The #1 Blind Spot Preventing Accounting Firms from Growing

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,661 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 4 minutes to read.

I want to share a catchy graphic from Ryan Lazanis’s post on LinkedIn:

It does a good job highlighting the main issues firms struggle with but one thing is missing:

Leadership skills.

I discussed this on my recent podcast episode with JStaats.

It’s the number one blind spot I believe accounting firms face.

As an industry, we spend tons of time tweaking our pricing models squeezing every cent out of engagements as possible.

Invest hundreds of hours testing new software apps and automating workflows.

But then we promote the wrong people into leadership roles.

(in practice, it often means promoting the people with the most billable hours)

All the leverage gained from the pricing tweaks and software implementation is nuked as soon as we promote someone to a leadership role who doesn’t know how to lead.

Here are the characteristics of people who have the potential to be great leaders:

They can objectively self-reflect on how their own actions impacted the team

When the team fails, bad leaders blame everyone but themselves.

They blame technical skills, lack of support, software issues, workflow inefficiencies, client document disorganization, you name it.

And that’s not to say these issues don’t exist.

But great leaders start by assessing how they may have set their team up for failure.

Specifically, they review expectations that were set and how they held the team accountable throughout the process.

Only after they’ve confirmed they did everything they could from a communication, expectation setting, and accountability perspective do they start assessing other potential causes of the failure.

Great leaders focus on the right problems.

I find it interesting people will spend hours and hours trying to make small tweaks to workflow and technology but don’t spend a minute thinking about how they set up their teams for failure or success.

(and by the way, most of the time, team failure is due to poor expectation setting… good people with great leadership can execute in bad systems).

They have ideas to improve and present well-thought-out solutions

How many meetings have you attended where an issue is being discussed and ideas start flying?

There are certainly times when brainstorming is needed.

However, I’ve found most ideas are cheap.

And sometimes the ideas presented are a defense mechanism intended to deflect the boss’s attention away from the person causing the failure point.

Great leaders gather context before presenting an idea.

They seek to understand what the firm has tried in the past. Whether it worked or not and what alternative solutions were explored. They may even seek to understand the financial impact of solving the problem.

They will then spend time developing their idea into a real solution.

One that includes thoughts on how to implement effectively, downstream impact, and expected results over a specified time frame.

They don’t experience the same issues over and over (because they solve them)

How urgently someone solves a problem that has the potential to reoccur is a good indication of leadership potential.

Bad leaders complain about experiencing the same problems week in and week out.

Great leaders solve the problem once and for all.

This is because people with leadership potential are forward thinkers. They consider the impact of a problem reoccurring in the future and opt to solve it today for good.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,
Brandon