The Wize Way

Episode 155: The Wize 7-Division: Your Blueprint to Building a Business That Runs Without You

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 2 • Episode 155

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In today's episode of The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants and Bookkeepers, Jamie Johns and Thomas Sphabmixay deep dive into the nitty-gritty of building a successful accounting or bookkeeping firm with Wize 7-Division model — the core structure behind every thriving, scalable business.

As your firm grows, the real challenge isn't doing more — it's evolving from wearing every hat to delegating, leading, and building a team that can thrive without you.

Jamie shares hard-won insights on leadership, investing in people, and why showing results is key to growing an independent business.

Join us to learn how mastering these divisions can help you build a business that runs — and grows — without you at the centre.

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PS: Whenever you’re ready… here are the fastest 4 ways we can help you fix and grow your accounting firm:

1. Take the Wize Accountants Scale Scorecard – Find out your potential to scale and the next steps you should follow – Start Your Scorecard

2. Download our famous Wize Freedom Strategy Map for FREE - Find out the 96 projects every firm owner must implement to build a $5M+ firm that can run without them - Download here

2. Need to Hire right now? Book a 1:1 FREE discovery call with our WizeTalent hiring coaches to help find your next team member the Wize Way – Click Here

4. Book a 1:1 Wize Discovery Session – Spend 30mins with our Wize CEO, Jamie Johns, a $7M firm owner who is ready to give you his entire business plan to build a firm that can run without you – Find out more here

Wize Mentoring:

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants and Bookkeepers, a show about accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and the many stories, lessons, and tips from their experience of transitioning from a time poor practice to a business that runs without them.

Thom Sphabmixay:

I hope you enjoy and subscribe, and look to dive into the nitty-gritty now. Let's dive into the seven divisions. If you've been part of Wize Mentoring before, you probably would have heard us go through the seven dish visions. But it runs so deep and the way it's able to explain the scope of a Wize firm and what exactly we need to do to build it up and what sort of leaders we need to put into each division becomes so clear when it's all laid out before us. And, jamie, if you'll be so kind to take us through the seven divisional org chart and how this aids us in basically building up a business that would run without us, and perhaps in going to these divisions, what are some of the barriers in setting up these divisions and that could ultimately affect our growth as a firm.

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, thanks, Thomas, Everyone. I know when you start out you have to wear all the hats, so I started my business from my home office.

Jamie Johns:

Anyone the same, whether you buy a firm or you start it yourself definitely have to wear all the hats. You're the cleaner, you're the receptionist, you're the admin person, you're the marketer. I used to joke because I was the director. I was the director, the shareholder and the employee. You just won't have to wear all that.

Jamie Johns:

So I think, Thomas, the biggest barrier is, as your firm grows, you have to change professionally. I know that I had to change how I thought about things. That was a bit of a challenge. So I think they say, by the time you're about 25, you're pretty set in your ways.

Jamie Johns:

Thomas, you've really got to take stock of how you used to do things and, as Ed says, we're all born out of production, most of us. I started in bookkeeping. My career was I started in bookkeeping, and then I started teaching people bookkeeping, actually, and then ended up doing. I did management accounting and then did public practice in the end, and that's how we got into what we do today. But yeah, the thing is when you start, is realise that you have to delegate. So you have to delegate effectively and then, when you delegate, you have to lead people, you have to mentor people. I think leadership can be learned as long as you're open to it, willing to change, and that was the biggest thing that Ed helped me with was just leading the team. Ed has all these fantastic sayings like seek the facts, pick your battles, don't have videos behind your eyes, don't get paranoid all these. We're putting a book together on this, aren't we, Thomas? All those things are really really helpful. Another thing was that Ed would say on it. So, really big decisions. So when you're hiring people, never hire quickly; do it slowly. That was a massive lesson. And then we got WizeT alent quickly run through the divisions, your division, one board of directors. If you're the owner of your firm, you'll pretty much sit in that seat the entire time.

Jamie Johns:

But that's very strategic. You must think strategically as the owner of your firm. So you really should be at least monthly looking at your figures. When you scale your firm up to past a million dollars or whatever your long-term goals are, make sure that yourself, as the owner of the firm or the general manager or CEO, make sure you keep looking at the figures and then, once you get senior client managers, at least sort of monthly or at minimum quarterly, if not monthly. Look at your Fab5. And if you don't know what the Fab Five is, make sure you do a deep dive into the videos on Fab Five, because leadership is all about showing people the results of their actions. That's really, really important. I couldn't stress that enough as a leader. See, when you're the owner of a firm, you should be at a helicopter level. You should be up higher. You should stop cutting the wood and stand up and look over the forest to see where you are. That's so critical. So you've got to do that as a leader. And particularly when you've got client managers, you must show them the results of their actions as well. So that's really that sort of at the board of directors.

Jamie Johns:

And then, of course, back in the early days, I didn't do any marketing, I just got referrals. Once you want to step back from being the butterfly and become the butterfly catcher, Ed says that we need to create a garden of butterflies, a sort of thing, in marketing. When you're starting out, often you won't do much marketing. But as you get bigger, and if you want a healthy source of leads, it's good to do marketing. So these days, for example, we have a full-time person who just does the marketing at Sky Accountants, and they're in the Philippines. Once you get to a certain scale, you can definitely step back from marketing, and you can even have someone who's very strategic at marketing as well. There are so many things in the Wize Vault around marketing third-party testimonials. You can enter business awards. You can get testimonials from your clients as well. So there's so much work you can do in marketing. It's great.

Jamie Johns:

Sales is one of those areas that, as your firm grows, it's probably one of the biggest steps to remove yourself from. Traditionally, the client managers, the senior client managers, and the assistant managers look after the sales. So when I went through that process, it was a matter of just putting the senior client managers in place and helping double back in the meetings, micro-training them, Thomas, so that they know exactly what to do. It just takes time. It takes time.

Jamie Johns:

I had a call yesterday with someone about how to get trust and loyalty from their team, and the way to do it is to spend time. You can't demand trust, and you can't demand loyalty. So you must spend time with them. And when I say time, you must spend hours with them. You can't just ring them every day and say, what are you going to get done today, like the daily huddle, is one thing. That's just one aspect of it.

Jamie Johns:

But to get trust and to get loyalty, people want to grow in their careers, they want to succeed in their careers, and the way to help them is to micro train them. And micro train doesn't mean five minutes. Micro training means going through a set of procedures, policies, and investing in people. I couldn't stress that more to everyone here today. Invest, invest, invest in people, but not just five minutes here and there. It doesn't work like that. That sort of leads onto sales, where you can pull yourself out of sales. Invest in people. Same with production. Micro-trained people have standard operating procedures, checklists, and, again, teach your senior client managers that they have to invest in people.

Jamie Johns:

Middle-level management is the hardest to fill anywhere in any organisation. So your role as a firm owner is to create a leadership level underneath you. That's really a challenge. It's a bit like Ed says, it's always easier just to do the work yourself, isn't it? And you should never say, Oh, it's quicker if I just do it myself. That's just like the hamster on the treadmill, it just keeps stressing it. Invest in people. When you invest in people, you'll win their loyalty and you'll win their trust. You have to earn it both ways. You're moving through this oil chart here, Thomas. Quick wins a lot of firms.

Jamie Johns:

If you're not doing that, make sure you survey your clients when the jobs get done on how they're going, and then provide that feedback to the people who are doing the work. You know that you are responsible for the client, the client managers, office admin. Division six is a great one, and sometimes firms have their bookkeepers and accounting accountants doing too much admin. So, make sure that the admin people do the admin. The rest of the team does what they're supposed to be doing. You want to make sure that people in divisions three and four are getting a level of productivity. It doesn't matter whether you're a fixed fee or not. You must measure efficiency. But you don't want them doing admin. So it's really good to hire.

Jamie Johns:

One of your first hires can potentially be an admin person. You can just take or make a list of all your admin tasks, and then you can delegate them effectively and invest in them to do the admin, and I did that. Early days, probably the first couple of years of my firm had an admin person. And then division seven, which is really critical, I would say, not only just to do your own internal books, but that's important, of course, but make sure you get the Fab5 done. When I'm speaking to people or mentoring people or helping people, I will absolutely do a sprint, I would say, Thomas, a sprint to the Fab Five. I see people's eyes light up when I show them the Fab Five. And then, once you've got senior client managers, once you've got people in teams, which is really important, then their results, their facts, are in the Fab5. That's a real breakthrough, like an epitome of saying, Oh wow, does that person need to set a budget for you? Yes, they do. They have a budget, they are in charge of the team, they set the salaries, so forth and so forth. As long as you empower them, give them some leadership training.

Jamie Johns:

I remember years ago, Ed came to our office and we did some leadership training. There are different types of leaders. So each of those divisions, Thomas, has their own challenges. But I think one of the big challenges, once your firm gets to the right size, you've got trusting and loyal staff. One of the biggest steps is division three, once you get client managers. That changed a lot for me changed a great deal as you develop each team. As each team sort of gets to 500,000 or 600,000, each team will have its own challenges as well. Not everyone's different like a robot. The different client managers have their own personalities. So then, as the leader, you can help them overcome their own challenges as well. But a lot of the things that Ed taught me were out of the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That's a great resource. We've really taken Ed's, taken that and a couple of other books like the E-Myth, and really just Ed's made it fit for Wize Mentoring and helping people.

Thom Sphabmixay:

So I really love the seven divisions because not only does it show you the different modules that are needed to build up a Wize firm, it's also the things that aren't here that are important to that, Jamie. You might often see in other accounting firms that they might set up like an IT department or some sort of funky department and funky roles, and all of a sudden they're saying, Where's my profit going?

Jamie Johns:

This is like a ladder. So these seven steps lately we've been calling the seven steps to freedom. It's like a ladder, these are like the backbone. Those seven steps are like the backbone, and that's a great graph. Years ago true story, Ed might remember that I said to Ed, this is many years ago now. I said, Ed, how do I move myself and my firm? And then Ed took me on a journey, and he actually said it to me, I think, on the phone. And then I got a graphic designer, ed you might recall, to draw this up. And I remember you saying, Jamie, you remove yourself from admin first. That's really easy, you can get someone else to do the admin. So I thought, right, that's a good point, I'm going to list all the admin tasks and get someone else to do them. And then the next one was production, and so away we go, production, and then managing. That was more tricky again, so you can follow all those steps down there, everyone.

Thom Sphabmixay:

And that's exactly how you do it. And something to point out, Jamie, is that perhaps everyone, every firm's withdrawal journey might not always look the same, but definitely, admin, is one of the simplest and easiest to be able to get ourselves out of.

Wize Mentoring:

Yeah, on how to build a business that runs without you. Head over to wizementoring. com/ podcast to download a free copy of the Accountant's 20-Hour Workweek Playbook. We've included a link in the show notes below. See you in the next episode.