551 Employ THIS Delegation Practice In Your Accounting Firm

You don't need more things to do. You need less things to do. Today, again, we are talking about radical elimination. What are the things in your accounting firm that you can either delegate or stop doing altogether so that you can double down on the important stuff? You got enough ideas. The secret to executing on those ideas is in what you decide to now not do, giving you the capacity to do. The theme today is the aspects of the business where we can set a dollar threshold below which we agree to no longer care. Either we're going to stop doing that stuff altogether or we're going to delegate this cross section of the business to the team. The obvious example here is clients. You know, clients under some dollar threshold. We'll talk about that. But we'll also talk about seven other similar dollar thresholds that can get you back to doing the important stuff. In fact, one of these eight that we're going to go through want you to do it coming out of here today. I want to give you, like, something you can actually run with. A little mini project that should get you a bunch of time back, but also be the first step in what can be actually more steps. You'll find every single one of these is kind of a gateway drug to like, oh, we can start this at 500 bucks, but that opens the door to 1000 bucks to 1500 bucks, buddy. Now we are talking about getting all, all kinds of time back. Okay, come on in. Let's talk about it.

Okay, if you're new here, welcome to the Jason Non Firms podcast, where we talk all things running small accounting firms. I have a disease. And that disease is it's too many ideas. You might share it. You might be driving your team nuts. Your team might despise my content because you come to them and you're like, hey, look at this cool thing we should do. And they're like, brother, you just, you just brought me something yesterday. Would you chill out? Let's put the ideas on pause today. I don't want you to have one more idea. I want you to see a path to elimination. Because it is the people who are prolific at not doing things who are doing the prolific things. That's their secret is in what they're not doing that you're doing right now. So let's find some stuff to. I was going to say the K word, but I still want YouTube to serve this video to people. Some stuff to eliminate. Okay, eight ideas for where we can set dollar thresholds that we can effectively remove ourselves from. Example number one, monthly bookkeeping clients under you know, pick a dollar threshold. The thing that you'll find with all these examples is the notion of getting out from under a hundred percent of any of these things. You just can't get your head around it. So this is a bookkeeping example. Next we'll, we'll, we'll do a tax example. But if you've ever thought, boy, it would be nice to get out from, from under some of this client work, but you're like, I, this, that just seems impossible right now, then let's break it down to a subset, a part of that. That would be possible if I've got clients. Let's see when I had it. So my background, I bought a tax practice and then I built a cast practice doing bookkeeping kind of accounting department in a box sort of stuff. We're a team of, of 10 or so by the time I, I sold that cast practice back to my partner and within that we had clients. This is kind of crazy now that I say it out loud. We had, I think my largest engagement was just shy of a half million a year. We had monthly bookkeeping engagements down to maybe 300, 350 doll month. In reality, we were, I think we were only obligated to touch those a couple times a year. It was too much of a variance. Okay, but if somebody'd come to me and said, we need you for an important role at the Pentagon, your job managing the cast practice has to be transitioned to somebody else in 60 days. That would have been overwhelming. Like, I don't, I couldn't have seen a path to doing that. How do I get out from under all of this stuff? Like I still have at that point, I had clients connected to me still. I was very core to like how that business was running. But because I couldn't imagine getting out from under the entire thing didn't mean that there wasn't a cross section there that I couldn't get away from. So are you going to set that bar? Initially, it's, I mean, it's totally dependent upon your business. But I could have said every client under a thousand dollars a month, it's got a new owner. And this, this may or may not be the like account manager. The main point of contact depends how you've structured this inside of your firm. It could be like a manager who is not client facing that is quote unquote, taking the ownership. The right answer depends on like what your pods look like if you use pods. If kind of the manager of a client is the same as the main point of Contact. But either way, the goal is for you to be out of that stuff. So sort out where to set that threshold. It is a threshold at which if something goes totally sideways, that's all right. It's not the end of the world. In fact, a couple days ago on the podcast, we had a real uncomfortable talk about how in accounting firms, good enough is a business decision. Even though we as accountants, we will kind of like die on the hill of like, no, this is right and this is wrong. Sometimes there is very clearly a right and wrong. Oftentimes there isn't though. Is it right to spend an hour reviewing something or an hour and a half? Is it right for your most senior person to review it? Or will the person just below that be enough? These are business decisions. As much as we sometimes like to think of them as like, these sort of absolutes, and this is an example of a business decision, we are like building the muscle, building the skill of creating a system and being able to do that risk calculation of what needs you and what doesn't need you. Because once you remove yourself from it and you're not the hero, then we start thinking about how to, how to build the next hero, how to build the systems to scale. I mean, effectively your heroics. If you're the best person in the world at something, think about this. Let's say. Let's say you're the best painter in the world. You. You could shut yourself in a garage and paint stuff, do the paints, paintings all day long if you wanted. If you never opened the garage door, nobody would know that you're the world's best painter. But let's say you figure out how to do that stuff. You share your stuff online, more people find you. Now you're selling all the paints, selling paintings to the world's most wealthy. They've got a one of one in their living room and you're just. You're getting billions of dollars for every commission. Neat. Now, how long is that fun? You selling lots of paintings. You got the cool penthouse, the Camry's at the maximum trim level. What would it look like to show other people how to do this stuff? You create a YouTube channel, launch an academy. A school painting might have been a bad example. But if that person is passionate about more people in the world being good at painting or discovering the love of painting, then I would argue the highest and best use of that person's skills is to systematically create a way for, for other people to discover that passion to get better at painting. My take on running accounting Firms is the most powerful unlock anyone will ever have is discovering the power of connecting with other people who run accounting firms. It is, it will give you the ultimate shortcuts to find success faster and like recharges your soul when you make those connections in a way that nothing else does. And so my business in many ways has been about how do I create a systematic way to create the connections that I made serendipitously over the course of a few years just meeting people and being like, oh my gosh, this person just changed my life in one five minute conversation. That's where the accountant community came from. That's where as you're hearing this, I'm in. What is this Wednesday, I'm in New York City with over a hundred accounting firm owners on our 12th of 13 workshops this winter. It's a workshop that I've already run 12 times. We're trying to create a systematic way for people to have those transformational experiences meeting other people that do what they do. Because for me that was life changing. As long as I'm the person that says I got a sign, I got to, I got to sign off on every month, then close, that goes out the door every, every day I am, I have to be that person is a day that I'm not learning how to build the systems and the skills to instill that into other people. Now if you want to be the solo firm person and you want to do this on your own, your version of this is as simple as I'm, I'm not going to support those folks anymore. Maybe there's a, a version of this that I do for you, but below this dollar threshold. Maybe this is a done with you version or a DIY version. Maybe I create the course to show them how to do it, or maybe I just review the output or something like that. Even though that's, that's kind of messy, if you want that constraint of I'm only ever going to work with myself, then there, there, honestly, even if you go back to the Painter example, there are exam like our ways that you can certainly upskill people and empower them to be able to do more of it themselves. I mean look at Hector Garcia, the number of folks that have learned how to use QuickBooks from his content. But it starts with constraints and like setting that bar and saying, I'm only going to touch the stuff above this right now. Now it is, it is a great place to start. And that number, it's going to be very conservative when you start probably because you're scared. Right. And if you're scared to even start, consider what are the downsides, what could go wrong? And, and it's not to say that there is not a way that it could go wrong. It almost certainly could. It is just to say, how real are these spheres and if one of them did come to a head, what would we do? Basically have a plan for the downside. But what I find in most cases is people will start with something conservative and it's fine, it goes fine. And, and if you run a team, the biggest upside here is, is the ownership that the folks who are now in control of those engagements feel you're getting out of their way and they're now growing at a faster rate. And most of the time that number threshold, we're able to grow it pretty quickly because for the first time we have a path to you getting out of more and more and other folks becoming responsible for more and more. That is, that is an upgrade to you and your skills and what you're able to do because you're focusing on better stuff. It is an upgrade to your team and their skills and their worth. So that'd be an opportunity for them. Honestly, we can probably pay them more because they're owning this stuff, right? And maybe that's hard to imagine down the road. Start now with the simple threshold, the little itty bitty baby threshold that you can stomach so that further down the road we can stomach a bigger one. So first example here of a threshold you can set is for monthly accounting clients. Second example, tax returns. You could also look at this by tax type. And so if you're starting with the least scary version of this in a US firm, this is 1040s under, you know, some small threshold. Can't recommend this enough. This could be a dollar threshold. It could also be a complexity threshold. I've shared before kind of the review complexity grading scale thing that I use. In fact, somebody told me in an event the other day they rolled out the same thing that's been going super, super well, which is awesome. We basically had a level 1 through 5 grading scale for gem 40s. Level 1 is like government forms only no itemized deductions, nothing. Basically data entry. Level 5 is all the hairy stuff. And then we had a number of steps in between your threshold here for the stuff that you are no longer going to touch. Could be a dollar threshold. Could also be a complexity threshold. If you already have that, be an easier way to get there. Complexity doesn't always map very clearly to dollars. But if it's a close enough proxy like that may be fine if it just is less complex to roll it out that way. But this is the path to upskilling your team. So much of our own fears of delegation and getting out of the way are holding back our teams. You're talking, you're thinking about like, how do I do myself a favor and get out of the way? You're doing an even bigger favor to your team because until we hand that stuff over, they can't keep growing, right?

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I worked with a church that had this like multi level, like just this crazy hairy combination of approval approvals that was dependent on like a mountain department, all these different things and they had this physical thing that had to get passed around for every single total nightmare. You probably got a bunch of clients with situations like this and you can absolutely be the hero. With Makers Hub. It is seriously good, worth checking out. Learn more about Makers up with the link down in the show notes. Boo. You know what's the worst man? When you hire somebody and they start working for you and you're like, I thought this person knew stuff. The number of times I've been hoodwinked by somebody that interviews well and they have umpteen years of experience and you pull them in and you're like, what you did? You don't. What? You don't even know your stuff, man. This isn't gonna work. Let me tell you what one of this episode's sponsors, Cloud Accountant Staffing, is doing about that. So Cloud account Staffing, they help accounting firms find talent around the world, be it the Philippines, South Africa, Latin America. And they have an online portal where you can go out and see folks that they have recruited, schedule interviews with those people directly on their platform. And one of the things now that every single one of Those people have is a collection of assessments. I'm looking at one right here. Assessments for business tax, for individual tax, for critical thinking, for understanding instructions, their personality type. And so many of these things like individual tax, this person I'm looking at, they're in the 93rd percentile. And so cloud account staffing, they have a huge volume of folks that they have go through these assessments and they hand pick the highest performers and they serve them up for you to make your wildest dreams come true. Cloud account staffing's backstory there actually ran an accounting firm, hired some offshore folks, had an amazing experience, and then just started helping other accounting firms do the same. Interested? I thought you might be. Check out the link down to cloud accountant staffing in the show notes. Okay, first example, monthly accounting clients. Second example, tax returns. Third example, proposals. There's going to be some of these where you can be like, I could see this. Other ones are going to be like, ooh, I feel like a long ways from that. Honestly, I just want you to leave from this episode with one of these things also. Yeah, I would say leave with one of these things. I would also say because this is putting on you the initiative of figuring out how to make it work. Just share this episode with the couple few people on your team who you want to do this with. If the initiative is left on you, that's where most, most things go to die, right? So coming out of this episode, send this to a member. Three members of your team say, let's do number six. The dollar threshold is why once you start working on a high level plan for how we can do this, if you're one of the people that this episode got sent to, welcome, like and subscribe. Great to see you here. Okay, number three proposals under a dollar threshold. One of the last things most accountants are able to get out of is sales. And that's because it's an entirely different skill set to, to build, doing, being able to do the sales, but also to like train into another person. And honestly, like in the grand scheme of things, it's not that it is any harder than training folks on how to do technical work. In fact, most people would probably tell you it's easier. You look at like just the percentage of the US economy people who are in sales roles. Like there is an abundance of information and expertise out there on how to do sales and on, on and on sales training. But this is often one of the last things that folks will get out of. Like, you know, well, after they get out of the client work. Because it's just a different skill to learn how to delegate this stuff. This might be an argument for you beginning to cross train somebody else on this stuff. So if you've got, you know, if you've got an onboarding person, for example, we're thinking of like, who's the most logical person to pull into this sales role? Maybe you've got a good onboarding person, which is usually just, they were a good accountant or a good tax pro. They can do the messy cleanup stuff. Congratulations, you're now promoted to the role of, of onboarding, where you do the hairiest of the, the messy cleanups. Maybe that's the person that makes sense to get pulled into this. What's the threshold here where it's not really going to be a risk to the business, where it wouldn't be the end of the world if, if it wasn't done, let's say to your level, but especially around sales. Remember there's, there's levels above you too that someone else could come in and do this better. But Even if the 80% version of it was done, what's the dollar threshold under which someone else could manage it? It's okay to be conservative in the beginning. The goal is to just start with a threshold, see what we learn, and then figure out how to grow that threshold from there. Fourth example of where we can deploy this is in renewals. So proposals, proposals. I'm thinking first time, like new clients renewals. I'm thinking the annual renewal that has to happen each year. I rail on this a lot. Two thirds of accounting firms in my polling still don't do any sort of annual renewal. I can't stress enough the importance of this. We were a pretty fast growing firm. I mean, we grew from about 3 to 5 million in my three years of ownership. But still the single biggest source of growth every year was the existing client base. And usually when this stuff is happening is when we're doing annual renewals and we're saying like, hey, we're doing X, Y and Z for you. But this actually pairs nicely with this other thing that we do as well. And growth within an engagement. That's great, that's a healthy sign. The whole like scope creep, we almost talk about it negatively in the accounting profession just because it's uncomfortable and we're bad at managing it. But scope creep is a sign that you're doing a great job because they're pulling you into more and more stuff that's exactly what you want. It's just like a high performing employee where they do something well, and then they start giving them all these other different jobs, Right? And it is in renewals that we by and large cashed in on that. In my experience now, renewals, there was a time when I did all the renewals myself because they were so important to the business. But I can tell you, the first year that I made my team responsible for renewals, the entire process got infinitely infinite easier when I was doing it myself. I would have to do this entire archeology project because I was removed from the work to figure out, like, what were we doing at the beginning of the year? What have we done during the year? What are we. What are we doing now at the end of the year, what's changed? And this took a lot of, like, trying to pull stuff out of people, and they had a hard time remembering. But the moment that I said, y' all are responsible for the renewals, here's where you need to track throughout the year anything that changes. The list of those changes got a whole lot better because people realized it was going to be up to them at the end of the year. To account for. Here are the things that have that have changed. Here's how the engagement has evolved, because we really need to track all of those details to ensure that the renewal is fair to us. Everything that we forget costs us money. And it's not that we're trying to nickel and dime the client, but the collective size and mass of all of these details that we just forget because we don't track them throughout the year, they add up to a lot of. And if you combine that with the fact that we get more efficient over time, oftentimes these things are sort of hidden because we will make systems changes and all these things that make the client's life easier and makes it faster for us to close the books. But us getting more efficient doesn't make the work less valuable. Arguably, us getting more efficient in how we support a client makes the work more valuable, because the faster we can deliver the work, the more valuable it is. The client doesn't care how much time it takes us to do it. They care how quickly they can get answers, how quickly they can get what aspect of this experience they extract value from. And once I involved my team in the process of renewals, this got infinitely easier. Now, I didn't just say, go and do renewals. I basically said, you're making the first draft, and then we're getting together and making sure that we're dialing this in as well as we can, because this was a huge, I mean, it was the largest source of, of new revenue for us. But this is another thing where you can set a dollar threshold. I don't, man, I don't know. You can set a dollar threshold that maybe doesn't require your review. I mean, I would almost, I would really push you for all renewals. Make the person in charge of the account, the primary person that's putting that renewal together. What may require a dollar threshold is whether or not you go through it with them before it goes out the door. Okay, dollar threshold number five, that could be subject to delegation. Vendor management. This is something that gets stuck with the owner and it is just like you're taking out like the financial trash of the business and it just kind of comes through the filter to you, but it often doesn't need to. You just assume that this needs to be your job because you're the big boss. But you know, somebody else can probably pay the utilities, can probably manage that, you know, software subscription. So when I say vendors, this to me is like if it is someone where the annual spend is under a certain dollar threshold, I'm going to have an ops person manage it. The big dollar stuff, you know, our tax, software renewal, the stuff that is like the biggest spend. Maybe you still want to be involved in that. But again, can we find a way to baby step into this, a conservative threshold initially so you can give somebody else the responsibility to handle this stuff for the first time? You'll be surprised how quickly they grow into being capable of more and it's one less thing on your plate. Number six, more generally, financial decisions, purchases, stuff that we need. Do you need to be privy to everything under a certain dollar threshold? Do they need to come to you to ask if you're still running the business where somebody's got to come and ask to buy some donuts? That's a lot, man. We are sending like just setting things up for a lot of folks to have to channel things through us when there's probably a better way you could be spending your time. Threshold number seven, write offs under a certain dollar threshold, depending on how you bill. Oftentimes you may try to maintain control over how this stuff gets billed. When like billing is just kind of fundamentally the biggest waste of time. You can't bill for billing, but it oftentimes get pushed, gets pushed up to like the most senior people who are in control of the money or something. If you're still dealing with a version of this almost. I mean, this is, I mean, in many ways this is a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. But if you are, and maybe this is even for like kind of one off messy work, these still bill hourly. But if you are, in all likelihood somebody else can probably handle the bulk of that stuff and only pull you in in scenarios where there's it's crossed some sort of dollar threshold. Number eight, hiring. Hiring under a certain dollar threshold. Could also look at this as hiring up to kind of a certain level within the org chart. There's arguments for this, arguments against this as well. In some ways, hiring is the not, in some ways, it is the most important job of the big boss. That's how you kind of protect your culture and set the expectations of what is good enough inside a company. Are we letting people in the door who are raising the bar or not? And my opinion has always been basically throughout your professional journey, you are collecting great people because it is really hard to find great people, right? And five years may go by and then that great person shows up and you're like, oh my gosh, where have you been all of my life? And the notion of the idea of not being able to work with that person just keeps you up at night is terrifying, right? That is a lot of entrepreneurship. It is being a collector of those great people, figuring out how to find the next one and having the vision and the chops to kind of get people excited to come and work with you these days. I mean that we do, we do not have the leverage to be entitled to people wanting to come and work with you. Like the whole notion that like people should just be happy to have a job and just be happy to work here, that's just not the reality these days. And so your vision, what you're trying to do, it has to be big enough for others, other people's dreams to fit within it. And if it's not, they're going to do their own thing. But the folks who are able to attract the most successful, the highest level people to come and work with them and stay under their employee, they're the people who are able to paint a picture. That is something that those folks can get excited about. And that's, I mean, to be clear, that's a learned skill. Not unlike talking with potential clients about what we do. You, you have to be something for somebody in your firm in the same way that having a general website landing page isn't going to really do anything to attract clients. Talking about what it's like to work at your firm in a very generalized way. And to not be good for anybody in particular isn't going to look very attractive to the next candidate. Right. Because you don't look any different to any other firm. Now maybe there's a dollar threshold or an org chart threshold where you can entrust the team with this. It's probably isn't happening until you're getting into bigger firms. At the very least, like you are handling last round of interviews. This is where I was at with my firm. I had, I had a lot of other people involved in the hiring process because we wanted to. The hiring process just couldn't be blocked by me and my time and my availability. But I definitely wasn't involved in the first interview. You go through a lot of people in that first round. I would do kind of the final round with my team and then give the team feedback on like what did I think of this person, why was I excited about them, why was I not excited about them? And we could all get a little more in alignment on what we were looking for. And the next folks we went through, I'd encourage you to run with one of these. Let me give them to you again. Number one, a dollar threshold for monthly accounting clients. Number two, a threshold for tax work. Number three for proposals. Number four for renewals. So proposals is like first time work. Renewals is year over year renewals. Number five is vendors. What is our total annual spend with that vendor? Do I really need to be the one to manage them? Number six, ad hoc financial decisions, going out and buying something. Number seven, write offs. Number eight, hiring. Which one of those feels most in reach? No, I won't even say that. Which one of these things, if you started to get out from under them, takes you in the direction of what sounds like a better job. For me, I had been doing tax work and client Service Services for 15 years. It wasn't my strength, it wasn't the thing that I was best at. I was better at like the strategy and the running of the firm, the running of the machine. And so the very obvious answer for me was getting out from under client work, some of these things. Honestly, all of us ought to be able to get out from under to a certain degree, like vendor management, putting together the first draft of renewals, all that stuff. But even just coming out of here today and picking one of those, I challenge you to find one that makes sense for you. Get to a dollar threshold, share this with your team and say, gang, let's put together a plan here. Because the best thing for the business is the big boss getting more of their time back. It really is not to play more golf, although there may be a bit of that. If the big boss is working 60, 70, 80, 90 hour weeks, golf is maybe exactly what the doctor ordered. I don't know. What's your version of that? Pickleball, Watching football, heavy drinking, Whatever it is you do to unwind. The worst thing for the business is doing another year that is more of the same. That not only hurts the business owner, hurts the folks that work with them. Like there is a huge, you know, huge growth potential within your team if only we can get out of the way. The quicker we can move that work down to the rest of our team, the quicker they have the opportunity to grow up into it. And sometimes or not, and you don't learn that until you put somebody in the position to potentially be able to do that. But I'll take that over me getting in the way of the people who work for me. You can do it. Pick one that makes sense for you here, share it with your team. And if you didn't hear it a week ago we kind of kicked off this series with Getting out from under email. Super recommend you check that one out since that's kind of the biggest chunk in everyone's day that we can probably better manage. Gang, thanks for being here today. I'll catch you in the next one. Foreign.

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, D.C. philadelphia and Boston. If you are there or anywhere near there, within a half tank's gas up there, buddy. I want to see you. We 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 interview, 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.