541 10 Commandments of Accounting Firms

So I scaled my accounting firm to a team of about 40. But in the last couple of years, after working with thousands of other accounting firms, I've noticed some patterns. In fact, the firms that follow these 10 commandments, whether they knew it or not, they were the ones that found the most success. Break these rules, man, you're gonna end up overworked, having no fun. Follow them, and you can build a firm that is profitable, scalable, and actually kind of a blast to run. So in this video, I'm covering all 10 commandments of running a successful accounting firm. Catch all 10 of these. Because if you break just one, you're going to a counting hell, man. I don't know what to tell you. Okay, Number one, first commandment, thou shalt answer thy phone. Because the leading cause of people leaving their accountant is just this. They couldn't get a hold of them. And the solution doesn't mean like standing by your phone all the time. It just means clients need to understand how. How to get in touch with you, what the rules of the road are and what the expected turnaround time should be. Because completely reasonable clients like Janet, you can show Janet the rules of the road and she'll follow him. But Dennis, sweet Dennis. Dennis just wishes the rules of the road. Yeah. He wishes the rules were what they used to be, not what they are now. Stop texting me, Dennis. The whole my accountant won't get back to me thing. The problem, unfortunately, is that we are very work centric. We are technicians. Our craft is the doing of the work. And so it can be hard to make time for the client experience, to give the client the shoulder to cry on to answer their stupid questions. And it means we have to design a business not only around how the technical work gets done, but how all the human stuff happens around that, right? Otherwise, people like Dennis, they will try to get their way and just blow up whatever process you got going. And this is why. Commandment number two is, is thou shalt not listen to Dennis. Dennis. Dennis is what we call in the biz a C client. Because he's not as good as your A and B clients, but he's a little bit better than a D client. He's right between a B and a D. He's a real C. Dennis is the client who makes the little comment about, oh, your fees have sure gotten expensive. Dennis is the one you write down the bill on just a bit because you know he isn't good for the full rate. And you'll always know a dentist by them saying things like I wish. I wish we could go back to how things used to be. I wish you charged what you used to charge. I wish you were as available as they used to be. They want you and your firm to be what it was. Here's the problem. You're not that anymore. And for as long as you hang on to clients who want you to be who you used to be, they will keep you from growing into what you're trying to become. Really, they are pulling you back while you are pulling your business forward. Which leads to the obvious solution. Thou shalt fire the thy stinkers. If these clients are holding you back, just let them go. Right? Simple as that. Here's the problem. Dennis. Dennis is actually kind of a great guy. He was one of your very first clients. He volunteers at the animal shelter. Your dad. Your dad thinks he's important. That's what makes him so hard to fire. Because if Dennis is a bad guy, sure, that's easy. Get him out of there. But Dennis is a good guy. And this commandment, actually, if I can give some feedback, it's not named very well. How about we make this one name? Thou shalt fire thy legacy clients. And to be clear, legacy clients aren't bad people. They're just no longer aligned with the direction your business is headed. This was a really hard lesson for me. Good person does not equal good client. Bad person. Bad person equals bad client. Which would lead you to believe that good person equals good client. But no good person can be bad client. The clients I want, they are the Venn diagram intersection of both good people and good client. They are a good person. And they want from the firm who we are trying to become, not who we used to be. And when you really think about what clients on your list are pulling you in the right direction, you start to realize the key to success, to a better future in your firm. Thou shalt covet better clients. And deep down, deep down, you know this. Because we all do. This fantasy. What if you cut the business in half? What? What? Got rid of half of the clients, Maybe dropped a few staff. You'd probably make 80% of the money in half the time, right? Your kids would love you. You finally dropped those last 20 pounds. Look at the way she looks at you. You've thought about it. Don't act like you haven't. And if you're the big boss, this is why your most important job is curating that client list. Trimming the fat. Because most client lists, they are 30% great, fit clients, they are 50% whatever you collected over the years and 20%. Your mom and her friends and most firms, they will spend a decade paralyzed here between being able to be great for your A clients to be what they want you to be. Because you're still serving the legacy clients, right? You're stuck between those two things. But if you are truly trying to get to something better, we gotta focus on those best fit clients and separate ourselves from the rest. And this is how my mom is finding out right now. Mom, I'm sorry, but boo boos got big now and I have to run my own business now. These first four commandments represent your duties toward the firm, while the next commandments represent your duties toward stacking up cash. We're talking lot lots of money. Fat stacks. Kay. Commandment number five. Thou shalt prioritize profitability over growth. Because profitability solves everything. Capacity, hiring constraints, work, life balance, not being able to pay the team enough, bad systems. You want your systems to look better? Try running half as much volume through those pipes and then see how they look. Most of us, what we do, I did the same. We grow our way into a mess. And when you get near capacity, you're like, better hire another accountant. Six months go by, crap, we still haven't found another accountant. Then once you finally do hire somebody, what you're doing is more. But more isn't the same as better. And this is where actually solo accounting firms, like single person firms, they have to operate with this extreme mindset of respecting the fact that there's only 24 hours in a day. But if you run a big team, buddy, no such constraint, take on some work. Maybe we shouldn't have taken on hire another person. Got some clients we should probably let go. That feels emotionally taxing. We need another accountant, stat. We're supporting the economy. Job creation, right? This is a trap. And it is the worst kind of hiring you can do. The way we should be hiring is to first hire for the jobs that you do. That's right. Thou shalt fire thyself. This is actually a big unlock. Normally we hire people who can do more of what the staff does, right? You get to capacity and you're like, oh, I need more staff to do the staff things. And what this does over time is it gives you more people to manage, more people to train a harder business to run. And oh, by the way, that person you hired, they're not giving you any of your own time back. You just picked up more jobs. So what if instead you started by hiring for the things that you do? Cause Hear me out. Just consider this. Whose time in the business is the most valuable? Your time or your staff's time? That's a rhetorical question, man. Your time. This whole business exists because of you. And if you don't improve the business, who will? I learned this lesson the hard way myself. Trying to be the hero, hiring for like everyone else, but hiring for myself last. But we gotta keep in mind the work that will have the biggest impact on our firm's profits. It's not the doing of the work, it's everything that happens around it. To be clear, you gotta have both. But pricing work better, attracting talent, being perceived as a more premium solution. If you don't do that, who will? And this whole mindset shift of prioritizing, getting help for yourself, arguably the biggest benefit of doing this is the example you will set for the team. Because thine team shall fire thine themselves. Team should fire themselves. You set the example of evolving into more valuable tasks, and you want your team to do the same. Most of our professional staff spends an outrageous amount of time on tedium, on document management stuff that doesn't require their expertise. In fact, oftentimes they're worse at this stuff than like the knobby. Need interns that have no technical expertise but grew up on an iPad. For all the same reasons that you need help. Your most senior people, they need help too. Nobody rolls out of bed one day knowing how to delegate effectively. But your team, having a more helpful mindset, being willing to support each other. That starts with the example that you set. If you're always gonna insist on being the hero, expect everyone else to do the same, right? Never ask for help, never pull other people into the process. So consider who on your team, your senior folks are able to push work down to. Is there a release valve there where they can ask for help? When a client sends over 60 pages of docs that now need to be organized in some certain way, who can they give that to? Because your tedium and the stuff that you and your seniors shouldn't waste your time on, that is someone else's opportunity. Oftentimes we feel bad, like giving away the dumb task to somebody else. Recognize this is an opportunity for them. And the faster you're able to push these tasks down the skill spectrum, the faster you actually upskill everyone involved. And all of a sudden, your people, they are growing at a faster rate, so they're becoming capable of more and more. You could throw more work at them. But still, most of us, most of us are still blocked on that next Hire, right. Where am I gonna find that next person? And these last few commandments, they represent our duty to scale, not just for growth's sake, as you'll see. But the eighth commandment is thou shalt build a sustainable staffing strategy. Because most firms today, this is it. This is their strategy. Two steps. Step one, chuck a job description on indeed. Step two, start praying. Then nine months down the road, when you haven't found that tax senior yet, you're like, life's not fair. Whatever hiring issue you're blocked on right now, almost every firm is stuck on some sort of hiring issue. Recognize nothing is impossible. After all, somewhere there's a company that is hiring thousands of people a month. So nothing is impossible. If you're plateaued, it just means that your current approach isn't working anymore. And the solution to this, overcoming this plateau usually requires breaking some sort of belief that we hold, some assumption we have about the way things are. And we have to break that and go back to the drawing board. Can we get there by hiring remotely, by using recruiters, by hiring offshore, by being less reliant on expertise, by acquisition, by building a better talent pipeline, maybe leveraging local universities? We gotta change the approach somehow, because we always need a reliable plan to find the next person. Most firms today, they are a single person away from being up a creek without a paddle. And that includes you. You getting sick, something happening. And the big benefit, like what this unlocks, when we've got that sustainable staffing strategy, it's this. Thou shalt be visible. Go out and tell the world about what you do. Because the best marketing for small firms, it is simply to be ridiculously visible. Hey, real quick, I want to invite you to my super excellent weekly newsletter. My newsletter was like the start of my thought leadership journey. It's where I try to collect what I think are the most important things for you to see every single week sent to you every Wednesday morning. Make sure you don't miss any of the good stuff. Right? Increasingly, we're also building into that some like, of the best evergreen thought leadership I've ever done. Kind of make that like the most action packed, highest quality email you get to your inbox each week. Because listen, we're all busy, all right? You're not gonna see every single little thing that I put out. Goodness sakes, there's just too much. If you're not on my newsletter yet, check that out jasononfirms.com or I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. Hey, quick word from One of today's sponsors, Me. Me. Yes. I run a community Realize that is for accounting firm owners. And realize is kind of the secret behind how I've done all of my content and been able to like financially turn thought leadership into a business. About a hundred firm owners in there Realize is a systematic way to build connections with other peer firm owners. It's not a framework for how to run a firm. It's a way to introduce you to other super cool firm owners. Right now we're putting together small groups so you can have a group of like 5, 6, 7 other firm owners just like you that you meet with every single month. Run very similar firms. Having this for me, totally transformed firm running my North Star. Like my goal for you coming into this group is to make a new best friend, somebody that runs a firm. Because that was what I needed in my journey. The whole community is built around that. It's called Realize. Link down in the show notes if you wanna learn more. Right now you search on YouTube for anything accounting firm related. What do you see? Pretty irritating, right? Kind of hard to avoid. Here's the secret. We want our accounting firm to become the default solution for a specific type of person. It's just a reframing of building a niche firm. You want the people in that niche to think of you as the default option. With that level of specificity, we can command much higher fees and systematize much better. So for beekeepers, the next time they're looking for a bookkeeper, they're like, oh yeah, I've seen a ton of those ads. I've seen that person everywhere. Is that bookkeeping firm that just works with beekeepers. That's the default choice for them now. And the secret to becoming that default choice, it's not to be the leading expert. It is simply to be unavoidable to be the most visible. And I know that feels wrong. Cause we're like, ah, I gotta be the leading technical expert. But then you won't be visible because you have to first become the leading expert. But then you can't really build the expertise until you're visible and get to do the work. I love this one. You want confidence to go into a new niche, but you're worried that maybe you don't have enough experience in that niche. Consider this. Consider every generalist firm who will get their first beekeeper and be like, yeah, we could figure that out. Meanwhile, you who's into beekeeping and you've probably already done a few of these. You're like, ah, I don't know if I have the expertise. You got a whole lot more expertise than all the generalist firms who are like, sure, we can probably figure out how to do this. So go out there, talk about what you do, be visible. And most of us struggle with this so much because we don't like self promotion. Maybe uncomfortable putting ourselves out there. But the reality is the day we put our shingle out and say we do accounting, we are entitled to nothing. People will not just stumble through the door because we have a website. We have to be in the world, showing up every day talking about what we do, not shilling. Like, there's definitely bad versions of this just showing up. And honestly, here is my best hack here. How to crush any type of marketing. Thou shalt be helpful, be helpful. Seriously. It kind of all just boils down to this. How can we be as helpful as possible to a very specific type of entrepreneur, not only to our clients, but to the larger community of this type of person that we're trying to serve? About a month ago, I gave out my cell phone number on the Internet. I said, I'm running the world's first free accounting firm coaching service. We'll talk about all time bad ideas that's up there. This is here. This is my number right here. Text it, call it, leave me a voicemail. Since doing that, I've met over 500 accounting firm owners I would not have otherwise met. It has taken me a crap ton of time. It doesn't scale. My team is still mad, but you know how good it's been for my business. The scariest thing in my business right now is a series of workshops we're running this fall. Invested a pile of money in it. We need a bunch of accounting firms to come out and go to these events. And so many of these random people I'm meeting, texting that are leaving me voicemails are now signing up for these workshops. And me personally, like, of the things that give me energy, I actually love doing stuff like this. Like, I love just being helpful one on one. It is the part of my job that I most enjoy. And if you love that stuff too, if you take satisfaction from that, that could be your entire marketing department. Most accountants say what they enjoy most is advising people, supporting them on their journey, which also happens to be the very best kind of marketing. Right? Like what are you and I doing here right now? You are so deep into some weird Ten Commandments thing that's kind of blasphemous, but you sort of just wanna see where it Ends now, which surprise twist, we actually found an 11th commandment like fell under this weird scraggly bush. We didn't even notice it. And the last one, 11th one, here's what it said. Thou shalt enjoy the journey. Because entrepreneurship, man, it will kick you right in the stomach over and over. That's kind of the name of the game. A lot of entrepreneurship actually boils down to pain tolerance, building your ability to be resilient in the face greater challenges. And that can be an extremely isolating journey. It really can. The solution for me, it was finding my peer group, other firm owners that I vibed with who would support me and I could share ideas with them and they wouldn't make me feel stupid. That group was invaluable. Took me about three years and a whole bunch of conference travel to build that little peer group. And it's why my core business now the thing I am most proud of it is Realize. Realize is an alliance of over 600 accounting firms. It's a bunch of people that watch my videos, listen to my podcast, and it's a place where you can come meet a ton of folks just like you and have that support. Because my take here is what's better than a coach, actually, and a lot cheaper than a coach is access to hundreds of people who actually do what you do. Like they actually do it. They're not just some Internet grifter talking about it. Right? Take a look at Realize. I built Realize so that in 30 days you could have the peer group that it took me three years to build the old fashioned way. That's the whole idea. To meet a bunch of really cool other people that are doing the same thing as you. Okay, here we tackled what I think are kind of some universal truths. But next, let me give you something hyper tactical. Let me show you in under 15 minutes a path to doubling the profitability of your accounting firm. A path that you will actually believe in when you see it like this is real. You can absolutely do it, share ideas with them and they wouldn't make me feel stupid. That group was invaluable. It took me about three years and and a whole bunch of conference travel to build that little peer group. And it's why my core business now the thing I am most proud of, it is Realize. Realize is an alliance of over 600 accounting firms. It's a bunch of people that watch my videos, listen to my podcast, and it's a place where you can come meet a ton of folks just like you and have that support. Because my Take here is what's better than a coach actually, and a lot cheaper than a coach is access to hundreds of people who actually do what you do. Like they actually do it. They're not just somebody Internet grifter talking about it. Right? Take a look at Realize. I built Realize so that in 30 days you could have the peer group that it took me three years to build the old fashioned way. That's the whole idea, to meet a bunch of really cool other people that are doing the same thing as you. Okay, here we tackled what I think are kind of some universal truths. But next, let me give you something hyper tactical. Let me show you in under 15 minutes a path to doubling the profitability of your accounting firm. A path that you will actually believe in when you see it. Like this is real. You can absolutely do it. A heads up for my podcast friends. We put together the biggest, scariest project my team has ever worked on. A big old run of live events around the country headed up until year end. To ensure that your 2026 is just the best year ever. Let me run you through the cities real quick. We're coming to Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, NY City, and Boston with some super cool half day workshops that roll into dinners. You get CPE for it. It is an event that is built for your entire team to get the whole squad feeling inspired so that if you are a firm leader, you're not feeling like you gotta put everything on your back. Headed into 2026 gonna be a super fun experience. It's gonna be a surprise guest at every city. We're gonna record an installment of the podcast live at each of these events, you're gonna be part of the podcast itself. What? And then I would love to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.