491 My Accounting Firm’s Biggest Hiring Mistake

Today, the biggest mistake that I made in hiring in my accounting firm, I was hiring for all the wrong jobs you may have find your found yourself in this situation. Your firm continues to grow, you hire and you just find yourself ending up with more jobs to do. When I sort of worked out this framework and like flipped the model for how I hired it was what ultimately led me to be able to get out of client work for the first time successfully. Like fully remove myself from client work in a 40 person firm. I could work on strategy, I could work on hiring, all the big stuff. And honestly, at this point, once I'd removed myself from the work, our firm saw its most positive changes. Like it was absolutely the right move. But I couldn't do it until I figured out this is what we're digging in today, the right way to approach hiring. I've been talking a bit about Dan Martel's buy back your time book. It's going back through it again this last week. A lot of good stuff in it, like very no nonsense. It's a quick read. I'll put a link to it down in the show. Notes worth checking out and sort of the the core concept in the book is protecting your time. And if you listen to this podcast, you know, boy, does Jason give me a whole lot of things that I ought to be doing in my accounting firm that are not client work. And you can tell in my accounting firm, like that was ultimately the hat that I wore in the end was not doing the client work. And so that's while that, while client work was all I did for, I don't know, 12 years, 14 years, my last few years kind of in my, my accounting journey was out of the client work. And it gave me a really healthy perspective because the folks who are doing the client work and even the owners who are still like technicians and doing all that stuff and that may be all that they ever want to do, which is fine. The folks who are in the client work, they look at the person who's not in the client work and you're like, they're like, you don't understand. But then the person who's not in the client work, who's solely focused on the business and sort of the meta risks of the business, how you bring in better clients and all that stuff, they look at the people doing the work and they're like, you don't understand the business because there's, I mean you look at other accounting firm owners who run themselves into the ground. They distract themselves by being head down in Work, right? Like, it's so easy to trick ourselves into doing our best just by working hard. You're like, oh, boy, I worked myself to exhaustion today. Pat on the back, you did your best. But then if you do that every day for the rest of the year and you never escape that, is that doing your best? I would argue doing your best is actually making the hard decisions. Like, like hit and pause, looking around and being like, okay, we gotta break this, we gotta do that, we gotta do these uncomfortable things to get to a better place. I can tell you, for me, that was a whole lot harder than working another 14 hour day. So. So when I was able to get out of the client work, I actually felt like our firm collectively had a more holistic balance of who's looking out for the business and who's looking out for the client. Because both of us have blind spots and the right answer's in the middle. In the short time, not the short time, in the few years I own the firm, we did a whole bunch of stuff, from really hard price increases to letting a lot of legacy clients go. All the stuff that you hear in like traditional accounting firm thought leadership, the same journey that many of you have been on the last five or 10 years. And the reason we're able to rip off all those band aids is, was I was able to like, put the time and thought into thinking through how to do that responsibly. Not leaving clients in a lurch, doing it in a way that we could feel good about, but also in a way that protected the business long term. And if somebody wasn't wearing that hat, those that had those changes, they would have never happened. But for most of us, we're like, I don't, I don't have another hour in the day, man. So here's what flip for me. And it's actually sort of the main through line of the buyback your time book. Most of us hire staff to support business growth. You're like, we got a lot of clients and I got a few more knocking on the door. We got to make another tax hire, another bookkeeper hire, filling in whatever gap is next. But you find as you do that is, with each new person you add, your job remains the same, except now you have to manage one more person, right? So the team continues to grow. You have just sort of the things that are unavoidable aspects of running a team where stuff comes up, you, you gotta train them. Somebody's dog gets sick, you fire em. That leaves you in a lurch, not because Their dog got sick. But oftentimes the last person to be considered or served when you're making hiring decisions is you and your time. So instead of simply hiring to support the growth of the business and handle more clients, what if the first thing we hired for is what you do today? And I rail on a lot about having an assistant on this podcast, podcast. And I think most accountants are still grappling with, well, I'm not that kind of person. And maybe you've, you've never seen or worked with somebody who had an assistant. But if you think of what your business needs you to be and you put on a list all the things we do every day, the things that are suited for an assistant to help with, those aren't the things that your business needs you to be. Your team, like, needs your support. The more meta issues of the business and how we attract clients and all that, those are the things that need your attention, but they won't get your attention as long as that calendar is like just absolutely stacked. If you set out to do X, Y and Z during the day, and then at the end of the day, you only ever get X done because you have all these other fires that you're putting out and, and you're bailing out your staff and you're bailing out your clients all day long. And we don't yet have control of our time. And oftentimes we limit this to, like, business time. When the reality is, when you're an entrepreneur, every single day, every single hour of the day is both a business hour and a personal hour. Because the time that I spend with my kids is a product of how much time am I spending on my business. And this book, like, will give you some good kind of practical thoughts. Like, I travel a bunch, so I spend a bunch of time in cars having to drive to freaking airports. If you're like me and you are driving, I don't know, four to six hours a week, do you know what the cost is for someone else to drive and you to be able to work? Like, that's a number that we ought to have in our head. And one concept from this book is figuring out your buyback rate. And their approach for figuring out your buyback rate is to calculate your annual take home. And, you know, this could be salary distributions. Also some discretionary stuff in the business probably as well. Take your total take home, divide it by 2000. As if you work 2000. Only 2000 hours in a year. Good one, Dan. Divided by 2000 and then divide it by four. So you get to an hourly rate, and then you divide it by four. We're going to treat this as your buyback rate. And then if there's. And basically any way that we can claw back your time for that price per hour, we're going to do it. So, for example, if you take home 200 a year, that's 25 bucks an hour. You take home 400 a year, that's 50 bucks an hour. So just to go back to the driving example, if I drive six hours a week, what would it cost me to hire a driver for those six hours so that I could instead work when I got to ride in the car? And again, like, I think a lot of these things are, like, social, where it's like, oh, hire a driver. Look at you, big important guy. Or, wow, hire a landscaper. My dad mowed his own lawn. I'm never going to do that. And the people who ultimately pay the price for this man, it's your team who needs more of your time. It's your family who would love to see you sometime. And they're these sort of like, arbitrary blockers that we kind of have to get over. And it's very, very much a skill. Cause a lot of folks, like, don't lean into this stuff because the delegation skill doesn't come naturally to them. And this is definitely a learned thing for me. Like, nobody learn, like, rolls out of bed one day and knows how to work efficiently with an assistant. Now, there's definitely loads of frameworks and education out there around how to work with assistants, but most people will say, like, nope, it's not for me. Without actually knowing anything about it or learning about what that process looks like. Like, but, like, at the end of the day, you can zoom out and look at like, boy, how do big companies operate? How do companies go from one employee to thousands of employees in a matter of a couple years? When I'm like, how are we ever going to make that third hire? Oh, I don't have the bandwidth. You've got, you know, your Richard Branson's of the world that has founded something like 200 companies, and that guy goes on a lot more vacations than you do. Why are you attacking me today, Jason? The difference is, like, they're just. There's opportunities to learn new skills to develop. But a lot of accountants, they burn decades heads down doing the exact same thing, not developing any of those new skills. Speaking, I mean, speaking from experience. Exhibit A right here. So what would it look like for your next hire to be Someone that could protect your time, step into to the jobs that you're doing. This all kind of starts with auditing your time. And recognize, like, the only things we know how to do today are all built on the. The blockers, the sort of assumptions and understandings we have today of what we're capable of and how the world works. And recognize you can't get to something better until you break one of those assumptions, like, within the world today, as I understand it, I'm doing the best that I possibly can. And it's not until I challenge one of those notions and kind of break that or say, see someone similar to me that's doing things in a different way. So then I believe it, because I've seen it. It's not until a change like that happens that I can get to that next thing. So if we want to get to the next thing, we got to break something, right? And this all probably starts with an audit of your time. And then what would be really, really helpful is if you can get like a trusted friend, another entrepreneur, to take a look at that with you. Because you will audit your time and you'll look through the whole thing. You'll be like, oh, yeah, no, nobody else can do that. And that's why right now, nobody else is doing that. But if you got somebody that can come alongside you and help you with that stuff and see through it, maybe somebody that's kind of a couple steps ahead on that delegation journey or looks like they've got something figured out. Talk with someone who works with an assistant. Talk with someone who has somebody else manage their email, who's hired a sales team, who's hired a junior tax preparer, a junior bookkeeper, someone who's, you know, hired a recruiter, an HR department to handle some of that stuff, someone who's hired a marketing person. All those people are out there. Would you believe that there's loads of accountants that have done every single one of these things. But then we think about it and we're like, man, that's hard. I haven't done that before. I don't know how to do that. This episode is brought to you in part by Client Hub. Client Hub, been one of my recommended practice management systems for a while, but they're doing some really cool stuff. One of the first PMs, investing heavily in work. And if you followed my Maslow's hierarchy pyramid food chart of the tech needs of your accounting firm, right now, the workflow tools are getting super, super good, but almost feels wasteful to buy it in addition to a practice management system that's something Client Hub is working on. So they do all the practice management stuff that you want from the dashboards to track your work tasks that can be assigned to clients. A really good client portal, time tracking, CRM, email integration, all that stuff. But they've also got a really good Quickbooks and Xero integration for stuff like resolving uncategorized expenses, even uncategorized deposits, requesting receipts from clients all like in the same client portal they already use. They're also doing some cool AI stuff quote unquote magic books review, identify expense inconsistencies and other review items across the balance sheet and P and L clienthub. Definitely worth checking out if you are a bookkeeping or cast practice. And I love that they're going hard on workflow now. Learn more about them. Check out the link down in the show Notes this episode is brought to you in part by Canopy, the practice management system, who I'm co hosting some events for over the next few weeks. Totally free events like unrelated to Canopy, just about workflow in general. We're going to be in Dallas, we're going to be in Austin, we're going to be in Minneapolis and we're going to be in Boston. Okay. If you're anywhere near there, I want to see you. I'm going to do a keynote. We're going to end with with a Q A. It's like a half day sort of thing. I think you get a few hours of cpe, they're gonna feed you lunch. What more do you need? Gonna be some smart conversations, but also just a great hang. Spots are pretty limited for these events. I think we're targeting about 70 attendees for each. Those are gonna go pretty fast. To learn more about those events, check out the links down in the show notes Philosopher Alex Hermosi talks about by the way, I say that every time I am joking. I don't know that I I really call him a philosopher if just hard to take yourself seriously when you quote Hormozi sometimes. That's that's my own issue. Hermosi talks about how in your entrepreneurial journey you hit these plateaus because you don't know how to build this or you don't know how to build that. Don't know how to build a sales team, don't know how to do paid marketing, how to hire somebody to do marketing, how to hire someone at all, how to delegate things to an assistant. You hit all these plateaus that you can't overcome until you learn that new skill. We're all stuck on different new skills right now. The thing I'm stuck on is getting somebody to help me with writing. Like, that's the most. The thing I'm most blocked on in my business yet. We have 500 podcast episodes and then an abundance of things that Jason has put out into the ether. Surely someone can help us organize these thoughts a little better, right, to like, keep producing content and show up on social media more regularly and all that. But I have never successfully been able to pull somebody in to write stuff in near enough to my voice to where I could come through and finalize it without it taking more time than me doing it from scratch. And we all have some version of this, right, where it's like, nah, I. There's no point in me delegating it. It'd be faster for me to just do it myself. But I can tell you, in my case, that's not a hill that I want to die on. I don't want to be 85 years old still saying the same thing. Nobody can write good enough for it to be useful to me. And so that's a plateau I'm trying to overcome right now. And each one of these can. Can get us some time back. Like, it's an opportunity to protect more of our time. Because the thing that the business needs most is not some other random person you're going to hire. It's. It's you. And like, every little bit you remove yourself from the day to day and the production and all that, you find new things that would help your business from. Ah, man, maybe if I did just pop into that trade show for a day to. Ah, no, I. I could send that, like, email to the person that writes the newsletter for beekeepers, talk about the new tax bill and how that's impacting beekeeper stuff. Oftentimes we look at the list of things we do today and we're like, well, if I chopped off all of these things, what would I even do? And it's like, I don't know. I mean, would be the worst thing if you went outside. You probably won't though, because you're gonna backfill it with all the other stuff that you've always told yourself, oh, if only I can make time for that. And then you have time for it. You do it, you learn that skill and then you reassess, you audit again and you evolve, like, to the next thing. And that's gang like, that's the fun thing, that growth, that evolution, becoming a more and more capable entrepreneur every year. And so if you think about what the highest leverage things you can learn are, man, hiring an assistant, being able to be productive with an assistant, that's probably right up there because they are always taking things off of your plate. You're never the first one to see an email as you shouldn't be because the, the 10% of emails that, that can only be handled by you, that's, that's a small percentage of all the things that come through letting someone manage your, your calendar a little more. How many of us have calendar meetings that are like 15 minutes and 45 minutes apart all throughout the day and you just have all these nothing dead periods of time where you can't actually get into deep work. You know, hiring managers, hiring someone that can manage people on your team who has a big one to learn, that's a tough one the first time you do it. And with all these things you're going to get wrong 100 different ways. But at the end of the day, there is no more important time than your time and you're the only one that can get you out from under it. Right? And so for the type of person that puts our own mask on last, then you, you end up being just the bottom of this filter of a whole bunch of people and a whole bunch of clients that all have problems and you're the stop gap. And oftentimes we're like plugging ourselves into a situation that's impossible to find success within. Super recommend you check out this book. Every single one of us has improvements we can make on how we spend our time and that, that never stops. Like that's, that's just the journey. We find stuff along the way that we love doing and oftentimes those are the last things to go away. But even if you love doing the technical stuff, even if you are the technician, there's a lot of really basic and ain't aspects of being a technician like Hustle and Adobe Acrobat files and drawing red boxes and highlighting text and pulling in that document the client said to get it bookmarked in the right way and all that stuff. Like even if what you love is the technical stuff, you can do more technical stuff, right? You can get help with all that. And I don't want to say that's easy. It's a learned skill figuring out how to work with other human beings to be efficient in that. But it is, it is a thing worth doing for sure. And if you want to go back to doing that thing, you always can. Like you have your time back. At that point you're in control. You've got greater agency over the stuff that you work on. That's very different than being trapped under all the stuff that you have to do and not knowing how to get out. Right. Good book worth checking out. We'll link that stuff down in the show notes. And can I just tell you, I'm on the road right now as you're listening to this, assuming you're listening to it when it came out. I think I'm in Austin today, Dallas tomorrow, and the next week I am in Minneapolis and Boston. So many folks, so many pod listeners. It's like 1500 people a day that listen to this stuff. So many of them coming out to live events. And you're meeting other podcast listeners too. Like so many people making local friends. I love seeing that. Please do come out to an event soon. Jasononfirms.com events that's always the up to date place for any events we've got going on. Thanks for coming today and I'll see you in the next one. Sam.