545 The Secret To Accounting Firm Delegation (Keynote)

Gang today, a full professionally shot keynote that I actually gave five or six times. This may be the favorite, my favorite talk that I've done around just like building an entire firm wide habit of delegation, how to push skills down the expertise spectrum faster to upskill your team faster. This might be the thing I was most proud of doing well inside my accounting firm because we had admins that became very good technical people. I got myself out of doing all the client work in the firm. And this approach, what we're talking about today, was kind of the secret to it. This kicked off Canopy's annual customer summit. So the talk itself doesn't have anything to do with Canopy, but it kicked off the day that was full of some cool stuff including product announcements for Canopy. I'll put a link down in the show notes to the full Canopy customer summit. You can see the recording of that if you want. But without further ado, here's a recent keynote of mine on delegation.

Great to be here. It's an honor to be here. Kicking off Summit, I got a peek into what is to come and what you're going to get after this and it's very, very cool stuff. But let's kick things off with some hyper practical, just some things we can execute on right away as we're getting into the end of the year and we've got sort of all this planning to do before we go into busy season again. Right. I want to give you what is some of the most practical kind of tactical advice that I've picked up from the firms that I've worked with in the last couple of years so that hopefully you get some immediate wins in this opening session. Speed through this intro since Davis gave me a very nice one. My background I last ran an 80 year old tax firm. I had a team of 40 in Oregon in that we built a cast practice. Eventually I got into content creation which is all I do now, going around speaking, doing stuff like this. I launched an accountant community called realize. Got about 600 firms in there and that's just a private space for firms to come together and share what they're doing and learn from each other. And then I run a podcast, Jason, on firms where we just talk the ins and outs of running accounting firms every day. We've got about 1500 people that listen to that each day. So my street cred is I built a personal practice to it's actually one and a half million. And then I grew this 80 year old firm from three to five million. But if you're an accountant the only thing you heard in that intro is, did he say he doesn't even run a firm anymore?

And I totally get that. This is, like, something that I super grappled with as I sold my firm and transitioned into doing firm thought leadership. How can you know how to help people run firms if you don't even run a firm yourself? Right? And I think there's a lesson in here that's actually super relevant to all of us. So a story. I was at a dinner party recently chatting with this guy, and he's the.

COO of a big legal group in New York City. We're talking through what he does and kind of the things he's stuck on. And he's like. He's like, yeah, I'm blocked on change management, on legacy partners, on outdated tech. Like, go down the list of what you think this guy's struggling with, and it's just exactly what you would expect, right? So then he asks me what I do, and I talked about kind of doing thought leadership and content online and all that, but he got stuck on the same thing. He's like, how do you help people run an accounting firm if you don't yourself run an accounting firm? And my evolution the last couple of years has been one of I was super grateful to be able to run a firm and run a team, and that was a super enriching journey. But these days, I'm able to learn in a fundamentally different way that's helpful to a different set of people. So now I learn from the 600 firms in my community, from the firms engaging with the podcast, from the brands like Canopy that are big building the future before our eyes, from the people I meet at live events, and from the tens of thousands of accountants that I get to interact with online. And to give you a very practical example of how my learning has changed, if you think about what is the most important tech decision you will make in your accounting firm, what tool? It's the practice management system that's the first round draft pick. It's like the operating system of your firm. But how do you know what the right system is to choose? Do you make a decision solely based on what a sales rep tells you? Because I can tell you I did that, and it didn't work out well. So this is an example of something we crowdsource. So we put together this tool that we'll recommend, like a practice management system just for you. And this slide is out of date now, but we've had about 6,000 firms go through this tool now. And we ask them questions like, what was the last system that you used for practice management? Why did you change? Did you regret the change? What would you tell somebody else going through the same change? We got this for 6,000 firms. So then we put out kind of our recommendation of top practice management systems. What are we seeing people have great success with again for 6,000 firms? And so the way that I'm learning now is fundamentally different. I am gathering information from all of the folks who do what I used to do, and then I have the privilege of being able to put that information back out for people to benefit from it. So if we come back to this guy, the question I put to him was.

How many other people do you know who do what you do, who are the COO of a legal firm? He's like, I don't know a single other person that does what I do. I'm like, how many people just like you are there in New York City? He's like, probably over 100.

The realization is like, don't you think those people have some answers that we could benefit from? So many of us are doing the exact same things in our own little silos, right? Like, isn't there a way that we could exchange value with each other just by having more of these conversations and turning up to stuff like this and meeting people and going to live events? Like, there's so much to be learned in sharing the journey with our peers. And so I feel super fortunate today to almost be able to be a facilitator of that. I've chosen to be ignorant to the day in and day out running of an accounting firm because I don't do that anymore, right? But I'm doing something else that would have been a tremendously valuable service for me when I did run a firm. And. And every one of us, we have a version of this right now where there's something we're thinking about doing, but because our identity is tied to what we've always done, it's hard to give that up, right? It's hard to be willing to become ignorant to that thing, to then lean into that next thing that's even better and more valuable and more helpful to more people. And if you're at that tipping point, like, I cannot encourage you enough to explore that and find that willingness to say, I'm actually never gonna touch this again. I'm actually gonna hire somebody to do this. I'm gonna trust this to my team so that I can go and now do this more valuable thing and then see what's on the other side of that. And that's kind of the theme of the talk today. The notion that you are what you do. If you ultimately think about how do we identify as accounting leaders and what do we want to be in this mental image we have of who we are, is that representative of the tasks that we do every day? Oftentimes they aren't like the things that we get sucked into.

They are not really in service of who we're trying to become, what we're trying to get to. They're the inane things that we haven't found a way to get out from under. So today we're going to cruise through some very, very tactical examples for tax firms, for bookkeeping firms, of ways that we can challenge our task list and what it looks like today and how we have kind of a fundamentally different approach with our team to the evolution of our tasks. Because if what I'm doing 12 months from now looks identical to the things that I'm doing today, did I grow right? That's kind of the ultimate litmus test for have I grown in the past 12 months? Well, let's compare all the tasks you did today with all the tasks that you did 12 months from now. This is a very helpful exercise for you, but also for the growth of your team members. I want to show you exactly how to do that today. That's what we're going to dig into with some practical examples. So first, taking stock of what we do, the evolution of who we are ought to be reflected in the tasks that we do, right? In a.

I've got a 4, 6 and an 8 year old and my 8 year old daughter. If it was take your kid to take your daughter to work day and she sat in the corner and she saw the things that I did all day, I mean, I wouldn't wish this on her by any means. But let's say we did do this exercise. How would she view the tasks that I was doing? Was I on the phone with clients all day? Was I organizing work papers in Adobe Acrobat all day? What would she see? And is kind of the evolution that I'm trying to find, is it reflective in those things that she would see? Because what we are, man, we are scarce, right? Very hard to find a good accountant. We're experts, we're mentors, we're advisors, we're very in demand. These are all the things that we want to be. What we aren't document gatherers. Our client's personal assistance extremely overpriced admins but it's oftentimes what clients ask of us, right? And if we sort of sink to the level of being willing to do that stuff ourselves, as opposed to, like, well, what's it actually look like to build out maybe an admin support staff that can help with these things? So it's not me doing it.

I think that probably better aligns us with where we're trying to go. And the really, really sneaky thing here is.

Is if my clients see me doing this tedium, gathering documents, hounding them for information, then they're going to think that's what I do. Because when they don't understand what it is that we do, the technical things behind the scenes and all that perception is reality, they don't understand. You can put 20 hours into this complex tax plan that is like, you've just done this triple salchow to save them a whole bunch of tax. And then we send them an email and we're like, here are your vouchers, right? Like, they don't understand everything that just went into that, right? And so they will form their opinions of what we do based on what they can see. And that's really frustrating because we're the purists. Like, we pride ourselves in the technical stuff, right? But when they don't understand the technical stuff, they will look at, like, what they can see from their perspective and form their opinions based on that. And so if 80% of the emails that I send them sound like, hey, Mike, just following up for that W2 for the third time, if you could send that over to me, please, that'd be great. If that's 80% of the emails that I send to my clients, then every time they get a notification and they see it's from you, what are they gonna do? They're gonna groan. They're gonna be like, oh, okay, great, I gotta do more admin tasks and get that stuff over to my accountant. And that's not what we do. That's not the value that we provide. But their perception of what we do will be that for as long as we're doing it. And frankly, most of us are really struggling to escape this, to escape not being sucked into the tedium that is demanded of gathering all the information you need to close the books every month and put the 1040 together, which requires 35 bits of information that are totally unique to that client. Right? That is such a headache and not something that is in service of really our higher purpose of what we're trying to do. And you end up Stuck there. And I can tell you, most of us know someone who this applies to. You end up living the same five years on repeat, the tasks that you were doing five years ago look identical to the tasks that you're doing now. How do we escape that? Right? And how do we escape that for our teams? The same applies to the people that we're working with. If I am trying to put my staff on a path of, you know, getting paid better and having more responsibility and all that, the most real version of measuring that is, what are you doing today, and what do we want you doing 12 months from now? Like, this is where the rubber meets the road. So let's go through some very real examples. And these are a collection of kind of the coolest things that we had success with in my firm. But also now that I've had the opportunity to work with over 2,000 small firms in the last couple of years, I want to show you the coolest things I've seen in the wild, too. So first up, how do we deskill the process of tax intake? Because, man, like Q1 in a tax firm, it is just an outrageous number of documents. That scene in Harry Potter where, like, all the envelopes start shooting down out of the fireplace and, like, filling the room like that is a tax office in February and March. It is wild. But an amazing thing I found talking with a bunch of different firms is firms approach this work in vastly different ways. Even though we're all getting to the same outcome, like a completed 1040, firms approach this stuff in wildly different ways. This is a tax example. We're going to get into a bookkeeping example after this. But.

Even down to a question as simple as, when should the 1040 project begin? Like, when should your professional staff pick it up and start working on it? There's a lot of different answers to this question. And let's actually not think about this through the lens of our own firms. Let's put this business coach hat on. Maybe you don't even know anything about accounting firms. Assume you're this executive coach. You're looking at somebody else's business, their accounting firm. And let's get to what is the right answer to this? Because there's a whole bunch of different answers to this question. Well, we'll start the 1040 when the client asks us what do they need to get us. Maybe we start the project when we get the first piece of information from a client, right? Oh, my gosh. That's a recipe for picking up and putting down a 1040. Ten times before we finish it. Maybe it starts when the client sends us the organizer or when they just tell us to work on it. Or maybe we start it when all the information is in, right? At least from a pro forma standpoint. Everything that we think we are going to need, maybe that's when we start it. And if you distance yourself from your own business and the problems you have and all the reasons why these things can't work, if you were a coach to an accounting firm, you would say there's an obvious right answer here, right? You do it when all the information is in. Same exercise for this question.

Whose job should it be to gather the info? Should it be the big boss, the partner? Should it be a manager, a senior, a junior, or should it be an admin? Because after all, we're just talking about gathering information that we are pretty sure that we need based on pro forma, right? So there's always going to be things that come up where we're like, okay, you got this new thing. Turns out we now need this as well. But the bare minimum, the starting point is based on last year. What do we know that we're going to need? Is that like a big brain, very hard tasks, tasks that we need technical people to do? Because I can talk to two firms where one firm will say, well, it's the partners that manage all the client relationships. And our clients only really want to talk with the top dog. And so it's our partners that make sure that we get all this information in. You go across the street to another accounting firm. We had an admin team that does all this stuff. The admin team hounds clients until we got everything in. And then the professional staff doesn't start it until it hits their desk with everything that we think we need. Now does that have limitations? My admin team, they don't know tax. Like, what if the client asks them a tax question? Are there limitations to that? For sure. But if you put your business coach hat on here, like, what's the right answer? The right answer is it's gotta be the administrator. A really cool side benefit of that is the task that is the biggest waste of your partner's time is an opportunity for the admin. It really is. They're getting exposed to new higher value things. So you end up with these situations where you've got two accounting firms using vastly different level of expertise to get the same job done. But it's worth noting because this is actually the limitation I ran into in my accounting firm is that those tasks ultimately they can't move, let's say off of the partner or off of anybody else until they have someone to move to. And what I found when I would have these conversations with my team and like annual reviews, we talk about kind of their ambitions, where they wanted to be. You know, that could be compensation, could be responsibilities, whatever it is. And we would paint this picture of like, okay, here's what we want to do this year. And then you get to the end of the year and oftentimes it would be like, why does it feel like we're still doing the exact same stuff? 12 months have passed, right. The answer often was there was nowhere for that work to go. Maybe that person didn't feel like they have permission to delegate to another member of the team. There wasn't somebody there to support them. And what you'll find interestingly is the more that you give everyone in your team that is growth minded, the more support you give them from admins, from junior team members and all that, the faster they're able to move those tasks, but the faster everybody grows. So if you really put an emphasis on pushing tasks down the expertise spectrum, arguably the biggest benefit of this, besides saving the time of your senior folks, is it upskills everyone else at a record rate. Right, because they're getting exposed to more valuable work. Now, 100 ways we can pick this apart, right? It's very easy to do. Well, this will never work for my business.

The truth is there's a lot of accounting firms that it does work for. Why is that?

Is there a way that we can block through these assumptions that we hold? Because oftentimes, not oftentimes, always we're at where we're at today as a product of.

The assumptions that we hold of what is possible. That's all based on what we've experienced and what we've seen. And it's not until those assumptions are challenged and broken somehow that we're able to get to the next thing. And that could come from ideas in a talk like this. I think the best version of this is in a conversation with another practitioner where they say, yeah, we were stuck on the same thing. Here's what we did. This didn't work. This did work. And all of a sudden, boom, like, you've blown through that wall and you're like, okay, now something fundamentally better is possible. We're going to do it this way. So you will have that voice like in your ear. That is all these reasons why this couldn't work for us. And you got to work through all of those things. But it's so worth the effort because oftentimes you can't get to where you're trying to get until you have worked through those assumptions. Okay, now there is something unique to the accountant experience and how we are wired that can keep us blocked on, like a very specific limitation or assumption for so long. Like, we are chronic overthinkers. This is us, right? You're like, oh my gosh, I'm like so stuck on this little kind of nuanced thing. For some reason we are just wired this way. But, like, it is so worth the effort to try to overcome this stuff because, like, where we are at today, it's just simply a product of what those assumptions are. And so we try to try to really inspect them, what they are and are they valid? Are there people out there that can help me find a solution to it? Is it a tech thing? Is it a mindset thing? Is it a team thing? Do I just not have the right person to overcome that? Okay, that was a tax example. Let's talk pre accounting. This is a big one. If you do any bookkeeping, here's how most month end closes go. In my experience, the target close date for the month end closes the 12th of the month. So you start work on the 10th because it takes two days to get done, right? Work backwards, got to get it out by the 12th. You start on the 10th, you hop in there, oops. You find out the client login doesn't work. You can't get the information that you need to actually do the work. And then the client gets back to you on the 12th with the information. And they're mad that now you don't have time to get done on time. And you're just frustrated. You're like, why is it this way? This is such a big part of bookkeeping right now is just access and two factor authentication Olympics. And like, this is like such a. For people that don't do this stuff, they don't realize what a big headache that is. And how many gymnastics have to be done just to get this stuff, this stuff done, right? So same question we posed earlier in the context of tax. Whose job should it be to gather all that information for the month end close?

We may have all sorts of reasons for why it's not the admin. If you put your business coach hat on, that feels like it ought to be administrative. So let's go through a very practical example of how we could do this. Here are three kind of hypothetical clients and the things that you Got to gather to do that month end close. Client one. Well, we got to get the Wells Fargo bank statement. We got to get a screenshot of the loan balance from the website because they don't actually issue statements for that loan. So we got to have a screenshot. It's annoying, I know. We got to ask the client for some sort of report from their system. The credit card statement that comes available on the 24th. So we'll grab the statement, but then we got to download the activity through the end of the month. And we got a screenshot the end of month balance because the statement only has the balance on the 24th. Right? Very basic example. Client 2, similar Chase bank statements, invoices from some legacy system the client uses, maybe a line of credit statement, some receipts from Google Drive. Client three, I had a whole bunch of client threes in my firm. You got to download the transactions from First East West National Bank. Man, we had so many of these clients on these regional banks that didn't have bank feeds. And it was just this huge hassle. There was no automated way to get transactions. So we have to go out, download all this stuff. Then you get the statements. Then you got to have Craig send you the AMEX statement allocation, right? You got that client that wants to use his Amex across three different businesses. And so he has to go and do this whole process to split it up the right way. And it's holding up the month. End close, you got to grab the wage garnishment balance from the website. Okay? You get it right. You're annoyed at this point, but every month end close has some version of this. How do we manage it? Here's what I'd steer you towards. A dedicated pre accounting process. And it can look as simple as this. I would Recommend your version 1 is done in something quick and dirty. Like if you're in an office, this could literally be on a sheet of paper. If you work in a distributed team, this could be a spreadsheet. Long term. You build it into your practice management system. But don't start there because in the beginning you don't totally know what you need yet. But this is a very basic example of pre accounting system. The first column we've got what the thing is. The second column we've got who the client is that it applies to. The third column we've got the type of thing that's to be fetched. Fourth column we've got the source where we fetch it from. That could be a website, that could be a person. Next column is the destination, where does it need to go once we have it? And then you've got all the months has it been done yet or not? And your professional staff doesn't start the month end close until every one of those items are in. At that point presumably the, the project status in your project management system flips over from pre accounting to prep. Who should be doing this? Admins, man. If you're, you know, senior accountants, if they're starting the month end close and logging into all these different systems and doing all this paper chasing, that's a huge waste of time. And you'll actually find if you centralize this pre accounting work to a smaller number of administrative folks on their team, they will knock it out much more efficiently. They're able to do all this stuff at once. And again, the power of this is the more we push tasks down the expertise spectrum, the more it upskills the people that are now handling those tasks. This is very real. The tasks that we are clinging to right now are, are somebody else's opportunity. And oftentimes we feel bad for delegating the dumb menial things that we maybe even feel a little bit ashamed that like we still do. We don't even want anybody to know that we have to do this dumb manual thing. And so we cling to it when that manual task is actually somebody else's opportunity, giving that thing to them that upskills them. So the progression of what this actually ended up looking like in my firm was we had admins doing the pre accounting work for the first time. And so they're learning about like what's it take to put these work papers together? But then they start asking great questions like what is the naming convention we should use for these files that we're gathering? Like just tell us what it should be and we'll do it. Where should they go? Like what's the most helpful place we can put them? Because when we first started this they just gave a pile of files to the senior accountant. But if the senior accountant's just going to go put them another place, just tell us where they need to go and the admins will do that. Right? Third thing we notice that you always annotate checking statements this specific way. How should we. We can do that too. Like let's just have the admins annotate them before they put them where they need to go. Fourth thing.

We see that you tie this to the balance sheet, but oftentimes that's pretty straightforward cause it hasn't changed month over month. Do you Want us to just hop in to QuickBooks to 0 to whatever that is, real quick. Just make sure that it ties out. The admins can do that before you know it. Like our admin team, this is something we did in our firm. Our admin team was knocking out upwards of 50% of the month end close.

And they're starting to look a lot like bookkeepers. And so we went through this very. It was weird. We kind of had two phases in our firm where we had this admin team and we went from hiring admins who could answer the phone to admins that were like operations people, so capable. And that was such a big shift for us. But then we had a period of years where it's like the admin team was the admin team and then this switch flipped where it was like they can do way more like they should be allowed to do accounting. And this was, this was kind of an identity thing where some of the accountants on our team were like, what do you mean? That's accounting work. That's my job. Don't let the admin team do that. Once we worked through that and we started pulling them into examples just like this, pre accounting, gathering information, it was like boom, boom. All of a sudden the admins were like, hey, could you just give me a bookkeeping course or two? Because I'm pretty sure that I've almost got this. And now our admins are becoming professional staff and we start that cycle over. This is a huge change in our firm.

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 it's 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 want to learn more. 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. So 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. So we talked about deskilling tax work. Deskilling pre accounting. What about technical review? What? You couldn't descale that, right? Quality assurance. Listen, show me a tax firm right now and I'll show you a tax firm that's hiring a senior tax manager. I mean everybody is right? We're all looking for that unicorn. And if only those people existed, or enough of them existed, sure, we could pull all these people in with all this experience and they would knockout review and then everything would be great. But similar to what we've talked about thus far in two different firms, you will see them using wildly different levels of expertise. So how do we do this? How do we like get a junior person to actually contribute to the review process? I'll give you a very practical example of what you can do in a tax firm. This is what we did with our 1040 review process.

Is we introduced this difficulty scale. And this is actually something that's more common in larger firms but hasn't really trickled down. Too many small firms, our 1040s, every one of them fell into one of six buckets. That was kind of an approximation of the complexity of the return. Level one were 1040s where it was just government forms, no itemized deductions. So we're talking about like W2s, 1099 interest, Social Security statements. This is largely data entry, right? Like this is not something very complex. Level 2, we allowed for adjustments to income. Level 3, we allowed for itemized deductions. Level 4, Schedule E's Level 5, Schedule C's, Level 6, everything else pass throughs, multi state the hairy stuff. Now we have the problem in our firm that I think most firms struggle with where there are Reviewers. And then there are preparers, right? And there comes a time in some accountant's life where they cross some sort of magical threshold where there's trust there and they've got a bunch of experience and all that, and all of a sudden they can be a reviewer. And if this has been you, you remember the first time that you reviewed a tax return or a month end close, you're like, jesus, Louise, you're telling me I'm the last one that's gonna look at this before it goes out the door? Like, that's pretty, pretty nerve wracking. And so you have like the haves and the have nots. You have the reviewers, the preparers. And I wanted to kind of break down this divide in my firm and think through, like, how do we make this a more organic progression rather than someone just being anointed one day and they're just a reviewer at that point, right? And so what we did in our firm was every person that did tax in the firm, they were approved to prep up to a certain level, but then they were approved to review everything up to the level before that. So, for example, we could have someone that was approved to prep 1040s up to level three, but then it would be their responsibility to also review returns up to level two. And if you think about how to build a process around technical review, how do you build an SOP or a checklist to review a tax return? That feels impossibly complex, right? It's such an abstract thing, you can't actually do that. But what if you just started with level one, could you build a process and training to show people how to prepare level one returns? That's a lot more easy to digest, right? I mean, that's like, give an example of every government form they're going to interact with. Show them where to put it, any other considerations. That's pretty straightforward. So you can imagine building an SOP for level one prep. You can also imagine your review team building an SOP for level one review, right? That's where you start. But oftentimes we don't even start down this process of systematizing because we can't think about doing the whole thing. Don't start with the whole thing. Start with level one. And it's not until level one that you'll see a good way to do level two. And that's the progression. Then your team has a logical progression they can go through from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5. And now review is part of everyone's collective responsibility. This also makes preparers much better preparers because they have to think like a reviewer as well right now. So many reasons that you can dig into for why this couldn't work for me. I can't trust my preparers to not make mistakes. Man, my staff's gonna hate this. They don't wanna do review, they wanna do prep. What if they make a mistake? I actually got this one the other day, the last bullet here. My preparers don't have time for this. Buddy, that is such a.

We're missing the point. Like, the most important task that anybody on your team can do is the task that will help them to grow, right? And so it may mean shuffling around responsibilities. And even I had this in my firm where the first time preparers were doing a bunch of review, yes, they didn't have as much time for prep, but that was a great problem because the constraint of practically every single accounting firm is I can't get enough high level people, I can't get enough reviewers, right? That's the constraint. And so if we instead task people with like sort of continuing to evolve and give them a logical path to doing more complex work, then they are growing faster and we're solving those hard constraints and hard the business. Okay, this is all great, but if you're an accounting firm leader, let's be real. Where do you actually spend most of your time? You spend it on email, man. You spend it on the inbox. We thought that, like doing this stuff would be helping clients and chatting with them all day. The reality is that you just end up staring at your inbox most of the day. And honestly, that's like, that's pretty sad. Like, that's a bummer. I can tell you. At its worst, I was spending.

Probably six hours a day in email and we talked a lot about automation and workflow and all of that stuff. And every firm is different. So it's hard to know for you what the right thing to work on is. But the one thing we all have that we all spend more time on than we would like to, man, it is email. So that's oftentimes a good place to start with process improvement.

As we're going through all these ideas, I'm throwing a lot of stuff at you right now, right?

I say this for conferences and days like today. You got to anchor to one or two things you're most excited about to make the act of sitting here and watching me tell you this stuff worthwhile. So as we're going through this stuff, find maybe the one thing or the two things that you're like this. I can actually do this. We're going to implement this. I'm going to tell my team about, I'm going to make them watch this and say, let's find the version of this that works for us. You're not going to do all of these things, but so often we will engage with this stuff, get some continuing education credits. Great, we ticked that box. But then nothing changes. So of these things really zero in on what would be the most useful thing for me right now. It might be this. Let's talk about better email in seven steps. Just some very practical tips I can give you. For one man, don't start your day with email. Like don't let that be the very first thing that you do.

I had this thesis in my firm that like there's going to be a time in the day where the day gets away from you.

It's just a matter of when. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And if. We start our day with email, we are kind of volunteering or greatly increasing the risk that that day gets away from you at 8:00am and you never actually get back to the things that you wanted to work on. Because email is almost by definition other people's problems.

And I don't know about you, but I got a lot of my own problems that I got to work on. And if all I am is the hero for everybody else, that's not a long term sustainable thing, right? So don't start your day with email. Start your day with your own problems, the things that you got to work on and then go from there. This is a hard one for a lot of people. Check email once per day. Oh gosh. How many of you have email up on one of your monitors right now? I would bet the majority of us just asking to be distracted, right? Well, what if something spicy comes in? What if there's something that comes in, I gotta like respond to it right away. I gotta have this up. And if you think about it and it's, it's when we say these things, it's so much easier to think about other people like, than us. So think about this for a team member. Say you got a team member that's not as productive as you'd like them to be. And they sit there with their email up all day long just in case something spicy comes through. This is like the hat, wearing a hat of inefficiency. Like you are perpetually distracted at the chance of somebody else Having a fire that they need you to put out, that they email you about. If there's anything that spicy, are they going to email you about? Like, if my kid takes a header at summer camp, they're not going to send me an email. They're going to say, hey, can you come down here and pick up your kid? You won't stop crying. So, like, let's challenge, like, do we really need to have email up all day long? Now your once per day session, at its worst it might be six hours. Like, it might be like it was for me. At my worst, that might be a very long session. But let's compartmentalize it because the value of doing that, the beauty of doing that is all the other time and not having email distracting you and being able to do deep work. Like, we are so removed from the ability of like doing super deep work and having two hours of uninterrupted time. Doesn't that feel nice? I mean, that's. Tell me if you've ever said this before. I love working on Saturdays because there's nobody working to distract me. Right. How do we make those days our weekdays and then let Saturdays be Saturdays? Right? You know, you remember weekends. Okay, another tip here. Don't work out of the inbox. The inbox is like running in quicksand. You hop in and you're like, okay, cool, I can get through this stuff. Two hours later you got through all that stuff, but even more messages have come in than you actually got out the door. Right? And now you're sad. Don't do that. Very easy trick here. Have a folder that is like today or a tag system or something like that where you can indicate, here's all the stuff that I'm going to handle today. And once I get through that, I'm going to go off and I'm going to work on all the other stuff that I got to do rather than just being stuck here because stuff just keeps coming in.

I already railed on this one for a while. Close Outlook, close. Whatever your email client is, don't go to your inbox tab in Canopy, whatever that is. You got to kind of distance yourself from that so that you can.

Gain back control of your attention span, which is so hard to do. If we think about Microsoft Teams and Slack and text messages and phone calls and all the different ways that we have to be distracted. I can't remember what the statistic is. Statistic of how many times a day the average knowledge worker gets a message or an email or something like that. It Works out to basically every four minutes you're getting something. How in the world are you going to get anything done if every four minutes you're like, okay, I need to go respond to this? You just won't. So we have to enforce these boundaries in order for us to actually get anything out the door.

This next one was arguably the most transformational thing that I ever did, and I cannot push you enough to consider it. Delegate your inbox, man. For some reason, our email inboxes are like this. It's like this personal, sort of personal journey that we have to go through on our own, right? There's a sense of propriety. It's my email inbox, and if I were to ask for help, that would be like a failure. You know, I'm just not managing my email the right way, and I don't want to, you know, suck somebody else into that mess. That's not fair to them.

Email in different businesses is different. If you worked for Canopy, email is one set of things. It's internal communications. It's interacting with accountants. It is one set of things. Email inside of an accounting firm, it is how work comes in. It is so core to everything that we get done. It is. It is the receiving bay of your accounting firm. It really is. If you think about, like, a manufacturing warehouse or something like that, they back the truck in. For most firms, that's email. That's where stuff is coming in. So then why do we have this propriety over all of our inboxes and manage them in such siloed ways where only I can manage the things that come into my inbox? Right? And if you really drill into this, it's ridiculous. If you're sitting in your office and a member of your team comes in and they're like, hey, I'm gonna be away for 10 days, but don't worry, I've got my email on my phone and I'll keep an eye on it. I had a team of 40 people. Somebody comes into my office and says that, oh, my Gosh, we got 40 other people here, and you're telling me there's nobody that works for this firm that can, like, I don't know, keep an eye on it for you? Similar to me if you're the big boss, like, this was a huge transition in my journey, getting out of doing client work entirely to just working on the business. My email inbox was the most accurate yardstick or the most accurate snapshot of the things that I still needed to delegate because they were still coming to me. Right. And that could happen because of a myriad of reasons. Maybe last time this thing happened, I swooped in and I was the hero and I solved the problem. So the next time the same thing happens, let's just send it to Jason, because I'm pretty sure he'll take care of it. Right. But exact same rationale applies there. Something comes to you. You mean to tell me I've got 40 other people here and nobody else can do this? The answer for 95% of the emails in your inbox is no, there's somebody else that can do this. There's a hundred reasons why it may have still come to you, but somebody else can do this. And a really helpful forcing function here is having an admin, having somebody that can come in and kind of like, with their own BS detector, be like, no, like, you don't need to be the one to do this. Like, I'm gonna send this to this person because it's their client. And to have them come in and be able to do that is so valuable. The blocker that most of us have, Honestly, the reason why we don't do this is there's, like, sensitive HR stuff in our inbox. And I'm like, well, I don't want somebody to see this. Get rid of, like, find another place for the sensitive HR stuff like that. Like, if you're sending out pay stubs, whatever it is, find a different home for that stuff. Because what's happening in the email box is so core to the entire business. We need to be able to get help from our peers. Not just you, the big boss, getting help from other folks in the firm, but that person that's going on vacation, that person that really needs to focus this afternoon. But there might be a spicy email that comes in, which gets me to, like, this last tip. Monitoring, which is so much of accounts for so much of the time that we leave email up, we can make monitoring somebody else's job. So when I said, don't start your day with email, and you had that reaction like, ooh, what if something spicy came in overnight? Instead, if I want to say, I'm just going to check email once a day at 11am, it could be somebody else's job to see. Did something spicy come in overnight? Right. Similarly, with your team, if somebody really needs to focus that afternoon, they can ping a team member and be like, hey, I know, like, you're doing email triage right now. Do you mind keeping an eye on my inbox in case this one thing comes through? And let me Know, so that I can focus. If we can make email, like, a shared thing that we can all manage together, man, that is just such a better way to tame the email monster, which can take up so much of our day. Think of it as the receiving bay of your accounting firm. Like, imagine having. Imagine everyone in your firm having their own mailbox. Imagine you ran a firm and it had a big. It was a big office, and everybody had their own mailbox, and nobody was allowed to check anybody else's mailbox. Everyone had to run down and check it themselves, and only they could handle the things that came through. That's kind of how we treat email, which doesn't really make sense. Right. Like, we're trying to get to a more collaborative, more shared way of getting this stuff done. Okay, this is a biggie.

Client communication reimagined. This is the single biggest driver of the perception of the client experience is, will they respond to my call? Like, did they get back to me? I think that's the number one reason you probably hear from new clients that are looking for a new accountant is my last guy just wouldn't get back to me. My last person. Like, they just. They weren't responsive enough.

And most of us have designed a system of managing client communication that kind of dooms you to fail to end up collecting way more than you could possibly manage yourself. And like, the beginning of the solution, like, how we. How we begin managing this in a more intelligent way, comes back to this question, what's the expected turnaround time to get back to a client? Now, when I say that, a number comes into your head, and it's a little different for every firm, but it's something you've parroted many, many times. Maybe that's 48 hours. Maybe that's. We try someday, we try same day, maybe it's the next day. We all have this kind of ingrained organizational, like, cultural response to this that should have popped into your head when I said that. But consider this. When you say that and then all of your team parrots the same thing. Let's say Maybe you say 48 hours, and your team hears that. And so when the client asks them the question, they say 48 hours. If everybody in your firm is equally available, who will all the clients go to?

They go to the big boss, right? Of course they will. If it takes 48 hours to get back to hear back from me and 48 hours to hear back from the intern. Doug, man, they're not going to go to the intern. Right? But this is the Way most firms are run is everyone parrots what the big boss said. And so all the communication, it goes to the top. And if that's not what you want, then we're not enforcing the behavior of our clients. That will actually get you out from under all those client communications. So consider, what should the expected turnaround time be to get back to a client for partners versus managers versus seniors versus juniors versus admins, we put that business coach hat on again, right? This ought to be like this sort of cascading, cascading number. So in our firm.

We had a team of admins that you could pick up and call anytime. So the response time was practically zero. That was their job was to be available. Above that, we had the accountants that managed a group of clients. And the accountants initially we did the same thing where they were immediately available, you could call them. But what we found is, is we had accountants that ended up fielding all these dumb admin tasks. Can you send me a copy of this or that? Things that the admins can do. So we then actually made the accountants less available. We said that is 24 hour turnaround time. It's not immediate. And what this enabled was anybody that called the firm, they could get immediate answers. But from the admins now the big bosses, we would say 72 hours, it kind of changed, but it was always less available than the rest of the team, right? Because all it takes is you responding to that text that the client sent or you responding to that email right away, or you answering that call on your cell phone that you just got. All it takes is doing that once and that client's never going to get in the queue again, right? Why would they? They just found the shortcut, man. Like they're going to go, they got the fast pass, they're going to go in the side door, they're going to send you a slack message whatever way they have to get to you. If we reinforce the behavior that they can get to you that way, they will always do it, right? And so I say this with love, but our clients, in many ways they are like rats in a maze or mice in a maze, right? They're trying to get to the cheese and you're the cheese. And if we design a system that makes it so that it is easy for them to get to you, as easy as it is to get to the rest of the team, honestly, most firms, it's even easier for them to get to you than the rest of the team because they got your cell phone number or something like that. So it's actually easier than going and talking with the accountant that's actually in charge of the account. We gotta be really intentional about how we design that system to ensure it actually aligns with what we want to do. And if you're struggling to get out from under triage of dealing with clients all day long and working more on the business, this is one of the biggest things that you can enable that will ensure that your clients are starting to build a relationship with more of your staff. Because it is something that takes time. It's a comfort level thing. Nobody likes getting pushed off to that next person, right? Like, nobody likes that. But there's ways that we can make this more natural. This is one way. Another way we did in our firm, we mandated that every month end close had to be sent, had to be delivered with a three minute explainer video. So we used a little video tool and the accounting manager went through the balance sheet and the profit and loss. And you could see their little head in a circle as they talked through it. The client would see that it had to be three minutes or less. And just like that, because the client saw and heard from the accounting manager every single month, that became their go to person the next time they had a question. And so if we can design the systems in our firm to build the relationships we actually want to build, rather than reinforcing their attachment to you, it gets you out from under this stuff. Okay. Sticking the landing, that's a lot of stuff, right? And we're about to get into some other really cool stuff that you're going to be excited about with Canopy and all that. I would stress again, like, come out of today with one or two things that you're really excited about that you want to work on. But the catch here is, is if you're like me and you're like, yeah, no, I'm gonna go do this tomorrow, I don't know, man. That's kind of where good ideas go to die. So the sooner that you can actually pull the team in to this great idea that you've got, expose them to the same information you've got about it and say like, hey, work up a version one of this. And then let's all meet and see how we could roll it out, that is something that is vastly more likely to happen than if you just kind of put this stuff on on your own back. Right? So in closing, if I could stress one thing to you.

Let'S be ruthless in our own sort of self assessment of what are the things that we're doing every single day right now and are they reflective of what we're trying to become? Do the same thing for your team. We need to have these conversations with our team member about their ambitions and what they're trying to become and all that. Well, have I given them the support that they need to be able to move those tasks to. To somebody else? Do they even have anywhere for those tasks to go right year over year? Are their tasks evolving in a way that is reflective of the journey we want them to be on? And then bigger picture for you and man, this one is so big. As we are closing in on the end of the year and you're doing like annual renewals with clients and thinking about, like, what clients do I want to go into next year with? Am I going to let some go?

Can you see a path for yourself of the evolution of those tasks that is in service of the person you're trying to become?

Or are those tasks something that you've been stuck with the last five years? Right? And this is a firm system thing. This is a who are the clients I'm willing to work with thing. We have so many, most of us have kind of legacy clients hanging onto the client list who really, really want you to be the person that you used to be, but you're not super excited about serving that type of client anymore for any one of a number of reasons. And so they're not getting your best. And sometimes we think like, whoa, nobody's going to help them as good as we can. The reality is, like, there's a lot of accounting firms out there. You not at your best. Like, there's probably another firm out there for whom that would be an A client. They would be thrilled to have that client. And so be really mindful these next couple months. As we get into the end of the year and we're planning next year, can I see a path for the evolution of my own tasks that is taking me where I want to go? And then can I do the same for my team to ensure that we are all growing together? Foreign.

Jason back here. How was that? Did you like it? Drop me a comment. If so, hit that little upward thumb button. And like I mentioned at the top, if you want to see the rest of that day, some cool product announcements for Canopy. They had a panel with, with some canopy power users. I'll link that down in the show notes if you want to check that out. I'll catch you in the next one.

Hey, real quick podcast friends. I'm coming to a city near you running a bunch of live events before the end of the year, we're going to be at Intuit Connect in Vegas. We're going to be in Toronto, in Atlanta, Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Louisiana, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Washington, DC, Philadelphia and Boston. If you are there or anywhere near there, within a half tank's gas up there, buddy. I want to see see you. We've put together some super cool events that I'm very excited about all around getting you and your team aligned. Heading into 2026, the biggest problem I had running a firm was I had an abundance of ideas but was always blocked by trying to get my team bought into those ideas and everybody working in the same direction. And it's why I believe the biggest way I can help you is actually getting your team inspired, getting everyone energized for the year to come. So it's not just you, but also because these are live events, you're going to meet a whole bunch of other local practitioners as well, which can almost certainly unlock some cool things for you. I'm especially looking at you solo firm runners and side hustlers, where your team effectively is the people you meet along the way, the relationships that you build, the people you can go to with questions when you get stuck on this or that. Going to be a super fun experience. Including for some of these events we're recording like a live interactive version of the podcast where you'll get to be part of the conversation. Very, very excited for these. I want to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.