250 This Solo Firm Is Running $140k In 3 Days Per Week

This person's built their firm to 140 in top line revenue working three to four day weeks. Not a bad gig. Right? But how do you make sure it doesn't go off the rails, become too big of a thing? Maintain those boundaries for the fam. We got all the all the hot hot goss on this firm. I'll run you through what they're doing today and we're going to put our put our wheelo coaching hats on to help them decide what to do next. Come on in. We're roasting affirm today on Jason D. Foreign. We're roasting a firm today. If you're not familiar folks anonymously submit me details of their firm. And we get to put our our coaching hats on because it's a lot more fun than staring at our own inadequacies. So this firm makes 70% of its money from bookkeeping, 20% from Australian bass lodgments. Bas. Do they call it bass? 10% from advisory slash CFO. In fact, let me do a quick American detour here and let ChatGPT tell us what a bass lodgement is. If you even say the acronym that way it is spelled bas. Yo dog. I'm a virtual assistant so I don't have a dog. I love dogs. Do you have a dog? I'd love to hear about them. Sorry, that was a misunderstanding. Let's get down to business. What is a BASS or BAS lodgement? You'd file one In Australia. A BAS or Business Activity Statement is a form that businesses in Australia use to report and pay several tax obligations to the Australian Taxation Office. These obligations can include GST goods and services, tax pay as you go, installments, PAIG withholding and other taxes. Businesses generally need to lodge a BAS monthly, quarterly or annually depending on their turnover and specific tax requirements. Okay, thanks Doug. You're welcome. If you have any more questions about BS or anything else, feel free to ask the transcription that last time it got. Okay, thanks Doug. Some things were lost in translation there. Okay, Business Activity Statement. A form that businesses in Australia used to report and pay several tax obligations. Okay, mall caught up. This individual, the one that submitted the form as the owner and account manager, they're kind of wearing all the hats, doing 140 grand in top line revenue. Where they are at is rural ish, small city, remote work. Some big city clients they said medium sized businesses which are a thousand plus per month but predominantly small businesses coming in at 200 to 400 per month approximately. No specialization. Yet they have one full time bookkeeper in the Philippines they do a bank recs, bank payments, payroll, some client comms. They prepare these BAS reports for their review. So they're like writing them up and then the owner's reviewing them. They prepare draft performance reports like an executive summary. I think the owner is working three to four days per week. Two small kids bless doing most of the client comms advisory calls, reviewing the employee work lodging. The BAS reports cash flow forecasting and performance reporting cadence throughout the year. Relatively consistent revenue all year round. Every third month is higher work and revenue due to quarterly bas lodgement revenue. So quarterly tax filings, pricing. They say they're now only taking clients who are at a $200 minimum per month. This covers bookkeeping and Xero payroll and quarterly reports. Some small clients only need a quarterly report. They're charging 170 per quarter for that. Recurring bookkeeping ranges from 200 to 2000 per month. Should we assume they're talking USD here? One US dollar is one and a half Australian dollars right now. Which would actually make these numbers even smaller. I'm going to assume they're talking USD here because that would mean their minimum is like less than 150. Let's assume USD billing through ignition, the software platform billed monthly for recurring work. Clients on fixed billing are automatically billed. We use zero projects to track our time spent on projects. Have some legacy clients that are billed hourly. Newer clients are on a fixed monthly fee. They use Xero practice manager to track jobs and tasks for every client. The whole Xero suite. They've even got like a work papers product. Works really good. If all of your clients are in Xero. That's what they're doing here where that's more the norm in Australia. Sales and marketing all referrals from tax agents or existing clients. Imagine getting a referral from a tax agent tech the full 0 stack 00 Project 0 practice manager ignition content Snare for requesting information like bank statements. Trello for day to day time management, G suite and Hubdoc for bills. Ongoing workflow. When the monthly bank recs completed questions are sent via Content Snare. Content Snare is like a standalone request platform. Payrolls completed depending on whatever the frequency is. They draft monthly or quarterly performance reports. They do quarterly cash flow forecasts for some clients. They do a monthly call with some clients. And quarterly tax filings are prepared and sent to the client for signing pains. I am the roadblock. My capacity is full based on my available hours each week. Getting tied down with tasks that could be outsourced. I. E. Client onboarding some client emails, admin related tasks Looking to hire someone part time in Australia to help with basic book bookkeeping and admin what they enjoy performance reviews they most enjoy that is going through that with the client advisory work as it's where the clients get their value from. Us least enjoyable is the quarterly tax filings as it's very repetitive and as a result they're constantly trying to keep up with emails. Okay, hearing that back, let's start out by giving some props for having two kids and running your own business. That's top lining. 140 grand a year and three to four days a man. In many ways that sounds like the life man ultimate flexibility. But it can be hard not to like grow for growth's sake and just kind of get sucked into it all becoming too much and maybe losing track of those boundaries. So having heard all that, what would be maybe your top bit of advice for this individual? Pop that in the comments before I convince you of maybe, maybe something else entirely. I want to know what you're thinking about before I share any of my thoughts here. Okay, My thoughts as I ran through this thinking about this earlier today. Number one, and this is where like lifestyle needs to be consideration on how it bumps up into your firm, especially when you're running your own thing here. It's kind of great. Like there's definitely limitations of running your own thing, but kind of the, the ultimate control and all that like that is. That's so nice. This episode is brought to you in part by Cloud and Staffing, who helps you find just mega talented accountants in the Philippines to join your team. I got another resume here. This is a real life resume. I'm looking this person right in the eyes right now. Also got an intro video because that's how cloud account staffing works. You tell them what your needs are. They got boots on the proverbial ground in the Philippines. Recruiters who will find you the folks that you need. Then you get a resume, you get an intro video. If you want you can interview these folks and you actually don't pay cloud accountant staffing a dime until you make a hire. Check out this resume though. Professional US tax accountant with six years of experience been working with US tax firms. Last three roles were Senior Tax Accountant, CCH Access, Ultra Tax, Lacert Corp. Tax NetSuite, SAP. Bless your heart, QuickBooks Online. There you go. And their last role they've been in the last two years just doing business Tax S Corps and C Corps. They do some of the other stuff too. But main focus has been business tax tax because they've already done a bunch of individual tax in the past. They did all that. Oh former PwC gang. I've shared with you how my team I was I was building a huge percentage of my team in the Philippines. Mega mega talented people that become a like came became such a crucial part of the firm that I was building. You got nothing to lose to explore it, learn more. If I plop this resume on your desk and it was an onshore person tomorrow, you'd be clicking your little heels in excitement. I know you would. Okay. It's big. It's a big world out there. There's other ways to get this stuff done. I'll put a link to Cloud Accountant staffing down in the show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. I think this is my favorite tagline for live flow where QuickBooks Online ends. Live flow begins. Aww. Liveflow gives you the ability to sync a whole bunch of data and reports and all that out to Google Sheets or Excel. Because there's a lot of data captive in QuickBooks Online that you may want to give people access to or you maybe don't want in the QuickBooks file. But even if you just need to get that data out and cut it up different ways, they've got a lifflow's got a consolidations product that lets you roll up all sorts of company files with different different chart of accounts. And something I'm kind of hot on right now that has absolutely nothing to do with Live Flow, but I'm going to include in the ad read anyways is getting away from the traditional month end cycle delivery. Getting away from financial statement delivery as being the thing we build deadlines around like because that ends up being the crunch for your accounting firm, right? Getting the financial statements out by the 10th. Well, what if instead we had something that was not the financial statements? But maybe I don't know what the client actually needed to see because they don't really understand the financials. What if you had a more real time dashboard that was the stuff that was actually actionable for them that they wanted to see that could be populated on a weekly basis or real time. Or you could use Live Flow to like pump into a spreadsheet that they use. If they've got this info near real time, then it takes the pressure off. Hey, when are those financials gonna be ready, right? Which ends up being the bottleneck for your entire accounting firm because LifeLow will sync just about any QuickBooks report you want out to Your spreadsheets, you can cut that stuff up to do any sort of reporting that you want. Either pulling that data out, like when you choose manually, or continuing to sync it out real time on an ongoing basis. Could be just the thing to get the crunch off that month and close. All right, learn more about lifelong the link in the show notes. So number one, my first point here, like, there's a million ways to squeeze this and that out of the business, but my first recommendation was ensure that you can maintain those boundaries. Having kids and having a job that gives you the flexibility to spend more time with your kids. I would argue there's not very many things in life that you will look back on more favorably than that. You're not gonna be like, I'm sure glad I doubled prices that one time and we made all the more money doubling prices to get time back, stuff like that, that's all great, but ultimately, like when we reflect on what we've done, I think we're thinking more time and experiences more so than business optimization, you know, and oftentimes when you go out and you do your own thing. If three year old you could speak to you today, you'd be like, you freaking knucklehead. You're making more money than you ever could have imagined and you're still finding a way to be a baby about it and making your life difficult for yourself. Like fire a court of your, of your clients and get all this time back and you'd still be making more money than you ever thought you would make before. It's funny how we're like the, the dog chasing the hot dog on a fishing pole on a treadmill. For some reason we're just like perpetually unsatisfied with where we're at and always need to go a little bit farther, a little bit farther and, and you stretch yourself thinner and thinner. That is just the human condition for some reason. But what you've got right now, you are the bottleneck. But what you've got right now is not bad. So I think really hard about growing, about pulling more people in that you have to kind of manage and oversee. A good framing for this is to think about what are your anti goals, what are the things you're unwilling to do, right? If hiring another person means you're gonna have more folks blowing up your messages when you want to be away from work, then consider for all of the anti goals that I have, one of them looks to be, you know, you only want to work three to four days a week. So weekends are off limits. You know, a day and a half a week are off limits. Oftentimes as we we grow and we kind of default path go into the next thing. A new compromise comes every step along the way. So get really explicit about what your anti goals are to make sure that anything that you do change doesn't conflict with the top priority stuff. A second thought here. It comes from something I heard the other day that I thought was a really smart framing. I was on a panel with Roman Koepchik at rightworks in Austin a couple of weeks back and he was sharing some experience from when he was in practice and said a mentor had told him find a way to become like in the top three experts in a domain. And obviously the smaller and the more specific that domain is, the easier it will be to be like one of the top three kind of perceived people there. But if you can find a space where you can be that expert, then it totally removes all of the struggles with being able to set prices and people being able to easily switch between you and somebody else because you're kind of it like you're the expert. And so my second suggestion here is consider what is the shortest path to being perceived as a thought leader in a specific space. There isn't any specialization right now. We all have like networks, we all have people that we know where some paths will be easier than others. If that is the type of thought leadership that's appealing to you. I shared on social media earlier this week as we were about to I was about to publish my 200th YouTube video. And that's not even counting the podcast. And it was a woo woo feel good piece about, you know, how people think you're a natural after you've done it a whole ton and they weren't watching when you were really bad at something. And I think what I've, what I've realized is if I did have any sort of unfair advantage when it came to doing video stuff, it was because I had a genuine like appreciation and enjoyment of making videos, which I had never done in my life. Like I wasn't the theater kid. I didn't do any sort of filmmaking or anything like that until I was 32. And the only reason I stumbled into making videos was because I wanted to learn more about marketing. And then I got into email marketing and then I was running this newsletter and one week I put a crappy video of me explaining a at the top of it and more people clicked on the video than anything else in the newsletter. I was trying to like, get more engagement on the newsletter. So I'm like, great, I'll just put a video there every single week. And then it kind of started getting more involved and more involved. And eventually I started putting those videos on YouTube. A couple of years later, here we are. And so I was not a natural by any means. In the beginning. I wasn't any better than anyone else would be. But my unfair advantage was, I found, when I started making videos, like, oh, this is kind of fun. Like, I can do silly things. Like, I have these kind of off the wall ideas in my head. And videos are a way to get those out in sort of a creative way where you wouldn't otherwise get them out. And so what's the lesson there? The lesson is to follow what you enjoy. Like, follow your passions. I think we're kind of trained when we grow up and we play a little bit of sports and stuff like that, that, you know, natural talent is this, this big thing that sometimes can't be overcome. You're Usain Bolts of the world who can do things that you and I could never do. But that's the case until you're like in your mid-20s. The reality is when you're old and you're going through decades and decades of professional work, more than anything else, it's about how you spend your time. Like that is what you will get good at, be skilled at, is the things that you choose to spend your time on. And unfortunately, we can let years and decades slide by spending time on the things that we think other people want us to spend time on or, or spending times on things that are in service of other people or building something cool and amazing for them, sometimes at the cost of developing skills that are more in line with what you're passionate about and may serve you longer term. Like learning how to do video is something that will aid me the entire rest of my life. And so when we think about becoming a thought leader, and that's something that's very foreign to us because we're accountants, we're. We're generally going to be doers. You're like, what am I even going to, what am I even going to lean into or learn more about or invest more in? Like, your unfair advantage is what you're passionate about. If at the end of the day, what makes the difference is how much time you will spend on a thing, then it's more a question of like, what's not going to feel like work. That I can do a lot more than any other person would do. To get me to a place where I'm going to be better than them at that. That was the case with video for me. I put a lot of time into video, but I enjoyed it. Most of the time I enjoyed it. And because I enjoyed it, I think I had more of a willingness to sink time into it than other people did. But we all have things that we're passionate about, and the more you can marry that with the type of thought leader that you develop into, the better. 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. Open source accountants with experience working at US or or Australian firms familiar with tools like Zero, 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 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. This episode is sponsored in part by the folks at the Forwardly. Are you sick of ach transfers that stick to bank hours or checks that get caught in the mail? Of course you are. That's disgusting. Stop being stuck with slow and expensive payment options and say hello to the future of money with Forwardly's award winning cash flow management platform. Tell you what. I move some money around this morning and nobody involved in that exchange has won awards. I can tell you that. Start sending instant payments for free to hold money at the bank longer and receive instant payments for 80% less than credit cards. Plus enjoy same day ACH for free. Why is everything not same day ach? It's 2024. Can everybody just get with the program like Forwardly has? With Forwardly, us businesses can improve cash flow and simplify accounting with automatic payments and a two way sync to QuickBooks and Xero. Shout out to two way syncs. We've all seen those one way syncs. I remember when we first started rolling a BillPay platform. We're a long ways off the ad read copy at this point. I remember when we first rolled out using a bill pay platform with our clients. Not an exaggeration. I think 50% of the time we spent paying bills was actually on support troubleshooting sync issues. That sync is no joke man. Start receiving bank payments now to work towards a free iPhone 15 Pro with our new giveaway. Sign up for free@fordlee.com or check out the link in the show notes to learn more. Now there are absolutely technical things where the more time you spend with them, the more you actually do enjoy them and you and you can take enjoyment and satisfaction from being proficient at it. And that's also a path to like finding something that you enjoy. And it may not be a sexy thing, it may not be, you know, golf or like these more kind of traditional things that people get passionate about. Just ensure that that thing that you're going to double down on, like if you're going to be talking with people about that thing all day, every day, the more you like, the easier it'll be. And once you are among kind of that, you know, few foremost people in a little space then this, this firm, you, you have massive amounts of flexibility with it. Right now we're, we're sitting at the bottom of the market. We have no specialization. We are price takers. We're not setting the price. We're able to price price our stuff basically. However, the rest of the bottom of the market prices it. When you are the expert, you're realistically doing the Same engagements for 3-10x the fees and it's not really any more work. In fact, it may even be less work because you're now such an expert for this specific type of project that advising gets much easier. But that'd be my second tip to just start thinking down that path a little bit because as soon as you're able to charge more like in a situation like this, all that additional money is going straight to the bottom line and it'll give you Even more flexibility around your business and how much you want to work and how much money you want to make. Last, my third bit of advice, it sounds like at the moment the business owner is the bottleneck and oftentimes the trap here is well I got to grow the team, but I'm growing the team. I gotta add more clients to pay for the team members that I just added. And if you're not careful, you'll never actually remove yourself from more than you are adding to yourself as you add more team members. Because man, finding a team member, that's a whole new job that is takes a lot of time. Training that team member is a whole new job that you're not going to have time to do if you're already at capacity. So you have to come into this with some sort of expectation if you are going to build the team more of firing yourself from more jobs. There was a note in the form submission that they were thinking they'd pull them in for basic bookkeeping and admin. Right now you've got, you've got an offshore person. I would probably hire somebody that could help me with some client comms. That's the big thing that you're blocked on. Like the, the thing that it sounds like they least like right now is, is quarterly tax stuff. Let's get that off your plate. Let's hire somebody with really good attention to detail, which is admittedly hard to do. That's where you got to look at doing a trial project to try to suss out like do they have good enough attention to detail for me to be able to trust the work that they do. Since you already have a team member in the Philippines, I would think more about if I am going to do another, if I'm going to do my first Australia hire, is this someone that could help me in the client facing capacity, maybe even start phasing them into some of those advisory meetings. But there's a tremendous freedom to be found in like removing yourself from certain parts of the business. And there's a number of different dimensions you can do that on. It can be specific types of tasks. You can be like I'm never going to be doing the first pass on bookkeeping on any of this stuff or I'm never going to be doing the first pass on the tax filings. And sounds like right now you've successfully gotten out of a good bit of that. But there's also various thresholds that you can set here where if your minimum right now is $200 a month, do you need to be hands on. On the $200 a month clients. Is there a threshold below which you could trust your team with managing those engagements? So, for example, let's say you bring in a Australia hire that could do some client facing stuff. Could you hand off engagements under 400 bucks a month to your Australia and your, your Philippines bookkeeper? Is that something that you could kind of graduate out of? That's a really hard thing to do. And the act of doing it, you will learn some new skills and get more comfortable with like letting that stuff go. But there's so, so much freedom to be found and finding a new willingness to step away from something that that's just an ex, a muscle that I think we need to exercise more. Now. There's, there's some, some very obvious things around here like raise prices, stuff like that. And at this point, that probably kind of goes without saying. That is the problem for most firms is we just undervalue what we do. And so I would, I would push you to lean into being a thought leader. That can help develop some confidence and pricing power. That should make it really easy to increase prices much more than where they're at right now. But tippy top for me, man, maintain those boundaries. Good for you. What a cool business that just like when we were all in middle school or high school, if you'd explain this business to us when we were that age, you'd be like, man, that's the dream. I don't have to have a boss. I don't have to have a whole bunch of people I got to manage. I can make what is like in reality, a stupid amount of money. Being helpful to other entrepreneurs, like, that's not a bad gig. So think about those anti goals and how you can make those next steps without making your life any harder, because that's pretty cool. In fact, there's probably a lot of people listening to this that are running way bigger, firms that may look impressive and all that who are going, oof. I don't sound too bad to me. Thanks for participating in the roast. I think it's fun for everybody to kind of think outside their own firms and play coach for a minute and then puts your own stuff into perspective a little more. If you want to get roasted, I'll put a link to the form down below. I can't do everybody but pop your details in there. And I've started doing these on the podcast. It's been a lot of fun. So put your stuff in there and we may do in a future roast any other tips you got for this individual, put them in the comments. I'll see you tomorrow.