In this practical talk, the speaker addresses small‑business owners’ anxiety that hiring an accountant means surrendering financial control. He distinguishes delegation (responsibly entrusting tasks while retaining oversight) from abdication (abandoning responsibility), sharing personal hiring missteps and how his current 37‑person team operates with clear job descriptions, weekly reviews, and defined metrics. He argues that owners always retain ultimate responsibility for their finances, even when a bookkeeping firm handles data entry. To keep control, he recommends concrete mechanisms: viewer‑only bank access, limited transfer permissions for profit‑first allocations, and setting up key performance indicators (KPIs) that surface only the financial snapshots owners need. He stresses the importance of clear communication about transaction purposes, using analogies like a CrossFit competition where someone else loads the plates and a restaurant sandwich to illustrate how accountants can do the backend work while the owner still “eats the sandwich.” Finally, he advises owners to have exploratory conversations with accountants to understand services, deliverables, and responsibilities, reinforcing that profitability is a choice and that hiring an accountant does not mean losing control.
Chapters
Okay, when it comes to your accounting, the question we got is, I know I can't do it alone, but I fear that I'm giving up control over my finances if I hire an accountant. What can I do? Um, so thinking about this kind of on 2 sides of the coin, there's— it's a bit of a dilemma. They know that they aren't the accountant, that they may, maybe don't even know how to read financial statements. Maybe they know a little bit, but they don't know enough. So they've acknowledged, I can't do this alone, I need an expert. But on the other hand, I think that fear is more of just a fear of the unknown. I'm not sure what it looks like if I hired an accountant, and therefore my fear is, because I don't know what it looks like, that I'm going to be giving up control over my finances. So what should I do? Well, let me just explain how it works because I don't believe you give up control over your finances. And I don't believe, first of all, that you ever should give up control over your finances. So what comes to mind first is delegation versus abdication. To delegate is to basically entrust a responsibility to someone else. Abdication is failing to fulfill a responsibility. A lot of times, especially if you've gone through the experience of hiring someone and you're— maybe you didn't make the same mistakes I did, so I shouldn't say that. Let me say it this way. In my experience, my first few hires that I had, boy, I did a whole bunch of abdication. I hired someone for my team for a need, and I said, here's what I need you to do, meaning here's the result that I'm hoping you get. But I did a terrible job of explaining the hows, of training, of continuing to monitor them. No follow-up on my part, not a lot of reviews. And then when I did finally take the time, usually because a customer was complaining about something, that we messed up on. And I started looking into it like, what the heck have you been doing? This isn't— this work is terrible. And in my experience, especially in the beginning, that was not that person's fault. It was my fault because I abdicated responsibility to them. I said, here's the result I need you to do, but then I failed to fulfill my responsibility. And that's They just didn't have the tools to be successful. I didn't give them the tools to be successful. Delegation is, you know, what I've learned better now. I mean, we're a team of 37 right now, and here's your job responsibilities, here's your job descriptions, here's weekly one-on-ones so we can review your work. This type of stuff is going on. Here are the metrics we're holding you accountable to, and we're going to keep constant dialogue To make sure you have the tools you need to be successful with the responsibilities that you've taken on with our company. That's delegation. So how does this relate to bookkeeping? One, even if you wanted to, hiring an accounting firm does not abdicate your responsibility as the owner to understand the finances of the company. You will always have a level of responsibility because ultimately if the bookkeeper fails you, your business is the one that goes out of business, not theirs. So that's why you maintain a little— at least some level of responsibility. And the other aspect is there's always some amount of your time that you are going to need to dedicate to understanding the finances of your company. Now, you can set it up in such a way where it is the most efficient for you and It's in an area that you can be comfortable with without having to know necessarily all the backend crap of bookkeeping and accounting. Um, so let me give you a couple examples that came to mind. Uh, in the CrossFit world, once a year there's this thing called the CrossFit Open, and last week they just finished the 3rd and final workout of the Open. And in that workout, There's a couple of rounds involved. And, uh, those who are competing in, in the workout, they have, you have a barbell and they wanted you to do, uh, I can't remember. I think it's power cleans, but the point is every round the weight goes up on the barbell. So if you were competing, it was allowed that you have someone else Add the weights to the barbell as you're doing some of the other movements to save you time. So all you're doing is showing up. Your job as the person competing was to still pick up the bar, always pick up the bar, but someone else could put the weight plates on for you. Uh, if you weren't competing, at least in our gym, uh, everyone put on their own weights, which. when you're in a competition that you lose some time that way. So the point being, bookkeeping is kind of like putting— someone else is putting the plates on the bar for you, but you still have to be the one who picks it up and does the movement. Maybe another example that— another example in a different scenario. It's kind of the difference between being at your house and making a sandwich versus going to a restaurant and buying a sandwich. In both scenarios, you are eating a delicious sandwich. But when you buy the sandwich, someone else did the work of putting it together for you. That's what accounting is. When you hire an accountant, you're not giving up control. You still have control over eating the sandwich. But they're doing the data entry, they're doing the backend stuff. to compile and put together the sandwich for you. That's all you're doing. So that's why I'm saying you're not giving up control. Now, if you've never hired an accountant before, yes, they do need access to your bank accounts and they do need access to your credit cards. It's the best way to make sure that you are eliminated from the making the sandwich process as much as possible. Um, but there are ways you can give them access without giving up control over your finances. Uh, so there are— with bank accounts, you can set up users, and most of them, if— I mean, everything that we've seen, uh, with our clients, and we have, you know, we're 300+ bookkeeping clients, um, you can set up access called viewer-only access. So they see what's going on, but they can't actually do anything. So they don't have authority to mess around with your money. Now, that being said, there are services you can do. For example, if you do Profit First allocations, you can give access to an accountant to actually transfer the money for you. But again, that's why it's called delegation, because you're entrusting that activity to somebody else. And there is a level of trust that you need to have with them because they are transferring your money. It's your money. They're just doing a job for you. They're making the sandwich for you. Uh, but again, you're not actually giving up control over the finances. So with that being said, uh, a few of the things that I think you absolutely always have to do as a business owner, but again, you can eliminate all the sandwich-making aspects and you just, you get handed the sandwich every week or twice a month, whatever frequency you want. Um, that's really, you want to create some key performance indicators or key predictive indicators, something where it's like, look, I don't need to see all the data entry backend stuff. Now, that being said, if you have an accountant, they don't always know what your transactions are for. So they do ask you, I know we do that. And it's probably the only part of the process that we need better communication from our clients on is, hey, here's a list of a few transactions that happened last month. We're unsure what these were for. Let us know so that we can classify them the right way. There's always going to be that level, whether you have an in-house bookkeeper or not. We have an in-house bookkeeper at Insight Tax, and I still answer questions for them every once in a while, like, hey, I saw this transaction, what is it for? Um, so again, there's always some level of responsibility you're gonna have to have. Um, but that's minimal. So you can then set up, say, uh, I don't actually want to see the full profit and loss statement. I want to see revenue. I want to see my net income. Those are 2— technically they're called KPIs. Uh, or, you know, marketing department, I want to see how many leads we got. I want to see how many we closed. I want to see new revenue for the month. There's a whole list of key performance indicators that you could be using. But again, ultimately by having an accountant, they're doing all the backend stuff for you. And on, depending on the level of service that you're getting from the accounting firm, they could just be sending you this report of key performance indicators that you're interested in seeing. So it's like having a chef make the sandwich for you. It sounds nice, right? It is pretty nice. So I hope that answers that question. You're not giving up control when you hire an accountant. I do think, though, not every business owner feels that they can't do it alone. Some feel like, yeah, I can totally handle my own finances. And that's great. If you can do that, that's awesome. But if you're in that boat where you're like, you know, I know this isn't my expertise, I'm not sure, all these different things. I'd like to learn more about it, but I only want to learn enough to know that I can successfully run my company. You're, you're probably in the boat where it makes sense to find an accountant and, you know, talk to them. It doesn't hurt to have a conversation with someone and just say, well, what does it look like? What does your service look like? What does the deliverable look like? What are my responsibilities? In you doing my accounting? Um, because worst case scenario, you get the answers, uh, to your questions and you still decide, yeah, I don't want to do it. Conversation never hurts. So anyways, hopefully that answers your questions. But remember, profitability is a choice. Have the courage and wisdom to choose it.
