The Wize Way

Episode 171: Turn Your Board Meetings Into a Growth Engine

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 2 • Episode 171

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Stop Talking Tactics. Start Leading Strategy.

Most firm owners turn board meetings into long tactical checklists. The result? Burnout, disengaged leaders, and no real progress toward growth.

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Thomas breaks down how to:

✅ Keep board meetings purely strategic (not firefighting)
 ✅ Use a 90-day plan to drive clarity and action
 ✅ Track the Fab 5 KPIs that give you peace of mind

If you’re ready to stop micromanaging and start leading with vision, this one’s for you.

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1. 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

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3. 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

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Speaker 1:

no-transcript. Profit and freedom and a business that can run without them. I'm Bren Ward, your host, and each week, we deep dive into the real stories, proven strategies and battle-tested tools from successful firm owners. Just like you, our wise mentors want to share their journey of how they've scaled and systemized their way to freedom. So you can, too. If you're stuck in the grind or you're ready to scale smarter, this is your blueprint. Let's get into the episode.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so today's an important topic. It's all about monthly board meetings. I think, because of the busy period and yesterday was the best due date, it seems that more than one accounting firm is trying to lodge it. Hopefully they get a warning letter instead of a penalty for the clients. That's not something you want, okay, but you're here today, meaning that you're ready to think about where you could be investing your time into your firm for the future, and nothing is more important than the monthly board meeting. Okay, and if you are an owner and you don't have a partner, you might be thinking, well, how do I actually hold a monthly board meeting then? Well, you still have your senior leaders that you can bring in with you, and you could even bring in a wise growth mentor such as Tim or Christy or myself. But today we're going to go into monthly board meetings, and this is something I have done with a lot of firms over the past six years. I've done hundreds and hundreds of board meetings. By now in my own firm and for the wise firms here, we're going to be talking about how to nail your board meetings. Okay, all right. So if you could, it'd be great if you left your cameras on. You know it just keeps the room alive and until you had a question, it'd be nice for you to keep yourself muted, but otherwise feel free to raise your hand or ask a question in the chat and I'll be happy to address it. Okay, so, starting with, what is a monthly board meeting? What is the purpose and how is that different to the other board meetings that we advise firms to do?

Speaker 2:

Here in Wires, there are four main meetings that should be part of your firm's cadence. There is the daily huddle. That's where you're asking the team what are you going to do today, what are you going to finish and what are your roadblocks, and that's really important. That's a 15 minute thing every single morning. It makes sure that your firm is starting off all at the starting line, all together at the beginning of the day and then getting ready to go at the same time. It also allows you to dress any roadblocks that your team is going to go through before they go for a whole day. And then you're following up on something and they tell you they were stuck on something very simple you could have answered in the morning, and now the client's asking you where their work is up to. So that's crucial, but that's meant for the team as a whole. That's crucial, but that's meant for the team as a whole.

Speaker 2:

You then have the weekly tacticals, and the weekly tacticals are where you involve your senior client managers and your senior production managers and practice managers. So your senior leadership team, your senior management team, okay, and then in the weekly tactical, the teams are sharing their KPIs with each other, kpis that I'll be going through today, that are important to the monthly board meeting as well, but the weekly tacticals, like the name suggests, is a lot more tactical. Okay, so you're discussing about specifically what jobs, what's the schedule looking like for each team for the next four weeks? What leads, appointments or proposals have been sent out, what sales have been won, what's the schedule looking like for each team for the next four weeks? What leads, appointments or proposals have been sent out, what sales have been won, what clients have been lost? Specifically addressing issues around workflow, the team NPS, write-ons and off the whip balance. And then, finally, it being a forum for where senior managers and leaders are able to contribute their ideas and raise issues that they're seeing on the ground in the firm, for everyone to be able to collaborate together and then share a bit more insight into that problem and then solve Okay. So it's tactical, it's getting to the heart of problems that are happening day to day in the firm.

Speaker 2:

The third meeting is a monthly office-wide meeting, and this is where you invite everyone in. This is usually more of a team building exercise, a emotional bank account exercise. It's also an opportunity for you, as a leader, to be able to share to the office important policies such as the no bypass policy things that you want everyone to be able to share to the office, important policies such as the no bypass policy things that you want everyone to be on the same page on. Okay. And then, finally, we have the monthly board meeting, and ideally, the monthly board meeting is a purely strategic meeting.

Speaker 2:

When we're looking at the KPIs, we're thinking from a strategic point of view. We're thinking what should our objectives be? What opportunities should we go after, what are our goals, what are we trying to achieve and what should we implement? What initiatives should we drive within our practice in order to achieve those goals? So, thinking strategically, thinking like a room full of generals if I want to capture this territory, well then, territory A well then I need to go and capture territory B so that I can build up my forces at a closer distance to capture territory A. What strategy is is it is achieving objectives that build towards a larger goal. Okay, it isn't just solving the burning fires, it isn't just making things more efficient. The purpose of strategy is that you are solving those specifically because you're trying to achieve a greater thing. Okay, so we understand what a board meeting is. It's meant to be strategic.

Speaker 2:

Some of the things that I see firms talk about in monthly board meetings that feel strategic but aren't really strategic involve issues with team members. Now, if that team member is a senior leader, if this is a person who's a senior client manager, sure, it's strategic in the sense that senior client managers need to be implemented properly. We need to be able to develop them because they work towards a greater goal of growing the practice. But if you're talking about the specific performance of a junior accountant or an intermediate accountant administrator, then it's a little bit too into the details and you're going to lose sight of the bigger picture and what you actually need to work on in order to achieve a greater goal. So what is the one technique that can help you improve your board meeting engagement or decision making. It's developing a quarterly plan. It's developing a larger goal that you, as a firm, collectively agree on is worth achieving in everyone's best interest, okay.

Speaker 2:

So if you want to deliver a good board meeting, if you want to ensure consistency and connection between each of the board meetings, you want to develop a quarterly plan, a 90-day plan that says that is smart. It's specific. This is what I want to achieve. It's measurable. What are our objectives? What are the key results that we expect to see to know that we have succeeded? What are the KPIs that we are going to track? It's actionable Okay. So that specific goal should then be broken down into 20 specific goals and then disseminated and distributed across the team, assigned to various leaders and managers so that they can execute on.

Speaker 2:

It's reasonable, okay. So you know you can't say to, and I've seen this happen. I've seen this happen in board meetings where a firm owner would say we need to grow by 50% per year and it's a great goal if your firm is already achieving 40% growth. But if you're a firm and your team hasn't seen any indication or signal or effort, or hasn't really consistently invested or worked on marketing or sales or anything related to growth and you have a growth rate that is 5% or 10% or even 15% purely coming from referrals, it's really hard for the team to connect with. How are we actually going to achieve 50%? Do we ask more people for referrals? It's not really clear how exactly they're going to be able to achieve that. So it needs to be reasonable. You want people to be able to achieve their goals.

Speaker 2:

We have many years in practice. We have many months to conduct board meetings. It's important with us leaders that we set things that are reasonable and then the T for time. It's timely. It's, you know, after 90 days, after one quarter, this is how we know what we've achieved. Okay, so the one technique that I can suggest is set a 90 day plan. Suggest is set a 90-day plan. Describe your initiatives in terms of the SMART framework and make sure that the members of your board are across this. You don't want people just bringing up any burning fire that they are seeing day-to-day into the board meeting. It's a place where we free ourselves of the noise, we free ourselves of the distractions, we free ourselves of any doubts and we're able to just practically and realistically look at where we are now, where we want to be and what are the points that we need to capture in order to get there? Okay, so how do you focus your agenda on strategic issues? Again, it starts from that 90 day plan. Make sure that your 90 day plan and actually describes things in terms of agenda. That is strategic at the best.

Speaker 2:

A few weeks ago, I did a board meeting with a firm and the owner has been doing 90-day plans for a while, but they were still sort of leaning on the tactical side. The last board meeting that we had was probably the most strategic 90-day plan that I've seen yet, and it was so perfect that I wish I had it for my own firm. I wish I was in their position to take advantage and execute on their strategy. What it was was they wanted to achieve growth as well. They wanted to be able to grow their client base, and we had spent months figuring out their ideal client personas. What exactly, what niche should that firm go towards? And the exercise started with getting them to go and look at their top 20 clients, analyze them in terms of what did that client look like when they first came to your firm? What were their pain points, what was the state of their business and what weren't they happy about with their previous accountant. Okay, so you're starting with your top 20 clients and then doing a bit of study and research on it.

Speaker 2:

As we began to build on that study and add more fields and columns to it, such as what location do these clients operate out of? What industries do they operate out of? How many employees do they have? What industries do they operate out of? How many employees do they have? What we were able to do is look at that entire picture and realize that all these clients were actually coming out of a specific suburb, and this suburb was a manufacturing construction suburb. This was a suburb that had many, many factories producing construction equipment and materials. What we set as a strategy was okay. Our strategy is if we want to be able to grow this firm, we need to capture 60% of that suburb and the manufacturing and construction industries within it. So what that does now is it makes things very narrow.

Speaker 2:

We started from something very abstract and researched base. We looked at the research. We look at their client base. We knew what their goals were. It was to grow the firm. They wanted more teams. They had profitability issues. They had a lot of fees to add, they had capacity to fill in and going past the point of abstract research. And going past the point of abstract research, now to a point of let's get a list of all these manufacturing and construction businesses within this suburb and our goal, our strategy, is to capture each one, get those names of their businesses onto a big whiteboard in the middle of the office and in 90 days we need to be making progress on capturing every single one of them. And when your strategy becomes that specific, when it feels so clear like that's the red flag, we need to run towards it. It's five kilometers away, it's guarded by these people. There's this terrain that we need to cross. There are these things that we need to go wrong. There are this many days we need to travel. When a strategy has become so clear that you have a thing that you just cross off, like this, you know you've done it.

Speaker 2:

Okay, I'll give a second example. Three years ago, I was wanting to start doing more digital marketing within my firm and I didn't really know where to start. I've had many marketing strategists advise me. I've had the ex-chief marketing officer of chan and nella and a strategist to sky accountants teach me and work with me on the strategy. I've had various people I paid for consultation to teach me and it they gave me a lot of information, but I didn't really know how to put that all together. I didn't know where it was leading to, um. But something that I did notice amongst all of them was that they constantly, like when we did this marketing plan exercise, when they did a discovery with me, they would always say to me Thomas, I need you to list down the top 10 keywords that you want to target as a practice. And so I noticed the pattern, the same way that previous firm I mentioned noticed the pattern.

Speaker 2:

When you have multiple clients or multiple strategists offer you advice, you start to see patterns about what they're asking you, and then you need to ask yourself this critical question what exactly does that mean? Why would they ask that? Why is that important? What does this pattern show? What is it guiding me towards? And the question I asked myself then was how do I even know what keywords they are? I can sit there and just make it up, but I don't really trust things that just come out straight from my head. So when I had direction, then I did the further research the same way that previous firm began to add additional fields and additional meta information to their client analysis, such as the location.

Speaker 2:

What I needed to do was I needed to research. I needed to get the specifics on what exactly is it about this SEO keyword research that I need to get right. I need data. I can't just think about it from the top of my head. There's a limit to that.

Speaker 2:

So what I did was I had a strategist teach me on using an analytics tool and for six months, I began to collate the keywords that were relevant to our industry of SME public tax accounting practices out of the top 200 accounting firms listed on the AFR, and I did that for about three years worth of it, and I would go through and put each website in the top 100, out of the top 200 firms, each website in the top 100 out of the top 200 firms. I put each of their websites into this analytics tool. It spits out all the keywords that they have. There are 10 000 of them in each website because they're a top 200 firm. They're clearly doing very well and what I would do is I would then go through their database of keywords and I would pick out keywords that were low in difficulty and high in volume, because what a previous strategist had taught me was that's the one you want to go after. You want to go after things that have low competition but high potential to bring traffic to your website Makes total sense. So I did that.

Speaker 2:

I collated a list of keywords for about I think I collated about 5,000 keywords and then, out of 5,000 keywords, I narrowed it down to 500. Now if you, the goal here now is that you have to write a piece of content for each of those keywords and then actually competitively try and rank for it, it was going to take me 10 years to have coverage of 500 keywords. But the fact that I narrowed it down to 500, it now showed me what my target was. So if I wrote an article once a month, it's going to take me 10 years. If I wrote four articles a month, one every week, it would take me. What is that? I don't know. That's two and a half years, I don't know. Four times less. One year, one and a half years, and so I thought I could live with one and a half years.

Speaker 2:

I think it's not easy writing these articles to be competitive. One a week sounds good enough. So that allowed me to size up the problem. It allowed me to size up the problem because I set the T, what the time was. I set the R Instead of 5,000, it's 500. There has to be. There's an 80-20 rule there has to be 20% of those keywords that contribute to 80% of the success towards my strategy of building up the website traffic. There's the A it's achievable, well, definitely achievable. It's writing one article per week. It's the M it's measurable Well, I know if we're writing articles and I know if they're going to rank because we tracking them. And S it's extremely specific.

Speaker 2:

So when we set out to tackle, uh, writing articles for these keywords, I knew that I needed to hire people. So I brought in marketing people and I went through about eight different marketing people until I knew that this was the right person to achieve this strategy. And so, in that situation, if you didn't have a marketing strategy, if you didn't have a strategy at all, you wouldn't even know what marketing person to hire. Do you hire someone who's good at graphic design? Do you hire someone who's good at videos? Do you hire someone who's good at writing emails?

Speaker 2:

I had a very specific strategy in mind and that was writing SEO articles. So what I thought was a one and a half year plan took three years, and three years later the website is achieving 60,000 views per month and it produces about three to four prospects per week coming through the website. Now, out of 60,000 views, it's not very good. It achieved the goal that I wanted, but not to the extent that I wanted. It wasn't achieving the measurable things that I wanted. I got what I wanted, which was traffic, but what I really wanted was ROI. What I really wanted was for it to be flooding the firm with fees, and three to four prospects per week weren't really going to cut it. So I knew my journey wasn't over and then I would begin working on the branding side, working on how to optimize the conversions of these views in order to turn these three to four prospects into what I think should be more like 10 or 15 prospects per week.

Speaker 2:

So when you have a very specific strategy in mind, you will feel it. It should look like a list of things that you go. You'll get to a point where you think, well, now we're just going to put in the work. That's a lot of work, right? You know it goes from an abstract discussion. It goes from consulting with various people. It goes from looking at a sample of something to try and draw a pattern, then going to doing research to getting the specifics on it, until you get to a point where it's wow, I just gotta cross things on the list.

Speaker 2:

That firm I was in the board meeting on previously that I mentioned now. Now they've got a list. We went on the internet. We actually just searched up manufacturing and construction industries in that suburb and there was a list. There was a list that existed for it and it stated the revenue of each of those companies that existed in that location. That's perfect. Print this out, give it to everyone. Put all those names onto a CRM ASAP and start finding ways to have conversations with people in it. Start finding ways to identify which of those people have the pain points that matched the top 20 clients when they initially engaged with your firm. Find the companies that have like characteristics to your top 20 and begin to execute on it. Begin to collect intelligence on all these firms. Go and visit them. Try find ways to bump into the owner. It becomes so specific now you go from like this abstract persona study into, just get out there and start putting in the work, and that's time and time again, I've seen it.

Speaker 2:

That's what good strategy feels like, okay, so how do you ensure that your agenda focuses on these strategic issues? It starts with having that list, and now your monthly board meeting feels like you're working on building a pyramid. You know what the final shape is going to look like. Now you're just getting there and laying down the bricks. Okay, and in your monthly board meetings you're going. Well. How many companies did we reach out to this week? What progress did we have on these specific companies that we're trying to target in that suburb? What articles did we put out this week? How are the ones that we've published ranking? What are we seeing work? What are we seeing not work? This is strategy, okay, and this is what you want your monthly board meetings to feel like. So you have the beating heart now of your monthly board meetings. You know what connects board meeting number one with board meeting number 80.

Speaker 2:

So what are some fundamental KPIs that you should be tracking in order to ensure that you're not losing sight of the firm, ensure that you're not hyper-focusing on this specific initiative that you're trying to have the firm go through and then everything else starts falling apart. Part of what allows a board to be able to focus on this strategy is peace. You need to have peace and comfort that your firm is not falling apart and that they're not disappointing clients that are falling behind on work, that they're not allowing the debtors to blow out the whip to blow out, that their team is happy that people are being retained. All those needs need to be met before the board can just focus on being somewhere else met before the board can just focus on being somewhere else focusing on executing on this. And so what is that? That's the Fab Five KPI. That's the Fab Five KPI that you've heard from us time and time again. That's the revenue, the profitability, the lockup, the sales and the NPS.

Speaker 2:

Now I've had board meetings, many board meetings where I've helped firms implement this Fab 5 KPI, and some of the common objections that I hear or concerns that I hear about this Fab 5 is how am I going to keep oversight, truly over the firm if it's just five KPIs? I had one firm recently who said this isn't working out for me Like five KPIs, five major KPIs, doesn't make any sense. I'm going to contact Clarity Street. I hired an in-house software developer. I have a data scientist. I'm trying to figure out, I need to see everything. And then I said and he told me he's already working on it. I said, okay, show me. And he brings up this Excel sheet that is about 60 KPIs and I go.

Speaker 2:

It's hard to explain why we're only looking at a few KPIs versus 60 KPIs because logically it makes more sense to look at more things. But what it does really is that it distracts you. It distracts you from actually working on the strategy. Something that Ed drove into my head and Jave me drove into my head and it's a whole experience over the six years doing monthly board meetings with firms and even in my own firm has drove into my head is at the board level. What KPIs are meant to do is it's meant to give you a peace of mind. It's not there for you to try and maximize efficiency. It's not there for you to try and get 60% gross profit into 80% gross profit. What it's there for is to explain to you that.

Speaker 2:

Here are the benchmarks for each of the KPIs. If your year-to-date revenue is higher than last year, great, by how much? Well, that depends on the growth rate that we were targeting that your year-to-date revenue is at your budget. If it's at the budget, cool. The goal here is don't think about it anymore. There's nothing to think about. Don't keep raising it.

Speaker 2:

If you don't set numbers where, once achieved, you just let it go and then stop worrying about it, you won't give your senior leadership team the incentive to actually achieve them. What you should be basically instilling within your senior leadership and management team is if you achieve these benchmark KPIs, then I have nothing to say to you. I could suggest you do things better, but you have no reason to listen to me. In fact, I have nothing to say Okay, you're doing, you're doing fine. I don't have anything more to add. This is where I you know you're, you're fine, you're, you're in a safe zone. Okay, profitability If your cost of goods sold is 40%, if your EBIT is over 25%, if you're not incurring any write-offs, you're good, there's nothing to worry about. I had one owner say I'm using offshore team members, my 60% gross profit should be 80%, and I go yeah, it could be, but that's not the purpose of the board meeting.

Speaker 2:

You're trying to squeeze an extra little bit of performance out of something that is distracting you from the major priorities of your firm. Return back to what your original goals were. Return back to actually trying to identify what your specific strategy was. Are you achieving your strategy? The board isn't judged on the Fab Five KPIs that measures the team. It's just there to give the board a peace of mind that there aren't really any burning fires If the team is achieving 25% EBIT and there are no write-offs and the whip is reasonable.

Speaker 2:

But there are clients on your ATO list that still haven't been lodged that received penalties, it doesn't matter, let it go okay. I know it's your tax agent license on the line, but if you don't, if you actually drilled into it, you will learn that the fact like, given the fact that your team actually achieved those benchmarks okay, means that they are decently conscientious, that they're genuinely trying to perform well. When you drill into it, they'll just say things to you like we tried following this person up, we tried getting their information in and, yes, you might tell them, but did you send them a final letter? Did you send them a final warning letter? Did you give them the final, final warning letter? Did you impress upon them the urgency, the penalties they're going to face? And they're like no, I didn't. And then you'll think how disappointing, how disappointing you didn't do that. And then what's happening now? You're getting lost. You're getting lost trying to solve the problem of a client that probably has shown themselves not to be ideal. So if your team is achieving those benchmarks in write-ons and the whip balance, let it go. If the client gets a penalty, the team has tried their best. It's already in your engagement letter that they're supposed to provide you information on time anyway.

Speaker 2:

Don't let a few clients that are late on an ATO list distract you from the bigger goal of building up an actual business you can withdraw from and instilling within the team that when you achieve the benchmarks, I'm letting it go. You're safe, you can be comfortable. I'm not going to try and make everything urgent and emotional and constantly apply pressure all the time. That's not where the growth is going to come from. Growth doesn't come from us just trying to stress our team out. Growth is going to come from when the board focuses on the strategy rather than trying to constantly apply pressure at the tactical level.

Speaker 2:

If your debtors are good, if your debtors, say, are worth half a month's worth of monthly budget, it's fine. Your debtors and your WIP balance together calculate an indicator called lockup, debtors and your WIP balance together, calculate an indicator called lockup, and if your lockup is less than 14 days, you're good. If it's greater than 14 days, then you might be running into cash flow issues. Okay, so, unless your debtors are a huge issue, there is really nothing to worry about. Then again, let it go. How is discussing something that is already hitting its benchmarks going to help you get closer to your goals?

Speaker 2:

And then finally, the sales. If you're converting 50% of your prospects into clients and a prospect is not a lead, a prospect is a lead who's been qualified to be a good client, who has done a discovery meeting, who has been sent a proposal. So, out of 50% of people who have been sent a proposal new clients how many of them have been converted? It should be 50%. If it's not 50%, if it's like 10%, if it's 15%, sure you're going to have an issue. But the issue really isn't, say, senior client managers not selling better. The issue could just be in probably we're not qualifying people properly. We're letting too many tie kickers come through the door and get themselves in front of $160,000 a year senior client manager and wasting their time. Sure, that is a burning fire you need to deal with because that's going to get in the way of your growth.

Speaker 2:

If you're winning more sales than you're losing. And even if you've lost clients, as long as you understand the reasons for them maybe they went out of business, maybe they closed up, maybe they sold their business, whatever, maybe they retired as long as you understand the reasons behind the lost fees, that's fine. In all the firms I've worked with, I've never seen a firm not lose fees. I would say the typical is about I see firms on average lose in fees about a third of what they gain in fees on average. Okay, and then your NPSs. If your clients are answering the NPS and they're giving you a nine out of 10, great, there's nothing to worry about. It means your client managers are doing a good job, they're looking after them, they're happy. If your team NPS is nine out of 10, great, the team is happy, they're going to be retained, they're more likely to follow your initiatives. So you can see what I listed out there, what I went through.

Speaker 2:

There is fab five KPIs. Those are just five major KPIs, but can you imagine the level of depth that you can go into just discussing those KPIs? It's already a lot to get through. It's already a lot to get through. It gives you the full spectrum of what's happening in the firm. Sometimes a Fab Five KPI can take up a whole board meeting. Sometimes they can take up five board meetings. We could be talking about write-ons and not for five board meetings. So what happens when you add another 45 KPIs to this? What happens when you add all these other KPIs and you try and fit them into a monthly board meeting? It means that you will never get around to addressing how you're actually working towards your strategy in order to get to your goals.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so you know to answer these very two questions. To summarize this part before you know and I really want to hear from you if you run board meetings or maybe you're yet to run them and you're thinking about it, or maybe you have comments around how other meetings are conducted and you feel like they're not tactical enough, they're not strategic enough. We're happy to answer it. But to summarize, do a quarterly plan, do a quarterly plan and this quarterly plan, the more effort you put into it, the better. And to just add to that, like what I mentioned, the quarterly plan is not a wish list. It comes from looking at a sample of something. It comes from looking at patterns between advisors, advice from consultants or advisors that have given you their time. It comes from actually actioning what they're trying to say and realizing that and then critically thinking there's something missing here, like there's more to it than what they're trying to say, and realizing that and then critically thinking there's something missing here, like there's more. There's more to it than what they're saying. To me it's putting now the time to research it and get the extra fields and details and you will know you're done with your quarterly plan when you go, when you're when you can just see a list of things you need to check off.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So that's the first thing to improve your board engagement and your decision-making. It makes you really focus on just getting through that list, the second thing being just focus on the Fab Five KPIs and implement that. There are, of course, other KPIs, like productivity. That's not in the realm of the monthly board meeting to work on and that's not the point of the monthly board meeting. The monthly board meeting looks at the Fab Five KPIs as a means to go. So are we good to talk about the strategy? Is everything okay here? Is there anything to discuss? If there's nothing to discuss, because it's all hitting its benchmarks, great, move on on.

Speaker 2:

I love those board meetings. I love the board meetings where I go into them and the firm shows me their fab five kpis and even if they aren't hitting certain benchmarks but we know why they are the way they are we just move on. There's really nothing to talk about. We understand what's going on with the firm. We know what's developing. We just move on. It's fine. Yeah, the whip looks really high. Well, the team is going through this. They're trying to implement zero. It's hitting the capacity. There's nothing to talk about. If we talk about that again in the next board meeting, we don't really gain anything. We're just repeating ourselves. Okay. So the best board meetings I've been in is we'll look at the Fab Five and we spend about five, maybe 10 minutes out of an hour on it and then we get straight into the strategy. We get straight into okay, so let's talk about how we can increase our outreach. What micro projects or initiatives can we do that build towards this major initiative?

Speaker 2:

I love those board meetings. Those are the ones where I feel like I'm really. This is really a board meeting. Now I also understand that before you can even get there, you probably do have a lot of burning fires. So you might just focus on things that you feel are tactical or issues in the Fab Five over and over again for the next six months in every board meeting. Fine, but just know that that's temporary, that that's not an ideal board meeting. That's just the board meeting, where the board is trying to put out fires. Sooner or later you're going to get past it or sooner or later you can comprehend what the reasons are and you move on and you just go after your strategy, please, because you achieving your strategy will fix those KPIs. We put too much pressure on our own team at a tactical level when in fact it's really on us.

Speaker 2:

In my time so far, I've seen multiple board meetings, multiple firms where their senior client managers or partners have joined them in our monthly board meetings and they resigned in the board meetings. And why did they resign and did we see it coming? Well, we did, because once you start hearing your senior leaders say these words, I don't really feel like the leaders of the firm, the owners of the firm, are really focusing on how to grow the company. I feel like they keep trying to hop into my space and tell me how to do my job better, when I could be doing my job better if they focused on strategy that actually expanded the firm, worked on new services, find markets to go after, go and learn from other people. Every time I've seen very good senior leaders leave a firm, it's always been because of that reason.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and it's sad because once people, once a team member or a leader starts thinking this, it's like when you're growing up and you realize that your parents aren't gods. It's like you're growing up and you realize, oh, they're just people as well. They make the same mistakes I do. They don't know the answers to everything.

Speaker 2:

The moment your senior leaders begin to doubt your vision and your leadership, they're thinking two things. One I'm going to start applying to other places to work because I feel like I've definitely outgrown it. My leader I expected them to be someone who was always 20 steps in front of me and I've clearly caught up with them. This place it's too small for me now. They might not say it to you verbally or directly, but it will come out in other ways. It will come out in ways where they're starting to increasingly ask for higher salaries out of nowhere, okay. Or the second reason is maybe I should just start my own company Like, like, if. If they can do it, I can do it Like if. If this is how they run the company, I can run a company Like. All they do is just stress over this, when I know we should be working on the vision. So I'm not going to be in a place where there's no vision. I'm not going to be in a place where I'm entrusting my skill and labor and time and life to a person who has no vision. Okay.

Speaker 2:

So your strategy is more important than just growth. It's also a very important aspect to holding a strategic leadership team, a senior leadership and management team together. Okay, this is how leaders are formed into groups. This is how leaders are able to form cartels, like you know, groups of people. How do you get very strong-willed people who are clearly talented, they're clearly ambitious? How do you even get control of these people? They need to see that you have a big vision, that you're able to put it all together, and you're the reason that the strategy is making sense, that you're spending time with advisors to bring in intel to them that helps them do better and see that there is a future with you.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so that's. You know I was going to just summarize in three points. But, yeah, so, quarterly think, quarterly goals, your Fab Five KPIs, and just, yeah't, don't get caught up in the benchmarks and just just start working through your strategy. Okay, uh, okay. So I want to just share some important resources that will help you, uh, get a bit more detail on this, and maybe you might want to even take these and have them become your firm's sops, okay, so, uh, you have the meeting rhythms. Okay, so, get this down pat there. There is a resource um, selena can link it uh, into the chat. There's the meeting rhythm formula and then there's, uh, module 10 on the kpis for your monthly dashboards.

Speaker 2:

I think, list the resources that are. Let me see if I can get a few more for us. Yeah, so you want to start there. Module 10 is really good. In fact, I'll just watch all of module 10. Yeah, module 10 To 10.2 is good.

Speaker 2:

The firm KPI template summary, 9.1, which is, yeah, the four meetings every firm needs to do. Then you have the SLP on how to plan for a meeting. You have the weekly client managers meeting template and you also have. Uh, I would also go visit module six for 6.4, which is the no bypass policy. Actually, I'll just um, and then module 16 is good as well the three most important keys to leadership. So, balancing your leadership, board effectiveness, uh, people, results, self-awareness, strategic versus operational leadership, distinction.

Speaker 2:

So, if you want to get you know Ed's um, you know Ed's version of this and Jamie's version of this. Uh, really, go and visit those resources. I'll just go and link. Well, I can't link it, but then, um, let me see if I can just throw into the chat. Okay, so it's a lot of different documents there. Putting some into the chat, okay, so it's a lot of different documents there. I suggest you download, you go and visit them and then download them, yeah, and sort of use that to create your own monthly board meetings. So, does anyone have any questions on the monthly board meetings or any meetings that they're doing currently? Put your hand up if you're doing the daily huddle in your firm. Yep, doug, peter, awesome, do you want to tell me about them? I haven't heard from you in a while. Peter, tell me how your daily huddles are going and it will go to you. Doug, sorry, I didn't get your partner's name. Go ahead, Peter.

Speaker 3:

Tell us how your daily huddles are going. Thomas, daily huddles are going well. Look, the discipline with daily huddle I changed it from at this stage. I changed it from, rather than first thing in the morning, it's actually in the afternoon when the sort of the pressure's off during the day. But the daily huddle discipline it's a bit of a hybrid meeting. It's sort of gone from the daily huddle to then sort of dealing with um sort of client issues and things and it stretches out a bit. But that's it's. That's okay. Once the tax season's over and everything else is um settled down, then we'll we'll put in place, you know um a quick 10 minute daily huddle. But at this stage it's just a's just a daily routine of catching up and keeping on track.

Speaker 2:

That's good, that's good. I have never seen one firm, peter, that does the daily huddle the exact same way. Some firms. Their version of the three questions are what did you finish yesterday, what do you plan to do today and what are your roadblocks? Because some have said that asking what you're going to do today and what you're going to finish today sounds similar. So you know, some feel a bit more free form. Some feel like you know you're bringing up issues. I think that's fine. Anything you know, it's a moment to get in sync at the start of the day.

Speaker 3:

So that's totally true, and we do. We bring up I think you know we use FYI, so FYI for us it's the workflow tool. So the thing we just we bring that up and that's the first thing we look at. And we look at, you know, the job statuses and the task statuses and identify, you know, what's being completed, what's not completed, what's been completed, what's not completed, what's the blockages, et cetera, and have some help.

Speaker 2:

Good, that's good. Thank you, peter.

Speaker 5:

And Accounting Ninjas I'm sorry. I'll get your name next. Hello, my name's Kerry.

Speaker 2:

Oh hey, Kerry, Okay, yeah, so how about your?

Speaker 6:

daily huddles and how they're going. Um, yeah, good, I mean, we've got he's new to us, so a lot of the time is getting to know them. Um, but then with my meetings with him, I'm saying, right, I want you to do this, need you to do that, etc. And, um, go and watch this video that I've recorded of a job process, things like that. And yesterday we've just started using fyi um with the staff, so it was focused on that, um. And then, well, you have your own meetings with him as well, and sometimes we're together but just working out what to do and and, yeah, and how to do it really.

Speaker 2:

Awesome, yeah, you know my first daily huddles. You know they probably went for like an hour. You know, like I had so much to say from Ed, like oh, and then you know yesterday's board meeting and also said this from Ed, like oh, and then you know yesterday's board meeting, ed also said this. And I'm like Thomas, are we going to do this every, every day? And you know, eventually, to keep myself disciplined, I had to like set a timer. I said, okay, I'm going to share something for five minutes and when it rings, I promise I'll stop talking and then you can go and do your daily huddle. But the key thing is, like you're doing it daily. It sets that, you know. It sets that rhythm and routine for the team. How about board meetings? Have you implemented board meetings?

Speaker 6:

Have you or thinking about doing it? Not yet, but this is why we're here. So it's something that we are going to start doing and obviously you know from today start with that 90-day plan what we, what we need to achieve to get to where we want to be excellent, selena.

Speaker 2:

We have like a 90-day plan template, right? Could we get one sent out to everyone in this room at the end? Thanks, yeah, so you know, we have a template that you can use dog, uh and booth. And do you have a? Have you had access to the freedom map um document we have as well um, I've seen a lot of documents.

Speaker 6:

I'm not sure yeah.

Speaker 2:

I forget sometimes too. Could we Selena, could we also? Yeah, go ahead, raul.

Speaker 3:

The freedom map. It's part of the 90 days plan spreadsheet.

Speaker 2:

So, oh, it's, it's, it's a single document, great, great. So if you need help, you know being able to figure out what exactly is my strategy. This freedom map, basically, will show you some a roadmap, depending on the stage your firm is in whether it's in it's establishing, it's growing or it's matured and what strategy you should actually try work towards implementing. So you can take a look at that and cross out the ones you're sure you've done and then you know, set a target a little bit ahead in order to achieve it. And yeah, and any questions about doing the monthly board meetings from you know the things shared today, doug and Kerry.

Speaker 1:

Not at this stage, no, no I think we can start doing them that's it, that's it, that's the.

Speaker 2:

That's how you know when you have a good strategy, right, just, I guess I'll just start doing it then. Um, that's perfect. And uh, colette, how yourself, are you doing daily huddles, weekly tacticals or monthly board meetings?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so it's really important to meet together. But I have done daily huddles in the past but I do feel it's a bit of an overkill. That's just me personally. Once I used to do them. I think it can cut into your day a little bit too much.

Speaker 4:

So basically, what I do now is I divide the team by administration and accountants, so there's two different meetings and they don't need to waste time by sitting in each other's meetings. So basically, just set those at the start of the week, try to keep about a half an hour limit because, again, you don't want to cut into too much productive time. Before those meetings we'd always prepare, so you'd always have an agenda and a structure ready to go and also involve the team to communicate as well. But then once a month I hold a leadership meeting. So the leadership meeting involves the three main people and then also a group meeting. So, with everybody, um, and I also encourage um, yeah, everyone to speak up in that, but always go in with an agenda and um, something that I always do as well, as I carry forward the agenda from last meeting. So if any items need to be carried forward, um, yeah, but yeah, the daily huddle was good, but yeah, that's just my viewpoint on it yeah, I mean ideally they should only be a 10-15 minute thing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, but it but yeah. You know, in reality it is so easy for it to like evolve you know, into something else.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, um yeah, it's well.

Speaker 2:

Um, that's really good, colette. I really like how you would carry the previous board meetings or monthly meetings agenda to the next. That's also key for having an effective monthly board meeting. That's where we can track what progress are we making against this larger goal, so really good. Yeah, thank you, can track. You know how you know what progress are we making against this larger goal, so, uh, really good, yeah, thank you okay.

Speaker 2:

So just to go for a few more things. Uh, if you enjoyed today's session, if you're thinking of implementing monthly board meetings, or you'd like an experienced person to come in, uh, from wise to be part of your board meetings and then help implement the WISE way, feel free to reach out to Jamie. He can do a strategy call with you. You can meet up with him. Just tell him about how your firm is currently going and he'll give you advice on what strategy you should set for your monthly board meetings to achieve next. Okay, and we have Danny here. Danny, you want to share about wise talent?

Speaker 5:

Yeah, absolutely Sorry, I was struggling to take myself off mute. Yeah, so with wise talent, I mean, I think most of you know what we do, but call it. I'm not sure if we've spoken before, so you know, just for your benefit. Basically we do everything from start to finish for our clients. So we'll, you know, create the job description right through to shortlisting candidates, interviewing them, reference checks, testing, but basically we follow a lot of procedures and a lot of steps. So I think all up there's about 44 or possibly 45 steps now in our hiring process. And we do that because we do want to make sure that we are finding our clients the right person who's going to stay with their firm, not just leave after six or 12 months. Yeah, so we are very much about systems and processes to sort of take the emotion out of the hiring process.

Speaker 2:

That's it yeah, I can really vouch for danny, danny, um the last. The last thing we did to um you you helped me with was um hiring five uh, graduate accountants. You gave me like 80 resumes to look through and I used to try source them myself and I would read through them, but the quality, I think, of the graduates you were able to like put together was awesome, you know. So thank you for that. Okay, so our next session on the 3rd of June is is design your life, planning for your ideal lifestyle and income. So if I had to think, if what I discussed today was about strategy, there is one level above that and that's your grand strategy. That's your life mission, your life goal and, to be fair, that probably everything. So be sure to go into this session.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes you might ask yourself you're five board meetings in trying to cross lists of, you know, trying to cross potential clients off a list that you're trying to acquire, increase your market share, and then you ask yourself one day what is this all about? Why am I doing this? What's all of this for? So it's really important that you do this so that you don't lose sight of the reason why we're so doggedly going after trying to implement this strategy, and it's extremely important. It's extremely important because times will get tough. You'll feel like the strategy is not working or failing, and this is the one thing that gives you, you know, that extra drive to keep going. And it's also something you should find out from your team too. Okay, because there's their goals need to align with the firm's goals too. Otherwise, again, they'll try to find some other way to achieve it.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Wise Way. If today's episode sparked an idea or helped you see things differently, please don't forget to leave us a review. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast on your favorite platform yet, please go ahead and do that as well. Let's continue the conversation here through YouTube or any other social platforms that you can find us on. And just remember, if you're not a subscriber, our weekly Friday tip newsletter. You can get that to your inbox every week. Going forward, whether you're starting out or scaling up, you don't have to do it alone. Let's build a business that works for you the wise way. We'll see you in the next episode.