480 13 Brutal Truths to be a Better Accounting Firm Owner

Go. Warn you right now, you're either going to. You're either going to love this episode or you're going to hate it. Okay, today we're talking more frameworks for you as an entrepreneur. How do you find success and satisfaction in what you do? Because the age old. Do you work harder? Do you work smarter? The problem with working harder is somebody, somewhere, I guess they will win that game, right? Like somebody will work harder than anybody else and they quote, unquote, win. But do you really want to be that person? But the same is true of working smarter than. Because if you don't work harder, if you don't outwork the other people, you gotta be smarter than everybody else. And I can tell you I'm not. And you probably aren't either. So not working hard assumes everybody you're up against is a bunch of dummies. So today we're talking about, we're just getting really real. How do you work harder and how do you work smarter? Giving you my 13 best ways to do both, specifically through the lens of running an accounting firm. Let's do it. The most simple distillation of the value of doing both comes down to like I. We could boil it down to just this. Comparing the generalist accounting firm to the accounting firm trying to serve a specific type of entrepreneur. If you're a general accounting firm, if you want to be the best at that, you got to outwork everybody building general firms, and you got to be smarter than all of them. Whatever that equation is, whether you multiply those two things, add them together, I don't know. But to run a better general firm than anyone else, exceptionally hard to run a better firm for beekeepers, for taxidermists, for creative agencies that make between 2 and 5 million dollars a year and are tired of having to manage their back office, being the smartest and hardest working person in that domain, much easier, right? You say the same about social media. Your posts standing out, rising to the top, how to read a balance sheet versus how to read a balance sheet for phlebotomists. That bar is vastly lower for how hard you have to work and how smart you have to be. So before we get into the actual tactical things of how to do these better, make sure you're setting yourself up for a game that you can actually win. I run a podcast about running accounting firms. There's quite a few podcasts in our space now, but not very many specifically about how to run a better, more sustainable, more profitable accounting firm. If I zoomed out and ran a Podcast about professional services businesses or service businesses in general or, or entrepreneurship. That's a lot harder. I don't know that I'm capable of that. And if you look at me and you're like, oh, Jason, you could totally do X, Y, Z. Maybe I, maybe I could. There's some potential. I could. But I know this. I can do well, right? I'm playing a game that I'm. I'm pretty sure that I can win. And a lot of us right now, we might be working hard, we might be smart, but the game that we're playing is one that's like, yeah, but how many other people are playing that game? That's always going to be a tough one to win. Okay, let's get into it first, seven ways to work harder. And this might surprise you because I'm not like sweaty work hard guy. I'm not the guy that's like, in your 20s, you should be putting in 80 hour weeks. But the reality is hard work, like it is a necessary ingredient. So let's get into it. Number one, my favorite ways, best ways to work harder. Number one, find the thing that you love that nobody else does. I think it's naval that framed it as like, what's the thing that it doesn't feel like work to you but feels like work to everybody else. The best example I have of this is me making videos. Before COVID I had never made a video in my life. I was like silly and loved making like sort of creative things and jokes and stuff like that. But I was not a video guy. And I started very humbly making very simple videos. And then over time they got more involved in all that. But While running a 40 person accounting firm, the last 18 months, I put out two videos a week on YouTube and, and at the end of that 18 months, I had 500 subscribers. Nobody was watching. Who in their right mind would do that? And how did I keep doing that while running an accounting firm? While, by the way, having a second child less than 12 months after I had my first child? Yeah, no, that. That guy was running from something, wasn't he? No, it wasn't. The bad things are good, huh? Could have sworn I heard my wife. No, that worked for me because I learned that video and kind of make it silly but helpful things. That was something that I super enjoyed. I could do that at night. I could do that late into the night and I would enjoy it. That's not the case for most people. Right? That is something that would feel like a chore, feel like work for everybody else, but not for me. There's some sort of combination of it being a fun, creative outlet to me, being a youngest third child and this just giving me the attention that I always needed. Right. Like, let's be real, that's an ingredient. I like to joke when I give talks. I have a joke. Or like, I may be talking about my family or something like that. And I'm like, I was a third child, I was a youngest child. And I know you're like, I mean, we were pretty sure. We were. We're pretty sure that that was the case. Jason, I found a thing that doesn't feel like work to me as much as it does for everybody else. And that gives me the ability to work harder at it than other people can. Number two, delegate things in your personal life just like you do your business life. Time is time. That is something they don't always tell you when you go out into business yourself. So. So if landscaping doesn't bring me closer to my wife or my children, then I shouldn't be doing it. I'm trading the low leverage business of the landscaper for high leverage opportunities that I could be doing instead. We can, like, pride ourselves in not asking help in so many ways, both in the business context and also in the personal context. But there's something about the personal context too, where people are even a little slower to delegate things. Because my dad mode is lawn. Usually it usually comes down to some example you have around you or how you want the people around you to perceive you. The reality is time is time. So number three, we need to have greater agency over our own time because obviously that time is all we have. That means canceling meetings that are pointless meetings. Don't respond to emails where you don't need to be the person to respond. The majority of us, 90% of the emails that we send somebody else could have sent. There's very few things that land in our inbox that requires the joie de vivre that is specific to you. I know you didn't think we were going to be getting into French today, but we will be the one to respond to the email because of social convention or that's what we've always done in the past. We got to audit all of the ways that we spend our time to ensure that we're spending it on the right things. Number four, you got to get your house in order, man. You got to set your priorities. What are the non negotiable things that rise to the level in your life of deathbed importance and, and the whole, like, what do you think on your deathbed sort of thing, like, it's a little bit conflated because on your deathbed you wish you had everything you do. And that, like, that's human nature. Like, I wish I could have done this other thing, this. This other thing a little more. And it's like, well, of course you do, but you didn't, because you did this other thing in the moment. And had you done this thing you're thinking about, you wouldn't have done that other thing. But by and large, the people in your life, those are the things that are going to be most important to you, more so than the work. I will say, the things you regret on your deathbed, I mean, you're not regretting them long, right? You got that going for you. It's probably pretty terrible life advice, but you got to get your house in order to, like, make sure. Like, with my wife, what is an acceptable volume of travel and what isn't. I'm headed into eight live events over four weeks. About half the time I'll be home. About half the time I'll be on the road. I don't just, like, yolo my way into that and hope everything will be okay. Definitely times where I've done that in the past. But you'd really have to decide for yourself, like, what's the level to which I'm going to be there? And spending time with whoever that is in your life or on whatever things you need to in your life, whether that is service stuff, spiritual stuff, until you decide, like, what the right amount is there for this sort of season of your life, then you can't respect that when it comes to working more. And oftentimes that means work ultimately pushes all that other stuff out. But then ultimately work ends up paying the price for those things that you push out, too. And that's where you end up with a host of regrets. So getting the house in order, understanding what the deal is, which is easier said than done, like, to have sort of this existential dread over what is the right answer, because it's so much easier when you work for somebody else and you can blame them for the time you don't have. Well, I could have gone to that cello recital, but I had to go do this, that, and the other thing, work. When you work for yourself, you could spend the entire day with. With your kids on that oil painting, playing with your cats. Theoretically, you could spend the entire day on that and everything would probably be fine. So how do you. How do you draw the line. And what most of us go to is, well, what did my parents do? And so we're trying to like incrementally do a little bit better than our parents did, when at the same time we're probably messing up in different ways that our kids will then be like, well I'm never going to be a narcissistic Internet personality like my father was. It is. It's very hard to get to what is the right answer for that. But we have to. Otherwise working more is going to push that stuff out. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub, the practice management system that delivers WOW seasons year round, not busy seasons. Seasons that will dazzle your clients for two reasons. One, ClientHub is drop dead simple, man. If you're too tired of a practice management system that just feels like you gotta have a PhD in learning something new, Client Hub. You hop in, the vibes are great, it just all makes sense. But two, remember there's a second reason ClientHub offers a game changing client experience that is you can actually get clients to like collaborate with you and be helpful on the platform. Cause the portal wasn't this like afterthought. Bolt on now. Very cool. Recent development in Client Hub Magic Books Review Twinkle sounds so ClientHub syncs in the transactions from your QuickBooks file. You can run an AI analysis on it like from inside of Client Hub. It'll highlight any potential issues you can mark like on the balance sheet in the P and L you mark each account one by one, whether or not it's been reviewed. But if you want to troubleshoot, it'll pull you straight back into QuickBooks. Like you don't have to learn like a whole new troubleshooting tool. If you'd rather sort that stuff out in QuickBooks. Other cool stuff it'll identify automatically expense inconsistencies, purchases without a payee, purchases in parent accounts. Why is why can we not disable that in QuickBooks? Large transactions, new accounts, new vendors, new customers. It's Magic Books review inside of Kleinhub. I think you might like it. Learn more about ClientHub. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Verdo Here's a hard truth Incoming Oof Bomb. If you're still managing your own IT relying on generic IT guy, you could be non compliant with FTC safeguard rules, IRS Pub 4557 and WISP requirements. That's exposure you don't need. But enter Barados Barrett Guard Barrett Guard Can I get some feedback on that? No. Okay. Barrettguard gives firms fully managed it that's purpose built for compliance. That means your systems are monitored, patched, protected, and documented continuously. Over 1400 accounting firms rely on Verido to stay audit ready. Gang, the reason we're actually talking Verido here. Can I go off script? About six months ago, I put out a post on social media and I said, oh, first party hosting from the usual characters you've heard of. Not great. What's everybody using? What do you like? And I saw a level of love and fandom from Barado, and I'm like, hang on, why is everybody so enthusiastic about like a hosting provider? I mean, don't get me wrong, that's it's important. And Silverado, they have had a place in my recommendations ever since then because firms are just like, do it. You won't regret it. Whether it's. I'll assert Drake QuickBooks Desktop, they speak your language because they work with a bunch of other accounting firms. Okay. To schedule a free consultation just to learn more. What do you got to lose? Check out the link down in the show notes number five. Build around habits, not goals. There is like no destination to all of this stuff. I know very, very people, very, very few people. And a lot of people are like, well, my number is this, and if I can just get there, I'd shut it down. Some people actually think that a very small percentage of those people, when they get there, that will actually be the case. Look at, I mean, there's so many people out there who, they will have this windfall and they have 12 months, and oftentimes before they even hit 12 months, they're already like dabbling in new stuff. And before you know it, they're right back into the next thing. That's for me, always been the problem with goals. Like, I use goals as, as a framework for sort of designing the habits in my life and the things I do every day and every week. But the goals beyond that are, are pretty negotiable because when those goals get too extreme, like we stake too much on that payoff, I think. And the payoff oftentimes, like it's just a new goal. I also think those big, super, super important goals, oftentimes we set them to prove something to someone who doesn't give a hoot about you. Like, why do you want to build a firm of excise like that sort of driving like Rocky Balboa? What's that thing inside of you that's just like, mom, I'm just going to satisfy this. Usually that's coming from trying to prove something to somebody, which is an awful way to spend your time and attention because when you get there, I'll let you know they're not going to give you a call and be like, nice job, because they don't give a hoot. You've proven something to yourself, but oftentimes, like, it's the people that actually care about you that pay the price for you proving that. Okay, number six, don't be afraid to follow like your energy for work. We're talking about ways to work harder here, and not all hours are made the same. And one of the gifts of entrepreneurship that can also be a trap is kind of the shiny object getting distracted, trying to do too many things. But, like, the balance of that is also having the ability to work on that thing that is like, that you're hot about. And for example, for me right now, there's a YouTube video that I need to write and shoot today. But I'm way more excited about this podcast idea and it's going to create some workflow issues in the team. But the work product's going to be better if I do this right now because this is just where my energy's at when you're jazzed about that thing. And this is also comes back to like, the importance of crafting your role and the people around you to take the soul sucking stuff off your plate. But when you're like operating in that, in that lane of what you're just super juiced on right now, you are wildly more productive than you are doing anything else, that's going to feel like a slog. That is, that's working harder. It really is. It's working harder. But it doesn't have to feel like toil. Going back to the first point of finding the thing that you love that nobody else does. Like, that's kind of the goal here. There are, at the end of the day, there are only so many hours in a day. During different seasons of life, you will have different volumes of hours that you can commit to things. And so those constraints are the constraints. So how do we make the most of what we can, like, in those life circumstances? That's probably by. By those hours being more efficient hours than the hours you spend just grinding. Okay, last one, Number seven. Get back to the fundamentals, man. Sleep eight hours a night, for goodness sakes. Quit eating crap and exercise every day because your brain needs it if you want to optimize every single hour in the day. And get the most out of it. And this isn't just work stuff. This is optimizing every hour you do on the other stuff, the non work stuff too. You better believe you're going to turn up better for your family, for your church, for the, the charitable organization you do stuff with. You're going to turn up better in every hour you spend in those areas. When you just got yourself together, when you slept last night, when you're not hungover. Everybody wants the shortcuts, they want the hacks, they want all of these ideas and, and then they'll get four and a half hours of sleep because they were up too late watching Netflix. Like until you've got those foundational things, the other stuff isn't going to work. You're going to be overthinking things. You're not going to have like any sort of clarity of thought. You got to know the basics. I get teased for wearing two watches and I shared this on my newsletter a couple months back. I wear a whoop w h o o p whoop. It's like a CrossFit nerd sort of thing is what it originated from. But it's the only health tracking stuff that's actually impacted my behavior versus just shaming me. The the way it measures sleep and quality of sleep has fundamentally changed how I structure my day. Like I no longer eat less than three hours before I go to bed. I try, I eat better stuff in general because I've seen the impact of bad food versus good food and how much that hurts my sleep. I've almost completely stopped drinking alcohol. It sucks, man. I've stopped drinking fluids less than two hours before I go to bed because I'm old and gotta get up to go potty. And I know now just how much that hurts the quality of my sleep. I say potty because I have kids, man. I was in a staff meeting. This is when I was running a 40 person firm. And at this point I had three kids under the age of five and for I was there was like a blanket or something and I said the word blankie in front of 40 middle aged accountants. And I never lived that down. And I already had enough problems with being like I'm like 32, 33 years old. These folks are all my senior. Never live that one down. Okay? That was seven ways to work harder. There's no such thing as only being able to work smarter unless everyone else that you're working like that you're up against are dumb. And they probably aren't. But similarly, I don't just want to outwork everybody. That also sounds like it sucks. So we gotta do both. Here we go. The six best ways to work smarter. Number one, steal ideas from everyone else. Stop reinventing the wheel, for goodness sakes. This is, I mean, I talk about this a lot. This is the single biggest thing that most accounting firm owners do wrong is they don't know anybody else that runs accounting firms. They don't look into any sort of thought leadership. Like, this is still 90% of the profession. They're not on social media trying to learn from anybody, from, you know, think boys like me to other firm owners that are sharing their journey. Like the, the arrogance to think that you're going to close yourself off from the rest of the world and have any sort of optimized approach. The reality of what happens is you spend a decade on something that could have otherwise taken you a year if you had just listened to what other people said and learned from other people's journeys. There really is nothing new under the sun. And for the first, probably 12 years of my career, I was too prideful to acknowledge this. I would lock myself in a room and do this stuff that I thought was really cool and novel. But I didn't know anybody else that did any of this stuff. So I didn't know what I didn't know. So I had a very simplistic sort of decision making framework for what to do and what not to do. Now, loads of ways to steal ideas from your peers. Listen to podcasts, curate who you follow, the folks that actually share useful, like nuanced stuff. Still, 80% of the thought leadership in our profession is put out by software vendors. That's not by and large nuanced, helpful stuff. It is education through the lens of selling you something. So curate who you're consuming. Don't get too caught up in it though. Like, there's definitely an element of consumption being a way of deferring action. It is not a replacement for doing stuff and learning by doing. But having that information is better than not having that information, as long as it's from the right sources. Make friends like. And I that this is the reason that my online community exists. Realize is it is in my opinion the fastest way for me to help you make at a minimum five new friends who run accounting firms in under 30 days. Like, that's something I can pretty much guarantee for you by joining my community. Like, if you think of all the things I've done over the last five years and all the things that I talk about, there's a reason that that is my only business. That is what people pay me for because that is what I am most passionate about. I don't sell like educational prod products or training or anything else like that. You being able to make friends who do this stuff and learn from your peers, that's better than a consultant. That's better than the ultimate framework for how to run your firm, any of that stuff. And I feel that way because for me, when I was running a firm that was the most impactful thing was having some friends who ran firms similar to my own, being able to bounce ideas off of them, learn from them along the way, meet some people that were ahead of me on the journey. The satisfaction of being able to help some people who are behind me on the journey, that was infinitely more impactful than any sort of coaching or anything else I ever could have had. I follow a lot of sort of influencers in different spaces to kind of learn how they do things, what works, what doesn't work, how they approach creating content and that sort of thing. There's a guy that does like sales trainings that's kind of one of the biggest folks online and they have all sorts of different sort of sales mastery courses and programs that they put people through. And this stuff like as a influencer product works really, really well because you're getting them to buy a thing that will immediately cause them to make more money, right? And so salespeople are commission based. The offer is pay me money and you're going to make 5x as much money, right? And you're now you're going to have this skill set and it's going to aid you for the rest of your life. Much better business model than my own. But they do loads of Instagram reels of just kind of day in the life of this guy going out and doing events and stuff like that. And he's fascinating because he's kind of a prick. But every time he bumps into someone who like recognizes him on the street or something like that, every single time he will say if, if they had gone all the way through his courses and his programming or not, he will say, you got to be committed to mastery, man. That's what it's called, like sales mastery. Something, every single conversation without exception would you got to be committed to mastery or the conversational end and the guy will leave and, and he'll be like, had he been committed to mastery two years ago when he was in that job, he'd be making a half million a year by now. Every single time without exception. And I'm so disgusted while simultaneously being envious. Imagine having that level of confidence in what you do for every conversation to be like, okay, well, if you're not buying my course, what's your plan to get there and explain to me how it's better than what I'm offering you right now? We, like, we need, all of us, we need to get to that level of confidence where we have something that we are that convinced is essential to someone's journey and it's going to turn people off. But I'm like, I myself, I'm getting better at having that level of conviction in the things that I do to where I can get closer to saying, okay, if you, like, are bought into the notion that your peers, the other people that run accounting firms, have more to offer you than any course or think boy or educator ever could, then what's your plan for having an incredible network of other firm owners? And how is it better than what I'm putting in front of you? Because I can tell you what I do. It's a whole lot cheaper than consultants. It's a whole lot faster and more safe and comfortable than going out and hanging out on social media and sending people DMs to make friends. And you certainly do all of that stuff. But there's examples of stuff like this in our business that are, like, sitting in front of us. And oftentimes we will wait years to do the thing where it's like, no, that seems like the solution rather than doing it now and finding out for yourself if it is or isn't. So that gets me to number two and the six best ways to work smarter pay for the shortcut. There's so many examples in my life where I would see something from a thought leader, from somebody else or something. I'm like, nah, that wouldn't work. And then four years later, I come all the way around and I'm like, oh, yeah, no, I'm just gonna do that now. And I wish I had done it four years ago. Right now there's a lot of examples of this where paying, you know, paying for that shortcut, maybe it won't work out. Maybe you won't get anything out of it. This is actually, I would say, a skill because there's a lot of naysayers out there who are trying, almost going out of their way to prove that something won't work. But you can have let, you know, let's say you drop, you know, five grand or 15 grand or whatever it is to Go to, like, an Alex Hermosi workshop in Vegas where they do a whole day thing for you, and like, Alex or later come out and do a Q and A at the end. So you're in a room of 40 entrepreneurs. Let's say you pay to go out and do that. You're sitting next to somebody else. You're getting the exact same programming for your business. Those two people can get wildly different levels of value out of the exact same thing. Right. You know, there's people in my life who just, like, refuse to be impressed or let themselves like something. You know, that person who hates every movie or this or that. And it's like, you look at that and you're like, buddy, I. I would rather choose to be happy. Like, I would rather let that thing make me happy. You get the same thing in the business world and learning and extracting value from things, and it's. I mean, it's just like, you know, sweaty, think boy kind of work culture where it's like, you gotta work X hours a day. And Alex Hermosi is a great example of this, where you may see a person like Alex Hermosi, and you're like, man, I'm. I'm a single parent. I am caring for one of my parents in my home right now. What I have the ability to do is different than what Alex Hermosi can do right now in his circumstances. And so at that point, do you look at that and do you walk away from it and you say, well, that's not relevant to me. Or do you adapt that to your circumstances? You find the wisdom in it and you pull out the stuff that's like, yeah, no, this actually could work through the lens of how I do X, Y, Z, or modified in this way. Those people, the people who can adapt that stuff to their circumstances, they're learning, they're getting value, while the folks that are, like, almost looking for a reason to dismiss it, they're not. I've increasingly become a believer in buying the shortcut, and it will not always pan out. Like, sometimes you will get into it and you'll realize, like, this isn't what I hoped it was, but is that a reason to never do that? Right? And we've had. I mean, there's. There's coaches in our space who charge, you know, $30,000 a month to work with an accounting firm owner. Is that worthwhile? Doesn't that feel astronomical? The answer is, oftentimes it is. Depends on your firm circumstances and all that. But if that can shave three years off your journey. If that can get you over a realization that otherwise would have taken you 24 months. And I can now get it in 60 days. Yeah, that's, that's worthwhile to me. Today's episode is brought to you in part by Team Up. Who helps you hire direct in the Philippines? What is hiring direct? Hiring direct means you own the relationship with that person. Person. You're not paying a middleman, a middle person. You're just paying the person that works for you. And that's all they do is work for you. It's, it's, they're an extension of your culture. It's no different than hiring somebody in another state. You're responsible for training them. They're just part of the squad now. Things to figure out the first time you're doing them. What does it look like? What? There are a number of things to work out. If you do tax work, you've got some disclosure requirements. But that's why pulling in someone like Team up where this is, is all they do is really helpful. In fact, team ups been around for 26 months. These are, these are real numbers. They've now placed 250 hires into firms. 98 bookkeepers, 98 bookkeeper slash accountants. 80 senior bookkeeper slash accountants. 42 tax accountants. 11 team leads slash managers. 10 EAs. They recruited for 135 firms. Oh, and 184 of those hires are still with the firms. That's fascinating. 184 out of 250 hire. That's a pretty good number. And Team Up's even got like a six month guarantee. Or if that person doesn't work out for the role that you had defined, they'll find you another person. Team Up. What they're really good at is direct hiring. If that's what you're looking to do, schedule a call with them at the link down in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by Missive. Missive is a platform for managing email in a team. And if you've heard me talk about email, you know we need to break down the silos where we all are managing our own email inboxes. Please. Email is the receiving bay of your accounting firm. Let's take the team approach. Okay, now Missive. Actually a huge percentage of Missive's users are accounting firms. Probably because most practice management systems these days, like with very few exceptions, their email implementation, like the client for sending emails, kind of sucks. But also outlook, awful place to manage team based inboxes. Missive, we talk about like building your org chart around pods and managing client groups and all that stuff. Missive will let you set up like email management the same way in pods. Everybody can have their own inboxes, but you can also share those inboxes well so people can help each other out. Cover for each other. Makes it way easier to delegate the work that's coming from those emails. Really cool platform. Some G2 reviews from actual accountants. It massively improved their workflow. Makes inbox management a dream. Fantastic tool for my busy accounting firm to manage multiple inboxes for clients. Missive is all caps. Amazing and I can't live without it. If you are wasting too much time on email man, give Missive a look more info down in the show notes. Okay, number three Ways to work smarter. Don't suffer underperforming clients and team members. Two firm owners who have the exact same team in the exact same client list. Everybody's got ABC and the clients and ABC and the team members. Both your clients and your team members can be coached to get to a different place. So this doesn't mean that we're just like cut and bait. But one firm owner, it may take them three years to do that coaching or they may never do that coaching. The other firm owner, it could take three months. We want to be the three month firm owner. How many things have you known that you needed to do for years and you finally did it and you're like, feels good. Wish I would have done that years ago. Being the three month firm owner where you're willing to do that stuff quicker, that is like that benefits you in a compounding way because you're learning faster, you're getting to the next more valuable mistake or hard decision faster. And like, don't do this in a cavalier way. Usually the right way to do this is to have a more explicit improvement plan and put people on it faster. But then when they don't meet it, you hold them accountable. And it's one of those things where when you look at it and you think about it, it seems scary because it's ambiguous. But the more you can dig into it and make it very, very explicit, here are the expectations and when you don't meet them, here's the process for how to get you back on track. When you can get really explicit about that stuff, it takes the fear out of it and everyone actually appreciates it because there's total clarity on expectations there. And then if you do have to cut bait, it shouldn't be a surprise. Like that is the worst way to cut somebody is when you're mad for six years and then you pull the trigger and they're surprised. Right. We don't want to do that. Okay, number four, best ways to work smarter. Get out from behind your desk. Your world won't change oftentimes in meaningful ways when you're sitting in the exact same place that you do every other day. So this is conferences, this is retreats. It's cool to build virtual relationships with new folks that are your peers and all that, but it's an entirely different level of cool when you can do that stuff in person. Most of the biggest brain transformational moments that we have are in these different settings. So then why don't we do them more? You know, when's the last time you went on a trip with other accounting firm owners? Have you ever even done that? Oh, doesn't that. I mean, did that idea kind of give you the tingly a little bit? Yeah, that could be a thing. It probably should be a thing. Yeah. You know that, right? Like, there's a very good likelihood that something like that could change your life. And there's a world where you could organize that 60 days from now. Do it, man. Let's think bigger. Number five, focus on the higher leverage work. And that's probably not client work. Client work kind of by definition is the lowest leverage thing that we can do when we're doing it ourself. We're blocking someone else from our team from being able to do it and them upskilling themselves in the process. The nature of professional services work is we're doing this all behind closed doors. And you could be the very best person in the world at this thing, but no one will ever know it. And oftentimes that client may not even necessarily appreciate it. And like, my heart goes out for the technicians here who are the people that just want to do the work. And that is the vast majority of accountants, because we go through school being taught how to do the work, and then we go to work for somebody else only ever doing the work, and then we have the courage to go out and do it for ourselves. And the job is to not do the work. That's hard. And some people never. I. I shouldn't say evolve from that. I shouldn't say escape from that, because it's. It's actually, I would say, okay to go out on your own and be a technician. And a lot of people like to dunk on that and be like, well, you don't have a business, you have a job. And to that I'd say that's probably a better job than the job I had when I worked for somebody else. And that that boils down to like how much do you hate the other stuff? Do you really not enjoy having to have hard client conversations and all the sort of admin that comes with running your own business? There's a world where you can absolutely go out and be your own technician and do client work. Just know that that's going to come with some trade offs. If your goal is to scale impact, scale impact happens from moving your focus to higher leverage stuff that's building your team, that's running a webinar. Instead of taking that next phone call. If three people get on that webinar, that was more valuable than the phone call in all likelihood. But think of all the reasons why we don't do the webinar. What if nobody comes? What if I look them? If you look at your calendar right now and all the tasks that you're going to do over, you know, these eight hour blocks the rest of the week, what's the percentage of time that's going into high leverage tasks versus the percentage of time that's going into low leverage tasks? Responding to client emails, getting that client project out the door yourself rather than helping another member of the team do it. For the vast majority of us, like 90, if not a hundred percent of our time is going into low leverage work. And I'm, I'm fully red pilled on this because I went through the whole evolution of like I was the technician, I was a staff in this firm, I bought the firm while still having a one and a half million dollar practice myself that I had to manage inside of a larger $5 million practice. How do you do both those things? Well, you don't, you don't do them well. And ultimately I got myself fully out of the client work and that was hard. And I let some clients down and there were some mistakes I made that I could have done that better. But on the other side of that, having that time and being able to be the person that was out of the client work and have a different perspective than the rest of the firm. I mean that, I mean that got us through Covid that, that unlocks so many things for the, for the firm. Our, our client list turned over a huge percent because we basically over doubled prices over the course of two or three years. Like that firm was in a completely different place as a result of me being able to focus on those things instead of me giving in to the idea that well, I could just keep working really hard and that was doing my best I could. I know I'm working 90 hour weeks and I'm working more than anybody else around me. So I'm doing all that I can. That one hurt, didn't it? I mean that would even hurt me as I said it. Going to need a cigarette after this one. Okay, I think we're on the last one. Number six, how to work smarter. Upgrade the team who supports you. This was a big one for me. Buying out a traditional firm with like four or five partners, which by design then doesn't have any middle management layer. It's just all the, all the partners kind of managing their own fiefdoms. When you consolidate that down to two partners, me and my partner, and then I got out of client work so it was really almost like only one partner was doing client facing stuff. Then you have this huge void in the middle for management and for folks that can be a filter to the rest of the business for me and support my team more directly. Because if there's 40 people there working for you and they report up to one person or two people, that is madness, absolute madness. And you're not giving those people what they need. Like you just can't have that many direct reports. And so I over time valued having fewer and fewer direct reports and higher and higher level people that reported direct to me. And that is a really big factor in how important are the problems that will filter down to you today. Because oftentimes we get stuck with the stuff where it's like I really have, you're telling me I have 40 people that work for me and I'm the one that has to solve this problem. I oftentimes the answer is no. If you're a swooper, you like to come in and save the day. The reason that problem came to you this time was because you were the one that solved it last time. And them sending it to you is a whole lot easier than them doing it themselves. So there's for sure like right and wrong ways to do this. But if you look at your org chart, there's a lot of accounting firm org charts that are just designed to keep you from ever doing any sort of deep work or get out of the minutiae. And so for the answer for many of us may be spending more on that next person to help you than you've ever had to spend before hiring someone who's not a technical person. Like at a certain point you got to hire something more than a senior accountant or a senior tax manager to make your life easier. And maybe it's doing that for the first time, like figuring out how do I build like an executive team around me for the first time. And maybe those people aren't even client facing. If the goal here is to work smarter, it means your job is to work on the biggest brain opportunities, problems, freeing yourself from like the minutia that can eat up your day so fast. That's my take on the work harder versus work smarter stuff. You gotta do both. But also be sure that the game that you're playing is one that you can actually win. Some spicy takes today, right? You got any thoughts? Drop that stuff down in the comments. Great example of paying for a shortcut. Obviously I plugged my community pretty hard in this episode. That's realize RLZ IO will get you connected with a whole bunch of peers who run accounting firms. It is. It's absolutely transformational and costs about a twentieth of what a like actual consultant or coach would cost you. But upcoming live events. I bring these up at the end of every podcast because I want to see when person manage the best next four events I got coming up. They're about AI adoption in your accounting firm. If this is a thing that's been looming over you, how do I get my team up to speed on this? How do I get up to speed on this? Here you go. Here's your shortcut. It is a paid event. It might not be near you, so you might have to fly out to it. But about half the people on the guest list so far, they're literally flying out to it, bringing their teams to it. It's a great example of a shortcut and it'll be a good hang. Coming up first is Los Angeles. That's next Monday, July 14th. Two days later, we're in Denver. July 16th. The next week, July 22nd in Chicago. Later that week, July 25th in Atlanta, Georgia, it'll be me. It'll be Chadwick Von Davis, enthusiast and Canadian heartthrob Twyla Verhelst and some other big brain folks from Zero Carbon CEO will be there. It'll be a lot of fun. We'd love to see you there. And gang, thanks for coming Hanging. I'll see you in the next one.