Boost Efficiency with Business Pipeline Management for Accounting and Tax

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foreign 's gonna be different good morning sleepyheads did you like super close I guess good morning sleepyheads good morning sleepyheads we're gonna make a vlog I don't know how to vlog [Music] [Music] let's get Hench oh spoilers problems or problems or problems or problems or problems on problems I saw but my brother through the money depression we call it left for my blessings I feel like I'm falling the birdie is back tell me I'm garbage I'm going through something that's why I ain't call it [Applause] yesterday Adam Markowitz sent out a tweet that kicked off a great discussion I think here's the Tweet aside from back in a big truck full of Ben Franklin's up to Jason's home where does an accounting firm go to hire someone in-house to improve processes is that like a nerdy admin type of role or just some consultant or is that just my job asking for me how do you find that person I think everybody's talking about that person right now I know a few firms that have made like full-time automation hires maybe you're not quite there yet but what does that roll look like is that like an admin's job is an accountant's job there's this perception of like who's the youngest like most I.T Savvy person like they just kind of become that but I think there's two questions here really first how do you know what to even work on like how do you even know what you need like what's next there's always 100 things you can do right but how do you even know what the lowest hanging fruit is do you even have that perspective so how do you know what to work on and then two whose job is it to do it is it somebody hire the right thing to do next is so contextual because all firms are so different right I think an external like third party can give you good perspective and maybe point out some stuff that may be obvious that you're blind to but so much of what would inform what should be done next is also organizational knowledge what do you know about your clients what are clients like clamoring for right now that they don't have that's where your in-house people are going to be really good at finding that stuff but it doesn't really require expertise like automation expertise and then the second question of where to find that person if it's me honestly I'm really quick to hire this stuff out so yes I can do maybe more than some people but I'm also aware of so much more that's out there that I can't do that my first go-to is like pulling in contract help on specific work so if I'm not your solution if I would be the first one to tell you I can't even do all that myself does it exist and how reasonable is it to think an admin or a accountant is going to be able to do this thing for you I do think it's easy to say I just have to find person X I think we do this in a lot of different areas or sometimes it's easier to imagine the hypothetical like a unicorn person that's out there that will solve the this problem for you completely the question is does that person exist or is it just easier to fill up that theoretical person with everything that you need right now so who's the right person to hire okay [Music] all that's well and good but answer the question who's the right person to hire how do you make it happen show me those muscles so if you're following on Twitter you know I've been through the most ridiculous dishwasher Saga I've been without a dishwasher about four months just from some ridiculous stuff with Home Depot and we finally got a replacement two days ago big day for our family but I've been putting it through a series of tests series of challenges it tried one side's pretty clean green cheese one's good where was the cream cheese I was the one right next to it oh looks like a little bit of peanut butter got on the fork or that could have been peanut I just need a reflection okay you know what it's doing all right so far daddy oh [Music] this button calls mom this button calls Logan hey you want to go get Finn up with me let's do it let's do a high five thanks [Music] so much Salt's on the stairs yeah doesn't seem like a good idea [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'm gonna ask you the question just answer one way or the other okay you can send to your likeness being used on video you do yep I'm getting you uh I'm getting you homemade bread okay [Music] medium boy 108 [Music] next up nice car yep [Music] [Music] Jason oh yeah [Music] you gotta climb up to it so there's always a million things you can do right like a bottomless pit of new stuff you can take on how do you know what to do next how do you pick like what's the highest impact thing how do you prioritize like how do you how did you decide what to do next at any given point in time or did you just kind of like roll out of bed and go whatever way the day took you I think in the beginning it did and you're putting out fires and then so you focus on doing all the things to make the clients and your employees happy to drive that's a bunch of things though how do you pick them how do you pick the one thing that you do next for me it was make my employees happy because when they're happy their clients are happy right so I yeah focused on making the employees happy within a reasonable scope and you know just doing the small things and being human with them and connecting makes them happy and that makes our clients happy gives the business as a whole just a good positive vibe [Music] foreign so I can relate to what Heather shared but it also adds another question to me so her first job was the person putting all the fires out I can relate to that but then she said her main focus was keeping employees happy so that was the hat that she wore in her business but who wears all the other hats and whose job is it to develop processes like is that is that a dedicated person like is that a collective thing I definitely feel like it's one of those things where unless it's somebody's job nobody ever does it so who can you point to in your business where they need to be the one thinking about this stuff does that need to be a specific person probably so as with every messy question it's like there's a bunch of messy questions rolled up in there so this morning we talked about it's really how do you know what to do next where do you find the person to make it happen and whose job should it be to make is its job of a specific person in your business is it a collective thing is that like a consultant's job I've got that it's almost nap time feeling getting close can you get the mic out of shot I'm just kidding that's [Music] it big boy I think we're baking now it's hot hot nap time okay everyone listen up here's the plan it's nap time we've got two hours this is the only two hours of the day where you're both allowed to be an adult and still sober first up bathe check second final revisions on the 2K q a video third build a cheeky automation fourth figure out this whole hiring and what to do next thing and make this video actually useful so we're doing the 2 000 subscriber q a video I don't edit most of my videos I've got an editor some of the stuff I will like the some of the montagey like trailery stuff I'll do myself but 90 of it is done by my magnificent editor but most of this is just a ton of back and forth and slack we'll go through two three revisions on each video [Music] okay video down let's make a cheeky little animation so I'm doing this thing called roast my firm anybody can kick in anonymized information about their firm I'm going to share that info online solicit some like tips from people online and then make a video around that firm so like tell you everything about the firm they stack their workflow all that stuff what would be my advice for next steps kind of like what we're talking about in this video it's a fun way to kind of Open Source some of this feedback I think and one of the things I'm going to do is send kind of those firm profiles anonymously to the thought leadery type people in our profession so I send that info to them don't skew their opinion or anything and say hey give me like a 90 second overview of what you would advise this firm to do next but the way I'm collecting this information is an air table form so how do I get from an air table form with sometimes that's like a bunch of data they shoot a bunch of information how do I get that into a format I can send to those people to share their thoughts so what I'm going to do never done this before I'm going to use Google templates which are new to me I learned about it from Chad Davis on our automation podcast I'm going to take the data in each of these Forum entries generate a Google doc with them from template using make create a PDF and then save that PDF back to airtable then I can use that PDF anytime I need to share the details of that roast my firm firm so we'll see I'm going to time this because I think there's a perception that like oh I don't have a half day to burn on an automation when usually this stuff's like honestly pretty quick famous last words I haven't actually done this before but we'll see and then I'll show you how it works at the end [Music] so here's the table of the roast my firm data I added two things a generate PDF column this is a button you can click on and then a PDF column for the output so now it's generating these PDF files that include all of the data from each of the submissions so people submit via this roast my firm form type of work specialization what's your role what's your team makeup Cadence sales and marketing all that stuff quite a bit of information and some people like give you a lot in there which is great but I gotta package that up and something that I can give to someone and so now I've got this PDF remember at the beginning when I said it doesn't always take a half a day it doesn't always take a half a day but if I were to guess how long that was going to take I would have thought like 20 minutes ended up being like 50. here's the thing though next time I encounter that issue if I gotta get something from Google Drive to airtable it's gonna be super fast that was like a 20 minute process building out the make automation but even building out the document template from scratch that was all the longer that really took okay so let's make sense of this whole what do I do next thing we've got three issues one how do you know what to even do next two how do you find the Unicorn that's going to get you there and three whose job is it to actually make this stuff happen is that still my job if you find the Unicorn then that's the unicorn's job in the case of my wife that we talked about her Focus was on like caring for the employees but how do you put that stuff alongside the client experience making sure the company's making money overall strategy small workflow things who is looking at all of those things and making a list start here and do these things I feel like you could like Spiral and think about this all day here is like the most straightforward framework I've been able to come up with and a few tidbits that manufacture some structure around this so three steps to this framework one prioritizing what to do next it needs to be a combination of several things needs to be a combination of what your team internally thinks is important nobody knows how you work and your clients better than you but secondarily you need an external input there you need a consultant an advisor even a peer who understands your business who can come in and help you prioritize any low-hanging fruit that they see where with what your team thinks you need because you're going to have blind spots so that outside party is going to help you with your blind spots you're going to have your own list of what you think you should be doing and then you'll come together with that outside party and prioritize those things together you really need some sort of advisor if you don't have anybody speaking into your firm outside of your internal firm group think you can have big old blind spots but the flip side of that where that person drives all of the decision making honestly I think advising firms is so nuanced because every firm is different every set of clients is different the wants and desires of firm owners are completely different so like no external consultant is going to have a perfect roadmap for every single firm so it's got to be a marriage of what makes sense internally with general advice from an expert bringing that stuff together to have a prioritized list of here's what we're going to do so if there's a tidbit to take from that you need somebody to talk to at least quarterly if it's scary to get a consultant even just ask a peer honestly that's better than nothing but if you don't have anyone scratching that itch for you right now your absolute really going to have blind spots so that's first thing list priorities great and that's the first step like that's a huge First Step just knowing what to do is honestly half the battle second validate your plan with a bunch of other people this is where Community is gold for me whatever you're planning on doing there's a hundred other people who have already done it wouldn't you love to hop in that time machine and see what happened for them what their advice would be whether they were adopting the tech that you were looking at whether they tried this thing and it created some sort of issue they didn't anticipate I want to hear 50 of those stories before I go through the work of actually making this change validated decision making there is nothing more valuable myself man I've got so many horror stories about this we changed our practice management system like four years ago it was a bad decision the decision was made based on what the sales people told us because at that time I didn't have any Community we didn't have anybody else to talk to so you're literally going off the advice of the people who are incentivized to just get you to buy it and that's how like most of the decisions in this profession are made which is nuts and that creates like years of chasing your tail you made the wrong pick you're back to square one you made the wrong pick You Back Square One and when so many of these things are on year-long cycles that can be so frustrating so hugely important step number two validate that decision making have a trusted group of people where you can put that out there where you have permission to pick the brains of a bunch of other people that did the same thing as you because they're out there and if you're like too proud to ask them how it went or think you're gonna do it right you don't trust how they did it like that's so naive so go out and find the people who've already done that third find somebody to implement it so I gave a talk the other day on how I hire for automation stuff and it's almost all experts on contract it's not me doing the stuff myself bad example I just did a thing myself for simple stuff like that I will do it myself but the reality is if you're a firm Runner like you've got no business spending a half day trying to automate a thing or weeks on a bigger project that's not your job like you got to pull somebody in for that and on the flip side if you got people being accountants all day that can sometimes be automators they're never going to be anywhere near as good as the people that just automate stuff all day so I'm going out I'm looking at contractors who are experts and specifically the type of tech that I need to implement this thing I'll put a link to this talk that I gave down below but basically the idea is you need to understand the different types of tech that will solve the specific problem you're talking about choose the most robust one because there's a bunch of different tools that will do the same thing from zapier to RPA all these different things but some are much more reliable and cheap to implement than others to identify the type of tech you should use and then find the expert in that type of deck go out to upwork go out to Fiverr there are such good people out there who do this stuff all day and no matter how good I think I am or how good I think that person I have on my team who's like slightly dangerous with this stuff we are never going to be able to touch the people that just do this all the time now what's really exciting and liberating about this you don't need that unicorn you're hiring out of a massive pool of people some of them aren't going to work out but over time you'll find the winners like you'll build up that automation team Rolodex find the people you like working with and they're going to be available when you need them now it's still valuable to have automation expertise across your whole team because those people will be better at identifying things they can put together the Simple Solutions where it's maybe not worth pulling in a third party but if you put all your eggs in the hypothetical oh find the perfect unicorn basket I'm that unicorn if I were just going to stop what I do and automate for people all day I'm telling you I can't do everything that's out there I would go hire people so I think what that gets me to is don't go looking for the unicorn look for people with like a comfort level with basic Automation and help get everybody up to like a base Comfort level but is it realistic that you're going to have that person in the house that can do everything probably not because they're doing accounting all day unless they're like a full-time automator you're a big enough firmware all they do is add stuff all day long but like even in that case they probably have a very specific type of automation expertise they can't do everything it's just like tax there's too much for one person to be the expert in all things I think that's what makes the most sense to me and I like it because it's actionable find an external advisor to help me identify what I need to do next find a community where I can validate that decision with people and then understand what type of expert I need to go hire to help me do that thing I'm going to keep hiring accountants I'm going to keep training them to like a base level of savviness with automation things but at the end of the day when it comes to doing the big mission critical things I'm gonna go out and hire an expert I'm gonna pick somebody up on contract low commitment they're going to come help me with that specific workflow issue I had that's what I'm do I don't know if it's the right answer I'd be interested to know what you think drop a comment below no no my next stuff is I'm changing practice Management Systems oh Jason what did you do I got a short list of the stuff we're doing next but two hours are up so when we go through that short list I may not be sober but hey who's keeping score if you treat Like A Champion you'll be a champion [Music] foreign [Music] food coloring [Music] [Music] sleepy time [Music] so if you're so smart Jason how do you do it oh man deciding what to Do's been really hard honestly last two three years that's probably been the hardest thing to navigate if you know about my firm it's an 80 year old tax firm it's like I bought an old wooden sailing vessel and it came with a crew of like 500 people it's hard to change direction there's a lot of I've got like 1500 clients 35 people it's a lot of inertia there's just everything's happening nobody necessarily knows why it's happening but it's happening just like it always has happened in the past it just kind of keeps going keeps chugging along and anytime you're going to change the direction of that many people staff and clients you gotta have a really good reason you got to get people really excited about it it's a lot of bloody work however long you think it's gonna take it's gonna take longer but the same rules apply so prioritize what to change taking into account internal and external input validate the change find the people to implement the change so deciding on the change I feel like we've got a pretty good feedback loop with the staff who are never short of opinions so we definitely don't have any problem Gathering and organizing internal feedback and what we think we should prioritize I don't have like a consultant like an external person but what I do is talk with like several firm owners a week every single week and I'm super transparent about what I do and I feel like I'm able to pick up a lot from those conversations and also just learning about other people's firms I think gives me good perspective but no technically I guess I don't have that like consultant type person but that's how we've prioritized our internal feedback me putting that up against what I'm saying from all the other firms I'm talking to and the interesting things that they're doing two validating that stuff man I've got such an unfair Advantage there so I run an accountant community Unity where that's like the whole purpose of the community is coming together and sharing the decisions we're making and fleecing other people for ideas like literally seeing their live setups like sharing all those private stuff that you don't normally get to share I am so big on validating decisions before you make them even if it takes twice as long so that you never have to make the same decision again like that's a mistake I've made in the past you do this big thing and you're like nope that wasn't right and it's going to take years to get back so validation through YouTube through Twitter through my account Community I feel like I've got a really unfair Advantage there third who's going to implement it depends on the thing if it's a super techie thing every change has a champion and that varies from being admins to being accountants but whether they're doing it themselves or not usually they aren't they're the ones making sure that it happens so do you need more resources to do it do you need more people to do do we need to bring in an external person to help us do it we have an internal person that's in charge of making sure that happens and as soon as they know it's not going to happen they got to ask late that we figure out a plan when it's workflow and automation oriented like I shared I'm very quick to pull in a third party even if you think you know how to do that thing there's somebody that sits there and does that thing all day every day and they do that thing better than you building automations is still development and there's a hundred different ways to do the same thing and their way is going to be better than your way so as much as I can do a lot of this stuff myself if it gets Beyond a certain complexity level I'm very quick to pull in expertise and honestly that is like that's so easy it is such a hack to get used to hiring off of upwork off Fiverr like finding talented people that you can hire on contract I think accounting firms usually frame things through the lens of employment because it's what we know but employment is so bloody risky think about a two-person firm hiring a third full-time person you're like betting 50 33 of your Workforce is just like just gonna work out and those hires don't work out they take a humongous amount of time to train get up to speed it takes years but we never hire people on contract if I hire automation people on contract I can like go through five of them until I find a really good one or a really good two or three and then we keep coming back to them but I love doing that stuff on contract and right now there are way more no code dorks out there who love this stuff and want to do more of it than there are people realizing how powerful it is looking to hire those folks the price of like bubble developers of zapper developers that's it's gonna go through the roof in the next few years as more people start wanting those Freelancers but right now it's so easy to find them they're not all good but if you're doing something Mission critical especially if you're able to hire offshore like hire two or three of them they'll do it different ways you'll have more confidence in one and the others and you'll feel better about the result so because cost is like so low on a lot of these projects I'll go offshore I'll hire somebody on contract and that's how the automation like heavy lifting stuff gets done we got an in-house person that's the champion making sure it happens but we go out and hire the expertise we need I did a whole I think I shared I did a whole talk on the hierarchies of different types of tech that you need to know about as a decision maker not be an expert in but just know they're there so you have the right expertise I did a whole talk on that but I'll link below so how do you prioritize this stuff that you gotta do or even know where to look next do you have like a that's not funny I'm it doesn't even make sense I'm wearing a lav mic do you have a framework that you use also if you aren't like on Twitter yet you're missing out on so many of these good discussions thanks for stopping by is this weird what do you think of vlogging how do you feel about my deck let me know if you think we should do more vloggy type stuff like this in the future bye come say bye bye [Music]