293 Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Standardize Your Accounting Firm

What do you mean I shouldn't, shouldn't standardize my services? What about, what about the whole service library week and trying to run a more lockdown accounting firm? Here's the thing, here's the risk with getting to turnkey is you don't learn what works and what doesn't. You get so fixated on how it is that you don't have any room for experimentation and for the things you learn from the people who fall just a wee bit outside of what that machine will allow for. So how do we build a version of a firm that is turnkey and standardized and super efficient, running like a well oiled machine like you're churning a Prius out every five minutes while still having the flexibility to experiment to not get stuck into this big like once annual change cycle that so many of us firms are stuck on. Today we'll talk about the right way to destandardize. Come on in, let's talk happy mediums. Just gonna jump right into it. Okay, you ready? Downsides of too much rigidity being too standardized. Here you go. All decisions are insanely high stakes. Those advisors out there that tell you you need to lay down the law on those clients, you need to say this is how it's done and you need to make no exceptions. Here in Soviet accountant firm client is process. There's still a lot of this, this thought leadership that says anytime you're considering a change, you're gonna go through this 96 point inspection list, have a nine month due diligence plan to ensure that it's the right change to make. And then you're gonna roll it out, communicate it to all clients. It is the new rule and there are no other rules cause they don't have an option. And obviously that's very extreme. But even itty bitty like advisors for itty bitty firms will say this, that you're only punishing yourself by allowing for flexibility and, and exceptions. But you know what the really big downside of that is? Oh buddy, I hope, I hope you were right about that change. When it's something that is that extreme and mandated and you're gonna, you're gonna take those stone tablets on down from the mountaintop to your clients and say this is the way to do it. We're sure when that doesn't pan out, if you make a wrong decision and that's, that will ab like it will 100% happen. Because we don't have perfect information until we go through a change, that stuff's just bound to happen. Then boy, do you look like a dummy when you got to reel that back with all your clients. And boy, isn't that hard. So it just makes any kind of change feel so incredibly high stakes, so risky. Second, big downside of too much rigidity. Rigidity, you're going to feel trapped to the status quo until you make one of those big changes. So you don't have what is the, the opportunity of crafting a new reality the next time you bring a new client in. So if you decide that today, man, something's gotta give. Oh, I'm a broken accountant and things need to change. The really, really hard version of change is, okay, let's put together a communication plan that we're gonna send to all 326 clients and just tell them that I'm a broken accountant and things need to change versus digging into that a little further and saying, okay, I'm never gonna take another client that I have to do in taxis, or I'm never going to take another bookkeeping client where we gotta finalize the books before the 15th, and then setting that ground rule and never taking in another client that will conflict with that plan. Right? Like if we can ease or relax our restrictions just a bit to say that we can do something different with the next client that we add, we, we're immediately making the big problem better rather than putting ourselves in this impossible situation or it taking six months to make that change, because we have to make the change across the entire client base. Rather than like, if I'm convicted, if I just watched this video and I'm like, yes, this is what I wanna do and I want to do it now. From a practical standpoint, rolling that out across every single client, it's a lot of work. It's also probably just not a good idea. As opposed to new client walks in the door and you're like, hey, client, this is the rule, specifically the rule for you, which might be different than everybody else, but it solves the problems my business has today. And the counter argument to that is, well, then you just, you end up with this big hot mess of doing all these different things for different people. I've never met an accounting firm that didn't do different things for different people. Maybe one exists, but fundamentally different businesses have different needs. So I have a hard time getting my head around there being a one size fits all solution. But it's, it's why, like, the nature of, of the systems that we set up require some flexibility. So the service library setup that we did a couple, few Weeks ago. And we did a main channel YouTube video on that is designed with flexibility. So, for example, a for a bookkeeping client, a target delivery date property for one client that could be the 10th, another client that could be the 20th. For a tax client, if we're doing scheduled delivery, or even if we just have a month in there as like a property in the service library. Well, maybe that last client was March, but no future clients are going to have that being any earlier than May or June. If your underlying system allows for that flexibility, then you can create new rules and solve those problems so that the bleeding at least doesn't get any worse without having to like, make this big dramatic proclamation to your entire client base and run the risk of, you know, doing something like a massive client portal rollout and then you go back and change your mind later on or something like that. Number three, when everybody has to be on the exact same system, it makes it extremely hard to test things. I know in the tax firm I came up in, there were times of the year for change and there were times of the year for shut up and get back in your chair and send me some tax returns. And that window for change, I don't know if there ever was a bigger window than it seems like there was now, or if it was always just like a 48 hour period. But that window for change was never enough to actually like mindfully consider what we're going to change. But it only came around once a year. And what it meant was it put a lot of pressure on all that stuff and all the changes you wanted to make coming down to that one period of change. And then really, really costly. If you got it wrong, you just lost two years. But it's often something that could have been tested in two months or two weeks. The more we are willing to experiment with clients, even tell them that they're an experiment, some clients have absolutely no problem with that and are willing to take a slightly branching path on some of these projects to learn and validate what could potentially be a bigger decision. The more we're able to make those experiments, the more we learn. And that's the real opportunity of change. And the big cost of never changing is all of the things that you learn along the way from getting from A to B. The the firm that changes 10 times more than another firm, even if there's some zigzags in those changes at the end, they know a lot more about themselves and what their needs are than the firm that doesn't change. Now, is there like A version that has too much change probably. But in my experience, a lot of firms are too far on the other end of the spectrum where we are nervous, nervous to change. This episode is sponsored in part by Teamup. What if you went out and you hired an offshore person and they took some sensitive information, they did something bad with it, they stole. Oh, worst case scenario, right? How do you manage that? So to start some advice from Team up here. According to Team up, the number one and number two mistakes accountants make Number one, thinking of your overseas teammates as, quote, offshore staff. Thinking of them as as something else rather than just an extension of our team that is subject to the same rules and restrictions and controls as as anybody else that I hire, whether they're onshore or offshore. Mistake number two making global teams more complicated than they really are. The three things team up always says 1 it's just people. 2 build relationships of trust over time and 3 what would you do if you hired an Arizona? Wow. Why the heat for Arizona? Not, you know, Florida or something like that? You hire somebody in Arizona, you probably don't stay up all night worrying about them, right? And the same should be true with your team in the Philippines. Hire the right people, get to know them personally and give access to non sensitive info first. Feel like there's more a question of internal controls. Like we are accountants so we don't really rely on trust so much, right? We don't just fling open the keys of the castle for anybody to come get it. That's not an ad copy. That's my take. If somebody in the Philippines is going to steal from me, it's because I put them in that position. Just like if I hired anybody across the country. Instead, focus on the positive. Don't get too wrapped up in fear and scarcity. Be be logical about thinking through those problems and coming up with solutions for them to protect yourself not only from offshore hires, but the rest of your team as well. Learn more about TeamUp. Check out the link in the show Notes. Thank you to Teamup for sponsoring this episode. This episode is sponsored in part by ClientHub. There is no bigger software decision your firm will make than what practice management system you should use. But when it comes to picking a PM, here's a way to think about it. Use the 4C's capabilities, client experience, clarity and community. Last week we talked about capabilities. I also shared a fun anecdote about how I bought my wife's wedding ring. But that's neither here nor there. Let's talk about client experience. If you saw the five minute demo day I did on my YouTube channel about ClientHub. You know, ClientHub is built around like being a collaborative sort of two sided task management platform where you got your tasks, clients got their tasks, the experience looks pretty much the same. But rather than having your own like killer internal set of tasks and then bodging something together to send to the client or giving them an email, they're kind of just in there working with you. You know, like the client does in their own business, in their own task management system. Because the reason most firms get stuck has nothing to do with your firm stuff. It has everything to do with how efficiently you're exchanging information with your clients. And this is why a practice management system with a client experience at its core, not some like janky bolted on Portal, that's an afterthought. It's why that client workflow at its core is what will make your firm more productive. You know how to get your work done. You don't know how to get Steve to get you the gosh darn thing that you'd asked for 18 times. Right. Sidebar. Maybe my favorite thing from that demo day we did, they've got this dashboard that's just a dashboard of all the clients you've asked for stuff from and how long you've been waiting for those things. Like all in a single view. Like you can literally print it out, shoot darts at it. But there's like a mass remind button. I don't know if I've seen anybody else, like visualize all the clients you're waiting on stuff from in one place like that. It's pretty cool. Anyways, that's Client Hub. To learn more, check out the link in the video description number four. If you're too rigid, you can't accommodate. And there are just situations where the right thing to do is accommodate. We heard in our scheduling week that we did on like moving to fully scheduled work. In some cases you may move to a tech platform that some people just can't use. Should we just let those people go on their merry way and say they have to go get that stuff done elsewhere? I would argue not if there is like a genuine need there. Sometimes it is Bill being obstinate and being unwilling to use something. Sometimes it's somebody that doesn't have a computer. I'm fine accommodating those folks. The folks who just stamp their feet and they're like, no, this is the better way. I know better than you like those folks. I'm less willing to Help because somebody has to do their stuff. Now taken too far, if you're taking advantage of there, that can slowly become low bono work. So there is a line to draw there where like that person can't afford the price increase or they get referred from somebody who had a big discount, so you have to give them a discount too. Or they're doing something vaguely service based, or they're doing something service based but have plenty of money to pay for professional help. And you end up in this no man's land of not charging your top rates while it's still not being pro bono. And then we trick ourselves into thinking we are, we are doing the world a favor by doing, doing Steve's tax return for 600 bucks instead of 800 bucks. Meanwhile, Steve drives Alexis and there's, there's a whole lot of people that have no bucks to pay for help that like actually need help. That stuff, the low bono work, we don't want that. But the people who have a genuine like need where we need to meet them where, where they are, that is just like, that is the right thing to do in my mind. Okay, five ideas to mitigate this. So we've acknowledged that there is definitely downsides to too much rigidity. Number one, I'm a big advocate of always running various tests at any given point in time because there's always things happening in like whatever part of the year you are in that are specific to that year. I'm an advocate of always kind of ab testing different processes. So if you're coming up on 1099 filing season, try a slightly different approach with a few clients and see if you learn something from it. If you're doing, I know, quarterly payroll reports or personal property tax returns or something like that, get the bulk of the work done, like via your core method. But if there's an app that is maybe supposed to make this easier but you're not quite sure yet, or a different way of gathering information, or even a different way of communicating expectations to clients. I'm a big fan of rather than sitting around a table and then just guessing which one will be best and throwing everyone on that. I'm a big fan of running tests to actually be able to put data to this stuff and get a better, better understanding of what works about the current process. What could be better or worse about a different process? Because if we don't do that test, we don't learn. And 100% of the work's going through the pipeline the exact same way. We're not really Learning to see what other options there are to get there maybe more efficiently. So AB testing the notion of, you think about a website. A website could have an A version and a B version. And this is something that happens on almost all the websites that we're using. They're constantly being optimized and a button will be have a different color or a different copy or moved a little bit this way or that way. They're constantly dialing this stuff in to see which leads to the desired behavior. And it's, it's frankly a really big thing that we probably don't think about enough. I mean, stuff as simple as I have an app that lets me a B test different Twitter profiles where you can put in one version and another version and it will tell you of all the people that visited your profile, what percentage of people actually followed. And depending on the profile you choose, you can get really, really big differences, like tens of percents of differences between a low converting one and high converting one. So you stick with that high converting one, right? And now that is your new kind of baseline and you write another test that is similar to that. But you see if you can build on it. And over time you dial this thing in. But over the course of weeks and months and years, the comparison of the optimized version to the non optimized version is wildly different. And that growth compounds over time. So a B testing like it is a very real, very valuable thing. But when it comes to our processes and our workflows and the ways that we work with clients, if there's no element of AB testing, you don't get any of the learning that comes from like that adjacent potential alternative or trying that one tax tool where it's like that seems pretty interesting razzle dazzle. Like I've got a few clients that would be down for that. Let's see how this works. Obviously like you kind of gotta do this like within reason and they gotta go through your same sort of security, due diligence and all of that stuff. You also have to be mindful of. If I just hand pick the people who are always like super glossy and happy about everything, are they actually going to give me real feedback? Got to factor all these things in, but only ever doing one thing, one way for a whole bunch of people, you're not going to learn anything now. Big reason why we don't do this, because we are so like running on the ragged edge of capacity, 100% capacity, it usually is not going to be your highest output state. Unfortunately there's something quite a bit short of that, like 80%. That's actually much more optimized both for the long term, but even in the short term to getting more work out the door. There's a. I don't know, maybe it was, maybe it was college and cramming the night before a test that taught us this. But there's a very, very short time horizon at which working yourself to the bone is the highest output approach. And I think we all know this. We just don't always act like it. I can tell you my problem. Oh, you can tell me if this is relatable at all. I've always got this big, long list of things that I need to do and as soon as I feel on top of things enough to start whittling down the backlog, I'm like, oh, you know what sounds nice right now? Not working. Like, you've got this stack of things that are progressively more on fire and less on fire. And you get through the three and the four alarms and you're like, I mean, that's just a two and I started with a four, it'll be a three tomorrow. Feels like progress to me. And then in a couple of days something comes up and you can't work on it for, you know, 48 hours and then you're at like a six alarm. But for whatever reason, the further down that haystack you get like down that list, it is just harder and harder to knock those things out for me, I don't know, is that relatable anyways? And my perception of that is like, if I'm really going to get below capacity, it means I got to get through that backlog. There's probably some truth to that. There's probably also, I think, a degree of tasks getting stale that is healthy because it calls into question what's actually important and what isn't important. If you just put that task on a shelf for six months and nothing breaks, did you need to do it to begin with? Sometimes great things can actually come from that. But I would argue the biggest enemy to, um, trying different things and having some flexibility here is being too busy. Kind of. It's kind of the enemy of everything, right? When ultimately operating under capacity and having the ability to test these different approaches and validate your thinking can actually shave years off the learning process of, of knowing what's the right thing to do and what isn't. I've shared the example before of making the wrong practice management system decision. This was before I was posting anything online and had knew absolutely anyone who was running a firm was still, I don't know, five or six years ago in the grand scheme of things. Not very long ago, we were on just kind of a legacy system for managing our work that we weren't in love with at the same time that we were changing our tax software to Ultra Tax. And the company's like, well, you should use our workflow management software also. It's the only one that integrates with our tax software. You'll love it and we'll give it to you for free for three years. And we were like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. It must be really, really good if it's free for three years. But the way they're framing it's like, oh, it's the only tool that integrates with this other tool that you use, so it's the only one that's even an option for you. We still did a bunch of due diligence for like nine months trying to figure out, well, what's the right thing to do here? Ultimately made a buying decision that was largely based on what the salesperson was telling us. Not a good idea. And I mean, we invested so much money and time in this transition to get 40 people trained up on a system that's way harder and way more complex than it needs to be. I would also argue that cloud practice management systems six years ago are not where they are today. They're pretty rough. Like five to ten years ago, cloud PMs were very, very basic. And for a 40 person firm, don't know there was anything at that stage that I was super confident in. But I also didn't have the network. I didn't know all the people and the things that I've, I've learned since then. But we got about three months, like about three months down the road after we made that transition, me and my partner were like, yep, nope, this wasn't the right one. And what do you do now? Because we've pushed through a whole lot of crap and people complaining and being like, I know, I'm sorry, I don't like it either. But this is just kind of where we're at. We gotta do our best. And at this point we're a good, I mean, we're three months post transition, but about 12 months into the project, we've done all the hard work. You've got people who are champions on the team who have been just dealing with garbage to like push this change through. And you're gonna go to all those people and say, nevermind can we. What would it look like to just not. To not do what we just did? I mean, you make that realization and you're like, we just lost years. We genuinely just lost years. There are so many practice management systems where you can just spin up a trial and kick the tires on it and see how you like it. Like, see, send two people out, say you're gonna manage your work in both systems for the next two weeks. What do you like? What do you not like about it? Man, that was not a thing that was possible five or ten years ago. But we can actually, like, validate that change through testing rather than being so extreme about our processes and efficiencies that, you know, people just need to sit in their chairs, not think and pump in hours via our standardized process. This episode is sponsored in part by Financial Sense. If you're listening to this and you don't have a practice management system yet, stop it. Hit pause, Stop using a spreadsheet and sticky notes. And I can do all this by memory. You just can't. Now, admittedly, big problem with a lot of PMs, they started in a basic, humble place. A lot of them have gotten gotten pretty sweaty where it takes like a, like a PhD and computer changing stuff to get your firm onto this thing. Like, it's hard. It requires an implementation specialist and like a whole team of people to get your team to the next thing. But Financial Sense, man, you can pop out of their website right now, just spin up a free trial. You don't need onboarding, packages, all that stuff. It is easy enough where you can go out, take a first spin, see if you like it. If you don't, forget about them. Okay, but would they stand up a free trial if they didn't think it would work? Right? If you've had concerns or maybe analysis paralysis on what PM do I do? Honestly, the quickest way to get information, go out, spin up a trial, use it for a week, see what you think. There are not very many PMs that will actually let you do that right now. Financial Sense is one of them. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Boy, if you've been around this podcast, you know we have run a lot of live flow ad reads. You cut this podcast ad feed and it bleeds. Live flow ad read. In fact, you know, we should do. Hang on, I had a whole ad read for this, but I just got a better idea, you know, we should do. You know we made that Jason Bot that's like connected to all the podcast episodes and you can ask it questions and It'll go across 280 episodes and give you answers. Let's just make, ooh, let's make a bot. That's just all my Live Flow ad reads and then I can just ask it questions. I have this workflow problem. How can lifflow help me? I spent a bunch of money on a reporting platform. Is this something that LifeLow could have done for me instead in a spreadsheet? Because that's where I'm actually happy and comfortable. What's the easiest way to connect my spreadsheets to, to my clients? QuickBooks data in a single click. And the chat assistant would be like lifflo. No it wouldn't. It would be like, oh man, I hear you. Oh, that's a real tough situation. You got yourself there. Here's what you're gonna do. And it'd be like a two paragraph long way of just saying. Live Flow could be good content though. We should put something useful in this ad. Read Live Flow. It's the easiest way to liberate data from those client QuickBooks file files. Whether you're in Excel Google Sheets, you get a little Live Flow button. It's like an extension. You click that guy and you can run all your favorite QuickBooks reports. Sync that data into QuickBooks like a window one time sync or an ongoing like rolling sync. Do like some, some kind of real time reporting stuff. Great way to get data out to stakeholders who you don't want to have access to the QuickBooks files. Also be a banker, an advisor, employees of the business, quite possibly even the business owner themselves because they keep breaking things. That is Live Flow. To learn more about that one, check out the link in the show notes. I think we rushed to decision making in my firm just because it almost felt wasteful not to. And, and it was a very traditional legacy firm where change was very infrequent and to belabor a point and do a whole bunch of due diligence just felt so painful and so wasteful and so many hours going down the drain that you rush into this decision that actually then wastes and costs you an astronomical amount of time. If throughout your firm you have these sort of tests, these experiments running and you have a life cycle for how someone proposes a test, how long that test is allowed to run, how we are going to measure success from the test, what we actually want to determine from it. To have a person that is in charge of testing in general, you're enabling Just a wildly different level of learning that will make the core systems like the primary systems that you're running Almost all of your engagements on. Those workflows then are going to be so much more dialed because you just have seen more, have understood more, you've kicked the tires on different tech, you've tried different approaches with clients to know what works and what doesn't work. You're just in a much more informed place now. Last tip I got here for how to mitigate this is stop making it all about you. Okay? Stop putting everything on your back and saying, well, that's another great idea, Jason. Let me just put that on my. My scroll of great Jason ideas next to my desk here that I haven't implemented. You can chuck that baby in the fire right now because that is where ideas go to die. Your to do list. I inherited a family, a team of accountants from other people. I didn't hire most of these folks when I, when I bought the firm. And so it was like a. It was like a mixed family type of situation where you're going to work for somebody that didn't hire you, and you're never quite sure how that's going to shake out. And these people were not raised in an environment that encouraged change or thinking for yourself. Is it right brain? Is left. Left brain activities? I can't remember which side of the brain it is, but they were only allowed to use one of them. And it wasn't until I helped kind of some of those people out of that frame of mind and hired a couple of my own people who had a real energy for change that I realized, oh, these people, they're not going to do it the way that I would do it. And sometimes I do still have to be that guy that comes in and breaks something, as much as I hate being that guy. But in general, man, are they going to do a whole lot better job than I am. Because I'm going to come in and say I'm going to do xyz, and everybody in the room's like, okay, you know, I'm sure you will. And then you don't. And then nothing happens or just very scant thought is put into it. 100% of somebody else's attention span is almost always going to be better than 15% of yours. Quit fooling yourself into thinking that you got to be the guy. You don't. In fact, you want to look at scalable, like, leverage, skill sets. Much more valuable than you being good at a thing as you being able to, like, scope A project and plug a person into it to make that whole thing a success. That's a skill worth developing. You being a know it all and being able to do everything yourself. That is just a. Just a sad, sad road to a sad place. That's all we got for today. I always say this content is what I needed to hear five years ago. So if I'm shouting, it's because I'm shouting at myself, you knucklehead. Why did it take me so long to learn these lessons? Stop doing the same things over and over again. You already know what you need to do. Why did you just sign up for another webinar? Sometimes you just need need your buddy to put their arm around you and tell you to suck it up, get out of your own wind and trust somebody else to do your job for you. For once, you know you're the boss, but you don't have to be the boss of everything. Try to be the boss of everything. You can be a really bad boss at everything. And then you start investing in those people and they, they come to their own conclusions and they start like, outgrowing you in some domains. And that is a extremely exciting and terrifying thing to. To begin saying. But I can tell you from someone that no longer runs a firm, the things that I most hang on to, that I'm most proud of from when I did run a firm were those moments where you saw a person go from A to B and you enabled a path for them. You definitely, you didn't like, grab their feet and make them take all those steps. They did it. But you put them on that path and you kind of define the guardrails. And then you see them on the other side of that and you're like, dang, that's one BA accountant right there. It's a family show. They're doing some really cool stuff and you enabled that for them. Their career's in a totally different place. Like, that's the stuff that I hang on to most, that I'm most proud of from having run a firm. So if you're thinking about this stuff, like, what is next? How am I going to find time for this process improvement or to run that test? Maybe the problem is you're thinking too hard about it and you got to pull somebody else in. That was probably my problem more than anything else. Just being a know it all man. Nobody likes to know it all. Okay, thanks for coming to Hanging today. We'll see you in the next one. Sam.