129 Challenge Assumptions to Build A Better Accounting Firm

My brothers and sisters in accounting, oftentimes the thing that we really need, the thing that will change our lives, set our firms on fire in a good way, make a massive quality of life improvement, are things that are sitting like right in front of us, things that we can very easily change, where we're like, oh, shoot, we don't actually need to do this thing that we've just always done this way. Not for a good reason necessarily, but just because that's how we've always done it. And by changing that thing can actually make your life way better, be happier, make your staff happier, finally win her back. Who knows? Who knows? We did yesterday's main channel video on this. Today we're going to go even deeper on assumptions that are baked into many of our firms that we can absolutely challenge, that we can turn on their heads to get to something better. So come on in, let's talk about it. Let's challenge some assumptions. So this is building on yesterday's main channel video. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. If you haven't seen it yet, it was board game themed and it was a bunch of assumptions you can push back against that you may or may like, may or may not make sense for your firm, but can fundamentally change how your firm works in a way that could help you. So to rapid fire through some of the stuff we covered in that video. You don't have to answer the phone when it rings. Hot take, right. You don't have to respond within 24 hours. You don't have to be as accessible as your team. Different levels of accessibility there. You don't have to do phone calls at all. I know, I know that's just that knocks many people off their feet. But I know a ton of pheromones that don't do any kind of phone calls. And one of the things I want to talk about today is actually the change management side of this because there's going to be things here where you'll be like, well, wouldn't that be nice? But Steve will never go for that. And so there's a very real like issue of a nurse. Here's what we do. How could I ever get over to this other path? You don't have to manage your email inbox yourself. Oh, please don't, please don't. That's such a huge thing. Getting somebody in to help with your email inbox that actually cover that. That was a big chunk of the video. Please don't do that. You don't have to take Free discovery meetings, quit wasting time on tire kickers. You don't have to give out your cell phone number. In fact, I shared my favorite way, if you are stuck under that right now, to get out from under that. In yesterday's video, and a whole bunch more that we didn't cover that I gathered from folks who run firms on social media, a bunch of really, really good stuff. There was way more than I could ever get to in the video. Okay, so even more. And then we're going to talk change management on some of these things. You don't have to plan to 100% capacity. You ever notice that we, like, I don't know about you, I just kind of always did that. Like I always. And we factored in things like, oh, you're going to have new clients, you can have some stuff that takes longer than usual. But the end of the day, the goal was for everybody to be dripping with sweat and have consumed every minute of every day in the pursuit of the almighty profit and loss optimization. And it wasn't quite that sweaty. But like, that was just the default of what we did, as we always planned, to 100% capacity. If I can pay all these people, I can pay all these people to come work for my accounting firm, then they're going to work. Gosh darn it. But how does that usually go? Really? Like, how does that usually work? Yet year over year we do the same thing. And there's like so many sneaky sources of more work and it never accommodates the unexpected stuff, which is always somebody getting sick. Are you getting sick? When's the last time an unexpected thing happened that actually got a whole bunch of stuff done for you? Has that ever happened? Anyways, it's never gonna be what you think it's gonna be, yet we still plan to 100% capacity. I've talked about this on the pod. I don't. The main channel wasn't ready for this hot take. You don't have to do 100 of the work in house. Ultimately, your job as a, as a firm owner is to deliver something correct to the client. And most of us go out and we hire juniors and they bang rocks together to make something that sort of resembles a finished product. And then you get it over the finish line, right? That's just the, the way that works. But the reality is there's a whole bunch of people out there, outsourced services, contractors, offshore groups, whatever it is, who will happily plug their production machine, you know, let you plug your rinky dink operation into their much bigger machine to help you get that work done. And at the end of the day the trick is you're still on the hook 100%. And so regardless of how it gets done, does that change the quality of the output? If I hire a good intern and a bad intern, I'm not going to send worse workout because there's a bad intern. And so I don't think we think enough about how really it doesn't matter beyond you how the work gets done. And there's actually a lot of ways to get the work done. Deborah Fox shared on Twitter, you don't have to respond to every solicitation received to look at software, improve your website, whatever cold email you got that day. Oh, we spend a shocking amount of time with software vendors. We really do. And actually tomorrow on social media I'm launching what has been a massive project that a ton of people contributed to. In fact I already teased it last week. We sunk months and a shocking amount of money. And when I say we, I mean me and a bunch of people I pulled in to help into a giant roundup project for practice management systems. I think I teased this a couple months back. It is Basically a over 200 feature comparison across 14 practice management systems. I got 14PMs to collaborate with me on this. It's going to end up being like a, I don't know, 40, 50 page report. We've got just mega feature comparison grid. We've got dedicated tool pages comparing them to what they're most similar to. We've got radar charts of what they do well. Email versus Portal versus File management. You can overlay those charts on top of each other. We've got like heat maps so you can see who are the very best ones at file management or at workflow. We're putting this out tomorrow on social media. I'm going to do the old thing where they make you reply to get a copy of it because that's really good for the engagement of the post. And frankly we have sunk way too much time and money into this for it to not work. Gosh darn it. Anyways, I would super appreciate you engaging with that tomorrow. On the subject of wasting too much time with software providers, the goal of this report is to massively simplify the process of selecting a practice management system and be able to eliminate a bunch of them off the list immediately because you don't have time to go like learn the in depth like which of these practice management systems will go more than three tiers deep on subtasks. There's people out there who that's really important to which ones have Kanban views, which ones don't, which ones do recurrence, which don't for which ones will the next task recur if the previous one hasn't been done? Some of them do that, some of them don't. Recurrence on day of the week versus weekly versus like all of these nuanced things where oftentimes we get like into the process and you're like, what? It doesn't have this. I never would have made this decision had I known that we tried to put all of that stuff on a grid so you could see it in one place without having to take a single sales call. Am I shilling for this hard enough yet? It is something obviously I'm very passionate about. To Deborah's point, you do not have to take every solicitation from every software company. You just don't. I'll try to remember when we ship that tomorrow to update. Would that be in a couple of days? Update the show notes at some point with a link to that thing. If you don't see it on here, go out to my social media. It'll be out there. You sick of hearing people talking about AI, yet you get into the office and you're like, my inbox is still a dumpster fire, buddy. Can you actually give me something that'll save me some time? My, my, I'm ready. Same, same, bro. Listen, Client Hub, today's sponsor. You want to know their mantra? AI. Client Hub. AI is not tomorrow. It's today, buddy. It is. It's already happening. They're already shipping stuff in product that are super cool. AI, large language, model driven solutions. They're not just talking about it and putting out webinars about how cool this stuff is. Like they've actually are implementing it into their product in really meaningful ways. In fact, I don't know. They're one of the only companies I've seen that have actually publicly put that roadmap out there to say gang, here's the stuff that we are most excited about right now and here's the stuff we're working really hard on and they're even extending like early beta access to some of these features. For the folks who are most excited to be on the cutting edge of things. I know a lot of whom listen to this podcast. Picking your tech partners is as much about where they are today as where they are going tomorrow and the things that they are investing in. Got concerns about whether your partner's investing in AI check out client hub might be for you. Link in the show notes. You ever thought, man, if only there was a portal for all of these portals. One portal to rule them all. The portal portal, you know, and we say this kind of tongue in cheek, but also kind of not because we really don't like giving our clients fragmented experiences. Spoiler alert. Copilot, sponsor of this video, that's kind of their mantra is the portal for your portals. The notion that you can plug in any of the other tools that you use into copilot to give people a single place to manage their stuff, totally customize like all of the options that the client sees within that portal, even down to the client level. Like you can have different clients see different options down the left hand side. Copilot's got a bunch of its own, like built in tooling, but you can also embed a bunch of the other tools you use into Copilot, giving clients a single place that they can log in and see all that stuff all in one place. Which is the holy grail, right? I don't know. Like there's oftentimes where one more tool for all of the tools isn't the solution. But for portals, I can't think of a better solution because we're at like we've got all these different places we got to go log into all these things, right? So if that's something that you've grappled with copilot might be for you. Check out a link to copilot in the show notes. Okay. Nicole Davis said, you don't have to wait to get paid, man. I think that's at least in the tax world, that's probably 90% of us still getting paid after the fact. And you just don't. And you know what, that's not unreasonable. But on the change management subject, I think where most of us are stuck is, well, we've never done this before. How are we going to change it from A to B? In fact, anecdote alert. My partner one time told me a story he heard from another firm owner where this longtime great client came into the office to take delivery of their tax return on a deadline one time. And the front desk lady said, okay, that'll be X dollars. And had the files right there, like had the returns right there. And it was clear she wasn't going to hand them over until the person had paid. And the person said, excuse me, I've been a paying client for, you know, since 1936 and now you're going to hold me Ransom and they walked out and they never came back. And there's a whole like, I think there's about 10 different emotions you could take away from that. What an a hole. Like really was that that unreasonable? On the flip side, we want to be white glove. Did we just imply that we don't trust our clients to pay? If you have this 20 year relationship with a person, really is that reasonable for that man? It's a complex thing made more complex by the norm. If that guy came in in 1936 and every single time when he came in to pick up his tax return, he had him run his card first, that would have been no big deal, right? So the change management aspect of it, that is a very real thing. Jennifer Wilson. You don't have to have an office. You don't have to have set office hours. Your people don't have to live in your state. You don't have to require full time. You don't have to track vacation and sick time. Jeff Kristof. You don't need to keep every client if the situation changes. If not a good fit, you can say best of luck and end the engagement with neither party being upset. Man, that's, I think that's the biggest problem with firing clients is like, it feels personal to us when the reality is if you're trying to do something for a very specific type of person, the likelihood that they're going to be a great forever fit is not good. And this is why it's completely okay to get rid of your legacy clients and to truly get too big for your britches in the very best way. Because what was great for you when you were slinging tax returns off the tailgate of your pickup truck is not going to be the same kind of thing. That's good for you now that you are up and you're, you know, C suite corner office at the very top of that very fancy building or in the dumpy workshop off of your garage. What has my life come to? Brad Garland? You don't have to do a task yourself just because you could do it faster yourself. You can still delegate it and create an opportunity for a staff person. Ain't that the truth? How many times has, well, I can do it better or faster or insert adjective than anyone else. And so I'm not going to delegate it when it's like, you know what, you big turkey. There was a day when you were not good at any of that stuff, but somebody trusted that someday you would be and that is why they gave you that thing. Liz Farr, you don't have to say yes to every prospect or project that comes your way. Boy, getting over the. This is a hard disease to overcome. This was for me. There's this machismo that surrounds the notion that you can. You can close every sale. You know, like, that's something to have pride in when in. The reality is if you are closing every sale, it just means that you're giving away more than anybody else is giving away. So who's the knucklehead there? Joe Montgomery. You don't have to accept clients that don't cause you to do an internal happy dance at the thought of them actually signing. Yeah, that's like a very real threshold. When we got really busy, we started setting, like, fee proposal fees at like, this. Holy crap. Did they actually just accept this level? And you know what? They do? And then you're like, wait a minute, we were too busy. That's why we set it too high. Now we have a bigger problem. Maybe. But then that actually inspired us to then drop the clients that weren't paying us much. Yeah, man. If you are in demand, you gotta be clicking your heels every time you let another person onto that list, right? Sean Duncan, you don't have to work over spring break. Tax people are just rolling over in their post deadline graves right now. You don't. I will say for tax people, the deadline, like, especially the spring deadline, like, it feels like, you know, harvest season. Was the analogy I always heard for a farmer. Like, well, of course you're gonna. You're gonna work, you know, 20 hour days in harvest season, but if you do, it's choice. Like, ultimately, that's. That's kind of the big thing. So all these things obviously are not gonna be for everybody. Just know that it is a choice, Carrie. Stefan, you don't have to be big to be successful. Oh, how'd that one feel? You get a little tummy tingle there, Tyler? Win. You don't have to take a meeting when a loom will do. Ugh, so true. And I will say there are certain people, and this is maybe even something to try to filter out of. Of clients when you're bringing new people in. There's some people that want everything to be a meeting. And they're just like, I think all these people might be on LinkedIn sending DMs, but there's always a reason to be like, what? No, it's just a quick. Let's just hop on a quick little. Here's my cell phone. This isn't a big ask and some people prefer that. And maybe it is easier for you to like hop on and just have a call with somebody, but that's not me. I love asynchronous work and I love that work is trending towards being more asynchronous. That is, you've got processes, everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing. You don't have set work hours. People can work where they want to work and if you need something from somebody else, you put that thing over the fence and they're going to get to it like when they're working next. And for some types of work that's not okay. If you're a paramedic, that's probably not gonna be for you. In our line of work like if something is super urgent and non fire it means something already broke. So there's probably an issue upstream somewhere. Most of the stuff that we do shouldn't be that urgent if it perpetually is. It's usually a problem of expectation setting. You don't have to take part in every single meeting. That's a biggie. If you run a team and like having too many people involved in a meeting. This is where AI meeting assistance can actually be a really big help. Is now it's much easier to get information out of meetings that you are not in that can be really valuable. Today's episode is sponsored in part by firm360. You checked out firm360 at practice management System. You know, I could tell you about the razzle dazzle features, about how it gives you a 360 degree view of your practice. Everything you need all in one place. But instead, let me, let me let the people talk, the people who actually use Firm 360. What are the users saying? Here's Joshua S. About six months in using the tool has a firm between 11 and 50 people. Firm 360 is a practice management solution I have been looking for. In my 25 years in this industry, I've used many different products all claiming to save me time, money and be the best product for my business. I've tested every other online practice management tool for accountants and all have fallen short. Except firm360. Finally, a product that has everything, is easy to learn and use and sell support that is second to none. Because you know what? We all need a little support these days, right? Listen, stuff's gonna happen sometimes. Maybe there's a surprise. Maybe you just can't figure something out and you need a friendly person to help you work through it. Right? That's why Support is so important. Okay, gang. If you're looking for the supportive practice management system, look no further than Firm360. 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, they work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not gonna 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 gonna build our own pipeline in the Philippines, gonna 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 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 Corey Ruffiner. You don't have to make six figures to be successful. Talk about like just the worst hamster wheel entrepreneurship can be. If you're not careful. Rain Alec V. Sorry. You don't have to be afraid to say no. You don't have to be everyone's hero. You don't have to do work that you don't love. Angie Basin. You don't have to know everything, man. There's some bangers in there. Okay, let's talk change management. Because I like, I feel very lucky that I have the diversity of experience from coming into a 80 year old legacy accounting firm that was absolutely everything you would expect a legacy firm to be. And this was a tax firm. But then I spun up an accounting practice within that firm which was you're super hip, super cool, super woke, no timesheets, value billing, everything's fixed fee, everybody's distributed globally. No office man, were you doing like cool automation stuff? It was like the polar opposite. And I think it, it gives me a special appreciation for the people who've been running firms for a long time. And then some snot nosed kid that just started his firm comes along and says what? You can totally do this. It's not even hard. And the reality is, like, at the end of the day, the buck stops with you. So, yes, anything is possible. You have total agency. It's. It's the best and worst part of running a firm. But the inertia of a whole bunch of staff and a whole bunch of clients doing a thing a certain way for a long time, like unwinding, that is work like it just is. And this is one of those situations where I argue that you can craft a new reality for new clients. Because what I often see is, is say you got a hundred clients. And at my firm back in the day, we'd have 1500 to 2000 clients. And so, you know, if you're going to roll out like a portal or something, you're like, okay, the half of this person's time is now tech support. Like, we just had to think differently about it. Let's say you got 100 clients and there's something that's just better for you. And that could be anything. Let's say not taking phone calls. Let's say you just don't want to take phone calls anymore. You just want people to have to schedule with you. Or maybe you don't even want to do that. But the a hundred clients that you have right now love talking on the phone with you should. The fact that those hundred clients have gotten used to that mean that when you bring in your 101st client, that they should be allowed to call you too. Now, some people will argue you need to standardize everything that you do, and it's going to create this total mess when you have these different expectations for different people and all that. And that's a. I think it's a completely reasonable argument, but I think the trap there is that you're never able to change and that any change becomes massively high stakes. Because that means if I ever want to change, I have to then force that change on my entire client base all at once. And for sure there are benefits to that. But, boy, I sure hope you got that change right. Like, it's incredibly high stakes. And so for me, how I manage this was. And I think I've shared this before in my head, I always kind of had two practices that were developing in parallel. I had my legacy practice, and then I had my dream practice that I was working towards. And some of the clients that I had in my head were part of that dream practice, and a lot of them weren't. But I was always developing this better firm in parallel, and oftentimes the expectations and how we priced and all that were different in that better firm. But it enabled a transition that wouldn't have otherwise been possible because I couldn't have enforced all these things on the client that I already had. I had 40 people that I had to pay. So I couldn't pull the rug out from absolutely everyone, like, overnight without having built this other practice. And there's absolutely complexities to come from that. But the best thing I ever did to manage this was really productize our services. That is, get really specific about what all the things we do are and the different service levels of those things and what those ultimately meant. So, really basic example, in an accounting practice, maybe some clients are allowed to call you and some clients are not allowed to call you. Those are different service levels for your, you know, customer service or something like that. So if you think about an engagement or a proposal, you send out to a client as all these different services in it, you know, monthly bookkeeping, quarterly advisory, whatever that is on there, that difference, that distinction, all it's going to be is there's going to be a service line item there for, you know, support. It's called support. It can be as simple as they can call you as service level two. They can't call you as service level one. So anytime we made changes like this, we just had to be really explicit about what it was called. And. And we would not try to do, like, an astronomical number of these things to make it a total mess. But at any given time, anytime a client renewed, we knew exactly what service level everybody was and what the expectation for that client was. And over time, when we would do renewals, we would really try to push people towards what we wanted them to be. And if you take this too far, then, yes, it absolutely is a mess. And you've got like this matrix of all these different things. But the alternative is you either are paralyzed and, you know, like, shackled to this firm. That is not what you want it to be, with seemingly no way out, and you continue taking new clients in under this same old paradigm that you don't even like, or you throw caution to the wind and you're like, I'm pretty sure this is the right thing, that we're going to do the right thing to do, and we're now going to force this on everybody, and it's now mandatory for everyone overnight if you ever want to work with me. Like, people talk about those as the two options, but, like, that's just not realistic to Me, things change too fast. And so the notion of being able to develop this kind of like, you know, ideal practice that would allow us to ensure that our next client was our dream client, that was okay with these limitations. They were okay with not being able to call me if that was what I wanted to get away from. Those are the people I want to, that I want to bring in, not the people that fit perfectly into this old model that I'm not even enjoying. Right. So when it comes to change management, I would argue, don't get trapped by the status quo. I mean, that's. And that's maybe the most prescient example is you have this thing that you don't like or something you don't want to do. And because you let existing clients do it, when new clients come in, they'll think it's okay. Or on the landing page for your website, you say it's still a thing that you do when it's something you're actually trying to get away from. I think it's completely okay to be building this aspirational practice. And for me, that is how we were constantly improving, constantly testing and, and kind of evolving that firm from what it was to what we wanted it to be, which ultimately was a moving target. Like, we would meet and have these conversations, you know, these bigger picture conversations. And it is not as if we could ever sit down and say, this is exactly what we want to build in five years. That just wasn't realistic. And so it gave us the agility to continue developing that in the direction that made the most sense at that point in time without having to make like these full sail, really hard big decisions and like, impose them on our clients. So for me, that was the best way to handle, like, tricky change management like that. And that was how we did, you know, getting clients to use the portal and getting clients on, you know, a proposal system and autopay and not being able to pay after the fact for their tax work. Like that was just how we worked through those changes. And I would love it if I could snap my fingers and that change just happened overnight. But man, we also got a lot of changes wrong where if we did the wrong change and then forced it on everybody, and then six months later we're like, holy cow, this was not the right thing to do. That would have been even worse. So zooming out assumptions. I love talking with other people who run firms because you hear them say things sometimes and you're like, whoa, what? Like, you don't take phone calls or you only spend 10 minutes a day on email or you'll just hear something that is like unbelievable. Like you can't imagine that reality. Right? I love having those conversations because it helps you to challenge those assumptions that are just built into your day to day. So I really enjoyed doing that video. I appreciate the folks who spoke into that and shared a bunch of their assumptions too. If you got stuff that you've challenged, it's been really helpful for you. I'd love to see in the comments we got that big study dropping tomorrow. You'll see me post about it on social media. Would love to get that in your hands. I don't know that we'll have a daily pod tomorrow. I'm in Washington D.C. for a keynote for ASPA. That'll be fun. But we'll be back on Wednesday. Thanks for coming and hanging and I'll see you when I see you. Sam.