427 How to Grow Your Firm When You’re Swamped

Accounting friends, I, a lot of you, I know you're going through it, you're in the middle of it, you are in the thick of it, the dark days. And I'm going to tell you something that maybe you didn't want to hear, but no, actually you already saw it in the title, so you already know. So you signed up for this. Oh, no. We're good then. Hate to say it, but when you're swamped, when you're in your busiest season, that's actually the best time to grow your firm. It's the time where certain things are 10 times easier than they are the entire rest of the year. But oftentimes because we can be so head down in our work, we miss those opportunities. So I'm going to give you eight, eight wee tips today about how to do things that are going to help your firm long term, even when you are at your very, very busiest. I know you get, I know the kids, they don't even remember your name. You slept under your desk last night, you filthy animal. We're going to work through it. Come on in, let's talk about it. Okay. Let's just level set on what I mean by growing to kick things off here. Growing is not revenue. Growth can be. Growing is, is, is better. So there's more and there's better. I want to do better. And better might mean a bigger firm. Better should mean better profitability, better flexibility for you. Maybe that means working a whole bunch, maybe that means taking a little more time off. But if you look at the 12 month arc of an accounting firm, honestly, there is no greater time to make big connections and leaps forward than during your busiest times. So my first tip for you here, as hard as it is, is you can't put those blinders on. Like you can't get so caught up in the work to lose perspective of, you know, a lot of these people, they're only going to see me in the next couple of months. And even if I'm generally a nice person, but only an a hole for these couple of months, that's, that's all they're going to remember, right? And it's when we're having these touch points with clients that are usually work related, but there's usually also some peripheral things, it's when this stuff's happening that all the opportunities come up. And so we can't totally turn that stuff off. So second tip is about getting back just a little, a little bit of control so maybe that you aren't quite so overextended. Busy season. It is incredibly important when you are busy to over communicate because the worst possible thing that we can do or the worst feeling that a client can feel is the feeling of being forgotten. There's so much power in just sending the no update update. The fact that I don't have anything more to tell you but, but I haven't forgotten about you. It's, it's very important that when the client drops off a project or something like that, they just have a, a standing understanding of when they're going to hear from you next. Doesn't necessarily mean that the work is done. But if I can tell them like, hey, at the very least we're going to send you an update every week on Wednesday or every other week on Wednesday or something like that, that is such a better way to stem the tide of status requests. To be able to proactively reach out and be like, hey, here's this stage that you're in. We don't need anything right now. Or hey, here's the stage that we're in. We need these three things from you right now. Go respond to that email that Jim sent you last week. And this is not as hard as it sounds. This is like playing, pulling an admin into like once a week, run a list and send those emails off. And it's a hundred percent worth doing because you know how much work the managing of the status requests can be. And if you're a US tax shop, like you're getting into that time of year where everybody's like, hey, so I gave you that stuff in February, how's that looking? Is that, is that done yet? And then the whole problem just compounds like you're treading water trying to resolve the, these status requests while simultaneously getting PO'd by the status requests while trying to get work done. And we can get out ahead of all of this stuff by setting the expectation of when they're going to hear from me to get out in front of that status request. Because what the status request really is, is 50%, hey, reminding you that I'm here and I'm, I'm being a squeaky wheel so that I'll get greased. But it's also 50% like, where's my stuff at? Do you need anything? It's not all tactical. A big part of that is like the emotional. They're like trying to, trying to ensure that, that you haven't forgotten about them. But if you can stick to that communication plan, it really, really helps. And as you get just in the, in the Thick of things like really into the weeds and your mind can't kind of get around all the moving parts that are happening. And so you feel like the only thing that you can do is just stick your head down and work harder and work longer. The best solution I know, which is counterintuitive, is, is communicating expectations to clients. It may feel like that's wasteful. That's why we don't do it is it's like, well, that's not getting a project forward. What's causing you stress is your delivery not being in line with what you perceive their expectations to be. Do we need to get the work done out, like out the door faster? Yes. But the friction comes from when the delivery of the work isn't aligned with the client's expectations. And so if we can manage those, we actually buy ourselves back a little bit of breathing room. So don't forget about that as a way to kind of release the valve a bit. Third tip, as much as it kills you, just take that extra beat with, with each person. Like take to just put that little bit of extra juice into each email. Just that little smiley emoji at the end of that sentence so that they, they receive it in a slightly less passive aggressive way. Like, just ask that one extra question when you're checking in with somebody. Set the reminder when they tell you that they've got something bigger, a surgery or something going on next week. Like set that reminder so that you remember to go and, and send that message even though you got better things to do and you're so busy. Like just that little ounce of extra effort makes such a big difference for people. And when your business is built on like these very infrequent touch points, all it takes is one negative touch point. And these people will dwell on that for the next 10 months. They'll think that you're a jerk or whatever it is. I personally, this mega stresses me out and I honestly, I didn't think about it through the lens of my accounting firm and I, and how big an impact that can have on people until I was, I'm in the business of what I do now. Like now I will go to an accounting conference and you, you'll meet somebody for the first time. Somebody that, that's, you know, I've, I've met people who will come up and be like, I've listened to every episode of the podcast three times. I'm a big fan. And I'm like, holy, that. Yep, you are a. Bless your heart, you are a big fan. You Meet these people sometimes and it's a big deal for them and like you could be in the middle of a super, super sweaty day and got a million other things going on. But if you don't stop and give your attention to that moment, sometimes you gotta think about what the long term impact of that will be on that person because you don't necessarily know when these people are gonna see again. When are you gonna talk to em again? Right. So these clients that you don't see all that frequently where the only time you work with them you're just like totally harebrained and super swamped. Just having that little bit extra patience, as hard as it can be, makes a world, a world of difference. There's the, the biggest point of frustration that I see from folks working with their accountants online. If you look at it, it is them feeling forgotten. Them feeling as though they are inconveniencing their accountant even though they're pay, paying them a pile of money to, to get their work done. That's like the real thing that stings for people. So making them feel appreciated, respected, that goes so far. And I, I like at our worst, like we can get a little self important about all this stuff. Like do you under, do you, do you know what it means to be in tax season for goodness sakes? I was reading a children's book that my kids checked out from the library and grandma was watching the children and grandma said, well your mother, it's tax season. And the kids are like, oh yeah, okay, okay. It's a freaking Arthur book. I would love it if we didn't poison the next generation of accountants to think that that needs to be the norm. There's a world where you can do that if you want to. It's harvest season and you're a farmer or something like that. Knock yourself out. But I, but I do think it's gone a little too far. At its worst, it can get a little self indulgent, a little self important. And the reality is from the outside, your clients are like, well, don't you kind of know how many of these tax returns you can do? Isn't it just a matter of, well, maybe you signed up to do too many of them. And you know why that pisses you off so much? I'm not even going to say it. I'm not even going to say it because if I say it, you're going to unsubscribe. Okay, number four, capture, capture, capture, capture. There's so many things that you're going to want to circle back to, right? But if we don't capture, we can't do that. AI meeting, AI meeting recorders. So, so, so, so so gold. If you think about stuff like building content and all that, when you're head down and doing the work, that is usually when content idea generation comes super fast and easy because you're working through actual things with clients now we have better tools than ever before to make use of those transcripts. And, and honestly, just in the last week, gang, this has changed so much with the availability of OpenAI's deep research coming to the ChatGPT team plan. Bless. I am, I am so excited. I've been using the, the ever loving crap out of Deep Research for so many things that are not even researchy. I can tell you in what I do, I've got an abundance of context, I.e. recordings of podcasts and YouTube videos and all that stuff. Uh, so for example, on my weekly newsletter goes out every Thursday, I think there's a link down in the show notes if you're not on it. What in the. Nevermind. Get okay, subscribe newsletter goes out every Thursday. At the top section of that newsletter, the, the hero, there's usually, you know, 500, 600 words on some topic that I think is important. Sometimes it'll be related to a video. This last week I wanted it to be about using Chat GPT for tax research because I think it's really important. That video is doing really well. It's been out for less than a week and we're pushing like 10,000 views on it. And I'm like, let's write the hero for the newsletter about this. So I go out, I download the transcript from the YouTube video. I put that in a chat GPT Deep Research. I attach the, the text, file the transcript. Here's what I do. I say using only this transcript, write me do a little 600 word write up, organizing it into numbered sections in a logical way. And I, I just send that off and it ask me some follow up questions. It says who's, who's the audience this is directed at? Do you want me to number it? Number the list the same way you did in the video. And I'm like, no, I want you to combine some of them because that's, that's going to be too long of a list. And you know what it comes back with is something really freaking good. And for all of the AI hyping I've done over the years, I have never been able to get excited about AI writing anything. And it's honestly has never really saved me any time at all. I think that just changed for the first time. Writing for sure, I can get you unstuck and give you ideas it can help you outline, but the actual writing never used it for that. Deep research, it's, it's on another level because it does such a good job of sticking to context. And you don't have, you probably don't have 400 episodes of a podcast that you can, you can summon and use all that context, but what you do is you meet with people all the freaking time and you've got meeting transcripts probably coming out of your ears and those are such rich sources of context. But until two weeks ago, we arguably didn't have a tool powerful enough with the data protections that we needed to be able to actually do something with it. Because deep research first came out on ChatGPT's pro plan, and the pro plan doesn't come with data protections. Basically, unless you do this kind of complicated opt out, your prompts are trained into the model and if I've got a meeting transcript with a client, there's all sorts of sensitive stuff in there that I don't want getting trained into a model. And now I can do that. On the ChatGPT team plan, they give you 10, 10 free deep researches a month, which isn't much. And unfortunately that's the only like fully secure way to use deep research right now. And this, this may even change by the time you're out of busy season. Maybe we'll have a way to get more access to it, but it's only possible if you capture so this is the time where it's super, super important important to be capturing that stuff that you can circle back to later. Those meeting transcripts are just absolute legal. This episode is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing who help you find talented accounts in the Philippines. One of the fastest growing trends in small firm running. Honestly, ask around. Ask in the comments. Ask folks you meet on social media. A huge number of people have started doing this in the past year or two. Not just accounting firms, tax firms as well. Yes, I, I understand with US tax you got 7216 disclosures and that's not a reason to not offshore, it's a reason to disclose totally manageable ways to navigate that thousands of firms are doing so world's getting smaller and honestly, it's never been harder to find folks that are excited about doing accountants onshore. Now does this change how you build your Org chart out a little bit. It does, but I was, let's see, I was on a meeting with 22 two other sub million dollar firms, tax firms specifically. And the prompt was, what's the best thing you've done this year? A couple different people called out hiring in the Philippines for the first time and they were super happy with the people that they'd found. Cloud account staffing's background. They were an accounting firm. They started hiring themselves. Folks in the Philippines hired some recruiters over there to do that directly and now they help other firms do the same thing. Simple as that. That's something you want to explore. Have a conversation with me. You got nothing to lose. Learn more about cloud account staffing down in the show notes. Oh, this episode is actually sponsored in part by, by Ramp, who I'm a Ramp user. I really am. My business actually runs on Ramp. It is a super, super solid spend management platform, which is a phrase that they made up because they can't call themselves a bank. So they're not a bank. But like spend hygiene and getting our clients onto better banking I think is it's a really, really a big opportunity right now. And it's one of those things where we don't necessarily like interject ourselves to say like, oh no, we should be opinionated with how you manage your money. But then you see like what a headache is to track down receipts across your team for just getting the month end close done. You see stuff like people passing around the office card where the numbers get stolen every nine months. Like gang, there is a solution for this, a way, way better way to do this stuff. We've done a couple Demos on my YouTube channel now for Ramp. I would recommend you check those out because you may not even be thinking about like, I don't even, I don't even know what quote unquote, spend management or a good version of this looks like. Give it a look. Solves a whole bunch of headaches, is like the responsible thing to do. Like if you run a small business, I'm thinking like put this information in front of your clients. If you do any type of bookkeeping, it can be a big old workflow hack to, to make your life easier too. Learn more about Ramp. Check out those videos on the YouTube channel or the link down in the show notes. Okay, number five, book the meeting to follow up when you go and talk to a software vendor at a conference. The big complaint that those folks always have is when I talk with the people at the conference like that the vendors have the Vendors complaint is when I talk to people at the conference, they seem so excited about what we do, but then I try to follow up with them after the show and it's just crickets. I can't get them to commit to anything. So oftentimes that like what, what they really, really try to do is their success metric becomes booked calls that are then actually followed through on. It's not how many people can I talk to, it's not even how many email addresses I can get. It's usually booked calls. Because there's for whatever reason, a, a different level of likelihood that you'll follow through with someone if that actually happens. And if you talk with the client about doing something or circling back to some point, just be like, want to just put some on the calendar right now so we make sure it happens. Like, I don't know why that forcing function is necessary, but you know, it, it, it makes a difference. And if it's with a client, I would actually argue even you could even do this with a staff member. But I would argue if you take the initiative to say, like, I agree this is important. If you take the initiative to say, let's put this on the calendar right now, I think that actually that means something to that person. Like it's. It. It is a confirmation that you're actually taking it seriously. But I think they'll appreciate that. Number six, similar to the capture point, have a, have a place where your team can dump all of their notes through busy season, from the goods to the bads to the positive client things to the negative client things. It's another thing. It's one thing for you to capture what's front of mind for you. It's another thing to capture what's front of mind for your team for whatever reason. It's kind of like having a kid where like there's this evolutionary thing that just blocks out those months of your life that just like somehow they just disappear. Otherwise you would never bear another child. Busy season, it's funny, kind of works the same way. And a couple months outside of busy season, those things will seem like not as big of a deal as maybe they are right now, but you know when they feel like an even bigger deal is when you get to the exact same thing next year. And now you're twice as annoyed because you're kicking yourself you didn't do anything about it, or your team member is, is doubly angry because you didn't do anything about it when they told you about it last year. Sure. To capture that stuff, because that stuff, while it does escalate and it can feel disproportionately significant. The, the reality is somewhere in the middle. It's, the solution is not just forgetting about it three months down the road. It's probably not as big of a deal as it feels like in the moment, but the reality is something in the middle. So let's capture it and do something about it. Number seven, don't like build yourself to this extreme sort of drop off deadline thing. I made this mistake early in my career and the most healthy deadlines I ever had later in running the firm, I was, I was working the day after the deadline because I didn't kill myself to get there. There's something about just absolutely going to the max to the point where you drop dead on the deadline. And I had a number of those years I had a, I had a firm that I worked with where we were doing, were doing 100 hour weeks pretty much from the last week of March. And that's, that's not an exaggeration, that is in the office, but in a chair. 1105 was where most of us would come in for the last two or three weeks. And that is like hardly have enough time to go home and bathe level of work. And all you can think about when you're doing that is the deadline. That's, that's the only thing you can think about. And there's something psychological about getting to that deadline and just dropping debt. Like it is an incredible drug. Like I do think there's something about this that is a drug for folks where you take the satisfaction from just working yourself to the core because it feels so good to be on the other side of it. The problem is all of the things that you, you give up and sacrifice along the way, but the other thing that that causes is you end up slipping a whole lot of obligations right after the deadline as well. And in an age where winning and, and clients being happy to work with you is as simple as being polite and being reliable. I found for me, like calling a client the day after the deadline, like working half days for the next week, something like that. It was actually less stressful for me because I could keep getting some of those things off of my plate rather than just going off a cliff after that deadline and being like, oh, it's so nice to not be working. But the reality is I'm not relaxed. Like if I take off for a week, I'm in no way relaxed because there's so many things that I just pushed off that I now have to get back into. I'm also, I'm almost jumping back into another busy season and my nervous system is just completely fried. If you zoom out, you know, think, think about the business and what your job in is in it. If you are a firm owner, it might look day to day like doing all of the work, but your most important job is managing that client list, figuring out where we're going to get the next client who will pay us better. Like, like that is it. As much as we love to geek on workflow and think about tools and tech and, and all of those notes that we capture are about how to improve our systems. As fun as that is, that's not ultimately what leads to a successful firm. Like do you need to be able to turn out work in a consistent way? You do, but if you got crappy clients, it doesn't matter how you turn out work. If I got clients that'll pay me 10x, I can be, I can be very efficient. I can hire more people to do the work. And if we are just like so intensely focused on that deadline and pushing ourselves too hard, we don't have that perspective. When busy season is the ultimate time to drive the factors that will like greatly impact the health of the business. Okay, last one, number eight. The way that I prefer to do post deadline is change of scenery work. So working somewhere else, go to somewhere nice, maybe take your spouse, work half days, work somewhere else. Because there's something about working in the same environment every day where you end up in the same headspace every day. And until you're in a different headspace, oftentimes you can't escape that same sort of tunnel vision that you have when you're just kind of coming back to the same thing every single day. It feels a little bit like a vacation. It helps you also manage the stress that at least I would have from going from 100 to 0. This is what works for me. Maybe, maybe the best thing for you is like fully turning the brain off and going doing and doing something else. But for me that just created more stress. If I'm going to go on a vacation, it's actually not going to be right after a deadline. It's going to be like further into the year or even earlier in the year when things, when there's not a huge volume of work going on. But I have, it would be really hard for me to go off a cliff and then just like totally shut, shut the brain down. This can be the, the, the best Time to like zoom out and get tactical. Because you are so close to your biggest constraint in a firm, which is like, when is workflow at its volume peak? You know, everybody's got ups and downs throughout the year. But your constraint in terms of how you staff up the firm and all that, it probably comes down to a single time of the year when you've got the most work to push through. Immediately after that, it's all front of mind. You remember it with much greater detail and clarity than you will any other time during the year. And that's part of what would stress me out if I totally clocked out. As I'm like, I've got all these things in my head right now that I need to somehow put into a framework or somehow capture. That's how I bounce back from a deadline that'll look different for everybody, depends on life circumstances and all that. That for me that's like spending time with the kids and stuff like that, but not going a hundred percent off. Super not popular advice. Trying to not lose perspective when they're. We're in the heat of busy season. If there's one like instant win you can get right now, it's hitting pause and setting expectations with clients because, because that really is the thing that stresses you in busy season. It's not the work not going out the door fast enough. It's my fear that it will not go out fast enough for the client's expectation. So if you can, if you can take a couple hours to send these emails out and be generous with the time you allow yourself, set the expectation of when the client will hear from you next. Like get on a weekly cadence, relaxing those expectations, many of, many of which are perceived or projecting onto the client. They think we're going to do this for them in this timeline. And oftentimes when they ask for a status checkup, we, we, we perceive that as well, they want their stuff now. And they're like, no, they're actually probably just afraid that you forgot about them because they haven't heard anything in a few weeks. So getting that, like getting proactive with that communication, you'll find people give you a lot of grace as long as they know that you haven't forgotten about them. And if they just feel like there's a plan and if you can navigate that busiest season without out all that undue pressure, it is a, it's a much more reasonable way to get through that system where you, you've still got your head up and you can, you can take advantage of opportunities that arise because people don't think about you all year round. Usually this is an opportunity to have some conversations you wouldn't otherwise have. And also to, like, I don't know, not run yourself into the ground, not. Not let it be this incredibly stressful few months. Easier said than done, I know, but I know you can do it. Okay. Hang in there. Thanks for coming and hanging today. We'll see you in the next one.