490 I Wish Someone Had Shown Me These 6 Shortcuts

I just love what we're talking about today. It is the shortcuts that have like 30 year old firm runners developing a, like more ahead of the curve model for how to run a firm than folks that have done this for decades. It's the, the thing that in like two years time took me from being just another person in the firm to being a total know it all in a constructive way that like turned around our 80 year old firm. Because these days in 2025, there is more information out there on the web, there's easier access to your peers, more templates, frameworks, all that out there for run a better firm than there's ever been before. And it means, buddy, you don't have to reinvent the wheel yourself today. I want to give you five shortcuts, just massive shortcuts that turn a decade into two years, that accelerate everything about building your accounting firm. Because the thing you're trying to build yourself and figure out, it's already out there sitting on a shelf waiting for you to grab it and make it your own. Here we go, five things. Let's do it. Shortcut number one. I don't know how to tell you this, but while it's possible that you were the very first person to figure this out or find this new app that nobody else is using, or stumble into this just novel approach, it's infinitely more likely that the real reason nobody else is doing that thing is that there's a better way. I, I spent probably a decade on this. I was like the guy, like hustling in my garage, like, I'm so smart, I'm so smart. I just figured out this cool novel thing. But at the time, I had no network, I had no perspective of anything outside of my own firm. And the reality of what I was doing was running on this hamster wheel trying to do something unique or novel. And this is like, there's a element of pride from this as well, where it's like, no, I got to make my own thing. I want this to be mine. I want it to be different, I want it to be novel. In fact, you look around at all the other traditional firms around you and you're like, I don't want to be like them. And so that makes you think you got to figure it all out yourself. When in reality what you need is to find the people who are working on the same things who were trying to do that thing a decade ago. It's infinitely harder and more risky to try to do something nobody else has done. And there's a possibility that you're the one person in the world that can do that. But I'm just going to play the odds game here and borrow from others. That's kind of the name of the game here is who can I borrow from? It doesn't mean I can't still make it my own. But this attraction to doing something that is a first of its kind or something like that, by and large it is a just a detour that ends up consuming a lot of time and creating headaches. The most common version of this that I see is, I mean almost every day I'll get an email from somebody that's like, hey, have you seen this app? This looks like just a better way to do X, Y, Z. And I'm like, I sure haven't seen that app before. I talk with thousands of accounting firms and not a one of them are using that app. And for some of us this is almost a reason to use it. And I think it's this pride of we found found something secret. We've got the secret sauce now that'll give us an advantage over everybody else. And I actually found in the process of putting together our practice management system recommendation tool, we've got this little like sort of workflow you can go through and in about five minutes get a tailored to you recommendation for what practice management system you you should use. I'll actually, I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you haven't used it yet. It's pretty cool. But part of that process it it has you provide what's the last practice management system you left? And so oftentimes the people who come to me with this tool that they don' see anyone else using, they're like, I think I'm onto something here. And very frequently it's a tool that I've actually seen a lot of people have left. And I'm like, no, the, the reason people aren't on that is there's something better, but maybe the landing page is more, more shiny. Maybe they've got this one feature that maybe it feels like all the other ones are missing. There was a time in my life where that was very attractive to me, the notion that I had found the secret. I think now I hope I'm smarter than that or can see through the likelihood that like 95% of the time there will be a reason for that. And as much as I want to be up like I'm better off like following what do I see other progressive firms using again, a blocker Here is like, if your only network is, say, other local firms around you, the bar for accounting firms right now is unbelievably low. And so you may not have another accounting firm in town that does anything remotely progressive, but that doesn't mean that progressive firms don't exist. Just means you got to look outside of that network, outside of that bubble to find the folks that are doing really cool stuff. Because I can tell you, like there are unbelievably smart people running really cool, really innovative firms. They're just, it's just probably not going to be the firm across the street. Biggest example of where I where I went wrong on this. Choosing the wrong practice management system. I wasted 14 months and a whole lot of money picking a PM based on what the sales rep said rather than having a network of other firms that I could ask and get the real answer from. At that point in time, I had no network. I was making buying decisions based on landing pages and sales reps, not the way to do it. Talk with other folks to do this stuff. Shortcut number two, building that fully custom like 90% solution is a really big and costly lift as opposed to using the off the shelf 80% solution. And I'm speaking to my, my hardcore tech nerds, which I know there's a lot of folks into my stuff because that was, that was where my stuff started, was the hardcore tech stuff and around like building custom stuff in Airtable and Zapier and all that. And I could tell you, even in my firm running journey, while my heart was drawn to those things and I really enjoyed building them ultimately for my skillset, it was not a good use of my time. Understanding what can be built, that's valuable. But if I'm the firm owner and I run a team, my team need my time, my business needs my time, my zaps. That's not where my time should be going. Now there's agencies out there that you can hire to build this stuff and maintain this stuff for you because you shouldn't be the one playing software night janitor when that stuff breaks. But oftentimes we get really hung up on needing the software solution that will do a hundred percent when the reality is there is no tech stack that will do a hundred percent. I, I talk with folks quite a bit who will build completely custom things but then be trapped by those custom things. Oftentimes it's like one or two things they really, really wanted to do, but all the other tools on the market, they don't do it. Another example of this Is a lot of firms still manage the month end close entirely in Excel or entirely in Google sheets and they've got this process for like pushing that stuff out of the accounting ledger and how they kind of tie everything out and that's better than nothing. But the reality is like there's dedicated month end close automation tools that do all that stuff that get better every single week. And so we're competing with like we were going to hire a developer or something like that to build something custom for us. We're competing with entire teams and companies raising like tens of millions of dollars to build the very best version of this possible. But then we start down that path of building our own thing and then we have this sort of sunk cost fallacy where it's like, well, geez, well now we've got developers on the team that we have to keep busy and we've invested several years in this. And one thing I've learned about running businesses and it's the same as like is true of my media business now the focus of your organization will follow what jobs the people in that organization are doing. And so when I ran a cast practice, we had a whole bunch of low value bookkeeping projects where like I had all these high level people that I didn't want mired in bookkeeping stuff all day, but we had so many of those things that they had to just crank on that stuff all day long. And so all we ever talked about was like oh, month end close deadlines and just bookkeeping stuff that I couldn't charge very much for. I've shared the story before of how we outsourced a lot of the really low value stuff to bench through a bench partnership. And then what my team worked on was not the bookkeeping, but the last mile, the review and the delivery and the conversations with clients and the collective attention of the business was focused on a much more valuable thing. Similarly, if we're building all our own tech and we're having to have these conversations and people on your team are constantly talking to the people building that tech and your software is this ongoing negotiation and we can customize all these different things and all that that consumes some of the attention of your business rather than getting it back to the stuff that actually matters, like the stuff that is the reason I'm not building custom automations myself. It is how do I find the next client that will pay us more for doing the same work so that I can cut two legacy projects? Tech, as much as I love talking about it, in many ways It's a distraction from the less fun, more important things to the business. Shortcut number three for the workflow change you're considering, there's a shortcut out there. From sales scripts to content creation templates to QuickBooks Training Services to, you know, our service library template. The really cool thing about the Internet and more folks who are doing stuff like what I do a thought leadership online is these days information is free. Like, there's more free information out on the web about how to do all this stuff than there's ever been before. I mean, imagine somebody launching an accounting firm now and all the resources they have access to compared to somebody 10 years ago or 20 years ago. It's a completely different universe, right? That's awesome. That makes all this stuff more accessible. It helps people grow faster. But it also means if you're considering a change, don't feel like you got to build that whole thing yourself. This is like One thing that ChatGPT is incredibly useful for. Specifically ChatGPT deep research. Say, I'm thinking about how to build out an SOP for this specific thing and it will go out to all the corners of the web to find examples where other folks have discussed this thing online. And you will find like, you know, some Excel file that somebody on this bookkeeping forum in Ireland posted that's like, holy crap, this saved me a week of putting this together. And this can be my starting point. That stuff's out there. We got to make use of it. And remember, we don't really have to figure all this stuff out ourselves. We got to tailor that to what makes sense for you. But going like full soup to nuts, from scratch to your own totally custom thing is usually not the way to do it. Gang, we're coming down to the wire on a limited series of live events that I'm running in partnership with Canopy. By the way, this episode sponsored in part by Kanopy. We're running the events in Austin, in Dallas, in Minneapolis and in Boston. Super fun half day events. You're going to get a pile of cpe, some free lunch, fill that tum tum. I'm going to be doing a keynote, I'm going to be doing a Q and A at those. We're going to have something like 70 firms out hanging out. You're going to meet some other smart folks, we're going to get to hang, and you're going to lead with some new local friends. Nothing better than in person stuff. Like online stuff is great, but man, like in person stuff just lands totally different if you are anywhere near there, I would love to see you check out the links down in the show notes for all of those events and let me know if you're gonna make it. This episode is brought to you in part by Maker's Hub. Hot off the presses. We recently did a video on the main YouTube channel. If you've seen it yet, it's kind of like a masterclass for how to automate the accounts payable department. Soup to nuts from beginning to end. From how you wrangle all the bills to how you extract the goodies off the bills to how you get them through like an accounting approval that is making sure that the stuff on the invoice is correct and that the correct accounting codes are associated with every single item on a bill to payment approval. Which is completely different because usually a different group of people have the keys to the castle to be able to make payment. But because most systems combine those two approvals, you end up with like the person who can make payments approving like the factual stuff on the bill when it's like they may not even actually know whether that was invoice correctly or not clear through to like how payments get released, what accounts they're coming from, when they're going out the door. Super cool stuff. This is like the, the area of accounting that AI has most impacted is accounts payable. I did a load of AP management in my firm. Even if you don't do it, you got clients who do it. I would super recommend actually you share that video we just did with clients that are doing this stuff because it completely changes how you build your in house accounting team. But for you as the firm, if you do this work, it's, it's actually a big time opportunity right now. So get out there and do it. Learn more about Microsoft. Check out the link down in the show notes shortcut number four. And this was a big learning for me. The most real north star of what should I be trying to do is what the firms you respect do. And oftentimes the firms we should respect are not the super visible people. There's a lot of thought leaders, there's a lot of very visible firm runners that run awful firms. A lot of folks that get up on stage and talk at conferences and they're not someone that we should model how we run our firm after. But as you build a network of folks that you know and you're like, I could see what he's doing here and that looks cool that maybe not so much probably wouldn't do that the more of those relationships that you build. And this is. This is as simple as, like, showing up on social media every day. The more those conversations you have, the more you're like, oh, dang, that. That's real. I can see what they're doing there, and I want to tre in that direction because I can tell you, thought leadership from software companies, which is 90% of the education that you'll see out in the wild. That's not real. There's a lot of really good stuff there. Like, don't get me. Don't get me wrong, but it isn't real. You got people with marketing budgets trying to get eyeballs. Most of the folks going up and speaking at conferences. Why are they doing that? It's usually not even paid. It's almost always because they have something to sell, be it coaching or something else. And, like, there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, look at me. I'm a spineless Internet shill. You're just waiting for me to plug my community right now. Aren't you? The very best people to borrow ideas from and be like, yeah, that's the direction I want to go, is the real people running firms. Because that's. That's the most validated version of this. Right? Last shortcut number five is just committing to a different level of. I'll say mastery. I shared this. I shared this story. I can't remember the guy's name. I shared this a couple of weeks ago. He does, like. He's like a sales influencer, and he has this program people can go through that he calls service mastery or no, sales mastery. And so, you know, you buy the courses and all that stuff, and you're. He says, committed to mastery. And there's all these. I love watching this stuff on Instagram because a lot of it is so cringe, and it's a lot of, like, day in the life following him around. Just bought a Aston Martin, all these different things, and he'll bump into people in the wild. But no, they're like, oh, hey, dude. Like, just, like, walking down the street, and they'll have a conversation. And. And genuinely in that conversation, he'll be like, man, you weren't committed to mastery because he didn't buy the courses and all this stuff. It's incredible. I'm. Honestly, I'm envious is probably what it is. Just that you can be that passionate about the dog food that you sell. But I will say there's entirely differing levels of veracity in how people approach accounting firms where there's folks that will just absolutely gobble up anything they can possibly find. And then there's other folks that just kind of like go through the motions. And it will take those people a decade to learn what someone else can compress into a year. And like we all have our own blockers. In fact, I jotted this down from Dan Martell's book, what's it called, Buy back your time. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Very good book. He says many of us will sort of self sabotage in one of these five ways. One, the staller. You just hesitate on making big decisions indefinitely. And as a result you learn nothing because you actually, you didn't even try a small scale version of it. So you're just, you're not going anywhere. Second is the speed demon. You make hasty, quick, easy, cheap choices and then end up having to like go back and fire that person that you hired too fast or redo the work because it was done too haphazardly. Third is the supervisor. You just micromanage the crap out of everyone instead of training and empowering them. Fourth is the saver. You hoard cash. You're not willing to spend money to get some of your own time back or fill in gaps in the firm. And then fifth, fifth is the self medicator. You use vices like food or alcohol to celebrate or escape wasting time and energy. I would say most accountants probably fall into bucket number four, the savers. A lot of them do. Where we have a hard time getting out of the mental scarcity of like early days of running the firm. You almost still don't believe that this whole sort of thing isn't just going to disappear and fall apart someday. Right. And so it stops us from spending on stuff that we know we need like an assistant, that next hire that can, you know, take some of the low level prep work off your plate or bookkeeping or something like that. We all have like some combination of these things that sort of like a degree of self sabotage. But then there's people who are like have a different level of, I will say commitment to mastery, that is commitment to like executing on the things that they know that they need to do. And it doesn't require a hundred percent like level of surety to do it because many of these decisions are reversible. So if you're pretty sure you ought to go down this path, some people it will take them three years. Other people it will take them three days. And I think that's one thing I've gotten Better at is being able to compress that. Because I've seen the compounding benefits of those faster decisions. And you don't always get it, get it right. And this is where, you know, Bezos talks about sort of the reversible decisions and the non reversible decisions. Reversible decisions, if you can quickly unwind it, give it a try, like you don't have that much to lose. Most decisions are reversible, but we treat them the same as irreversible decisions. And so we spend all this time thinking and worrying and hand wringing over them when we ought to just make those decisions faster. Because every time we do, we learn from some people are like that comes more naturally to them than others. I think one reason why I had a hard time with that was in my firm running journey, I was trying very hard to impress. This was before I owned the firm, trying very hard to impress the powers that be. And it was. I was not in an environment where failure was encouraged in any way. There kind of was no place for it because it was such a slow moving, slow developing firm that there was a tremendous amount of risk to me trying something and it not working. And that took me a while to unlearn, to recover from, to know that like we can try stuff because a lot of this stuff is very easy to reel back in. We can do tests, we try stuff out with the goal of not necessarily every single thing being a success, but the goal being that we learn. And so the next decision we make, we have a better decision making framework to kind of view that through. I tell you what, man, there's like, I'm so impressed by some very young kind of firm runners that I see. And I think back to the more traditional folks I worked with in my career that just had a very basic mental model for, for how to run a firm. And it makes me very excited, like for the future of running accounting firms. There's a very real problem of, well, I'm 32 years old and all the people with success, successful businesses are old enough to be my dad, old enough to be my mom. And that makes it hard to build a firm right? Like the normal distribution of how old successful entrepreneurs are that make for good clients, that makes it challenging to run a great firm when you're younger. But those people, I think many of them are so ahead of the curve on how to like build a network, how to borrow ideas from other firm runners, how to go out, find a quick answer online for something that you may take like six months getting stuck on yourself. Heck, making tech decisions rather than going and talking to your Thompson Reuters rep. Like actually finding some trusted sources to get this information from. I love it. It's like it is the Honestly, for all the fears around AI and all that, there's never been a better time to run an accounting firm than right now. So many resources out there, smart people that are willing to share, be collaborative about all this stuff, and that's not the case in many industries. That level of collaboration that we have in what we do, it's pretty cool. Any other shortcuts you got, man? Drop that stuff. Comments thanks for coming. Hanging today. I'll catch you in the next one.