Podcast

The dreaded client status update. Hey, how's my stuff? How's my stuff coming along? You got that done yet? Just checking in. Smiley emoji. Get off my back. If you're in the heat of busy season right now, you know, you know just, just what a PITA these status updates can be. And listen, I'm not taking the client's side. I'm just saying the strategy of hoping they don't ask, but I don't feel like a strategy to, So I can tell you the way that I did it, completely wrong. And then I'll also share some really smart stuff I've heard lately on how to better handle this stuff. Kind of doubling down on some of the stuff we've talked about last week a little bit around client updates, but going deeper on it for how to like build out an actual process in your firm that is more proactively communicative because that's, that's ultimately the solution to this. Because no client wants to feel forgotten. And as much as it feels like a way waste of my time to give them pointless updates, that may even actively take away from how long it's going to take me to do their work. Perception is reality and they don't understand the technical that you're doing. So how they perceive your interactions with you and your attentiveness and how much they can see into the process actually has a really big impact on the, the quality of your work that they would later like look back and assign like when they assess that experience after the fact. Unfortunately, it's a big deal and I wish, as accountants, I wish it was just about the pure, you know, love of the game, the technical, the doing it better than the accountant across the street. Unfortunately that matters as well as the client facing stuff. So I'll give you some practical advice for how to manage this stuff. This actually could be a great one to share with a team member and say, go run and implement this. Let's get into it. By the way, on the subject of sharing this stuff with team members, really common mistake is you will hear a good idea and you're like, yeah, I need to do that. And then you never do. The best thing you can do with a good idea is give it to somebody else to implement honestly, because the likelihood that it actually happens is much, much higher. And then it's not up to you to manage that thing on an ongoing basis. If I hear a good idea, take this, you know, proactive client communication thing. If I, if I hear this good idea and I'm like I'm going to set this up and then I go run off and then I design a whole system for my firm and then I push it out. Even if you actually do that like, like your best intentions, you actually deliver on that and you do it. That system is now dependent upon you for ongoing maintenance because you were the only one with your mind on it when it was created as opposed to very early in the process pulling someone else in or a few team members in. That process is now much more adaptable and much more self healing because it's not dependent upon you for it to be done well going forward. That is like a double whim and you gotta be okay with the reality that they may do the 70% version of it because nobody knows what you do and nobody does anything as good as you do. But that 70% version of it is better than the 0% version of it or the version that's 100% on day one. But then when it needs to change, it's like kind of broken and people stop using it because you don't have the time to give it the attention that it needs. The team member you sent this to just has whiplash right now from the head nodding. Okay, three ways that you can, that you can manage client status updates. Way number one is what I did is what 95% of accounting firms do. It's we'll let you know when it's done or we'll let you know when we need something. And you start that project off with the best of intentions and you think you're going to turn it around pretty quick. About as quick as last year. Sometimes you do, but, but when you don't, let's say it took you three weeks last year or the month end close, you know, you usually ship that off on the 10th or something like that. As soon as you get to when it normally comes in, that client may just, may just poke their head in and be like hey, hey, we, we still on track here, still making progress. And at this point you know that it's late and so you're already stressed and feeling pressure and that's what makes them asking doubly annoying. And if we think like if we, we go back to the start of the engagement, a big help here is, is just setting. Even if you don't do what I'm actually going to propose, a big help to all of this is setting expectations of how long that project is going to take from the beginning. Oftentimes we just don't do that at all. Which is not good. And it comes from a place of us being afraid to commit to something because we actually may not have our arms around our capacity enough to even know when we can get to it. Or you may do kind of the hokey pokey of I'm just going to fit in whoever is the least squeaky wheel or no, the most squeaky wheel first. Don't do that, like make a plan. Make sure you're aligned on. Is it okay that it's going to take three weeks? Because what that does is actually it buys you some time. If I tell you like you can expect to hear me on this time, then I've, I've got that, that window of time. And I wouldn't expect them to be bugging me or asking for status updates in the meantime. But when we give them no expected timeframe, that's kind of the worst case scenario where they can come back three days later and be like, hey, how are things coming along? And you're like, do you know how things work around here? Listen, we have a process where when you bring that stuff in, it goes and there's a shelf that it sits on for 10 days. The audacity to think that we would already be working on it. Okay, so first approach, what most people do is there's just no system for this. And then you're inevitably inconvenienced when the client does reach out. And that's annoying. And you don't have a plan for how to communicate that. So it falls on the, on the shoulders of your most constrained professional staff. Option number two is letting the software update clients. And this has some pros and cons. Right now this usually looks like automated follow ups for information that you need, like outstanding requests. This works as long as you're actually working on the project and you actually need something. So when the ball is in the client's court, then at least the software is following up to say like, hey, we need X, Y and Z and it's better than nothing. But as soon as they've got everything in those updates, stop, right, the ball's back in your court. Still, people just super, super, super across the board on whether they even want to put a software interface in front of their clients at all. And this has changed a lot in the last two or three years, both because the platforms we can use with our clients have gotten much better and also because this has just become more normalized. Five years ago in my accounting firm, I couldn't have imagined putting a portal in front of a client because the only ones that were available were horrendous and just a nightmare to use. They made you look dumb because it was just a very archaic app. Now we've got really, really good stuff, really easy stuff, stuff that doesn't require a bunch of client training. But many of us are still blocked by this. Like my clients don't like this sort of issue. And this is, it's very similar to clients complaining about pricing. You'll hear a couple clients complain about the change. It may not even be the, the platform or the process itself. It may just be the change or clients that, that genuinely don't like the platform. Or you've got a couple clients who aren't capable of, of using a platform like that because maybe they don't do computer stuff. Those couple of people take up an inordinate, an, an inord, an inordinate amount of head space when what you don't hear is the other end of the spectrum where people are like, yeah, this is perfectly fine. This actually makes a lot more sense. There's a reason that every service we use these days, like it's website, you just, you log into the website, you do stuff. I don't call somebody to get a copy of my utility bill. Why do I need to call somebody to get a copy of my tax return or my month end close or send an email or something like that? The normalization of this has come a lot, has come a long ways in the last few years. There are tremendous upsides to your, to your business for letting clients self serve, for using, you know, request systems that will automatically follow up. There's a reason that all of the, you know, the banking tools and, and all of the things that we use as, you know, more on the consumer side, I guess on the business side also there's a reason that people are not sending you personalized emails to do all of these different things. Now are they different because it's not professional services? I think that's an argument that, you know, accountants and lawyers and that sort of thing have made for a long time. Well, we're much more, we're much more personal than that. The problem becomes when your only interactions are transactional to say, send me this document or give me this thing or give me that thing, those are not high quality, like valuable interactions. When you have really, really smart people on your team or yourself whose interactions with the client are just that, like administrative, that sucks. And so the framing that I put in front of my clients is this is just paper pushing. This is the administrative stuff. We're going to use software for the paper pushing so that when you and I talk, when we make time for that, it's not like did you go and get that file for me? Did you were able to go get that brokerage statement? Like please let's not waste our time working on those things so that when we do connect we can actually work on the things that will move the ball or improve your business or something like that. This episode is sponsored in part by Team up, who helps you directly hire talented accountants in the Philippines. Why do you hear so much about the Philippines specifically? It used to be like India, right? Why is the Philippines caught on A few things that I'm stealing from this excellent salary guy Team up put together. You can swipe that down in the show notes. Four reasons for why the Philippines has caught on 1. They've got a critical mass of talent. Loads of people there with decades of experience and also just coming out of school. It was the only time in my firm running journey where I knew I could start the hiring process and have somebody within 30 days. In fact I just talked with someone who did that like within 14 days. So the talent is there. 2. English fluency Very good English speakers will have an accent usually, but very, very common to have strong English speakers in the Philippines. Cultural compatibility Very strong western influences in the Philippines. So generally easy from a work culture standpoint to get connected with and then a work ethic. So Filipinos pride themselves on bringing energy and optimism to work, which isn't always the case when you're hiring somebody, right? So to have that enthusiasm on your team to provide an opportunity to these folks, an awesome career, a better path, opportunities for their families. Like they turn up to work with just an entirely different level of excitement. And that was. That was my experience. Anyways, Team Ups put together a great guide for how to get started with this stuff. Swipe that one down in the show notes. Hey, real quick. I write a weekly newsletter goes out every single Thursday and let me tell you it is a banger if you ever struggle to keep up with like a high news updates. Things are happening so fast Jason. Where do I learn more? What is the most upto date tippy, top hot goss in the industry and and tech advice and all that. It's the newsletter buddy. Straight to your inbox every single Thursday 2pm Eastern. Thousands and thousands and thousands of thousands of accountants read it. I'll put a link to it down in the show notes. If you aren't on that list yet, you better get on It. If. If you're still stuck on that, like, my. My window into the accounting firm industry is. Is one where there's a lot of folks that all you ever see is my content. And you may not go to conferences, you may not follow a lot of other accounting folks online, and you may not have relationships with other accounting firm owners. There's people in my audience who 100% do. You've got hundreds of friends who are accounting for owners, but the majority of the people who listen to this podcast watch my videos, that sort of thing. That's not you. And the best recommendation I can give you. In fact, I just. The comment about offshore hiring, which is another kind of like, client portals where there's a lot of people that are just like, no, I'm just like, absolutely will not go down this path on actually on both of these issues. Both portals and offshore hiring. That was me probably six years ago is all I was like, absolutely not on both of those things. And the only reason I ever changed my mind is that a really smart firm owner who I looked up to, who I was like, dang, I hope I can run a shop like that someday. I found out, oh, they actually use client portals really heavily, or, oh, they're actually, like, making a bunch of offshore hires. And so I. I look up to these people, I look up to these firms, and I'm like, man, we have so much to learn from you on all these different domains. And then they say that, and I'm kind of like, skirt. Wait, wait. Okay. Something. Something has to give here. Either you're not the firm I thought you were, or I have to kind of challenge some assumptions that I may have about what may be flawed in that approach or something like that. Right? And it's really easy. The easy scapegoat here is what? That would never work for my clients. And it's very rare that any accounting firm, especially a generalist accounting firm, which is 90% of them, your generalist accounting firm, or whatever it is, it's probably not that different. Usually it's. It's us. It's projecting that onto the folks that we work with anyway, so. So the best tip that I can give if you're really stuck on something is. I mean, this is all solved by. By network. If you can find a few firms who, like, they're doing this and they can tell you what works about it and what doesn't work about it. Nothing normalizes something different for you faster than just being around the people who do that. So if I'm Thinking about hiring offshore for the first time. Like, I've got hundreds of firms in my Rolodex who do loads and loads and loads of offshore hiring. If I'm doing it for the very first time, how can I get some time with these folks to like kind of think through best practices? And you're going to come into this with a level of ignorance that is exactly what you would expect from never having done this thing before. You don't just roll out of bed and know how to do that stuff. Well, someday, like I'm a collection of all the things that people have told me and that I've seen and, and these sort of biases oftentimes driven by like the folks that I've worked for throughout the course of my career, the perspective of my partners. You're just a product of that. You can't help that. Like we all are a product of that, but recognize we also have control over that. And so another example that I come back to a lot here is like, you know, the most profitable work that you can do in a tax firm is, is tax planning. And we have, you know, very small, very, you know, two year old firms who won't touch a tax planning project for under 10k. And for most tax firms, that amount of money for a tax engagement and these, these are, you know, one to $3 million businesses that they're doing work for that amount of money for a tax engagement is like unthinkable. Like it feels wrong or something like that. Like it's similarly, it's such a big disconnect that you can't imagine ever getting there. And because you can't connect the dots to get from A to B, you look at that other thing and you look that other firm and you're like, well, that's somehow, that's somehow wrong or, or there's something different about their clients or something like that. Right? You can't make that connection. But give yourself three months of doing like a mastermind with a few other firms for whom that is the norm. You hang out with those people, you hear the way they talk, you learn about how their business is working and it is simply a matter of time before what is normalized for them becomes normalized for you. So what do you want to be normalized for you? You have control over that. Find the people in the firms for whom that is normal and figure out how you can spend time with them. This is, I mean, I rail on the value of community so much and I honestly, I don't do it as much as I probably could because it feels like shilling because it is how I financed all the stuff that I do as my accountant Community. And so, I mean, so many of the things that we talk about, for me, the solution is community. But I, I still kind of have this discomfort talking about that stuff. A great example is client updates like this. Like we, I was on a, I was on a call with like 30 or 40 bookkeeping firms on Wednesday and the, the, the topic of like status updates came up and a couple of people start talking through their approach and you're like, dang. Like, if I'd seen that written out, I'd have been like, yeah, that's weird. That's not for me. And then they just, they talk about it like, this is just kind of what we've done for a while now and here's kind of the boundaries and how we navigate this and that. And it's such a, it's like this weird sort of warming feeling of like, okay, I understand. Like, it's a thing. I realize what tunnel vision I have for the status quo in my firm. The world is just, it's so much bigger because we're just kind of fixated on how things are today. But the more I'm exposed to those other things, like the best, the better I can collect these great ideas and make my firm kind of the beneficiary of putting all those things together. So using software for requests, standing up a client facing portal, whatever that is for you, doing proposals, offshore hiring, whatever that is for you, like, consider if it is a big industry trend. And I only really talk about things on this podcast that are pretty significant trends that people are like raving about. It's actually this content really these days is very rarely my opinions from my own firm running because I'm now, I'm now two years and three months removed from running my own firm. And I've learned a tremendous amount since then. Because the benefit of me not having to run my firm all day anymore is I can talk with other firms all day. I now have a, a newfound ignorance for the day in and day outs of running my firm like I used to. But I have what firm owners don't, which is the benefit of perspective of. I mean, I've talked with over a thousand small accounting firms in the last 18 months. So I've traded that perspective and they each have different diff, like differing values. But in my content, like that's what I can provide. And so a lot of this, it really isn't my opinion so much as me just sharing. Like here are the themes that I see of of people having a lot of success with this and that. So back to the three ways of managing status updates. One, kind of doing nothing at all and hoping that they don't bug you. Maybe a bit of a solution here is giving them an expected time frame up front. Second, using the portal, letting the client or letting the software update them. But that really only works to the extent that you're waiting on information from them. Number three, this is like the most comprehensive solution in my mind is you have humans send updates to your clients every single week. It feels personal because it's coming from a human name that they recognize. It can encapsulate stuff that you need that you're waiting on the client for while also and this is a biggie while also recapping what you've done in the last week. And that's a biggie. Like to be able to say like here are all the things that we worked on in your QuickBooks file around your tax return or this or that or even to be able to give like a non update update. Like people also appreciate that like just sending the update to say like hey, just wanted to let you know we're still working on this. We're still on track. Haven't forgot about you. That goes so far with clients because their real fear is actually being forgotten. So even if the update just like doesn't give any detail at all, that's a whole lot better than nothing. This episode is sponsored in part by the folks at Canopy Canopy, the practice management system. I have spent a lot of time digging through PMs trying to filter through the 43pm now that I believe are marketing to North American firms. As you probably know, Canopy is on is on my short list of recommended practice management systems. And nobody likes having any more tools than you absolutely need to have, right? That's why you start building your tech stack with the practice management system to let that do as many things as possible. And when it comes to all in 1ers, pretty hard to beat Canopy. In fact, a couple years ago we did this giant roundup of feature comparison of all the the PMs on the market, Canopy may have actually had the most complete feature set of any PM out there. Now that's not always the answer, right? Just more more, more. But I can tell you we're also pretty burned out of just like having to build these ridiculously big stacks. So having a, having a PM behind your firm who has the mindset of we want to try to pull everything that we can into one platform for you and to know they're going to keep investing in that in the future. I can get behind that. Hey, I'm a big time tech nerd, but I also don't like playing software night janitor. So if I can get all that stuff in one place as much as possible, I want to do that. That's Kanopy. To learn more about Kanopy, check out the link 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 want to learn more. I actually you may have seen me post about this on LinkedIn last week. I would love to see a feature in our software platforms that is like an aggregation of all the stuff that we got done on a client that week. Maybe that's in your practice management system and all the movement on projects. If it's connected to the accounting ledger, that gets way juicier I think because then it could see everything that happened in the accounting file by the firm users and like aggregating that into a bullet point summary. Like AI could do that really, really well and we could then include that in an update to the client. That would be so cool. But this is kind of the ultimate solution to me is having a plan for doing proactive like outbound communication to clients to update them. And so if this sounds hard, I'll give you a few kind of thoughts on what you need to define in order to do this effectively. I think number one, you got to nail down what does the frequency look like and in kind of what context are they getting these updates so if you're doing tax work, maybe this begins from the time they initially drop off their information, like through delivery. Or if you're doing month end closes, maybe this happens, you know, from if you got to get the close done by the 20th of each month, maybe it starts at the beginning of the month and runs through the 20th or something like that. For a more compressed timeline, say a month end close, it's always done by the 10th of the month. A higher frequency may make sense, but maybe that's every other day or every three days. For a tax return project, that may happen over the course of two months, maybe once a week is enough. But for any given engagement, you just got to have a rule for how frequently are we updating the clients? That's, that's kind of the first thing. The second thing is these outbound communications, they need an owner. Like it needs to be somebody's job to send these on that recurring basis. If we just kind of say, you know, it'd be good if we could send clients updates, you know, kind of more or less once a week. Like if you kind of just do this wishy washy thing and you don't actually indicate like who's supposed to do it, that professional staff person, like, good luck getting them to like look up from their desk and add this new bit of work to their list, like, that's probably not going to work. And it's why my third kind of thought here is that that owner almost certainly shouldn't be a technical person. Now if you're a solo firm earner, if you run a small firm, this, this is a little harder for you. But this is like, honestly, this is responsibility number one that you could put on a virtual assistant, sending out these, these weekly or whatever the frequency is, updates to clients. So thought number three is in a perfect world, you don't want your technical people that are getting that project done doing this because this act of doing the outbound communication, it is, it is giving them more time back to actually get the work out the door. And if you are still a solo firm owner and you've considered hiring a va, an admin that can help you out behind the scenes, this is a great justification, like a great place to start as someone that can help you with these communications. Fourth thought, templatizing just what goes out, like take the brain, take the brain work out of what goes out to clients. You can templatize this stuff for various different scenarios. What do we send if there isn't anything to update them on? What do we send for the different types of engagements? Like, what do those bullet points look like? That message, while it's coming from a human, it can be largely templatized. And the more you lock that down, the more it deskills the act of sending that email. And the last one, number five, this actually came from this, this meeting with a bunch of bookkeeping firms that I referenced from earlier this week that was a huge, a mega nugget. It's very rare these days that I'm in a meeting with, with firm owners and I hear something that's like wildly novel where I'm like, oh. And it's like super, super exciting. This was super exciting. A firm who sends these updates out every single week. And if they're waiting on information from someone, if they've sent out the same requests two weeks in a row and haven't heard back from the client, that I don't remember if it was the second week or the third week, one of those updates, there's a warning there. This was a bookkeeping firm, there's a warning there that if they don't get that information in, the client will incur a cleanup fee. Oh baby, what a, what a great label for that. What a great forcing mechanism to get them to get you the stuff you need to be able to do your job. Now there's a version of this that you could do for collecting info for tax prep as well. But the only reason that that you know, quote, cleanup fee incentive works is because you have a regimented approach to sending that email out to clients every single week. And so if you're trying to keep the trains running on schedule, something I really believe that can help a lot here is more proactively reaching out to clients, telling them where things are, telling them what you need to, to keep their train running on time rather than just kind of sitting back and trying to get the work done, you know, as, as quickly as we can. Was on another call a few weeks ago where a firm has kind of, you know, invested a lot in sort of creating these systems and expectations for their team and really in great detail in the practice management system, setting up due dates for exactly when things need to go out and giving, trying, trying to do their best to give crystal clear expectations to the team as here is what we need you to do and when you need to have this stuff done by. So they've gone through all this work and they've set it all up and then the team doesn't deliver, the team doesn't get that stuff out by, by the dates. And then they come back and they review this later, to their surprise, to find there's all these projects that are overdue and nobody said anything. It's like, gang, I told you when this stuff needed to be done, why is, first of all, why is it not done? But also second of all, why did nobody raise their hand and before that deadline say, hey, I'm going to need help in order to get this done by this date? If you run a team, you're just, you're like, I'm. Yes. You're like, I. I know this, this truth all too well. And the frustration was like, are you telling me I really have to hire a manager just to get other humans to be accountable to the system that we all agreed to? And oftentimes here, I think, as much as I, I honestly, I don't suffer. I don't like the framing of, like, CND players, but I just, I don't suffer folks who, who, like, can't deliver and won't uphold, like, a really high bar on my teams because I've been on enough teams where I was the one that paid the price for that. The other people who just couldn't meet the level of everyone else. So I like, I do not suffer that stuff long. And even though that is kind of my mindset like that, like, people got to show up and be adults at work and kind of manage their stuff, even though I totally believe that oftentimes the management, like the administration of that stuff, even though it feels super wasteful, it still has to be somebody's job. And you know, in old tax firms, this was the person walking around with the clipboard saying, what are you working on this week? How are things coming along? And if you're the, you're the taxpayer, you're just annoyed by this. You're like, just leave me alone. Let me do my work. As much as I would love for this to be totally systematized, as much as I would love for that practice management systems landing page about how it just makes all the work effortlessly flow through my firm, I'd love to believe that the reality is, in my experience, somebody still needs to be overseeing that stuff. And I need to have people on my team who have the bandwidth to be able to handle some of this admin that isn't just doing the work and sending these updates out to clients like, this has such a beneficial impact across my firm, from the perception of the service that we're delivering from our clients to protecting the time of my Professional staff. This is the, the like core frustration with the status update. Is it a waste of time? Yes. But is it time that's required of my team? Yes. There's no way around it. And like so many things in our business, if we pretend that it's not a thing, it'll still be a thing and we'll just have to handle it in a, in like a very inconvenient way as opposed to acknowledging it for the thing that it is, trying to find the best way to manage it, making it somebody's job, because there is no escaping it. And like, we're in the accounting business, but we're still in the customer service business, unfortunately, which I. It just grinds my gears because, like we just. You just want to go to another CPE training. Like, I didn't get in this to be wiping other entrepreneurs bottoms. I just want to do the technical work, but unfortunately it comes with a whole bunch more stuff. Right. This is probably a super triggering episode. I mean, there's, there's like few things as triggering as status updates. And the only way to make it worse is to tell that person that it's your fault that you're getting those status updates. So I recognize that, but I, in talking with other firms, like, I'm always very impressed by firms who do not have this problem at all because a lot of them don't. Like, they have a very clear, proactive, like outbound communication strategy. And they'll tell clients, you're gonna hear from us every single week whether we've done something or not. And the client's like, cool, I'll just keep an eye out for the update. And the client never has to worry if they're been. If they've been forgotten. You got any sage wisdom on this stuff? Pop that down in the comments. You got any questions? Put that in the comments as well, because somebody else will have the same question. And just by putting it down there and keeping the conversation going, you're gonna help folks. Gang, thanks for being here today and I'll see you in the next one.