179 A 12 Month Transition To Working ON Your Firm

You know that old adage, we should be striving to work on our businesses, not in our businesses. Should you though? I don't know. A lot of people actually don't want that. A lot of accountants perfectly enjoy working in the business. But I will say, on a whole, most of us, most of us are aspiring to spend more time on the business, even if not a hundred percent. So can this be a thing you can get to in 12 months? Absolutely, you totally can. We're going to run through some ideas just for how to get started taking you in that direction. Whether you want to fully commit or not. Let's demystify all this stuff, make it feel a little more accessible. Come on in. You know what it is? It's Jason Daly. Mike Libby, listener of this podcast. Congratulations. Check out this flex from Mike on Twitter. I've delegated and got myself off about 95% of client facing work and it feels surreal. I'm having trouble pushing off the last few that have so much nuance to their situation. I've just got to spend the time making excessive notes before handing it off. Good for you, Mike. And I read that aloud for the entire world to hear because I think the more people you see that do it and the more you hear of people doing it, the more accessible it feels. Because sometimes the notion of the just working on the business or just even getting to a point where you're spending slightly more time working on the business, that just feels impossible. A lot of days, right? Like, I'm so bloody busy. I have so many things I have to do. I am wildly behind today. I cannot imagine a reality where I am somehow not doing all the things that I'm doing right now. But gang, reality is a lot of people out there are doing it. They, they're making it happen. And for me, it's always super energizing and inspiring to see those success stories. But on the subject of is this a thing that actually everybody wants Cause super gets glorified. There's this notion that, and it's something I'm asked about a lot on podcast interviews and stuff like that, you just cruised right past the fact that you got out of all of your client work. I think this kind of gets glorified when the reality is most a lot of account. This was kind of my gut feeling was a lot of accountants actually don't want to get totally out of doing the work. They actually enjoy doing the work. So I put a poll on my newsletter this last week asking what your preferred mix would be do you actually want to spend a hundred percent of your time working on the business? And less than 25% of people. And I have to assume that the folks on my newsletter are more the progressive bunch because it's, I don't know, tech focused and probably got a bunch of millennials and zoomers on there. And less than 25% of people said that they wanted to spend 100% of their time on the business. And that's kind of surprising to me. I don't know. Is that surprising to you? Less than a quarter of accountants actually want to spend 100% of their time on the business. Yet this is kind of what gets glorified almost as like Peak Alpha accounting firm Runner is the one that is just ascended, like mentally ascended above any of the work. But over 75% of accounts don't want that. The most common response was people wanting to spend 75% of their time on and 25% of their time in the business. That came in about 40%. About 15% of people said 50, 50. About 5% of people said 75% in 25% on and like 6 or 7% of people said a hundred percent of their time they want to be spent in the business. So biggest surprise to me there was less than 25% of people want to work a hundred percent on the business. And I would argue that I don't know that you actually know if you even want to do that thing until it's a thing that you've done. And most people are in a place right now where they can't imagine what they would do with their time. Like if you, I just threw out all the work that I did right now, what would I even do? I think that's something that a lot of people get stuck on and maybe that's part of why you couldn't imagine doing that full 100% commitment. So, interesting little thought experiment. What will you be doing in five years if you stay on the same path that you're on right now? Turn those little peepers out, out to the horizon, give it a noodle. What will you be doing in five years if you stay on the same path? What does that look like? If I do that exercise? It is probably making videos, posting on social media, got the team all sorted out, got like the systems running like a fine tuned machine and we're still putting out stuff and helping people, but it's still the same path. So the business grows probably just as reach grows and you have software companies come into the space and you've got advertisers and my community probably grows. But for me, the same path is more of the same, probably with a bit of growth built in. Now, if you think about what your path looks like five years down the road, are you happy with that? Is that something that sounds interesting to you? Will you be just as excited about that in five years as, as you are now? So if you think about where you're at five years from now, what does that same path look like another five years down the road? Does it look any different? So to open this up a bit, consider these questions. What do you want to learn? What do you want to have? What do you want to be? What do you want to try? What do you want to see? What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What do you want to create? What do you want to contribute to and what do you want to overcome? I don't know about you. When I hear that, it opens up my thinking on, oh, where do, where do I want to be in five years? Yeah, I guess I didn't think about like what I want to see what I like. I didn't think about any of these other peripheral things because I think when somebody asks you a question like that, where do you want to be in five years? We only think about the things that are on the top of our head. And so we, we always like, I guess understate the opportunity or the, the possibility or like the width of possibility that's out there. And there's a lot out there. And wouldn't you like to explore more of it? That's kind of my big takeaway. If I think about what if I just did the same thing for the next five years? Seems like I'd be missing out on something. And if I think another five years out, well, in my head that five year horizon, I've already done everything I kind of can do on this path. So what's the value of the next five years? I don't know. I think we, I think we approach those things differently. I think generationally the default answer there is very different also, as evidenced by people don't have 35 year careers anymore. Like folks just, they don't. That is like my generation and younger coming into work. So to circle back to the question, will you be happy doing the same thing in five years if you stay on the same path? I can tell you that I won't, I wouldn't be if I just kept doing the same thing. And I think that's probably the case for Most people, and whether your ultimate goal is to spend all of your time working on the firm or not, doing a new thing starts really small. It starts really simply and humbly. If you think about the notion of giving up all the things you do and exclusively working on the firm, that's a really big, hard, ambiguous thing with a hundred headaches and conflicts that are just tough to get your arms around to the point where you couldn't even, oftentimes you couldn't even really comprehend being able to get there right. But the most simple framing for me that I use for myself and I also use for my staff when we talk about growth ambitions with the team and where we want them to get to is the very like tangible way of measuring this is it's simply a matter of turning over the tasks that you do each day. So you've got a set of responsibilities right now. And all these things that you have to do 12 months from now. If you compared all those tasks that you do each day and each week and each month, what percentage of them are going to be different? Are they going to be the same things? When I would meet with my staff and we talk about growth goals, we would get really explicit about growth isn't. Here are the things that we talk about now and here are how the things we aspire to have changed. The most practical version of growth to me is here's the stuff I did back then and here's the stuff that I do now. Now it's not to say there isn't value in the thinking that goes into all that and the person behind the work that's getting done, but framing that around tasks and things to do is much more helpful to me because tasks I can see a path to delegation or I can see a path to a different way that task gets done or the task going away. And so for me, that, that is just like the most tangible way to consider a change like that. Now. When it comes to getting yourself out of work, the thing I think we often miss is moving tasks around is work. To get out of the work is to create work to get out of the work. Like that's just how it is. There's no way around it. The upside is it's temporary. And this is the age old problem with increasing capacity is you wait to increase capacity until you get to capacity and don't take into account the fact that it takes additional capacity to increase capacity. Somebody now has to go out and hire somebody. They have to go do all of the work that goes into increasing Capacity, which decreases your capacity until it increases and then you get that new person in and they're not productive and you gotta train them and it takes a while to get up to speed. And so for you, getting out of work is kind of what all this boils down to. Since regardless of whether you want to exclusively work on the firm, most of us can agree with, we would like to spend more time just working on the business. And that in a really like, simple way comes down to are you turning over your tasks or not? And there's absolutely a reality 12 months from now where you have turned over all of your tasks. And that feels really hard. It's going to take some time, but it's a thing that you can do. And because I think most of us are of the mind where we want to do more of this, we need to start planting the seeds that will just make that stuff happen. So I put a good bit of thought into this on like, could you kind of build a framework where you chunk this out by quarter and like, here's all the milestones you gotta hit quarter by quarter to ultimately in 12 months time, be out from under all of this stuff. And every time I came back to it, it got simplified more and more from four quarters to, okay, let's just make a generic and three phases. And then I thought about it more and then it was two phases. And then I thought about it more and it was just became, here's a list of things you should do right now with the asterisks. We're also going to set a drop dead date to rip some band aids off for some, you know, things that we haven't, you know, or clients that just haven't made the switch to your team or something like that. So this is basically just a list of stuff that honestly you could do right away. And it's gonna take some time for all of these things to develop to get you out of them. But all of these things I think are worth doing right now. 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 globally hiring and honestly is the best thing 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 menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms, you know, offshore outside the U.S. 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 that 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 to some of the vendors 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 you start heading down that path. Consider cloud accountant staffing. So seven things here that can genuinely, I think, get you out completely of client work in 12 months time. Number one, this may sound a little fluffy. Consider what you identify as. Because we ultimately value ourselves and value our time and decide what we're going to do each day according to what we identify as. So if you identify as a healthy person, you're much more likely to eat healthy, to exercise. If you identify as a gym rat, you are much more likely to drag your butt out of bed really early in the morning to go to the gym. A big change for me came when I identified not as a write up accountant, but, but as someone who runs accounting firms. And if you notice that is how I always introduce myself or frame. What I've done in the past is my background is in running accounting firms. And that was. It was that mindset shift that got me to that realization of, you know, I've said this before, Okay, I have 40 people working for me. Why is this coming to me? You're telling me that none of these other 40 people are capable of doing this thing. The answer was almost always no. It was because we haven't assigned a subject matter expert for this specific thing yet, and that's something we can fix. Or I swooped in and I was the hero last time this thing came up. And so sending it to me is now either the path of least resistance or that person is afraid of doing it themselves because they saw that last time I wanted to do it. And this all starts with our mental math on the value that we assign to our time. And I think what I did well with delegation, which definitely has trade offs, comes from like fundamentally assigning a different value to my time. That gave me a greater sense of urgency when delegating that stuff. So if you aspire to work more on the firm, it starts with like redefining what that identify looks like, that identity looks like. What would someone who had that identity do? And eventually, once you think of yourself of that, you kind of step into those shoes. Okay, now the rest of these are very tactical. Number two, ensure that all of your clients have a relationship manager, an account manager, whatever you want to call it, ensure that every single client has somebody besides you that can manage that relationship. And this may be something that's still relatively new for staff. Sometimes when you're making the move of extracting yourself out of that, it can require a higher level of staff that you may have. So for example, one of the firms I came up in was a very traditional firm with, with five partners. And the partners handled all of the client communication. Generally, the staff were not usually allowed to communicate with clients. And this fostered a, ultimately like the staff then was, in my opinion, a lower level staff. Not even the people themselves as much as the environment that they were put in, they were kind of capped in what they could do because they didn't manage any of the client stuff directly. And to then rip the band aid off in that firm and say, okay, everybody, you're now going to handle all the client conversations. All these people are like, excuse me, Most of them are scared because some people don't like that. And they may have loved that work environment because they had that buffer between them and the relationship management. They just wanted to do the work. But sometimes this transition may require different things of your team that they may or may not be capable of. Especially if you're coming from a traditional setup where somebody was managing all of those communications for you. Some firms are going down the route of having like dedicated relationship managers where they're not doing a ton of the technical work and they're just managing client relationships. That can work in some situations. In other situations, I've heard of it not working because it kind of just added one more communicator when the client just wants the tax answer or the accounting answer. And if they feel like they've gotta like get passed around to departments done wrong, it can just add one more point of contact. Done right, it can kind of solve for this problem. You can have the really high touch person manage the client interactions so that you don't need quite as many of those high touch people. Something to think about based on the makeup of the folks you have today and who you put in charge of like managing those relationships. But still, step number two there ensure that all clients have a clear account manager, whatever you want to call it, that should be in your CRM, in your practice management system. The client needs to have a relationship with that person. Number three, email your clients, tell them that this is a thing that is happening. That communication for me was something along the lines of, you know, my responsibilities are shifting a bit to be more strategic in how we run the accounting firm and how we bring in really talented people, how we bring in really good technical people to ensure that we are doing everything that we can for you. And my focus is shifting more towards investing in that because that's ultimately the way that we're going to be able to help people best. Not me doing everything myself by hand. And so for you client, what that means is I know you met Todd that one time. You're gonna be seeing more of Todd. Here's a funny anecdote about Todd. We're gonna send that email to the client to kind of set the stage for what's happening. Doesn't have to be like an immediate, like, rip the bandaid off, I'm dumping you, you're never gonna talk to me again sort of thing. Doesn't have to be like that. The best version of this is one that's organic, where they build a relationship with that person and that's just who they go to by default going forward. But when you send this email, get that other person involved. Get them. I'm telling you, getting them on video makes a massive, massive difference for them to see your faces. It takes a lot of the spookiness out of that unknown person. So when you send that email, if you can get that person on video, it makes a huge difference for the client to hear their voice, know something about them, have some sort of initial hook upon which they can start building that relationship. Number four, get somebody into your email inbox immediately. This doesn't even have to be an admin person. This could be a super high level person. So once you've got, you know, dedicated account managers for all of your clients, a big part of this person's job who's helping you manage your email inbox is air traffic control. Because habits are gonna be hard to break and clients are still gonna send things to you. But if a client sends you something that the account manager can handle, we still have to reinforce this sort of shifting policy that they are going to run point on that stuff. And you can do that in the beginning, delicately, by replying and copying the account manager and saying, hey, we're working on this. Todd's going to follow up with you on this once we can get to the bottom of it. And then Todd takes it from there. And Todd replies, I know done wrong. People don't like the feeling of an email going to you and then a response coming from another person who wasn't even copied on the original email. That's probably not the right way to do it. I think there's like a softer way to transition into that. Again, I don't, I. People like to make like big, dramatic, really hard, like, I don't know, kind of cut off, like abrupt things in a firm. I think that's generally the wrong move because you can't really come back from that. And the best version of this transition is one that happens a little more organically and usually that doesn't require a bunch of dramatic stuff, at least not in the beginning. There will be a day where you're like, okay, this is the drop dead date. This is where we're making hard decisions. But that day for most people is not today. It's not the beginning when you start planting these seeds. So number four is get somebody in your email immediately. Email is actually a really great proxy for what are the things that you haven't delegated. If that email had to come to you, why is it that that client's still reaching out to you? Or why is it that that internal issue, you are the, you know, why are you the person to handle that thing? Does it mean that we can, we can make somebody else the point of expertise for this thing instead of you? Email is actually a pretty good window into the implicit systems that are there that you're going to have to break. This episode is brought to you in part by Teamup, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between team up and all the other offshoring options. So 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. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants, Thought experiment what if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky ol inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this podcast? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Timo. Number five Price Increase let's talk about it. I actually saw a funny anecdote from Greg Kite this week. He said increase your prices and great job. You just got your Friday back. And honestly, sometimes it really is just that simple. I actually, I like that in the framing of the pie chart of how we spend our time, if we're like how in the world am I ever going to make time for this or that? It's like geez, what? What is it that's going to get you to be able to increase your price a bit more? How can we invest in the client experience to justify that? Are we undercharging for what we do now? Price change a good way to get some time back. In this case, going through this transition, I would actually argue price increase probably isn't the move. There's a, there's a base price increase that we all need to be doing every year. But to say I'm going to increase my prices 20% so that I can afford to lose some clients if they get mad when I transition those clients to my team. I probably wouldn't do that. I probably wouldn't go super extreme on the price increase because to do that at the same time that you are trying to hand clients off is kind of A double gut punch. And it is a perceived drop in value because they have a relationship with you. They don't have a relationship with your team yet. So the reality is they're gonna feel like this is a drop in value, and that is probably not the time to then sucker punch them with a price increase. The reality is, for me, there was a level of client that I was capable of supporting that my team was not capable of supporting. And that was the case for me at a snapshot in time where we had gotten into doing like some bigger, more complex. It was like big dental group type of stuff. And I could carry those relationships. And I had really good people on my team, but I didn't have anybody else that was at the point where they could do that stuff. And so the transition to me getting out of client work, I mean, really, it meant to a degree having to give up some work that my team was not suited for. We were doing probably a little bit more simple work, stuff that didn't pay as well. So it's a different type of business, and that's fine. The version of your firm that has you doing all the work all day long almost certainly will not be the same version of your firm that's going to flourish with you out of doing the work. That's a good thing to probably accept coming into it as the firm might look a little bit different, and that's okay. You know, I. I think we, we take a lot of pride in the quality of the work that we do, in the relationships that we manage and all that stuff. But to do that for the next couple of decades, that wasn't the thing for me. I realized ultimately the greatest, the higher leverage way I had to impact people was through systems around quality assurance and how we take really good care of our team members and how we create opportunities for young accountants to grow up through our firm and leave them in a fundamentally better place, either working with us long term or going and doing their own thing down the road. Those were higher leverage things for me to do to help people than to sit down and support clients one on one. And so for me, the trade off of the firm looking a little bit different. If I wasn't the one doing all that work, that was totally okay. And it's easy when you do changes like that, to just see the bad changes, just see the negative changes, and not see the positive changes. I think ultimately the thing that will stick with me most about running firms was enabling success for people on my team to look at where they were when they came to us and where they were either when they left us or when I left the firm. That is the thing that I still have the most pride in, probably more than, like positive outcomes we enabled for clients, was how we helped the folks that came to work with us and supported them. And so for me, when I look at running a firm rather than being in a firm, that's the thing, and we're helping a ton of clients. But that's the thing that I probably hang my hat on is was this a killer place to work? Did we enable a better lifestyle for folks? I mean, we had one guy who came from a really rough firm where his wife had to work and they had just had their, I don't know, third or fourth kid or something like that, and coming to our firm, she was able to stop working. They had like an unbelievably better quality of life. And just the before and after of that, just as a really great slap in the face to remember the pride there is to, to have in being a great employer and how you genuinely change people's lives by creating a positive, great work workplace for people. And that was how I. That was how I basically justified making some compromises on the types of clients that we would support, as I could take a lot of pride in that. Number six, update your messaging to start only taking in clients that work for your team. What that landing page looks like today, it might look a little different. If your team's not gonna be taking in the same type of work that you do, then you gotta kind of rebuild around that very much connected. Number seven, intro clients to your staff day one, so that there's no aspect of doing the handoff. Everybody always talks about what is the most tactful way for the senior to then hand off to the junior. And how do you do that without pissing off the client? You just don't do it. You don't do that. You start them from day one with the person that's going to support them long term. Now down the road, that person that they're meeting with, day one, that person's responsibilities probably change over time and that person probably develops more of a support team around them. In my case, those people kind of ended up becoming pods where then they had one person to support them and then two, and then three, and then four people to support them. And they were kind of that relationship manager longer term. But people only get attached to you when you are the first person they build a relationship with. And the best way to sidestep that Issue entirely is for you to not be there on day one, for them to meet with your team on day one. That was such a huge tipping point for me. And did it cost me sales? Yep. Did it mean we didn't get some stuff that I would have liked to have that I'm pretty confident I could have gotten? Absolutely. But it also developed the team to get better at that stuff and developed me to. Instead of barging my way through and saying, I can do this better, it challenged me to be better about developing people, to be able to excel at the things that I felt like I could excel at. It forced me to like, pour into other people that, that, that thing that I was good at that I could do well. And for me, long term, that was more fulfilling than me just saying, no, these are my toys. I will play with them. Nobody else can touch them. So those are seven things that you can genuinely start doing today that won't get all your clients off your back immediately. But an unwillingness to do those things, like not accepting those compromises, are what's going to ultimately keep you from being able to transition to spend more of your time on the firm. Now, one last band aid rip. There's gotta be a cutoff. There's gotta be a drop dead cutoff with clients who just can't seem to be weaned off of you. The reality is, if you look at your entire client base, if you are removing yourself from client work, it is extremely unlikely that every single client is going to be fine with that, and that there's going to be a reasonable home for all of those folks with the rest of your team. My skills were very different than the skills of my team. And so we ended up with a few clients where it was like I could either refer them out, they might leave if I'm just like, nope, you're just going to have to accept this level of support now that is completely normal. That is not a failure in any way. And so you're probably going to lose some folks because just the type of support your team is going to give them will be different than what you gave them. That's fine. Try not to dwell on just the negatives of this whole transition. Dwell on what opportunities this enables. Also, God forbid there be a thing that your team can do better than you if you're underwater. You ever drop the ball, fail to be as responsive as you aspire to be. Lot of upsides to getting help from your team. And as much as we don't like to admit it, things that they may be able to do better than us, or at least do better than a stretched, stretched too thin version of us. Now to circle back to the question at the top. What am I going to do with all that time? I honestly think that's probably why more people don't answer that they would happily spend a hundred percent of their time working on the firm. Because off the top of our heads, like, we remember a limited set of things. You remember all the things that maybe you aspire to do or that you tell somebody that, oh yeah, I'm going to do that someday. The reality is a small business has, has bottomless things to do. Like, have you ever, ever in your life gotten yourself out of things and then sat down, twiddled your thumbs and been like, well, what am I going to do now? Has that happened to you? If it hasn't, what makes you think this is that it's going to happen now? It probably won't. And if it does, it's a great place to find yourself in. Because you know what, there's a bunch of other great stuff you could do more of. We talk a lot about getting out there on social media, being visible and using that visibility to enable opportunities of all sorts of kinds. Maybe do some speaking, attract a higher quality client. Just be sure they start with your team from day one and not with you. When you are the perceived expert in a space. Folks are going to pay a lot more for that work when they come and do it with your team. Look at an adjacent business. That's something that we've talked about a lot. Not getting too fixated on just running accounting firms, when from an entrepreneurship standpoint, we have a whole lot to offer. What else can we do at that time? Maybe go home, leave work, get a life, make friends, do things in service of others, watch a sunset, ride a bike, give a really good gift to someone. That's something I've always aspired to be, is be a really good gift giver, call your mom, get new socks. Talking to myself there. Who? Man, I'm not going to get into sock issues. I've had teeth whitening. You've thought about it for a while. Problem with teeth whitening is it's one of those overnight things. Teeth whitening would almost be better if it was gradual because when you turn up to work the next day or you see that person the next time, you're like, I know they're noticing, they're not saying anything. Those sort of things are the worst. This, that's why, I mean, that's why plastic surgery has always kind of blown my mind that people can be like this way one way and then a different way the next day. And then they have to go face all those same people and everybody knows, they know that honker doesn't look like what it did the day before. I'm talking about if you got like work on your nose done that Honker. That's all I got for you today. 12 months is. It's a ways out, but you can do more in 12 months than you think you can. Super encourage you to start planting some of those seeds to give you a little more freedom. Freedom is the greatest gift we have running our own firms as long as we do something with it. Any sage wisdom you got on on getting out of client work, drop that stuff in the comments. The more visibility we have into people successfully doing this stuff, the more attainable it feels. So I'd love to see your thoughts or stories as well. Thanks for coming hanging today. We'll see you in the next one.