501 How To 10X Your Accounting Firm!

Buckle up for this one, gang. It's big brain time today. I want you digging in to what are the things that we are like investing our time and attention into today? And are they the things that's actually going to lead to like disproportionate levels of opportunity for me and my business, or are they the things that I've just kind of settled into by default? They go through a great book that has just been opening my mind lately. And I can tell you, in my business, my focus, it is completely changing. In fact, I'm ripping off a bunch of band aids right now and see so many of the same traps and how I ran an accounting firm where instead of thinking like, what is the bigger opportunity there that's, that's maybe just barely out of reach, we Instead have this 2x mindset of no, instead I'm just going to do marginally more of what I already do. But the trap is that leads to more. That leads to like exhaustion, more people to manage when if we look a little harder, there's actually a 10x opportunity out there that is just a vastly better path than the 2x path that we get sucked into by default. That's what we're going to talk about today. I can almost guarantee you've got a version of this. Let's explore how this could be the path forward. There are times in our lives where we decide to like, get off the bus that we're on because we see there's actually a better bus. And those end up being sort of turning points in our career as opposed to just continuing to play the same game. And many of us, especially when we get into accounting firm running, we get sucked into like, what is the chicken Parmesan version of accounting firm running like? We now identify as accounting firm owners or leaders, and so we do all the things that are expected of people within that business. And that's just a very marginal game you're baby stepping each year, oftentimes handling change on like an annual change cycle. And where that leads most people honestly is exhaustion because that ends up being like more, more mouths to feed, more people to manage, more clients to manage, as opposed to like there being a just a fundamentally better bus to get on. And to be clear, there can be a completely different bus to get on within the scope of running an accounting firm. And you hear about this stuff sometimes in extreme examples where people are like, my, my accounting firm was going this way for 12 years and then I got a couple of these types of clients and we realized these are the only people we want to work with. And the whole firm just went in a completely different direction. Like, sometimes you will hear stories like that, and it may be serving a more specific type of client. It could actually be a bunch of different things. But I think most of us have a 10x opportunity out there in front of us. But we may not even realize it yet because these big changes, they're normally much easier to see in hindsight than they are to see, like, down the road and out in front of us. One of the big traps here is we think that to lean into that 10x opportunity, we have to have the. The capabilities today to fulfill that, when in reality, you don't. By committing to that 10x opportunity, you're committing to developing the skills and the capabilities to do all of that stuff. In fact, if we go back to the example of serving a more specific type of client, this is the biggest thing that blocks people from going in deeper with a specific client type is they're like, well, I don't actually have that expertise. When in reality, those folks in all likelihood are served by generalist firms who will happily say, yeah, we've never worked with beekeepers before, but how hard can it be? Sure, we'll work with our very first beekeeper, and then us, when we think about niching down, we're like, I don't have beekeeping expertise. Yeah, I have five of these clients. But to hold myself out as the guru, reality is, you have more expertise than the generalists. And by committing to a 10x opportunity, you're saying, I'm going to continue developing this expertise to make this path kind of come to fruition. So it's hard to see us sometimes jumping into that next 10x opportunity. But in hindsight, it's much easier to see these turning points for ourselves. In the past, in my life, I've had four of them. First one was in high school. I was working at a grocery store. I was going to leave and go to college. I tell the GM that I'm going to leave, and he says, what? He says, why would you do this? He's like, you could have my job someday. This is the GM of a Safeway. And I looked around and I realized that's not a job that I actually ever want. I got off of that bus, and I got onto a better one. Second time in my life, I was working in an accounting firm, and I was pretty much done with accounting. I'd been doing tax for almost a decade at that point. And I was like, good enough at tax work. But this definitely was not like in my pocket of things that I'm good at. Like to this point in my life, there were a lot of things that I had done that I was very good at, very natural at. Doing tax work did not feel like one of those things. So I actually went back to graduate school and got an MBA with the plans of like leaving and going and doing something else. But in the course of getting my mba, realized building a CAST practice or basically an accounting department in a box, that was a great opportunity. I mean, we could work with like 1 to 2 million dollars. Small businesses basically come in and function as like an FTE and these folks would pay us 60 grand a year. I mean, how many $1 million businesses will happily pay a vendor 60 grand a year to do anything? But we could come in and do a better job than their in house staff and they would pay this sum with a big old smile on their face. And I'm like, holy smokes. Like right now in my firm, we've got 800 business clients. How many of them would happily delegate their accounting department to us? That's a big opportunity. That's a lot of money. That was where the cast practice came from, which grew to one and a half million in 18 months. And so as I was on the brink of leaving the profession, I saw a 10x opportunity that was, I'm not going to just do the work anymore. I'm actually going to own the work. I'm going to build this department myself from scratch. And this was before I had bought out some of the partners of the firm. But I basically came back and I was like, here's the deal. Mine are going to leave. I'm going to build this new department. And kind of here are my terms, like needs to have sort of financial autonomy from the rest of the firm. Here's my vision for this. You got to let me build this. That was a 10x opportunity that was going from just being the person doing the work to building a business of the work. Now 10x opportunity number three, for me, it was buying that firm. It was building a thing that was very valuable and then realizing, crap, I don't own, I don't own this thing. And so I bought out several of of the outgoing partners, but then in that process realized that me doing the work, it was not the biggest opportunity. In fact, me getting out of the work was exactly what the firm needed. So that process of buying the firm and then getting myself out of client work, that was a, I would say a 10x opportunity for me because then that forced me to hire the folks that could handle the fulfillment while I just worked on firm strategy and I built the machine. If I compare the machine I could build to the work I was capable of doing myself, that's absolutely a 10x opportunity, right? Because I can build that machine as big as I want. I can only serve so many clients. Number four, the last 10x sort of pivot that I made in my life, it was leaving that firm. It was seeing the thought leadership content that I was doing online and realizing I can have such a vastly bigger impact by putting stuff out into the world that helps a thousand firms rather than just pouring that into my firm. And since then that I've actually, I've actually learned being able to just spend time with loads of people who run firms is sort of like the ultimate investment in myself and in my own knowledge about firm running because I get to see what's working across like actual people running firms. So first 10x pivot, it was leaving that grocery store. Second 10x pivot was launching my own practice inside of an accounting firm. Third 10x pivot was buying the firm but removing myself from client work so I could build the machine rather than do the work myself. 4th 10x pivot was leaving the firm and instead investing in like the sort of infinite leverage that can be creating content where one more person listens to it, watches it, and that's, that's no more incremental effort from me. But I'm super hungry for my next 10x pivot and right now that's requiring me to make some hard decisions that any of us have to sort of work through in order to find that next great thing. And I think the easiest mental framing of getting to what your 10x opportunity is is kind of the old 80, 20 of, of how we spend our time. By the way, a lot of these principles are from the book 10x is easier than 2x. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Very good book, very mind opening book. But if you do the 80, 20 of, what are the things that you work on? Imagine putting all of your focus into the top 20% of clients on your client list today. And they get all of your attention. So you got the, the 80%, the riff raff, the top 20%. These are your A clients who happily pay you top dollar to do what you do. Imagine if they got all of your attention. Those folks, they're going to love you, right? A bunch more of those folks are probably going to come out of the woodworks, their friends, other folks who are hearing about what a good experience your clients are having before you know that 20% starts looking like 30%, like 40%. Right. Just imagine how happy they would be if they got all of your attention. And then consider, why don't we do this? Do you really not believe that that 20% could become your 100%? It almost certainly could. So what are the reasons why we don't do this? Well, it's usually the makeup of the 80%. It's the stuff we're afraid to let go of. Maybe some aspect of our identity is still sort of staked in what that 80% represents. Put another way, oftentimes our legacy clients need us to be the person that we used to be. And that can be a really a hard thing for us to walk away from and acknowledge that we're no longer that person. There was a time when we were, but we've now outgrown that, that person. And we are, we are lying to ourselves if we think that those clients are going to get our best once we've moved on. That might be your 10x opportunity to find that 20% of people. And you're like, these are the only people I'm going to work with at this point. Maybe that means your team can support the rest of those clients. Maybe that means letting a bunch of clients go. Maybe that means letting clients and staff go. Maybe you decide, we're going to cut this client list way back. We're going to trim a little bit of the fat on, on the, the employee roster. We're going to run a more lean firm. But this top 20%, they're going to get a hundred percent of my focus. Maybe for you, your 10x opportunity is never doing client work again. Making that promise to yourself that you're not going to do that and you're instead going to work on the business, on the machine. For most folks, that that next 10x opportunity is probably one of those two things. And that that's a scary thing to do because we're leaving the comfort zone of what we normally do and trusting that kind of going down that path, we will find even more nuance and even more interesting things there than we thought existed. And I can guarantee you, when you commit to that, you will find those things. And the interesting thing that they outline in the book is that doubling down and like finding that 10x opportunity, we assume that's going to be 10x the work, but in reality, when you do that, what you can find there is calm and time and balance. And if we just go back to the 80, 20 of supporting a hundred percent of your client base versus supporting 20% of your client base, you can come into this and say, these are the only people that I'm going to work with. Everybody else goes somewhere else, maybe a different member of my team, maybe a different firm, and this is how I get back to calm. It's actually a vastly more valuable, probably profitable path forward. And the beauty of it is it is by definition less. And this is, this is the trap of 2x, of sort of incremental growth as you kind of just, you do more and you do more and you do more and you just collect and you collect and you end up with more stuff that is reliant upon you as opposed to making the really hard decision of instead going after the more ambitious thing that you may not even know how to do today, but is a higher value opportunity that will ultimately require less of you because you're not doing more, you're doing less. This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about client billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't. You can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing because it's, it's icky. You let things slide. You don't get paid. You waste time. Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just, I didn't want to waste time chasing them. And so I would just, I just eat it. Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our ar, it's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients. Saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year because they didn't have to bill all that stuff manually. Man. With Ignition, we want more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustling, hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment upfront or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignitionapp.com I'll put a link in the show notes. Today's episode is brought to you in Part by Team Up. Who helps you hire talented accountants in the Philippines? Did you know you can just hire someone in the Philippines? That's the thing that you can do. Similar to hiring cross country. Like most of us run distributed teams these days. You can hire somebody that's in the Philippines. Now oftentimes big question if you haven't done this before is security. What about security? To which I'd say what do you do for security for your onshore team? If I hire somebody in North Carolina or for goodness sakes Florida, what do we do for them? Well, probably ought to give them a specific work device have like on device encryption, the ability to disable the machine remotely. All of those things, important things to do for any hire. Exact same things you do when you hire somebody in the Philippines. Only real difference for US firms is you have 7216 disclosures if you do tax work. Actually if this person will do tax work and for most firms that is that's two disclosures that you got to put in front of the client. Not a big deal. Team up. They've let loads. I kind of did a they let loads or they've worked with loads of firms that have navigated all this. Can give you the verbiage recommendations. I did it myself in my firm disclosures and everything. Wasn't as big of a thing as I built it up to be. And I went 4 for 4 on my Philippines hiring and I had never gone 4 for 4 with onshore hiring. Maybe I got lucky. I didn't get lucky. There's like a different attitude towards work with folks in Philippines. Literally 3 days ago somebody at an event, we're talking about their team and they're like man it's like refreshing. Anyways, if it's something you've ever considered, chat with the folks at Team up as I think this person had, they actually hired those folks their team up as well. So one of those things that seems more spooky until you actually do it. Learn more about teamup. Check out the link down in the show notes. So examples for me as I'm going through this right now, a big one for me. I'm not going to write the vast majority of my social media posts anymore. In fact we're going to get back to I will write one social media post per day and here's the justifications of how I've gotten there. For one, I've posted on social media for years. Does the world really need more net new brand new posts from me? Probably not. There is enough of My thought leadership out there in the ether where somebody else can package and present this, even if it means we're simply recycling stuff that performed well 14 months ago. Right. But what are all the reasons why that's hard for me? Well, nobody else is going to do that in my perfect tone. Does that feel inauthentic? The fact that there's other people involved in my social media stuff? These are all hard things for me to get over. But. But the more you dig into it, the more you realize, okay, how much of it is justified, where one's better than the other and how much of it is just taste. Because my North Star is to be useful. My North Star is not for my essence and the way that I would say something to be out there in the world for everybody to see. There's still going to be channels where I can do that. There's an abundance of me and my voice out there. Right. And it also solves for some of the constraints of my current approach where I write everything myself. While I can only show up on so many platforms, like lately that's pretty much been LinkedIn and almost nothing else. But by pulling other people into that process, we can put my thought leadership in more places where folks want to consume and they can get a version of that that's native to Instagram and to Twitter and to Facebook and all those different places in a way that I couldn't have done myself. Now, does that mean it's a step back? In some ways. Do I have to expect it to be 70% as good? Probably. But again, it's even then worth delineating between what is good and what is simply taste. What is the way that I would do it, which may not be the way that everybody else wants to consume it. At the end of the day, it is still useful stuff. And we're scaling our ability to put out useful stuff into the world. And with the right team, we can do that with my role being vastly reduced. And so that's. That's sort of the new bar that we're trying to get to is I will write one net new thing per week and I'm pretty sure we can have every bit as good, if not an even better social media presence across all platforms. Now, that doesn't solve for everything. That doesn't solve for interactions with folks and engaging with comments and all of that. For now, that still has to be me. Another hard change we're going through right now is getting more help with YouTube scripting. So historically, I've been the one that comes up with every idea and writes everything from end to end. But let's be real. We got 500 podcast episodes. There is a huge body of me, like, information, me talking about accounting firm stuff, where right now, the more useful version of that today would probably be more concrete frameworks and tools built around this thought leadership that get you from A to B. And that's where other people can come in and help us to develop those more clear frameworks, package them up into useful things, into videos and that sort of thing. And that's very, very hard. I mean, in many ways it is like, you know, getting other people to do the work in your accounting firm for the first time. And you're like, well, it's not going to be as good as me. And you worry about what the people on the other side will say. In the accounting firm, it's the client. In my case, it's the consumer of the content. And you are right now the client who's like, well, I've only ever worked with Marty. I don't want to have to work with somebody else. And you're saying, well, all the videos I've always consumed and enjoyed were written by you. I don't want somebody else's essence creeping into that. And that's. That's a balancing act, right? Like, is the stuff we're still putting out really, really good. But at the end of the day, if I compare the impact I can have running a firm where all I'm doing all the work myself versus running a firm, and you've got a team of really talented people involved in the process, if I overlay that life experience onto my business now, I'm pretty sure that the answer there is we can help more people by me building out my team and having more talented folks involved in the creation of that media. That's. That is my 10x opportunity. It is constraining what I do today much, much more. Where this day of the week, I do this, this day of the week, I do that, and this day of the week, I do this. And in the current version of this plan, I should have way more free time than I've ever had before, which gets me really excited because now I've got more time to, like, create some of the most useful stuff we've ever made, like the app database and the service library, stuff like that. Some of this, most of this stuff came together in an afternoon or in a couple of days. And. And you think about that and you're like, man, what if you just had more time to like invest into the most useful, most powerful resources we could give people. And so right now I'm really excited because I want that bandwidth and that freedom to have more mind space to create useful things. What's a more cohesive framework to take all this thought leadership and weave it together into like a more complete sort of firm operating system? You look at something like what, you know, the folks do at profit sense. You look at something like what the folks do at profit first. That is a methodology to do something where you then license the content to coaches and coaches can go out into the world and take those frameworks and apply them to the folks that need that help. Well, there's probably a version of that that we could do with all this thought leadership, right? How many people come to me every single week that are like, can you consult me on X, Y or Z? Whereas if we had a more clear set of frameworks for how to do all this stuff, we could have a whole crew of folks who are, who are able to go into firms and apply this stuff in a much more hands on way. This isn't something that I know that we're going to do, but to me this is an example of like, what's a 10x version of sort of my influence and my ability to help people today. I think that's a great example. And the seeds for that might be, I don't know, might be books, might just be more clear and sort of tactical frameworks. But you can see how the impact of that is going to be vastly bigger right now. Every one of those things, to me they're very exciting, the notion of having that freedom back, but also tremendously overwhelming because those aren't things that I know how to do right now. But what's the alternative? And so if I, if I don't lean into that, I can keep doing all this stuff, I can keep creating content. Eventually that feels like more and more of a grind, right? It becomes a little bit more work. And that's, that's like the 2x path. And sometimes I would say when you're running your accounting firm, you will just hit your breaking point. Sometimes where it's like, can I really do this for another decade? And oftentimes the path out of that is the 10x opportunity. And maybe we don't let ourselves think about that because it feels like more or it feels like a riskier path when in fact that is the better opportunity for the business and the more sustainable opportunity for you. And if you're like me, you've Got all these self limiting beliefs, right? Where like I can't imagine being the type of person that would do that. In fact, we've talked about doing like big tours, more like theater tours. So you think about like what stand ups do. They go around, they go into theaters, they have a very simple AV setup where they show up for a night at a theater, they have folks that turn up to the theater and buy tickets and everybody goes home with a smile on their face. I love the idea of doing events that you can bring your entire team to. Most events right now, like conferences, they're for firm owners and you gotta fly down to Vegas or whatever, wherever it is to do that. What about the rest of your team? They need help too because the owners that are going to conferences, when they come back to the team and all those exciting new ideas fall on deaf ears, it's because their team wasn't involved in the process. And so how could I enable a transformation both for you and your team? Well, it's probably doing like local events, local shows, because you're not going to bring your team of 10 to Las Vegas, right? So that means a high volume of shows. The beauty of doing it in theaters is you can get in and get out same day, no problem. As opposed to hotel ballrooms where it's like every aspect of the setup is totally custom and that's a lot of work. This is something we've kicked around for about a year now. What would it look like to do a tour of 20 to 40 cities once a year, even twice a year potentially? That would be amazing, right? Like you can imagine the number of folks you could impact. I love the notion that it's a single show that you just nail. And, and so the quality of the show and the production is just off the charts because it's the same show you're doing in 40 cities. Rather than going and giving a talk and only ever giving that talk once, that would be really cool. That would be a totally different type of business for us to build. And it's a skill set and a know how that I don't have right now. Like you'd have to hire a tour manager. Like you would have all these things that I have no familiarity with. But one aspect of like finding the right 10x opportunity for you is it's a 10, 10x opportunity that only you can do. And that's part of the appeal of that to me is like, okay, we've got like a list of, you know, 50, 60,000 accountants and most of these accountants we now know where they are so that we can have a short list and, and be able to say, like, Memphis, Tennessee, we've got 128 folks in Memphis, Tennessee. We can probably get 60 or 70 people out because a third of them will come to a show and they'll bring some team members. Like, how do we lean into an advantage that just we have that will enable that 10x opportunity that nobody else could do? I don't know if we'll do that or not, but it's something we talk about that we get excited about. And for you, your 10x opportunity, it's probably a product of the relationships that you have right now. It's because you've walked through a couple of doors in the past that you now have access to that next door that other people don't have access to, but you're still afraid to walk through it. Right. I would encourage you. That door is probably the path to something that's more valuable while simultaneously being more calm. And it doesn't mean you're going to get it right every single time. But if we look back on our lives, the biggest turning points were those 10x decisions where it meant leaving all my friends at the grocery store, disappointing those people. Right? That was really hard. Launching a cast practice that was closing the door on my entire career of expertise. That was saying, I'm not going to do tax anymore, even though it's all I've done for a decade and is, like, the only skill I have to contribute to the world at this point in time. Buying the accounting firm and getting out of client work. You want to talk about, like, what is your identity staked in? My identity was. Was staked in doing accounting and tax, and I'm now telling everyone in my firm I don't do that anymore. That's a pretty big swing. Then leaving the accounting firm, I. I'd won the game. Like, becoming partner, buying the firm, that's the ceiling right In. In. In accounting. You should have seen the look on my family's face. They were like, so proud. When I bought the firm and I was partnering, they're like, nice work. You did it. And I was like 30 or something. And by 32, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to leave. I think I'm going to make videos and stuff. And they're like, are you sure about that? You better believe that was scary. I mean, the path of running a firm, that's much easier to understand than whatever the heck it is that I do now. How's this Going to make money. Who else do I have to look to where it's like, oh, yeah, I can see that they did it and they found success, and. And I've. I've done that, and it's been amazing, and I don't regret any of it. But now, what's the next 10x opportunity for me that only I could do? Gang, we all have these turning points in our lives. You've probably got one staring you down right now. Do you have the guts to go for it? I think you do. I think you should. In fact, if you know what it is, write it down in the comments right now. There is something about saying something out loud or acknowledging something's existence that, like, lights a fire or opens a different part of your brain that wasn't open before. I would encourage you, and I know that's uncomfortable. You're like, well, if I don't say it out loud or I don't think about it or don't write it down, then I. I won't give it legitimacy. But why not? Let's do it. Give that thing you've been thinking about some legitimacy. Post that thing down in the comments of this, the YouTube version of this podcast episode. I would love to see it. And it is just the first little baby step towards, like, giving that path, that 10x opportunity, some legitimacy. Do it. I hope this was helpful. I've been thinking about this a lot on my own, in kind of my own business, but when I think about the conversations I have with firm owners, you're doing the exact same thing. I know when I was running a firm, like, there were several points where it was like, am I going to go all in on this? In fact, had I stuck with my firm at that point, we had probably 20 to 30% of our revenue was in dental. And the next really hard move, it was that it was for all of our attention to go into that. And that would have been such a more profitable firm, such a more focused firm. It's spooky to do, and you may not even know how to do it when you commit to it. But it is the path to something better. More calm, more control, more headspace available to be really, really good at a thing that only you can do. And I think you can do it if you know what that thing is. Pop it in the comments and check out that book. 10x is easier than 2x. I'll link that down in the show notes. Gang, thanks for being here. I'll catch you in the next one. Sam.