496 The MOST IMPORTANT Areas of your Accounting Firm To Work On

Today, how do you prioritize? What is the important stuff in your accounting firm? Because man can get just squeezed out of the conversation fast. When you're running on that hamster wheel of, like, daily email triage and get projects out the door, we're already behind and over capacity. How do I do anything more? Jason, some wisdom I've gleaned on this subject lately. How to put yourself first, put your own business first. A few bits of practical advice. Hop on off that hamster wheel for a minute, come on over to the water bottle with me, the one with the little ball that you lick to get some water, and let's. I think this started. Was it Stephen Covey, the habits of highly successful people guy that did the whole rocks and gravel thing? So the idea is, you got like, a bucket, and if you put a bunch of gravel in it, and then you try to put some big old rocks in it, the rocks don't fit. But if you do it in the other order you put big old rocks in, all the gravel will fit because it gets all down into the nooks and crannies. And now other people have taken that even further where after they put the gravel on, oh, now they'll put sand in, and, ooh, look at all the sand we can fit. And then after that, someone will come in and put water in. Be like, wow, look at all the water that we can fit. It's like, dude, just go. Just touch grass, man. Stop trying to make me do more stuff every day. But what's very important is for us to, like, develop the awareness of in our day, what's the rock and what's the gravel? Or what's the sand and what's the. The water? Big thing, little thing. What's the best thing? I was having this conversation with a member of my team lately who's actually gotten pulled into a bunch of more really cool, very valuable stuff. And they're like, yeah, no, I'm actually kind of getting, like, becoming a real jerk about my time. And, like, whereas I used to be the type of person that would just hop in and help with anything, I'm. I'm getting more selfish. I think that's kind of where this starts, is valuing our time more than we ever have before. And this is such a hard thing because we don't want to lose touch with our roots. Our roots. I'm not just saying that because I'm in Minnesota, to an event today, you don't want to lose touch with that person that you were. Right. But the Trouble is, in the process, we can simultaneously not be the person that we aspired to be because we want to hang on to both. It's kind of like the client list conversations where it's like, no, I could, I can always serve my very first client because they were my first client. But then it's, it's that client. It's those people that hold you back from like building the even better business that you're trying to build. It is this sort of wrestling match with growth where we want to be all the things, but clinging to all that stuff oftentimes is not living in service of the person you're trying to become. Oftentimes the like the best litmus test for is this the right thing for me or not is will like five years from now you thank you for doing that. And that person generally they will thank you for the rocks, they won't thank you for the gravel. So some practical everyday examples that Klein email, that's gravel, buddy. That's, that might be sand or water. In fact, this is the very best argument for not starting your day with email. Email is a collection of everybody else's crap that they want you to do for them. The problem is you're a big hot mess, buddy. You got your own problems to deal with. And in a world where pretty much every day is gonna get away from you eventually, let's not volunteer letting it get away from us at 7:30 in the morning, okay? Tucking into that email inbox, that is the, the quickest way to get a day to, to get away from you. It's also why like email I think is the ultimate snapshot of how am I doing from a delegation standpoint. Like I really push people. You gotta a day and then leave it closed the rest of the day. A lot of people hear that and they're like, well you're obviously never an accounting firm owner. And I had that period of my life, I mean like my reality run an accounting firm was 15 year accounting firm, professional buy out three legacy partners, turn a five partner firm into three years later, basically a two partner firm team of 40, no middle managers. Oh, was there a lot bubbling up to me? And I came into that having built about a 1 1/2 million dollar practice and then like through that process, eventually over the course of several years got totally out of the client work. But I mean the amount of stuff that was bubbling up to me and a partner, you better believe my email inbox was a big hot mess. And so when I started this transition from like there's got to be a better way. I was probably spending, I don't know, six hours a day on email. It's a pretty reasonable guess. But when you go down that email inbox, that's a great snapshot of what are the jobs I haven't fired myself from? What are the jobs where I keep swooping in and being the hero? Was talking with someone at an event the other day that was like, yeah, no, I, I told this person to go and do this thing and call support. And I checked back a few days later, they still hadn't done it. I come back a week later, I'm like, I need this done. And so I just, I called support. What's that person going to do the next time you ask him to do something? What's everybody else going to do when they see you letting that slide? This is, we got to go full pirate ship at this point, man. As far as I'm concerned, that person is walking the plank. Otherwise it's all coming down on you. So are we swooping in and being the hero? Are we not letting the team make their own mistakes sometimes and like zipping our mouth? Because oftentimes the best way for them to learn is to choose their own adventure. But sending that next client email, that's definitely not a rock. And I understand there's a. These are like, well, I have to send that email sometimes. Jason, what are you saying? I'm saying don't do it first. And I'm saying if we can't get the rocks done first, then that email may not go out as timely as we would like it. But what's the alternative? How many accountants do you know who live their life on repeat the five same five years over and over and over again doing the same things for the same people? It's not going to change just by getting the work out the door. It may some, but that's certainly not the optimized way to build a business. Right? How about that proposal we've been sitting on? Is that, is that a rock or is that gravel? I would say if that's like your next a client buddy, there is nothing more important than that. We all sit on proposals from time to time, right? I can tell you some of the slowest proposals I ever sent out were the folks that I was so excited to work with because I was so afraid of getting it wrong and I would send a proposal like three weeks later. What do you think they think at that point they're like sending follow up emails like, hey, real excited to get going. And I'm like, I know, I know you are. That's why it's so hard for me to hit send the next a client that's a rock, that's a big deal. But that client where you're like, ah, should we really do another one of those? That's not a rock, that's not an important thing. That's probably not something we should have even said yes with unless we were like jacked. We start our day with, with gravel. There's no room for the rocks at the end of the day. If we start our day with Roc rocks, then even if there isn't room for gravel at the end, which Stephen Covey. I mean, this, this whole thing might just be a completely flawed analogy because it's like, man, I still got, you know, eight hours in a day. I don't know, all my gravel's gonna fit in. If I'm, I'm just doing rocks, I, I would still call that a win because the rocks, the big things, are the most important things that need to happen that will like, shape the arc of the entire business rather than this little microcosm within the business. I would say your website is a rock. I would say your online presence, the things related to like folks learning that you even exist, that's a rock. That's such a big thing for accountants right now. We have never had more reach available to us, a bigger platform for folks to find us. But we, like, I don't know, we can't self promote or we can't talk about what we do. Buddy, if you've been put on this earth to do something, I know how many hours you work. If you're going to sink that many hours of your life into something, please have the courage to talk about what you do. This whole, oh man, I mean, it's so many things. It's virtue signaling. It's the people we saw before us who were, you know, overly self deprecating. Self deprecation is great. Lord knows I, man, my YouTube videos are just like rolling, making fun of myself. But there's a version of that that goes way too far where it's like, if we don't advocate for the importance of what we do, who will? If you're going to take all this time away from your family, from whittling from your hobbyist miniature horse farm, then let's make sure we have some impact. So being out there in the world, seeing what we do, and we do those things that are going to be visible and we, we, you know, we be helpful. It doesn't have to be overly self promotional. But simply showing up and being out there, that's incredibly important. Taking a trip to a trade show, trade show trips, in my mind, that's a rock. That's where you build connections. You start building a network within a space where folks see you. Somebody shared the other day, they're like, I'll literally just go to trade shows and wear a T shirt that says I wear taxes. I wear taxi. Did I just say I wear taxes? You know what I mean? I do taxes, I do bookkeeping, whatever it is. I don't even buy a booth. Just go and hang out. You won't believe the conversations and the connections that happen. Like the turning point in my entire career was going to my first accounting conference. You ever say something out loud, you're like, if my 13 year old self could see me now. I was in an Uber the other day, guys driving me to an event. I'm going to keynote the event. I'm a big deal guy's like, what do you, what do you. What's. So what's going on? What do you do for work? What are you going to. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to an accounting event. And he laughed and laughed and laughed. And you know what he said after that? He said, hey man, as long as it makes money, and that's such a low bar for employment. It makes. There's so many ways you can make money that my mother would not be proud of. I digress. Turning point in my career, going to an accounting conference. From the things that I learned, talking with people there to the connections that I made. Right away I was like, oh my gosh, this is so much bigger than I realized and so energizing. And I'm an introvert. People don't believe me when I say that I am an introvert. But showing up at a trade show, I think that's a big deal. This episode is brought to you in part by Stanford Tax, one of my favorite new tax, like AI Tax workflow tools. Stanford Tax actually heard from a big number of you very happy users. Stanford continues to evolve and one of the big shifts in 2025 is that it is now not just a tool for like serving as a portal for your clients to submit information into, but it's also just an internal tool for your firm now because it so does many useful things with those source docs. So basically you pile in all that info that the client gave you and it will compare those items against the pro forma checklist that it generated and tell you, okay, what do we have now? What do we still need? But it will also bookmark those documents. It will rename the documents, it will warn you about stuff like it being the wrong tax year. It will split bundled documents so they give it to you in a single PDF. It'll figure out how that ought to be broken out. The number of years I was putting like divider pages in and sitting in front of that scanner, if you know, you know. And it now rolls, and Stanford now rolls all that up into a binder in the cloud where you can do your PDF annotations right there inside of Stanford Tax. Okay, down with Adobe Acrobat. The world doesn't need us drawing more red squares in Adobe Acrobat. Okay. This excites me because it's pulling all this stuff into the cloud where every new AI model makes this whole workflow better. That's super exciting. To learn more about Stanford Tax, check out the link down in the, in the, in the, in the show notes 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 by Canopy. We're running the events in Austin and 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 gonna meet some other smart folks, we're gonna get to hang and you're gonna leave 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 a concept from a book recently. I brought it up several times. Dan Martell's buy back your time. He talks about the preloaded year and that is basically each year building out that list of things that ought to be non negotia to ensure happen. Kind of like your rocks. Not only for business but for life in general. And so that is like my wife, every single year, year after year she has a birthday that's a rock. I got a plan around that. Personally man, birthdays past about, I don't know, birthdays past 16 with the exception of 21, I don't know. They really matter. I'm old, dude. Like, who do we need to make a big like big old deal about it? I'm not going to eat any cake. Too old for that too. Who'd have told you you get past 35 and you can feel what you eat. It's the worst. My child, my 6 year old son, he came home from summer camp today because he threw up. He seemed totally fine. I was like, what's going on? He's like, man, I think I went down the polar bear slide too many times. I think it upset my tummy. I was like, you sweet, sweet summer child. If you only knew what happens when you turn 35 and you eat something you have no business eating and how quickly it will ruin your entire day. I just don't think birthdays when you're older, that big of a deal. But my wife, she disagrees. So that's one thing I got to do every year. But what do you need to squeeze into every single week? Like what's the right amount of time to spend with the family? What are the four big trade shows that you really ought to be at that you need to plan around? This idea of a preloaded year ensures that you actually map all of that stuff out so that the rocks are kind of built into your schedule not only on an annual basis, but also on a weekly basis. I think we kind of have to make a intentional deal with ourselves to ensure that these things actually happen. Another great example, I'm coming off these live events for accounting AI that we did the last couple of months and the problem everybody has is I can get back to work on Monday and it's going to like be so easy to slip into that normal routine and not invest any time into this. So we almost have to remove ourselves from the desk, from the triage, from the grid of eight monitors that have your email and your slack and all these different things. Because as soon as you get in front of that, you just start doing things almost mindlessly. We almost have to remove ourselves from that and build an intentional plan for every week and for the bigger things, like every quarter, every year and say like, these are the non negotiable things that I gotta make sure happens. And we can make this decision when we are clear of mind, when we're not having our ear bent by endless client emails and all that. We prioritize these things and then we see where the chips fall. And the chips will probably fall in a way that will make Us have to delegate more things than we ever have before, maybe pull in some additional help, maybe cut loose some clients that are not worth the time we're spending on them. But until we very intentionally, while clear of mind, make that plan, then every time you get in front of the battle station, you're going to slip back into the same habits. That's just human nature. And as long as you're the big boss, those big boss things that are going to impact the overall arc of the business, they have to come first. My perspective on this completely changed when I went from working in the firm to working on the firm. And that was genuinely the best thing our firm had ever seen is an 80 year old firm. And in the couple of years where I was fully out of client work, I was able to solve issues like staffing, pulling in really talented people to work for our firm, getting ever so slightly more selective about the people that we work with. Trimming the fat. I mean just we had a couple pretty brutal price increases, let some clients go that were not a fit. But in the end we had a firm that was more profitable while doing much less work. And I would say for all of the hard decisions that go into getting your firm there, that is not wrong like that, like the devil's in the details. I got to do right by people and try to not leave folks flapping in the breeze. But it was those big like arc of the business decisions that kept the business safe. And as long as I was in fully in the client work, I didn't have the bandwidth in the mental space to be thinking about this or even figuring out the right ways to do these things. And you may not be in a spot where like getting a hundred percent of your time out of doing client work is reasonable, but we at least got to carve out some space for it, ideally by day, like context, switching throughout a day, very, very hard. Ideally we can be in a different frame of mind day over day. We're on a given day, you're working on a given set of things. Avoid oh my gosh, calendar messes where you've just got this smattering of events that are not smooshed together. Thus like eating up your entire day right when we are like, I don't really have control over these meetings though, because it's when my clients schedule them. If we're letting somebody else dictate when every, when every meeting lands on our calendar, then all we're doing is letting them do what we want to do. We're saying no, your Time is more important than mine, so I'm going to let you dictate the time instead of me saying, like, hey, actually, no, it'd be great if we could do this either at. At 2 or at 4, because right now I've got meetings from, you know, 3 to 4 or something like that. Intentionally designing that week for the stuff that's most important. That's the only way we can make sure it actually gets done at something I still struggle with, but it is a. A useful sort of anchoring when I meet with my team to be like, hey, here's the stuff we're falling down on right now. Like, what do we have to change about our weekly cadence to prioritize the important things? What are those important things? And whose schedule do they need to get built into? Because right now we're not doing a good enough job. And this. This can be a negotiation not just for yourself, but with. With your team, so that we make sure we're investing in the big picture rather than simply triage. Encourage you to give that a think. We've all got a short list of things that are like, oh, we know we've needed to do this for so long, but we haven't made the time for it. Think about what those big needle movers. Needle movers are. Let's get moving some needles, people. Okay? Don't be that person that realizes they need to do something and then do it three years later. Ah, did that. I'm sorry, was that too direct? Get off my back, Jason. I'm just trying to go for a walk. You know what I mean? You can do it. Hey, it's a great day to be an accountant. Okay, I'll see you. I'll see you in the next one.