219 How To Ensure It Goes Better Next Year

A tradition unlike any other. It'll go better next year. Today, as you're hearing this, if you're hearing this today, it publishes is a big deadline day for many of the folks that listen to this pod. A tax deadline that's kind of a deadline, kind of not a deadline, but it's a huge milestone in getting through the year. And I can tell you pretty much every year we always said, well, it'll be better next year. We got all these ideas, but I think we have all felt that pang of being in next year and being like, are you kidding me? I still have this problem I still still haven't solved for this. So put out some messages on social media and folks shared a bunch of ways that they manage the ol how to make sure it'll actually be better next year so that we can capture all that stuff and put it to bed so we can all go take a nap, go have a nice, nice cocktail, go lay on a beach, go get some sun on them big white accounting thighs. Okay? Bunch of cool stuff people shared online. Good ideas. And then I've got like five thoughts of my own. Stuff that I got wrong. Some stuff that folks shared on Twitter. Several people said change practice management systems. Several people also said, don't change practice management systems again. That's the worst. Man, PMs these days are so sticky. The prospect of moving everything files project like, gosh, it's a heck of a business model. Cause boy, do switching costs feel astronomical. Kyle Johnson said, I'm gonna bookmark this later to make it better. And doesn't that just sum up so much of change management in firms, especially firms that are on like an annual cycle? That's maybe the worst part about like tax heavy firms is so much of change feels like it's on an annual cycle, which is so long. Kyle, you and I both know when you bookmark things on Twitter, you never circle them back. I like to think someday when I'm like in my 90s, I'll be like, today. Today's the day to go through my Twitter bookmarks and there's just like 70 layers of sediment of things I was interested in back then that aren't even relevant now. Brenda Cannon says, remember the pain and stress and fomo. That's the thing that's the trick with this is we leave it for a few weeks. We're like, everybody go cool off. And then when you come back, nothing hurts quite as bad as it did when it was in the busy season. Until you get to the next busy season and you are kicking yourself twice as hard because you're like, oh, oh, I forgot how much this sucked and I didn't do anything about it. I'm definitely of the it kind of needs to be captured before you peace out after a deadline. Otherwise you're not like truly capturing the, I don't know, severity, like, seriousness of it. Karl Strube Already dumping clients amicably. Well played. Rachel Fish opened a team's channel to collect feedback throughout the tax season. So all team members were empowered to identify pain points. Same for a pain in the hiney client list. This is a family podcast, Rachel. We also kept track of the kinds of complaints received by clients. So you got a teams channel where they collect all that stuff. Jonathan Gibson said, I need a good way of collecting feedback from our clients about how the experience was. I guess I was thinking more the internal side, but yeah, getting feedback from your clients as well. Greg Marks. Fire bad clients, then take on worse clients. James Upton. This was a good one. Start 4 16. Go outside, start 416 and make a list of all the changes that are needed and prioritize them with what aligns with your overall goal. More free time, selling, scaling, niching, et cetera. For us, it's documenting processes, better onboarding, better client comms and follow up. One good one over on LinkedIn that Nancy McClellan shared. Most of the others were self promotional. LinkedIn's gonna LinkedIn some ideas that she said she swiped from Tom Grzinski shortly after tax day sent a survey out to all my team members, not just tax folks, about what went well and what didn't. The survey idea, I think Nancy's saying she swiped from Tom. Then she sends out cocktail kits and snack packs and they have a zoom meeting where they go through it all and brainstorm how to make it better. And they vote a few clients off the island. Nancy, can I come work for you? We also come up with strategies to continue right sizing and our deal client and which of our clients don't fit that mold. It's honestly fun. I totally believe that that's fun. I worked at a tax firm once where for like decades they had a tradition of going bowling on April 15 after we were done. And the only reason the tradition ever ended was because the work didn't get done until like midnight one time on April 15th. And then that became the new normal. And then we literally started exploring. Could we get somebody to like e file returns for us in Hawaii where it's not yet the next day? That is 100% an actual thing that we spent a good amount of time working on anyway. So the bowling tradition went away when we never stopped working, but it was truly awful. You've just spent the entire busy season with these people and it's not like a work thing. It's, it's just like a we're now going to bowl even though we've slept like virtually not all this firm. You did a hundred hour weeks like the last two or three weeks up to the deadline and so we're all just zonked and the last people in the world that we want to see are our coworkers. There's definitely a right and a wrong way of doing like the deadline or post deadline event. I think Nancy's doing it the right way. Nancy, if you need anybody to like pop in and hang out or if you got an extra cocktail kit, just let me know. This episode is sponsored in part by liflow and Gang liflow just shipped Excel support. Yippee. So previously lifflow was for bridging data from your quickbooks file to Google Sheets and it now works with Excel. Hold for applause. Basically a way to like extend QuickBooks to do so so much more. Because QuickBooks has its own usage limits and like user access is not very granular. So having A bridge between QuickBooks and your favorite spreadsheet is kind of augmenting QuickBooks in many ways. Whether it's like doing advisory work with a client, whether it's giving very fractional access to maybe only specific data. Like say you got a director of marketing and they need to see everything that hits the ledger under marketing, but nothing else. Never in a million years is like QuickBooks. User permission is going to let you do that. Whether they are internal team members, whether they're external stakeholders gives you a super easy way to give granular access to stuff from the accounting file and even keep it updating live from the data in the accounting file without having to like spill the whole beans. Give them access to everything. LifeLoad's been doing this for several years with Google Sheets and now you can do it with Excel. To go check it out, link in the show Notes 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. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Zero, QBO and DeX. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistance, 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 going to get Robert Half to sponsor this pod? 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 Team Up. Okay, five thoughts I have here. This isn't just a tax thing. It's like a any big busy season cyclical thing, not even accounting firm thing. Anytime you're in like harvest season, like the time where you go hard, you're always like oh, all these ideas, all these ideas and then you get out of that season and you're not quite as motivated make that change anymore and maybe you lose touch with how painful it was. So number one, first and foremost you got to have a rock solid capture system not only for you but for your entire team. And my favorite version of this is probably like a suggestion box but you're capturing video. I would actually love it. And this, it doesn't have to be this way obviously, but I love the idea of people like shooting a quick loom to run through the issue, show it on screen, but you can see the person talking because it does such a better job of capturing their emotion. And that is what we are missing post deadline. We miss just, just how irritated we were at the time that we're like oh my gosh, I can't believe I just ran into this same thing again. And video does a great job of that. Second, don't wait to do it. It's really hard, especially when you're exhausted. If it was a really brutal deadline, it's really hard to imagine stopping and doing anything else. But man will your future Self. Thank you. I can tell you how my post deadlines usually went was all throughout busy season if there was something that I knew I wouldn't get done during busy season. But I promised it to people just after busy season and I man, I can't tell you the amount of work that a US tax firm commits to in the latter half of April or the beginning of May. And before you know it, you're at the end of May and you're like, has anybody gotten any tax returns done? And so you come out of the deadline with the very best of intentions. This is how year end always was for me too. Like, oh well this year we're going to nail it. We're going to have it all done by this, this date and that date. But you get out of the deadline crush and you're like, oh, you are vibing on a different level and it's a nice level, but it's not a level that's getting much work done. And before you know it you're like a week into it or six weeks into it and you really haven't like meaningfully jotted down a list of stuff just to do a brain dump. Not to go as far as prioritizing and putting together a plan or anything. It's just about the capture. So don't wait to do the capture because it will absolutely escape you otherwise. Number three, ensure that the team feels heard. If you have a team in the least fun place places that I worked, it was what the big bosses thought and nobody else didn't really matter like staffers and has a running with the client. Like it was almost like all that mattered was the relationship that the account manager had with that client. Which is kind of the. I don't know if there's a generational or what, but the more traditional mindset was like the clients are more important than the staff. And I think hopefully that's kind of flipped now and we realize, boy, if you know, these clients are taking a toll on my team, I need to be really aware of that for all the same reasons that you need to be aware of that if it's taking a toll on you, if it's work that you hate or somebody that you just can't get on with and you dread having to work with them, that matters for you. Like we like to talk about hourly billing. Like, man, this isn't, this is like if we could build by energy, that would be better. So much of this game is about energy management and how some days, man, I can work until midnight and literally enjoy working and having a blast. Other days I hit one in the afternoon and I'm like, man, I just. I want to do anything but this. Not all hours are made the same, and you know that. But when it is the clients that are sucking that life force out of you, in my experience, it's not a thing that generally gets better. And not unlike change management that falls through the cracks and then circles back the next year and is really frustrating. Clients can kind of have this same impact on you. Like, I can think of a lot of trouble clients in past firms where we needed to get rid of them. Like, the clients were a pain in the neck and always needed that urgent thing at the drop of the hat when they haven't gotten us what we needed and, you know, would wait to pay the bill until they needed another thing from us. Just like every problem client thing you could imagine, go down the list when it's your team that's being put in this impossible situation by your clients. Like, we got to have a real serious feedback loop to the team. I've talked with folks who basically give staff permission to like, pick a couple clients a year that they would want to get rid of if they want. They don't have to get rid of anybody. But just giving them that level of agency, I guess, is a really powerful signal to be like, hey, like, what you think matters to me now. Also important fourth one I got on the list here. Ensure the old team at home feels heard. If you have a home team, this feedback loop can be. Can be just as important, if not every bit as much important. Being the life partner, the child, the whatever of a person who is in a public accounting cycle that involves. Involves like a ridiculous amount of work. It takes a toll on everybody. It's easier to like, hide from that fact and be like, wow, I'm working. I'm working so hard. I'm suffering so much. The reality is like, man, that that can take a toll on the other people too. And oftentimes they are white knuckling it just like you are. And it can be a real challenge when you feel like you've burned the wick at both ends to then unplug from work and be immediately like, oh, I have to plug into these other obligations. Like, let's just be real about how hard that is. And the last thing you want to do is, you know, not make the people at home feel appreciated and loved and all that stuff. But there is only so much of you to be spread around. And by the end of A busy season. It is like it is spread real thin but not unlike. You got to do that, check in with how things went, you know, for tax season and check in with the team, open the door for that feedback from the folks at home. I guarantee you they have thoughts on how things could have gone better. They probably have input. I don't know that you need to like put an NPS survey in front of them each month. But I'll tell you what goes a long ways is like asking the question, like doing a debrief like how did this one go and how can the next one go better? This episode is sponsored in part by Keeper. Keeper was my 2022, I think tool of the year. I do like an annual year end YouTube video of my favorite new stuff of the year. Keeper's hard to explain. It's not really like a practice management system. It's like a task management system. Had a baby with the accounting ledger because it pulls all the accounting data like into the platform. So the way that most people use Keeper is you'll have a bookkeeper like reconcile the bank statement in qbo. Also works with Xero now, but you have somebody reconcile the bank statement in QBO and then the entire rest of the month end closes managed from Keeper, which is like a single hub for managing all of your closes. So the accountants generally aren't actually getting into QuickBooks anymore, they're managing it all from Keeper where it's doing like anomaly detection and making sure you actually are getting W9 from people. All these cool things that are built directly into the platform. And then if you need to change transactions because they're all there inside of Keeper, you just change it inside of Keeper and all that stuff Syncs back to QuickBooks now. Since then they've shipped all sorts of stuff like reports and like client facing portal. They just shipped receipts recently too, so clients can just chuck receipts in there. A very unique product because it lets you see the status of all of your month end closes in a single place. Like in this grid view that talks to QuickBooks so it can see like what's the locked period like all these things where normally you'd have to log into QuickBooks to see it. It's all managed in Keeper. Pretty cool. I'm supposed to send you to the link in the in the show notes. Don't do that. I did a demo day, a sponsored demo day for them on my YouTube channel maybe six months ago. It's like a five minute crash course on what it does. Go YouTube search Jason stats keeper that'll tell you what you need to know and then come back and click the link in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by the folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. How's this resume sound for you? This is a real resume. Let's do a tax one this time. 4 years US tax prep experience LACERT ProConnect CCH Access Taxdome carbon tally for QuickBooks Zero experience 1120 1120s, 1040, 1065. They've done it all. This is a real resume from Cloud Accountant Staffing where you can hire the accounting team of your dreams from the Philippines. This person's got looks like last four years doing US Tax and another three years beyond that working with western companies. Sounds pretty darn good, right? Well maybe they just cherry picked that one. Maybe they're not all that great. Gang, here's the thing with Glad Accountant Staffing. You don't pay a dime until you hire somebody. So you can go hop on a call, you can talk through your needs. They will cut their recruiters loose. Go find some folks that could be a great fit for you. You can go through the resumes, you can interview them and you're only going to spend a dollar. Once you have found somebody that you are jacked about, that's it. Worst case scenario, you get some experience going through the process. You have the chance to ask a bunch of ignorant questions about, you know, doing this for the first time, building your offshore team. Whether you're looking for tax pros, accounting pros, they can help you find what you're looking for. Not to like be overstated, just how much big foreign regional firms and, and the industry has invested in the Philippines. There's so much great talent over there. Now I've shared before, when we started hiring folks in the Philippines, it completely changed the strategy of my firm. Get some really, really good people. Like I said, you got nothing to lose. Check out the link in the show notes below. Book a call to make sure you get back to it. At the very worst, you learn something. The very best, you hire a killer employee. Right? So check that one out in the show notes. And the busiest seasons, man, life very much becomes about am I manufacturing the appropriate boundaries for myself? And it's completely a choice. I got a pile of young kids and everything about managing we ones that have a lot of but also the bigger ones that go out and do a lot of stuff. Everything about that is, is a negotiation. Not in like a, in a, in a negative way. But the squad's got to be clear about who's on first, this day, that time, all these different responsibilities. Right. And not unlike work, I think, in our. In our actual lives. Actual lives, in our real lives, you'll, like, fall into a routine and never stop to consider, like, why are we doing it this way? Is there not a fundamentally better way that we could do this? And then you look back and you're like, why do we just do it that way for two years? But I can tell you I. I don't give my personal life attention that I do my business, like systems and stuff like that. There's been a meme going around lately, the notion of, like, having a. A notion template, like the software program notion for, like, managing a relationship or your marriage or something like that. And that's a great meme. But I. I like, shy away from thinking about my real life the same way I think about business, and that there ought to be systems and, like, clear protocols and all these things, because it feels too, I don't know, mechanical. But part of me is coming back around to, like, maybe I actually need a little bit more of that structure. But even if it's just a conversation of, like, hey, let's do a debrief on this. This busy season. How did it go? How could we do it better next year? That's going to go a long ways. So much of human relationships is just, like, making people feel understood and heard, I guess. Not making them feel, but, like, actually listening. Last one. I got here, number five, man, take a break. Cheese Louise. Nothing lends perspective quite like running yourself ragged and then taking a break. And that can leave you in a whole bunch of different places. A good number of folks replied on social media who are like, man, this is, like, this is the best busy season we've ever had. We've made so many positive changes. We're stoked. And that's awesome. That's amazing. But not everyone's going to feel that way, especially folks who aren't, like, plugged into the right work setup. And I'm increasingly trying to be mindful of this as obviously we've got a ton of content out on the web that is really geared towards firm owners, but every day there's accountants who stumble into it who are like, oh, man, this seems like a. Just a much more refreshing, like, balanced way of going through accounting, which I hope that resonates with folks, because, like, the whole reason I started putting out content was for myself. I looked around, I'm like, man, I don't see anybody that thinks about this stuff the way that I do. So I started creating content that was basically what I needed to hear five years prior. So when those people, like, come to this content and they're not firm owners, and maybe they don't have ambitions to be firm owners, or at least not in the short term, as, frankly, most people, like, shouldn't. It's not for everyone. The vast majority of those accountants that come to this content are going to be in very traditional legacy firms, because that's just 95% of firms. Meanwhile, the majority of firms that are connecting with this content, at least aspirationally, want to be those progressive firms. Now, we're all on, like, a different spot on the journey and how far we've actually gotten there. But my fear is we have accountants leaving the profession in droves because they don't see an alternative, because they think this is just how it is everywhere, that they're going to be a cog in the machine at every firm. And as we see and like, the cool people we talked to and Nancy's example that she just shared, sipping cocktails and doing, like, a fun debrief with the team after the end of tax season, like, most people can't conceive of those things being actual things. And so another common trend on the replies on social media was, this was the last one. Like, I'm never doing this again. And, man, that just breaks my heart because so much of that is just driven by having a boss. And nothing gives me more hope in this profession than the super cool folks that I'm, like, fortunate to meet that are doing really cool, really novel things with their accounting firm, creating awesome places to work. And every time somebody leaves the profession, man, it feels like a missed opportunity. So if that's you, if you're on the razor's edge and you're like, man, I don't know that I can do this anymore. Know that you're. You're in total control. Like, it's a scary thing to do a big old shift like that. But at the end of the day, you got to do what you got to do. And oftentimes those big, hard changes teach you about yourself in a way that leads you better positioned to follow something you enjoy in the future. But know that, like with within public accounting, man, there are so many different flavors of this, and most of the time, it's just a matter of finding the one that, like, fits the vibe you're looking for. If you're a firm owner who's like, man, what in the world am I doing. That's tough, man. That's. That's hard because you've invested a lot of yourself into building something. The notion of walking away from that, that's tough. And I have had those feelings big time. It's equal parts letting yourself down, but also like letting everybody connected with the company down too. Like, that is a hard place to find yourself. Know that there are options. There are folks out there. A lot of folks in this community even just heard a story recently of somebody who's in a similar spot and basically sold that part of their practice to a friend. All this is to say community solves so many of these things. If you're struggling, put it out there, man. Share. You wouldn't believe how random connections can happen that can take you to just a totally different place. So if you're at your wit's end, if you can, don't bottle that up. Like, put yourself out there because there's other people that are feeling the same thing. And the more visible we are, like, the more exposed we are to just something cool happening that we could have never expected. It really will go better next year. Congrats to the tax pros that just got through another one. This week we're kind of going to be zooming out. Like, there's times to zoom in and like drill down on like execution, like going deep on stuff. But for me, the time to zoom out was always like when I kind of got over a milestone. So this week we're going to be getting out of the weeds a bit to like, kind of get perspective on, like, am I doing the right things more holistically? Like, is this the best way I could set up my firm to be run in a way that is sustainable and profitable and something that I'm going to have a blast with? So rest of the week we're going to have some cool, more kind of open minded stuff like that. And I look forward to seeing you there.