collection of tasks that we do? So, for example, if, if AI automated 80% of a member of my team's tasks tomorrow, I would be absolutely thrilled. Not so that I could fire that person, but so that that person could go do higher value and new and different things that we've always wanted them to do, but they couldn't do it because they had their existing set of tasks. Let you in on a secret, buddy. That same logic applies to you. There are bigger and better things for you out there than what you're doing today. But one of the big things that holds us back is the fact that if we give up this thing that we now do, it's undermining, I guess, our identity and ultimately that thing that we do that we feel has value. So a whole bunch of examples of this being the, like, top technical person in your firm or in a team. If you started your own firm, you probably don't know anything different. This is how it's always been. You. There was a day when you did a hundred percent of the work yourself, and ever since then, you've hired People beneath you because you're going to be at the top of the org chart, right? So like all the folks that you pull into the firm ultimately are there to support your big brain ness, because you have the biggest brain of them all when, when the reality is there's not a single thing that we do that there isn't somebody out there better than us at. And getting over this need to be the number one technical expert is a really healthy thing to navigate. So Patrick Dieter on Twitter, he does a lot of firm acquisition stuff out there and he's, he's a non accountant. He came into this not as an accountant, but started up rolling, started rolling up accounting practices. And the biggest objection I see from accountants is, is number one, how dare you? Number two, who do you think you are? But then number three, how could you even do this when you don't even know what you're doing? And the assumption there is that by being the big boss, you have to be the biggest technical brain in the room. And that's usually the case in small firms. But that's a really healthy thing to also overcome to get over that. The notion that you have to carry that weight you have to yourself and that weight of being the top technical expert is one of so many burdens that we assume that we have to carry that we really don't have to carry. And that's like what this is all about is how can we offload some of these things so that we don't have to be the person in charge of absolutely everything. Another example being the person that is the expert on a specific piece of software or on the systems that your firm uses. Again, when you start out, you gotta be the pro at every single one of them. But as you grow, you need subject matter experts on every tool that you use within your team. And that can't all be you. And that means that like, I don't know, there's a, there's a real kind of insecurity sort of thing around not being able to be the person to have all the answers. But that's a really healthy thing to get over because in my experience in firm running, you gotta have somebody to answer every type of question and it can't be you. So if you're, if you aren't designating these subject matter experts, then the default is for those questions to just go to the top, whoever the boss is. But anytime you get a question that has to come to you, it's worth considering. Why did this one need to come to me? And it's usually a signal that you're missing some sort of like designated expertise within the firm. So for every single piece of software, you need to have a subject matter expert within the team. That could be one person, could be a bunch of people for matters of like, technical things, like you need to have somebody that isn't, you know, besides you. And the right answer here is definitely a sliding skill depending on how big your firm is. But relinquishing like the software expertise, like, that's absolutely something you need to be thinking about. Managing people who. That's a big old threshold. When you are building a firm from scratch, the first time you actually put somebody in charge of being in charge of other people. Right. Because ultimately this, this for me at least was the thing I took the most pride in in my firm was just taking care of the people that were there and trying to help them grow and trying to create a killer place to work. And that ultimately was the hardest thing for me to delegate control of. But you know what makes you an awful manager? Trying to do too many things and trying to manage too many people. Right. Again, I think when we do something a certain way and we have never gone through the exercise of delegating that function in our heads, there's this thought, whether we actually acknowledge it or not, that, well, I'm going to be the best at this thing, so I can't delegate it or any delegated version of it is going to be worse than me doing it. And that's a really good thing to get over because it's absolutely not the case. People will do things different to you and there will be a whole lot of people who are worse than you at that thing. But you can absolutely find somebody who's going to be even better than you at that thing. Stuff as simple as no longer doing bookkeeping, no longer doing tax prep. Yes, you're losing touch with your roots. You used to always do that stuff yourself, right? No longer working with clients even. This is something that I had successfully navigated from being a peon, entry level person to getting to the point where I didn't do any client work. And I just focused on talent acquisition and strategy and more of the big picture stuff. Letting somebody help with your email. Oh my gosh, that's a big, big one. We treat email as this proprietary thing and if you pull somebody in, you're giving up and it's like, no, you are on a, like, production floor and a huge volume of the stuff that needs to get done comes in your, into your email. Inbox. Stop thinking that that is like some personal thing that you need to manage yourself. It ain't. Because everything that comes in there impacts everybody else in the firm. But we don't give these things up because. Oh, because you're just, you're gonna lose touch with how it gets done. Right? You think your software vendors are leaning into AI stuff? Like Real Talk? Let's level on this one. Do you think the people you're working with today are really like staying up at night going, ugh, how can large language models make my users experience better? Well, if they're not, gotta take a look at this episode's sponsor, Client Hub. Because at Client Hub. Hang on, I can't remember what the line is. I found it. Because at Client Hub, AI is not the future. It is the present. It's the now. It's here. In fact, they've already shipped some pretty cool AI stuff, but they got a whole like manifesto on their landing page, your firm on AI, about their entire vision for how they are building AI into their platform. And you know what? Gosh darn it, good for them. Because what I'm afraid of is a bunch of people have these big systems already and they're not gonna make the necessary like infrastructure changes to lean into AI in a meaningful way. But tell you who, you don't have to worry about that with Client Hub, buddy. To learn more about the cool stuff they're doing with AI and what their roadmap looks like, check out the link in the show Notes Gang. This episode sponsored in part by Teamup, who helps you recruit top Filipino accountants without any zero ongoing monthly fees. They can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms, people who are familiar with stuff like Xero, qbo, Dex. They can find them for you. They can also recruit specialist roles like a team lead. People with leadership experience, even US tax specialists. Wowee. The most talented and ambitious accountants in the Philippines want to work with you directly, not through an outsourcing company for two main reasons. One, they don't want to give a big chunk of their salary to a middleman, oftentimes upwards of 2, 50%. And they want to build a long lasting relationship with their employer. Aw. These are the people Teamup can recruit for you for a flat one time fee and then connect you with an affordable employer of record as well. If you need help with payroll and compliance, learn more at their site hireteamup.com and get on their newsletter for quick tips on managing overseas teams. Stuff like cultural miscommunications. Best Practices everything you need to know to get started hiring offshore. You already know I'm down with offshore hiring. Learn more@hireteamup.com now for me, for example, I've had a bunch of people ask and this is what actually brought me around to thinking more about this initially. If I don't run a firm anymore, who the hey am I to advise people on running a firm? Reasonable question, right? Like, and we've all seen those people who don't actually do the thing but want to tell you how to do the thing and know how irritating that is. All I can speak to is like my personal experience from you know, being a staff person in a firm to running that firm to now not running a firm anymore, but creating a whole bunch of content as if I know what I'm saying and telling other people the right and wrong ways to run firms. When I was running a firm, it was super fun. If I, if this content stuff hadn't come up for whatever reason, I would still be running a firm. A lot of really hard things with it. But what I really enjoyed was the ongoing growth of, of myself and getting to get pulled into different things and all that. But the reality was when I was running a firm, I had a hundred percent of my time focused on running a firm. But it was like my own lived experience. It was all through the lens of a single firm, which these days is extremely limited when we have online communities and we can make friends online that do the same thing and we can learn from them and collect something that is like, you know, 10x lived experience that you can use to make better decisions through. And so I've shared before some of the big decisions that I got really, really wrong, like going to the wrong practice management. So maybe five or six or seven years ago where we were largely making decision based on what salespeople told us. But I had no network of external people to like validate any of that. And so we just, we did the default. We went to what our tax offer provider told us would be the best tool their thing and it was hot, piping hot. Yeah, it wasn't good. Wasn't good. And that's the way that most firms still operate as opposed to building a network of other people who do what you do and be able to validate any of these big decisions with other people who have actually done it, who have like followed through on that change and know what worked and what didn't work. And so the before and the after for me was before at a single firm that I ran and had a really, really deep knowledge of, of what the day to day of that looked like. But for me, outside of firm running, literally all I do now is talk to people in my community about what's going on in their firms. I talk with people on social media about what's going on in their firms. And like all of that informs ultimately then the content that I produce. So is it different for me now? Yes, it's absolutely different. Like I'm not head down on all of the same things that I was while I was running a firm, but I would argue when I was running a firm, if I had just created content through the lens of my single firm, that also wouldn't be particularly relevant to everybody. And I had been running like my community. I've been doing social media stuff for years, up until I was done running my firm. And honestly, what made all that content good was, was all of the ideas I was collecting from all the people that I was already talking with and working with. And to me, the lesson here is like, as with all things in life, when you're considering doing that next new thing that seemingly closes the door on a bunch of the things you're doing now, you will actually find there's more opportunity, more nuance, more on the other side than you could have ever imagined because you just never done it before. Right? But many of us are afraid to kind of like go over that next hill to see what is there because it's not as well defined as what you're currently doing today. Now, other to me, really meaningful pros of doing this is one, you're getting out of other people's way. I enjoyed working with super capable people in my firm. Like, I learned about myself. What I was not very good at was like working with entry level type folks because I'm more like the entrepreneurial brain. And these people are like, okay, can you just tell me how to do my job? And so a great part of like pushing yourself to go into that next thing, even though it means giving up things, is you're getting out of other people's way. Like you're creating opportunity for them, which like I think is like the highest calling of, of being a leader, is creating opportunities for other people. But if you are like hanging like clinging to all these tasks and all these things that you want to do until the end of time, you're not making space for anybody else's growth. Two, I think a big pro is you're creating opportunities at a greater scale. So you are rising above the work and creating kind of more versions of yourself at that level of work that you just departed from. Ultimately, you are using, you know, fellow human beings as leverage, and that's. That's very objectifying. But ultimately, you're building teams to do the things that you used to do, and your impact is growing because you're able to do that with more people. But then third, it's also a path to freedom. Just going back to the example of, you know, every time something came to me, I kind of had to run a little analysis in my head of why did this come to me? Is there somebody already designated to handle this thing? If so, that's easy. Go talk to Tina about this. This is Tina's domain of expertise. Don't ask me. But if there wasn't, then we had to rethink. Like, why was this something that slipped through the cracks and got to me? And is there a better system that could have handled this? And that is freedom. Like, that is getting the things off of your plate. Now, there's always going to be more things, and there will always be things that slip through the cracks. But embracing this enabling of other people for you means trusting that on the other side of all of this stuff, there's still going to be something for you to do. And I'm happy to share that there will. There will still be stuff for you to do. So the four stages of overcoming this, as I usually see them in accounting firms, and you may already be on. We got people that are going to be on every, like, level of this spectrum. But one is, you know, first I can let somebody else do the work. I don't actually have to do all the work myself. I'm just going to review it. I'm going to make sure it's correct. And this is hard because in the beginning, you were the secret sauce. If you went out and you started your own firm, like, everything was you. So you were the secret sauce that got that stuff done. The things that you knew and what your expertise was, maybe your personality, it was all you. But it's a big first step to say, okay, I can actually pull somebody else and trust them to do the work. I'm still going to review it to make sure it's correct. But, like, that is a great first step. Step number two, I can let somebody else review it and I'll just sign it and we can pretend that this isn't a thing. In accounting firms, it absolutely is. I mean, the partner is just signing stuff. The old partner review step. That review looks like finding all of the flags and the paper thing that you have to sign like that is the partner review step. But step number two, you're pulling in somebody else to review it and you're trusting that their review is going to be correct. Gang, I get it. Choosing a practice management system that is big, that is high stakes, that is quite possibly the sweatiest decision you will ever make around software in your accounting firm. And I know that because I've got it wrong. And the reason is because these tools want to do anything and everything all inside of one tool, right? But what if I don't like this part of it or that part of it? Hey, could be a great reason to carve out that client portal, huh? Like today's sponsor, Copilot lets you do. It is a client portal only solution where it's not going to tell you how to do your work. It's not going to start mucking around in all aspects of your firm. All it's going to do is give you a super flexible platform for managing the client facing aspects of what you do. You can still roll your own tools for workflow. Everything else you're just going to use Copilot for the client facing bit. Recently they sponsored a video on my channel where we did a deep dive like a hands on demo of copilot on the YouTube channel. Let me show you some comments on that video. These are real live from human being comments on this YouTube video. Wow. I love they opted for flexibility essentially allowing us to embed other tools like calendly forms, etc. Rather than trying to create their own subpar version. Truff. Thanks. I was looking for a portal that linked to other places and is and is more flexible than your out of the box portal. Very interesting. I'll have to take a deeper dive into this tool. Okay. I love this. Those are all actual humans. Actual humans said those things. Wanna learn more about it? Check out the link to Copilot in the show Notes. 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 a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines 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 Number three, you're going to let somebody sign it? Oh, you mean in my firm where it may have my name on. I'm going to let somebody else sign it and go out the door. I don't even think about that. The whole life cycle of that engagement could happen without me being involved at all. Yeah, that can be a thing. That can be, that can absolutely be a thing. That's step number three. Step number four, this is the big brain step. You've you in step three, you removed your process yourself from the process completely. But in step number four, the process becomes the secret sauce. And step number one, and before you were the secret sauce when you started out, it's just you in step number four, the process and the quality assurance system that you set to create an organizational standard for the level at which stuff has to get done. This system becomes the secret sauce. And is it hard to create that system? You better believe it is. It absolutely is. But a system scales, right? So we can either on a spectrum of relying on system versus relying on expertise, if you have no system, it requires a greater level of expertise and experience from all of your people. If you have a system, you're able to plug lower skilled people into that system to get the same output. And oftentimes our over reliance on highly skilled people is actually a reflection of how we're failing to make good systems. And so ultimately the best, like most high leverage thing a subject matter expert can do can be the one that is in control of the quality assurance system. And so like that is, that is step four for me and that is a really hard thing. But ultimately what matters is the state at which that work goes out the door. I mean there's other things along the way like the client experience and all that. Don't get me wrong, but for you, like the pie maker, the technical person, if we go from the beginning where you did every single little thing yourself, and so you had control over how it all got done and could ensure that it was all done correctly. The full evolution to the other end of the spectrum is you still doing that, but in a completely scalable way. And that is you building a killer quality assurance system. If you think about how Toyota started, I have no idea how Toyota started, but it's probably very well documented. I imagine it started with a guy making a car, maybe it didn't. This might be a really bad analogy, but the way you scale anything is like that, that QA system, right? Like how are you ensuring that everything goes out the door in a standardized way? Ultimately, how you got there, whether it was a collection of contractors, whether it was hiring a whole bunch of people, whether it was high skill people, whether it was low skill people, how you get there ultimately, client experience aside, doesn't matter if we're just looking at the quality of the output. All that matters is the state that it's in when it goes out the door. And if you're grappling with what is my, my value and my worth going to be if I no longer do this thing that I do right now, I'm telling you there, there are so many things to still take pride in on the other side of like grappling with that. And for me, it ultimately came down to taking pride in higher leverage things. And so, for example, taking pride in letting people come in and review the work so that you're not the one reviewing it, letting people come in to do the prep work so you're not the one prepping it. For me, there was a tremendous amount of pride in that because I was able to upskill people into those roles, things that they had never done before. And it meant like reassigning the value and the contribution that I thought that I made to the firm, to something else. But the beauty was that something else was a higher leverage thing, right? I was able to help more people, I was able to help more clients rather than it just being me doing that entire thing myself. And it's actually what eventually led me to get out of firm running and focus more on helping firms at a more meta level is because now I have the freedom to spend all of my time stealing ideas from the smartest people that I know and then regurgitating them online as if they were my own. I don't, I don't actually do that. Hopefully I'm very transparent about that. But for me, that became a higher leverage People to help. A higher leverage way to help people than running a firm. Running a firm was helping awesome people that came to work for us and helping clients. Now what I do is I try to help firms who then can help more people and more clients. And it's just a higher leverage version of the same thing. Now there's no shame in like, loving what you do and wanting to keep doing that. And maybe for you, that's bookkeeping or tax or the technical stuff. Like, you may just love doing that thing. And there's absolutely no shame in that. The only time when that becomes problematic is when your expectation of the type of business that you can run and the lifestyle that you can live runs at odds with what's possible when you are that person doing all the heavy lifting. It's exceptionally hard to build a team while still doing all of the technical stuff. You're just adding job after job after job when, like, building a business really traditionally is going to be the opposite. You're going to be shedding job after job. Every time something comes to you, you're having to challenge and recreate systems that can ensure that that work will get done at a very high level without your involvement. And that is building systems and that's finding people. But it's another example of kind of one of those areas of our life where we are are really tied to the collection of tasks that we do today. And ultimately that's how we define our value. And because that is known, it's really easy to cling to it and you may not know what your value will be on the other side of that thing. And it's a great argument for why we should really ultimately never define our value in our collection of work tasks. Right? Like, our value is ultimately us as human beings and the experiences you've had and the opportunities you've had and how those better inform you for whatever thing that you do next. Like how to be not only a better professional, but a better human. And I'm a big believer that if you cling to the same collection of tasks until the end of time, like, you limit your development as a person. Like, both professionally but also as a human. And in many ways, if you're really, really good at a thing and you're just keeping that thing to yourself, I don't know. To me, it feels like. I don't know if selfish is the right word, but for me, there's a. Like, the most satisfying thing I ever did was get out of the work that I did so that I could Pull other really talented people in who were, like, jacked to be doing that work. Like, they loved it, and that was an awesome thing for them. And we had so many people that we check in who were working warehouses and like, all these other random things. Some were accountants, some were non accountants. We were able to upskill them into these really incredible careers where they quickly developed these skill sets that were so in demand. And, like, the thing I take the greatest pride in departing the firm was just the ability to, like, take other professionals on that path, regardless of their background. Because I actually loved hiring non accountants and putting them in a spot where they had this much, much, I don't know, better, but more marketable skill set where they would absolutely never struggle to find work again and to do so in, like, a fun environment that can be, you know, like, mindful of people having a life and, like, lean into the balance of valuing people through, like, the professional scope of what they did for the firm, but also them as human beings and the stuff that they have going outside of work and all that. But all that starts, frankly, with you getting over the fear of, if I stop doing this thing, I'm no longer going to be an expert in it. And that's a, like, that's a really helpful, like, healthy thing to get over. I know we've got a lot of solo practitioners that listen to this too. I think this absolutely applies to you as well. Like, there's, you know, whether it's a virtual assistant, a fractional person you pull on to help with email, or this or that, even itty bitty firms can create opportunities for other people that can be, like, really meaningful, something to think about. That's all I got today. I'll see you in the next one, Sam.