Three Questions I Received Last Week (And My Answers)

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,555 growth-minded accountants.

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

Today’s issue takes less than 6 minutes to read.

Last week I came up short on content and invited readers to email me with questions.

I received many!

Here are three that I wanted to highlight:

When hiring, is it best to hire bottom up or top down?

My thought is to hire top down, with “top” being manager-level talent.

I hired bottom up for years and found some great people in doing so.

But it also caused me a significant amount of pain and stress.

Less experienced people need a system that they can plug into while they learn the ropes. Most of us running smaller firms don’t have great systems.

Hiring less experienced talent saves money.

But with every dollar saved comes the pain of the time it takes to get less experienced people to the level you need them.

Instead, hire managers and have them help you build the systems.

And then help them hire great people to manage.

How do you systematize advisory so more people at the firm can do it?

The goal in systematizing a service is to “productize” it.

The first step is to interview / shadow the practitioners who are advising clients.

You need to identify the core issues and challenges your clients face (some of them will have nothing to do with tax/accounting).

Then, develop a scope of work that works for most of your clients and includes repeatable steps/milestones that your team must complete.

For example, our base-level advisory scope is:

• Planning phase

  • 3 calls

  • Tax plan delivered

• Maintenance phase

  • 2 calls

  • Email support

Our project management system automates tasks for our team to reach out to clients to get calls scheduled.

Our tax plans all look the same, though the content will vary per client.

We commit to onboarding clients who only fit this model ~95% of the time (the other 5% of the time we’ll experiment with different approaches).

Because it is so repeatable, we can develop systems around training and delivery.

We can develop systematic sales and onboarding as well.

And our marketing messaging becomes clearer.

Advice for small firm owner who is trying to cut hours?

I think many firm owners can solve the hours spent in delivery by increasing their spend on labor.

A $20k swing in salary can be the difference between someone who you have to babysit and someone who will build your systems, manage your team, and enable you to focus on growth.

When you factor in the time saved by spending a bit more on talent, it’s a no brainer.

So my first piece of advice is to make sure you are paying enough to attract great people to your firm.

My second piece of advice is to figure out a growth rate of your firm that provides you the income you want, the flexibility you need, and the ability for your staff to grow careers.

Many firm owners are focused on work life balance, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you don’t grow your firm at a reasonable rate, I believe you are exposing yourself to retention risk.

People will generally want to see their careers grow.

They will want to make more money.

Can you offer them that when you are laser focused on building a flexible firm?

Maybe you can! (And you should write about it)

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

See you again next week.

Cheers,

Brandon