318 9 Things You Know but Need To Be Reminded Of Today

Today, nine reminders from a friend. K. Those things that you already know but you need to be reminded of. We're continuing on the theme of uncomfortable action. Doing the stuff that we know we gotta do, but will get you to a better place, a less stressful place. Ripping off them band aids today. I hope you come away from here with a very specific action that you will go do. Because you know what? You deserve it. You deserve how good it's going to feel on the other side of that heart thing. Oh, baby, don't go for the ice cream cone today. K. That's tasty on the way in, but you always regret it on the way, not on the way out afterwards. You know what I mean? Okay, number one, there is one hard thing you could do today that you know would reduce your stress. And when I said that, it jumped into your mind. In fact, maybe, maybe several of them jumped into your mind, but one of them was probably harder than the others. And a whole lot of people just hit pause, just archived this episode. I know, but the funny thing about that one hard thing is the longer you don't do it, the harder it gets. Like, the more you build it up in your head, the more uncomfortable it is. You're like, maybe that'll just. Maybe that'll just go away or work itself out. But in the meantime, every single day that's passing you, you like paying the price for not doing it with this passive level of anxiety. And then the more of those things that pile up, they kind of build on each other. And in some ways, like, there's almost this, like, exponential level of anxiety because those stressors get more ambiguous. A helpful exercise here that we've actually done on the podcast in the past that might still be procrastination is that fear setting exercise. When you're feeling that stress and anxiety, actually sitting down and writing down all of the things that you're afraid of. And there's a whole sequence of steps there that are like, defining what all those fears are, writing them out one by one, but then also digging into, like, what is the worst that could happen here? How could I recover from it if I take the action to solve that fear? What would even a partial success look like? There are, like, very real ways to unpack your brain and make this stuff less stressful. This exercise is helpful too. Just to more rationally think through in a more ambiguous problem, what are the right steps to take. Maybe it's something big, like ending a business partnership or firing an important employee or something like that, where you need to, like, really tactically, as much as you can, remove the emotions from it. Think through step by step, what you'll do and the steps you'll take based on various different outcomes, like how you come back from this. And the easy thing to do here is to sit down in that battle station, fire up the email inbox, and get a project done or send some emails. And that's. Honestly, that's the trap, is never getting out of that when there's that hard thing that you know that you need to do. Number two, you won't find yourself with free time until the tasks you allow yourself will fit well within the time you have. We're not getting tasks down to, I want to work 40 hours a week. That's not how this works. You got to get your tasks down to, I'm pretty sure I could do that in, like a half day. And. And then you will find yourself with a full day of work. And you know this. But we, for some reason are like, we're thinking about things we can get rid of or delegate. And. And there's this little voice inside you that's like, well, what would I do even if that happened? Spoiler alert, it won't. But even if that did happen, would it be the worst thing if you didn't have something to do? I mean, imagine that. Just imagine how nice that would be. The reality is, to get to a point where you have actual free time, the tasks on your plate are gonna have to be way less than the time you think you have. And so this means getting more aggressive about what you can remove yourself from. And the lowest hanging fruit is usually those treadmill items, the things that you can do until the end of time. Your email inbox shipping that project. Is there a cross section of projects that you could say, I'm no longer gonna touch these. I'm not gonna touch clients whose annual fees are under a thousand bucks. I'm not gonna respond to emails like this myself. I'm gonna pull somebody in to help. Could be a member of my team, could be a va. Start with something small enough to where if it broke or went sideways, it wouldn't be the end of the world. And what you find is when you baby step into it, one, you learn how to better delegate. Like, you learn how to give that task away. And like this system that is required to ensure that it's still done the way that you want it to be done. And you won't learn how to do that well until you just do it. But the other even Bigger thing that you learn is stuff will still get done if you're not involved. And when, when you start with that itty bitty tiny version, maybe it's clients who don't pay you more than 500 bucks a year, you just don't touch em anymore. You trust the team with that because if you got 20 of those, you can do the quick math and be like, we could recover from that. That's not the end of the world. When you start down that path, it makes it easier to go from 500 to a thousand or from this type of email to these three types of email. That's the most important part, is that first baby step makes it easier to do the bigger steps. Number three, you aren't making as much progress as you could be making if you were doing less. If you feel like you aren't making progress, it's oftentimes because you're doing too many things. And we think that we can do more things than when we can. Like just accept that you will always tell yourself, oh no, I could totally do this project, this project, this project and this project at the same time. It's what makes me special. But the reality is the really good version of any of those, which is what we envision in our heads, we're like, oh yeah, if I totally put myself into this, it would become this. But we don't do that. We don't totally put ourselves into that thing. We do a bunch of different things. And if you're feeling like progress is slow in many ways, it's probably because you're trying to make it too fast and accepting a slower timeline. And really doing a thing well is what will actually progress that thing and have you at your best rather than doing a half baked version of a bunch of different things. Today's episode is sponsored in part by LifeFlow. Why run a big old fancy reporting suite when a spreadsheet will do, arguably the spreadsheet. It's your natural habitat. No need to learn a new platform to get a get a PhD and how to use some big new FP and a complicated thing when you can just plug your accounting ledger data straight into a spreadsheet. And if you've ever actually pushed reporting on clients, maybe your experience is different. I can tell you in my experience it was. It's, it is a enough of a fist fight to just get them to open the email to look at a detached PDF, let alone like train them on a whole new platform, get them logging into a different place. But a spreadsheet A spreadsheet you can point back to every single month. A spreadsheet they can point bookmark that's got all the information that they need. Some that's static, some that updates on an ongoing basis. Lifflow can do that for you. And it's super quick and easy to set up. Integrates now with qbo, with Xero, with Excel, with Google Sheets. I see you hipster accountant. Create that little report once and keep it syncing like forever and you got one place for the client to come back to. A spreadsheet super easy to understand, to change. Even if it's just like pulling net income across all their different entities, it'll do a consolidations. So even if it's like say a tax planning thing, we gotta roll up how much money have they made this year so far and is that on track with maybe how we projected taxable income would be looking this year? Bunch of different things that you can do with that from the comfort of your own home. A spreadsheet. P.O. box A1. Okay. And if that's your happy place, check out LifeFlow link in the show notes. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Team up, your friends who are going to help you find talented accountants in the Philippines. And they got a newsletter where you can sign up. Get just get a little bit educated every week about what it's. What it's like working with offshore team members, a distributed team. The questions you're embarrassed to ask. Shop little tidbits to your inbox every week. Whether you've done this yet or not, it's worth just learning what that looks like. Team up actually just hired two new recruiters in the Philippines. They're up to five, four total. So they've got recruiters on the ground in the Philippines who will go out and track down folks who are going to be a fit for you. Team up actually only launched last June. They've now worked with 85 firms with one firm hiring 13 people. How's that for social proof? Honestly, that was my experience. Starting to hire folks in the Philippines. We got one and then we're like, okay, how quickly can we get a second? And we just kept going because we had such good luck. In fact, as you saw in my podcast episode where I drafted my first 20 people to affirm, like if I were to start a firm tomorrow, like 50% of my hires were in the Philippines. That's what I was doing in my firm when I left. That's how I do it again. We just got really, really good people And Team up helps you do that. Team Up's approach is to help you hire direct. So you're going to work directly with that person rather than hiring a company who then employs the person. Team Up's approach is to hire direct. The other approach is called. It's called bpo. Basically the partnerships on all my content. We've paired now to two companies, both who will find you accountants in the Philippines. One is a bpo, one is direct. Team up is direct. I would say pros and cons to each Team Ups doubling down on doing it direct. That's the way they like to do it. And if that's something you want to explore, you don't cut a check until you actually make a hire. So hop on a call from, tell them what you're looking for, do some interviews, and if you're not absolutely blown away by somebody, don't make a hire. Right. Worst thing you can do in this whole process is just learn more about what that looks like. So interested in hiring folks direct and the Philippines? Check out Team up link down in the show notes. Speaking of myself on that one, number four growth will probably not help you meet your life goals. And 4B4A4 Appendix. Watch out for using someone else's yardstick to measure success. Look out for what someone else is going to think is impressive being what you got to go after. I was at dinner with some friends last night and a guy who's a COO and at a legal firm and they have 200 people. And I was like, yeah, when I got rid of my firm, we had about 40 people. And I was like, oh, that's a way smaller firm than he has. Is that then justification to go out and be like, well, well, this guy can do it. Why don't, why don't I try to go to build a bigger thing? Almost always. Not unless there is some life goal that is important to you that that's connected to. And so what are your actual life goals? Usually it's things like have more time in the summer. You know, being able to be with my kids when they're not in school, having more time for like service stuff during the week, getting to some financial freedom threshold. I'll tell you a banger I heard from, from philosopher Alex Horbozi the other day. For most of us, where you're at right now is financial success. Is a few years ago, what you would have been like, yeah, that's the destination. That's financial success. If you're not happy now, you won't Be happy when you get to what you now think financial success is. That's pretty good, right? So what are those life goals? Are they reasonable? For me, that's like having a little more time for service stuff. Having a better routine for like date nights, an all wheel drive car for the winter. Because we don't have that right now. Besides that, like, I'm good. And if you really think about it, particularly where you came from and what you would have told yourself five years ago if you could see the old personal balance sheet, you, you'd be like, bro, chill. Okay? Like you trying to generate more leads or, or do this or hire another person. Nothing about that is getting you closer to any of those life goals. In fact, it's oftentimes layering on more which will take you away from those life goals. Number five, there's something outside your work life that requires more attention. I'm feeling attacked. I feel like most of these are about me. Could be family, could be faith stuff, could be service stuff, could be it's stupid, stupid house that you bought. That's way too much work. Giving yourself permission to go and do those other things can be hard. Like, we don't let ourselves do it, but then we still kick ourselves for not doing it. Like, stop living. Between that, you either have to give yourself permission to do it and be okay with that, or stop kicking yourself for not doing it because you didn't give yourself permission to do it. I would encourage you to go do it. I can tell you in my experience, there's a level of balance that makes me better at all of those different things. If this kind of goes in cycles, there's, there's cycles where I can be totally consumed by a single thing. Like, I'm a pretty obsessive person, but it's only a matter of time before I got to go back to like doing other things. And then when I had that balance, it kind of enriches each of those things. It's like sitting down and doing knowledge work and then like going and doing something with your hands. Like, there's a level of that where, like helping other people, giving back to other people, that is like an incredibly enriching thing for you. Like, there's just, there's there's different aspects of you as, as a person that need to be filled out for you to be at your best. But I think oftentimes we will like feel this perpetual sense of guilt for not doing these other things. But it stems literally from you not even giving yourself permission to do it. So like, either decide I'm not going to do it and be like, that's a decision that I made and don't feel bad about it, or give yourself permission, go do it, and then don't feel guilty for being away from work. Number six, your best thinking won't happen behind a desk. So, so where on your calendar are there opportunities for your best thinking? I'm a big advocate of conferences. I did a main channel video on Is that out yet? Comes out this coming Sunday on upcoming conferences. I'm a huge advocate of conferences. If you've never done an accounting conference before, check out Accounting Cornerstone. If you've never done a conference before, if that's cost prohibitive for you, check out Accounting Cornerstone Foundation. We'll link that down in the show notes. They basically sponsor accountants who are going to their first in person conferences, but you also got virtual ones that are totally free. Like Workflow Con is one that Financial Sense is putting on. It's coming up. We can link that down below as well. Not as good as an in person conference, but not everyone's life circumstances allow for that. Just be aware of the fact that getting outside of your current paradigm, which is how big meaningful changes happen, you break some assumption that you have right now of how something has to be done to find something better. That stuff very rarely happens behind your desk. And so you have to intentionally build in space for that, for rest, for bigger thinking. What I get wrong here is when I do trips, I make them super, super fast because I have this perpetual guilt of being away from home and away from the family. And if you have a young family, you probably share that, unless you're a golfer, in which case that part of your brain doesn't work. Made some people mad about that. I don't. I don't know how to go play golf and not feel guilty. Okay? I got to get all my kids in school. I think that's the problem with the stage of life that I'm at. It's an unfair trade right now. Until all my kids are in school all day, then maybe. Okay, moving on. Number seven. The fire you're fighting today might be a distraction from the fire that's actually burning down your house. This is another form of jumping on the treadmill to distract you from the thing that you actually know that you need to do. So the easy thing to do is be consumed by the urgent, the inbox, the routine, or. Or what your team expects you to do. The natural rhythms of what everybody around you thinks that you're going to do each day when the reality is, if you're the boss, whether you're the owner or a leader or something like that, your job is to be the one person that doesn't do what everyone is expecting. Your job is to be the one who can simultaneously plug people into the machine to keep it doing what it's supposed to be doing, but. But also be the one to break it when it's not taking you in the direction that you want to go in. But if all you ever do is come in and do what is expected of you, you're not like, hitting pause and being like, gang, we got to have this hard conversation, or, I made a bad decision 18 months ago and now we got to pivot from that. That's your job. Otherwise everybody else is going to keep just kind of bumbling down the path. By and large, you're going to have people that'll be a thorn in your side sometimes, like, I was, or where I'm like, hey, this is dumb. Let's go do this thing instead. And, like, really push for that. But most people are just going to keep on heading down that road until you are the one that's like, skirt. We got to. We got to make this hard decision or pivot. So don't, like, hide from the important decisions by playing house and like, doing those little decisions instead. Today's episode sponsored in part by Core V. I can tell you, when it came to selling tax planning, as we called it back in my day, it wasn't tax advisory. When it came to selling that to clients, the tools that I had to do that work was just the regular, plain old tax software, or bna, which is just the most visually painful program you've ever used. And to present that to a client, to be like, look at this smart stuff I've done, I just. I couldn't get my head around that. I think most of us can't. Core V, on the other hand, super, super good at this. It's basically, they have, like, they say, over 1500 tax strategies, so they will help you identify strategies for clients. But even as you hear that if you're a taxpayer, like, what's a strategy? Do I really trust that? Here's the thing is, unless we dress it up, unless we can call those things out that we are capturing for our clients, then they don't know that. They don't know the value we are realizing for them. And it may be table stakes for you. But. But does the client know that? They sure don't. And if you never Tell them that thing that you did for them. They're not gonna value you. But I know virtue signaling. I'm not gonna spend a bunch of time beating my chest about the helpful things I did. Honestly, that's what Corvi's great for. Tax advisory visualizations that show all the things you've done for them, how much money you saved them, even rolling year over year savings stuff as simple as entity selection. Simple's not the right word, but down to like where you're setting reasonable comp retirement contributions, all sorts of different things you can do. Augusta rule visualizing all those savings in one place. Because your tax advisory work gang, it ought to be the best paying work in your tax firm. I did this mental exercise on the POD the other day, I think, say you got $1,000 a year tax client and all you do is tax prep for them. If we can get that same client to pay us another two grand for tax advisory, so they pay us three grand a year, that tax advisory shouldn't be any more work than the tax prep itself. And if we can get clients onto that higher package, let's say we've got the same costs in the advisory work that we do in the tax prep work. Say you're running tax prep at 50% margin, that's 1000 bucks in costs, 3000 top line, that's 2000 profit. Now you doubled the amount of work that client is. But we 4x the profit while 2xing the work. So effectively for time put in, we're making 2x the money. And for every one of those clients you get on that plan, maybe you can cut one or you can go home to bed, take a nap midday and never go back to work. For tax firms, I genuinely believe like tax advisory is the path to that, to more freedom. Corvee. Really helpful way to visualize that stuff. We actually did a demo day on the YouTube channel for them recently, so you can see how it works in like five minutes. Learn more about them. Check out the link down in the show Notes steps are sponsored in part by Stanford Tax. If you run a U.S. tax firm, you know just how cross crotchety the information gathering process has been for tax prep for eons. Sending out these nasty organizers asking boilerplate questions that you frankly already know the answers to. So the client's like, why are you making me do this work? Stanford Tax, they're gonna give you a super intelligent way to gather that information. Step one, connect your tax software. Whatever your role, Assert Pro Series drake ultra tax cch access import thousands of clients in under 10 minutes. Step two, get personalized questionnaires personalized to each client. Includes prior year numbers, detailed document checklists like based on the actual data from last year. Fast and easy for your clients to fill out. Do this for 1040s, but also 1120s, 1120s, 1065. And then step three, you get a PDF work paper of that client's submission. So you get a nice tidied up, organized bookmark. It's got all the documents they uploaded, all the ways they answered the question questions, all that stuff in a single place. So that that prep process is already halfway down the road. I don't know a ways down the road. And the client had a clean, straightforward, modern experience getting you that stuff. Stanford is one of a few companies using AI to innovate and how we approach our tax workflows. Learn more about that one. Check out the link to Stanford Tax down in the show. Notes number eight. Your resilience has to be number one. Something we talk about a lot in my business because it's very centered around the content. And the biggest issue for content creators is just burnout. And if you hire a bunch of people that work on adjacent businesses and in support of the content and all that stuff and then the creator just totally like burns out, that's a problem, right? So you can't hide from the fact that if you're not enjoying something or if you're not doing, like, if you're not getting energy for something, you got to delegate, you got to pull somebody in to help. You have to be super, super mindful of that. And you can, I'm sure you can understand that through the context of my business. But your business is very, very similar, unless you've somehow removed yourself largely from the business, which most people are not in that spot. And a good litmus test here is what would happen if you got sick and couldn't work for 30 days? Yikers. That's a big problem in most small firms. And so what do we do? That information, you got to think about yourself, you got to think about your own energy and have conversations about that within your firm. Like, don't be afraid to bring that up. And especially for dude bros like me. Like, you want to be, you want to be the alpha, you want to be unbreakable, right? The reality is, is you can break and if you do, everybody else is going to be up a creek. And so if you don't have real conversations about, here's what I need help with, team. Here's what's working for me right now and what isn't. And sometimes making bad business decisions in the support of your own longevity and sustainability, oftentimes that's the right thing to do. And it's where, you know, common business advice like specialization and all these different things, all of the things that are, like, mathematically best from a strategy standpoint, they can oftentimes be at odds with what is going to work for you from a sustainability standpoint. And that ought to take priority. But we can be so concerned with putting everybody else's masks on that we end up being the victim. I was talking with, uh, someone close to me recently who's going through this super hard transition that could hose a bunch of their team members. And they're absolutely burning the wick at both ends in the most insane way. And they're like, I just want to make sure my team is taken care of. And it's very noble. And like, there's a degree of that that we should be doing, but the one who's absolutely paying the price for that right now is, Is them and their family. That whole, like, it's got to be balanced. Like, that whole calculation can't skew too heavily towards your team. And is that arguably the most important part of running a business is how you take care of your team? I would say so. Clients will come and go. Like, I'm a means to the to an end for a client. My team, like, I'm impacting their life. Like, their children will talk about the mood that person was in when they went home from work and how much time they got to spend with them. That's almost certainly the most important aspect of what we do. If you run a team. But what's the point of it all if it comes at the cost of you? Right? I think in most cases, it's probably not worth it. Last one, number nine, kind of bringing this full circle. What's the conversation you're most afraid to have right now? Think about that. Is it a client conversation? It's a conversation with a business partner, with a staff person. What is the conversation you are most afraid to have right now? And then what would it take to make that amazing? This is a reframing that's often used in awful situations where something has happened. This reframing of what would it take to make this amazing? So what, what would a few examples of that be? Maybe you just had it with your business partner and you're like, I don't know a way out of this, but I, I just know that this isn't working for me. What would it take to make that amazing? What if having that conversation, that's even just. I, dude, I don't know what to do next. What. What if that led to, I gotta go take two weeks and I'm gonna go stand on a paddle board, paddle around, burn the H out of my shoulders, and get some headspace. That's pretty amazing. If that's a conversation with a key employee where things just. You finally decided, like, it's just not gonna work out. What would it take to make that amazing? How on the other side of having that conversation could you find yourself, like, renewed and excited? Maybe it's going out and finding a recruiting solution. Because that's the big fear is how do I fill this spot, that client that you know, that you probably need to get rid of? How would you make that amazing? Maybe when you fire clients, you get to treat yourself. In fact, if you have your team be the one to fire clients, which I actually super recommend, not just so that you don't have to do it, but to keep those client managers more in tune with the life cycle of a client and to feel like the stakes that are involved in that, if they're totally isolated from that, I don't think you're gonna be super aligned with your team. What would it mean to make firing a client amazing? Maybe you get the next day off, Maybe you get to take a half day. Then maybe your team has a pizza day. So consider that. What's the conversation you're most afraid of having right now? And how could you make that amazing? So if there's one takeaway from today, what is that hard thing? In all likelihood, you know exactly what it is right now stuck in your head. In fact, if it is, drop it down in the comments. Ooh, drop it in the comments, and I will reply and try to come up with a way to make that amazing. Don't have to get too into the weeds on the nuance or the detail. I can tell you one thing that's helpful is when you have a hard thing going down and saying, oh, a bunch of other people actually have this hard thing right now too, and it's not my fault, and it's frankly just a part of being an entrepreneur. Feel free to share that down below. Oftentimes, doing something that could hurt somebody else isn't actually hurting someone else. Like, if it's something that needs to be done, then doing it is in the service of yourself and it's in the service of the rest of your team. If you think about all these hard decisions and the time that we take to make them, and you add up all of the. The leg time from making every single one of those decisions where we've just waited too long, man, that stuff piles up, and before you know it, you will string these things along and use lose years stressing over the thing that you knew that you needed to do. Some guy that was on Tim Ferriss is like a Navy SEAL guy or something. He says, hard decisions, easy life. Easy decisions, hard life. Your willingness to do those hard things leads to an easy life, and you deserve it. Okay? So go do that hard thing today. I'll see you in the next one.