173 4 Questions Accounting Leaders Should Ask Themselves

Yesterday on the main YouTube channel, we ran through nine questions that every accounting firm leader needs to ask themselves. We've got four more that are more on the personal end of the spectrum of how we chart our course through kind of our careers. Whether you're an accounting firm owner, whether you work for somebody else, These are good sort of level set questions to make sure that we're not just on the hamster wheel for the sake of being on the hamster wheel. Right. So come on in, let's run through these questions. This is kind of an addendum to yesterday's main channel video. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's on YouTube, but with YouTube, you can leave that open. Listen to it just as if it were a podcast. I was inspired here by Tim Ferriss's 17 Questions that Changed his life. And I ran through that and it was really interesting. And I thought, what are the big picture questions that kind of the 10,000 Foot View questions that help us ensure that our firm is still like on track, headed in a direction that it ought to be headed in, in light of the Internet and the things that are changing and how we can find better clients these days and all that. But also what we're gonna go through today more personally. Why am I doing all of this? Why am I working so hard? Um, who am I trying to impress? And even for. And maybe especially for achievers, what does success look like when you're an achiever that just can't get off that hamster wheel? Right. So encourage you to check out the video that just dropped yesterday if you haven't yet. Not that the two are necessarily that connected. Cause this is definitely getting more towards the personal side. This first question is still a little firm technical. And then we get into like more kind of the career sort of questions. So up first, this is a big one, really helpful exercise. What would it look like if I cut my firm in half? I don't care if this is your firm. I don't care if you work for somebody else. This is a really valuable exercise. What would it look like if I cut my firm in half? I would argue most accounting firms could cut 50% of their clients, 50% of their staff, and, and probably make 80% of the money. And the most irritating thing about that statement is how true you know, it is. But we're genu. We're generally unwilling to do that. And I'm not even going to go say as. Go as far as to say it would be advisable. To do something like that. But what if somebody, I mean, like, what if you had to overnight? What if you had to cut your firm in half? What would remain? What clients would remain? Are they the clients that you enjoy versus the clients that you don't enjoy? Are they your biggest revenue clients? Are they a client that has some common thread that you're either excited about, you draw more personal fulfillment from, or due to some aspect of how you serve them? Maybe they're more profitable. I could tell you my favorite clients were generally not my biggest revenue producers. In fact, sometimes our big outlier, like big projects were some of our worst projects that we eventually try to get out of. How you answer the question of what clients would remain if you had to cut your firm in half ought to be a really good signal of who you ought to attract next. And if what's keeping you from attracting one more of those clients next is the other half of the clients. Right? I think that's what most of us are stuck on. What staff would remain? And this one's uncomfortable, but it is still worth doing that thought experiment. Not to say you're going to send half the team out to pasture, but if you could only keep half the time, who would you keep and why? For me, what I found was in our firm, we actually ended up with a collection of non technical accounting people who are, who were so essential to everything getting done in the firm. And we'd, we'd gone from a place where all we ever did was hire accountants to eventually skewing to where the majority of folks that we were hiring then were actually non accountants who are more like facilitators, helping the rest of the accountants get more done. But very quickly, those accountants, those facilitators pretty much become accountants because they pick that stuff up pretty quick. Or they're like, can you go throw me in a bookkeeping class so I can just knock out twice as much of this stuff myself? And before we knew we had these like operator non accountant types who were just machines and like got so much stuff out the door and we're able to keep clients so happy in a high touch way that accountants, many of the accountants we had kind of struggled to do. But by going through this thought experiment of thinking like, what would our firm look like if we actually cut it in half? It actually put a spotlight on, oh, we actually need to keep doubling down on these non accountant hires. We still need accountants, but we're actually having like, it feels like the well is drying up when you're looking for Very technical accounting people. But more and more, it was actually getting really easy to hire folks who were high touch first, but also like operational hustlers. Like, they worked really hard, they got systems, they could create systems, and then you teach them the accounting. Like, it was easier for me to go that direction than it was accounting first and then make an accountant a people person or a systems builder, that sort of thing. Right. So if you think about how would you cut that roster in half, that's probably a signal of, frankly, is there like some. Some dead weight, some people who are not contributing as much as you need them to? It's not unlike your client list, where oftentimes the underperformers, the bottom performing 20% can take up 80% of your attention span. That can absolutely be the case with staff, much like with clients, we oftentimes hang on to people for too long. We don't want to be cavalier about this. We want to do everything we can to help people to be successful. But if it's not working, it's not working. Last, if you did cut your firm in half, what would you spend your time on? And this may be the most important question. Yesterday in that video, we had a few other questions like this, where, if you were super, super limited, restricted in various different ways, what would you do and how would it change how the team around you had to support you? I think those are killer thought experiments because the blocker to delegation, the blocker to pulling in more talented people to help you is usually not them, it's usually us. And you find that when you cut somebody loose with really clear instructions and you say, I trust you to do your best on this and do a great job, you will generally be impressed with what you get back. Not because it's going to match and align perfectly to what you would have done and how you would have done it, but because you've hired smart people that are capable of getting things done and generally they just want you to get out of the way. I usually underestimated what these people were capable of, and it wasn't until I cut them loose that I realized they're really focused on trying to do what they think I want them to do, rather than just saying, you understand the business, go solve this problem within this framework, tell me what you learned. Like, that was where people were working at their best, I think, You know, people often ask me, jason, who is this episode sponsored in part by. Well, today this episode is sponsored in part by LiveFlow. Did you hear the news? LiveFlow just launched a consolidation product. You actually might have seen it on the main channel. Recently we did a whole demo day of it. LifeFlow's automated multi entity consolidations. It's beyond simple to use. You can easily map multiple unmatching chart of accounts from multiple QuickBooks Online companies into one standardized report. Important. Once it's set up, LifeFlow is going to get to work updating the consolidations automatically in real time, the realest of time. So you can focus on analysis using instantly updating data across entities. LifeFlow can even consolidate financials that are in different currencies. That sounds disgusting. Yikes. And it doesn't stop there. LifeFlow offers flexible, powerful reporting tools. Create customized dashboards that meet your specific needs, you little snowflake. Build executive presentations, cash flow forecasts, and more with just a few clicks. The consolidation thing is actually super cool. If you haven't seen that yet, check it out on the main YouTube channel. And thanks to Liflow for sponsoring the pod. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant Staffing Y' all know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to 100% distributed US and then 100% distributed global globally hiring and honestly is the best thing I we did it virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on. Because you know what, the folks we hired offshore really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like months menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms. You know, offshore outside the US you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself. Figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple. At accounting firm in the US hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like I'm going to stop Being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked with other practitioners, I talked with some of the vendors that, that would like, help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant Staffing Question number two. I believe this is number 10 in the entire question arc. How can I throw money at the problem? How can I waste money to solve it? This is a quote from Dan Sullivan. I absolutely love this. If you've got enough money to solve problems, you don't have the problem. How many problems do we have right now that we have the money to solve? In the beginning, you spend time to make money and the whole goal is to escape that game, that hamster wheel of trading, giving your time to somebody else in exchange for them giving you money. Now that you have money, once you escape that, are you giving yourself permission to spend money to make back time? That's how all this stuff works. You start by putting in time and somebody giving you money. Once you get over the hill and you've got the money, are you doing anything? Are you spending any of that money to get time back? Now, the last question we did yesterday was for this problem you have, how could you solve it if you could only ever subtract, not add? I think the default is adding, like adding people and adding clients and adding money and complexity and software and systems and all these things. What if you could only solve that problem by subtracting? This is where my mind goes first. We're going to do a podcast episode on that Elon Musk book. Not a big Elon Musk guy, but there's some frameworks in there that, that are interesting and helpful and the big one is, is what they refer to, as he refers to as his quote unquote algorithm. Algorithm, which is pretty much centered on elimination of, of absolutely everything possible. So while I don't think that the solution is usually to add, there's usually a much better solution to subtract. If you have the money that can solve a problem, are you doing anything with it? I have a landscaper come and does the landscaping at our house and in the home I grew up in, that would have been absolutely unthinkable. My dad had a little metal shed, had a mower in it, had a all manner of gas powered lawn implements that required annual servicing, all sorts of greasing and gassing. I got to partake in the Annual service. If I had a dollar for every time I learned how to change the oil filter on a lawnmower. And all these different things that I absolutely never have used since in my life. We had all this infrastructure on our, I think it was a touch over a half acre lot. We had to mow the front lawn and the back lawn, we had some bushes, all that stuff. And we spent virtually no time with my father growing up. Just like little to nothing. And it was the generational thing of, I'm going to work hard now, retire early, and then we'll get all of our time back. As I shared last week, he went to the doctor on his last day retiring and they told him, you've got a 30% chance of making it through the next 12 months. But let me tell you, he had every lawn implement you could have ever needed to keep that place spic and span. I have a landscaper. That's not to say there aren't things that you enjoy that you couldn't spend time on. And like, goodness. Sitting in front of our computers all day and I still struggle with this. Boy, it feels good to do something outside or do something with your hands or just with a whole different part of your brain that isn't sitting in front of a computer. I can tell you my experience also because I love like TV and shows and creative stuff because it's inspiring to me. But I that stuff, if I consume it at night, I think it's working the same part of my brain that I'm working when I'm sitting in a screen, working, working at my computer. And so I'm kind of bummed. Lately I've had like a lot of new work I've been trying to get done, but then my way of unwinding is in front of a screen. And like, that doesn't really work. I need to go outside and bang some sticks together or something. If you're doing things that are like, good for your brain and exercising a different part of you, great. Otherwise, do you have the money to hire a landscaper? Get the money to bring a babysitter over for date night? Accountants are probably really bad at this because we're just cheapskates in general. But I suspect most of us who have found success are not then employing that money to save time quite as much as we could. Number three, what would I do or believe if I had $10 million? What total monthly income do I require? So think about that fantasy life. What if you could escape all this? Or what if you could keep doing what you do today, or what if you could do half of what you do today and the other half is that other thing, you know, on a golf course all day or climbing a rock all day or doing landscaping, what is that fantasy life? Actually go through the work of pricing it out. I have a fantasy life in my head right now. I do. I can like, I can see it in my head. I know where it is. I know how much time I want to spend working. I know what things I want to do. And I can sit down and line item price out every aspect of that quote, unquote fantasy life. And it's not that expensive. And I think that's what most of us will find if you go through this exercise is it feels more out of touch than it really is. The things that are keeping you from living that fantasy life is actually everything else. It's all the people that maybe you will let down by transitioning to that fantasy life. It is maybe the people in your life who will be like, what is he doing? Like, that doesn't make any sense. Like, I've never seen anybody do stuff like that. And you're worried about what other people think or a problem. We, tons of us, struggle with giving yourself permission to live that fantasy life, for goodness sakes. Now, for me, the fantasy life is not a destination. It is a step along the way. It is a season of life. I've always loved the idea of mini retirements because we all burn out. Like, what if you take a couple years off here or there as you start thinking about what you want to do next? I love that. I think the reason most people don't do that is they can't go into a hiatus like that with any ambiguity about what they'll do on the other side of it. They're so afraid of there being nothing left for them after that. As if they will be some. The hollow husk of the human being they were before that. They just can't, like, put one foot in front of the other and just trust that for me, my fantasy life cannot look like complacency. I would work less, but eventually then I would work more again. And I'm fine, like, acknowledging that, like, that's how I am. I super enjoy the work that I do. The way I've been thinking about it lately is everything is just like. And we all know this, but we just. We don't live our lives this way. It is all about the journey. It's not about the destination. That's why I've never been super into goal setting, but I'm trying to lean into goal setting a little more. What I just don't like is that we prop up all of these big achievements in our life and we're like, if I could just get this and then you get that and there's nothing there. And there's not like happiness. There is fleeting and you don't know what's next. So when I think about goals or destinations or this fantasy life, what, you know, whatever you want to call that, for me that makes sense as long as that is taking me to a better journey. Because no amount of working really hard for me today is going to take away from the value of like going and building a fort with my sons upstairs, or going to gymnastics with my daughter or doing something in front of my children that will show them like, this is a good thing to do. Be it, you know, service or investing in myself and learning how to play the piano or stuff like that. Where it's going to make a difference that you are around them, it's going to impact them. There's no, there's no amount of future payoff to me that makes not doing those things worthwhile. And if as you're fixated on that payoff, everything along the way just gets steamrolled, right, like you just that, like there is no journey. There's no joy in the journey at that point. So to bring us back to the question, what total monthly income do you require for that fantasy life? I would venture to guess many of you already have that income, just not giving yourself permission to live that life or a version of that life. Here it is. Have this. Have this permission. This episode is brought to you in part by Team up, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Team up and all the other offshoring options is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, Gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. 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Last number four I think this is gets us to number 13 in total. Could it be that everything is fine and complete as is? Could it be that the hamster wheel has run its course and things are actually pretty darn good for many of us? If you looked back at where you were 24 months ago, or five years ago, or 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you'd be like, you lucky dog, you've done it. Great job. I'm proud of you. What are you doing with it? That old, that old chestnut? Did you reach your tmi, your total monthly income that you need? Did you get to it? And that's even an interesting thought experiment if you are working your butt off right now. And I always tell this to new firm owners, if you're coming into being a new firm owner, decide what you need to make from the business and be okay with that. Otherwise you just get on the hamster wheel and never get off because you got to do more and then more. And it's just this incremental thing each year which is what makes the journey where you need to get the satisfaction. Not, not that destination. But if you reach that total monthly income that you need for the fantasy life, would you go out and live it? Would you actually do that? Would you do something better? What would change? Would you work at all? Would you reduce it down to half? But if you got there, would you actually do it? Honestly, gang, I think the majority of people in today's society straight up, just wouldn't do it because it's not the norm, because they can't give themselves permission, and because we are constantly chasing the next better thing. And that's a really hard thing to shake. On the subject of everything being fine and complete and if there's any such thing, and if you even recognize it when you get there, something that's, that I try to do regularly is journaling specifically because journaling for whatever reason, and it calms me, but it also gets me to a place of gratitude where I'm like so much more grateful for things at the end of journaling than I am at the beginning. And honestly, the way my journal looks is probably just a lot of pissed off days where I'm like, I'm just so annoyed right now. I don't feel like I can get anything done. So I'm just gonna sit down and journal. And by the time I get to the end of that, I'm in a totally better place. And yesterday my wife brought me this quote, unquote journal. That's what my daughter calls it as her journal. It is a notepad from the Four Seasons at new New Money Summit in Orlando was at the Four Seasons. And so my daughter's journal is this. She will say things like reference to the Four Seasons, like the opulence, the privilege. But she writes in this little just tear off notepad. And it was a full page of text and she's, she's in first grade so like she's getting better at expressing herself and can actually put that stuff to paper. And it's, it's just super cute to see what comes out of these tiny little brains. And that page was rough. At the top was, I had a really bad day today. I cried at school. I didn't have enough time to finish the craft. I was upset at recess and couldn't play with anybody. And it was like that first third of the page was rough. But the further down the page she got, it looked just like my grown man grouchy about something. I'm probably just hungry kind of journal posts, journal pages. She was like, next week I get to go do this. And I'm pretty excited. Last night my brother brought me a minifig and a funny little motorbike and I had fun playing with that. I get to play my switch at 4:30 this afternoon. I'm going to play this game and I'm going to play this game and I'm going to play. And it was like by the end of that one sheet of paper, she did the exact same thing that I always do, which was like she just had this big old list of all the things she was excited about and grateful for. And it made me so happy. And I tried to like get her to understand the same things that we struggle with is that gratitude is like a state of mind that we're absolutely in control of willing into existence whether or not we feel grateful, whether she understood Any of that or not, I don't. I don't know. But seeing her go through that really opened my. My eyes to, I guess, what I kind of already knew and what we all know, which is that everything being fine and complete is just a matter of perspective. And oftentimes we don't leave ourselves space for things to be fine and complete and to get our minds to a place where they can enjoy what's going on. So, like, for me, if I'm not sleeping enough, if I don't get to exercise in the morning, I have a lot harder time being happy with things. And so much of it is simply making the time to feel gratitude. And if you never make the time to feel gratitude, it doesn't matter how successful you are, you're never gonna get there, right? You're never gonna feel it. Um, this was an amazing quote. The whole. The idea of this whole thing I shared was From Tim Ferriss 17 Questions that Changed my life. But this quote was killer. To reiterate what I've said elsewhere in this book, type A personalities have goal pursuit as default hardwiring. This is excellent for producing achievement, but also anxiety as you're constantly future focused. I personally decided that achievement is no more than a passing grade in life. It's a C plus that gets you limping along to the next grade. For anything more, and certainly for anything approaching happiness, you have to want what you already have. Many of us are fixated. This is me now. We're fixated on achievement because that's fulfilling, but that's not the same as happiness. And we've all gotten to these milestones before and been like, am I. Am I happy now? Or am I just kind of the same and doing a new thing? So, particularly for the achiever types, which I'm definitely one of those, just achievement can't be the passing grade. That can't be it. There has to be something more than achievement. Achievement ought to look more like having a framework and like that daily protocol to be able to soak up the journey and actually enjoy what it is you're doing. Because if you had to pick from one of those two things, achievement, success and financial freedom and all these other things, or fulfillment and being able to enjoy the journey. The journey sounds better. Like you can keep your achievement if you find a way to enjoy what you're doing every day, isn't that kind of all that matters? So if we're 100% fixated on achievement, I think we totally miss the point of that and making space for gratitude. There's a worksheet that I put together for all these questions, both the ones that we did today and the ones that we did yesterday. I'll put a link in the show notes. I would encourage you go through this exercise. The stuff yesterday I think is really helpful from a practical standpoint and running firms and delegation and all of that. Also, if you have a partner in your business or if you have another decision maker that you are trying to push them to something else or you just you need to be in alignment, I would also super recommend you each going through that worksheet on your own and then coming together and sharing what your answers are. Not to get your answers in alignment, but I think that's actually a really helpful exercise for you to see into where each other is at and prioritize what are ultimately the most important things for each of you and figure out how do we build a business around that that's going to lean into the stuff that you need to make this all sustainable. Sorry we got so up in the feels today. I'll keep it tactical the rest of the week. Okay, we'll get back down to busy biz. Thanks for coming and hanging today. If this was helpful for you, would love to see a comment and I'll see you in the next one.