Episode 191: The Art of Letting the Right Work Find the Right Hands

You're doing everyone else's job but your own. Client requests pile up, tasks that should belong to your team keep landing on your desk, and no matter how hard you work, the list never gets shorter.

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, we break down a powerful delegation framework that helps firm owners finally get the right work to the right hands:

✅ Why 80% of what you do daily probably isn't your job as CEO 

✅ The "task bucket" exercise that reveals where your firm's work really belongs 

✅ The difference between delegating and deleting — and why both matter ✅ How to stop micromanaging and start setting outcomes that empower your team 

✅ Why simplicity is the most underrated efficiency gain in your firm

If you're ready to stop being the bottleneck in your own business and start building a firm that runs without you, this one's for you.

________________  

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

 1. Download our famous Wize Freedom 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 

3. Work with Jamie and our mentors for 8 weeks - Build a custom business plan for your firm - Apply here

Transcript

Setting The Stage For Freedom

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to The Wise Way, the show for accounting and bookkeeping firm owners who want more time, profit, and freedom in a business that can run without them. I'm Brendan 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.

The Four-Quadrant Lens By Role

SPEAKER_01 0:41

But uh overwhelmed by client requests is a different thing. And as an owner, that's not really something you want to be overwhelmed by. And it's really all about a delegation framework, all about how we can uh create a system out of um delegating to client managers and managing our triage. Uh good to have you here, Edit.

SPEAKER_03 1:09

And good morning, David. Good to have you here.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

All right, so today's topic will be all on triage frameworks and um and bringing order to client requests. I think I'm just gonna go straight into the wise hub to illustrate this, and everyone will be able to find it here. Um I want you to take a moment to take a look at activities and this wise delegation chart. Okay, uh or this four quadrants, and I want to I want to spend just a moment going on this again, even though I know we've all seen this like a hundred times, but I'm all we're we're always kind of picking up new ways to interpret this, okay. So we have this quadrant here defined by two factors important and not important, and urgent and not urgent. And I want you to think about it this way when you look at important and not important, think about it as it being from your perspective in your role. So you could be a CEO, you could be a client manager, uh, you could be a uh practice manager. Okay, it's it's important and not important. That uh horizontal line refers to from your perspective in your role. I'll tell you what I mean. If you're a CEO, then what's important to you would be cash flow management, hiring the right people in the firm. Okay, what's not important to you is reconciling the PL for clients, um, doing BASEs, um managing your document storage. Okay, that's not important. It doesn't mean that it's not important to the firm, it's just not important to you as a CEO. Okay, it's not the most important. Okay, so it's a scale here, it's not the most important thing to you. When we look at urgent and not urgent, this is from the firm's perspective. Okay, so what is actually what it actually needs to urgently get done by the firm and what doesn't need to urgently get done by the firm. Okay, so that this is this is a little bit different. Um, I'm trying to describe it in a way where I'm not just going to be talking about quad one versus quad two. I want us to understand this four quadrants completely because it's going to be key to today. So if you're a CEO, then your quad one, urgent, important, are going to be things like um cash flow issues, making sure that um you're developing relationships with your referral partners. Okay, that these are these are all things that are actually important and urgent to a CEO. What's not important but urgent to you is making sure that the tax returns are done. Like it's urgent, it's actually important to the firm, but it's just not important to you in your role. Right? When we look at important and not urgent, these are things where you can think about it in terms of this. Something that is not urgent, if no one does it, nothing really happens. Like there are really no consequences. Okay, like things could get worse over time or not improve, but nothing really happens. So when a CEO works on an important and not urgent thing, it's exactly as it's listed here: training the team, delegating, um, creating processes to be able to delegate, reviewing SOPs. But think about it from a senior accountant's point of view as well. What's important and not urgent to them? Updating their knowledge, uh, being aware of um uh recent tax changes, uh knowing their way around uh the working papers and learning more about the apps that they use. Okay, that's not important. I mean, that's important but not urgent to them. What's important and urgent to them is that they meet their productivity and their billables. Okay, so start to like look at this quadrant from the lens of different roles. And what's not urgent and not important now. This list here, some emails, social media, time wasting, that's pretty obvious. But there are some things that are actually on this list that aren't very obvious. For example, spending time researching the latest apps to use. It seems like an important and not urgent thing to do, right? Like you're obviously doing research on things that are going to improve your firm. It's actually not important and not urgent. And it purely, and particularly in that reason, purely from the point of view of you're not really trying to solve any problems. You're just exploring different apps. Okay, you're not actually trying to, you're not starting from the point of view of trying to solve a problem. Um, what I see a lot from six years of this and firm owners having done their activities and delegation, I've seen lists that extend in the hundreds uh inside the activities and delegation in the wise hub here. Is that a lot of what the owner thinks is important and urgent, because oh, it takes up my time, it takes up my day, actually belongs in quad three. So when you go through that activities and delegation exercise and you mark a quad one, but then the action to take is that you should be delegating it. What you're actually saying is it's a quad three thing. Right? It's it's urgent, it's important to the firm, it's just not important to you.

Most Owner Work Belongs In Quad Three

SPEAKER_01 7:48

I think the if I could like communicate if I could share like a observational benchmark of what I've seen, the average firm owner who does the activities in delegation where there would be about a hundred items in there, only 11 to 15 percent of those things are genuinely quad one to them. And about less than 5% is in quad two, and the remainder, the majority is actually sitting in quad three and four. But believe it or not, when you're short of time, it's not that you've got so many burning fires that you have to put out. It's actually that 80% of your time is actually sitting in quad three and four. Um, you can all try this yourself. Go and do this exercise. And what I did uh recently in my board meetings is I would actually just copy this entire list like this. Okay. And I'll just paste it into GPT along with the people inside the org chart of that firm and uh the org chart and roles and responsibilities from the wise vault. And I go, here's my list. Go divvy it out to who's actually supposed to do it. It will actually surprise you. Okay, it understands quad one, two, three, four quite well. Implicitly, it's it understands what a CEO is supposed to do. What you should also do is train your team to do this list. Okay, so every fortnight now, I have a manager's training session just purely dedicated to working with my managers to do this list. Okay, I spend time with them where I would, I don't demand many things from my managers. Like I don't want to interfere with them, but if I if I had to, I'm demanding one thing. If I had to demand one thing, it'd be purely this. Okay, and I want to actually see them complete this list, and I want them to be conscious of what they actually do because it's not a timesheet, it's an audit of the task and responsibilities that they do. Because if they can do that, then they would train their team to do that. And what you would have is if everyone inside your company, including yourself, your managers, your accountants, your admins did this list. And suppose you put it all back into one single bucket. Okay, you put everyone's task into one single bucket and not have it assigned to any one person, and then you gave uh you gave you you everyone was uh assigned a particular role, and then you re-dived it out. You're going to be surprised at just how many responsibilities and tasks actually should be shuffling around your firm. One of the things that I see take the longest to implement is actually delegating tasks that we have as an owner. Not because we don't know how to delegate, but because of the pushback we receive when we do delegate it or when the managers delegate it. Team members would say, I'm too busy, you know, you're just putting more things on my plate. Obviously, the solution is that they need to delegate too. Okay. But then they would go in, they would run into the same problem. They would say, but if I try delegate it, my team members are also going to say that you're just putting more tasks on my plate. I don't have enough time to do it. And I realized that it is like a spaghetti of processes and code and ownership, um, all tangled up in the firm. It's really, really hard to undo one by one. Okay, so you try to delegate something one by one, and you're finding that it's really slow. People aren't eagerly taking it on, your managers don't have any space, no one seems to have any space. It's a sign that you should get everyone in your firm to do this list, throw all the tasks into one bucket and redistribute it out. Okay, it's the it's just it's really the simplest way. Just get everyone to put into one list, throw in the GPT, and go re-div it out. I don't know if I can actually show you this. Uh let me just make sure his name's not there. But um, I'll give you an example, okay?

SPEAKER_03 12:45

Um, let me see if I can let me just uh find and remove his name. Okay. I just replaced it with a full stop.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Okay, so let's take a look at this guy. Okay, he did exactly that. So he has a senior production manager in his team who just doesn't have any time to review any of the work. He has Karen and Ina, production accountant, and Hade, a office manager. This guy he works he works like seven days a week. He gets into the office apparently at 4 a.m. Okay, it's it's just so much. But then when I look at his capacity planner, he's got spare capacity. And when I look at the wages that he's paying his employees, they're very good. They're all above market rate. So things that a CEO should only be doing. Strategic client risk management, yeah, sure. Like if you're getting sued or someone's threatening to sue you, there's really no one else that can handle that problem. Um, team crisis, hiring, cash flow issues, compliance issues, hiring decisions, so forth. So, what should the CEO should actually be spending their time on? Building the leadership team, training the production manager, creating accountability systems, focusing on interpreting the Fab Five, running the weekly tacticals, planning, developing key relationships. Okay, so this person sits as a senior client manager. So that's just what the CEO of that company needs in that moment. Okay, and so forth. Um, so we did this analysis here, and I'll run down to this summary. But I also you'll find when you do these activities in delegation, it's hard to be able to determine is it quad one, two, three, or four, should I delete it? Should I delegate it? Here's the thing: if you never delete tasks in your firm, like if you do these activities in delegation and you don't delete a single thing, you're actually wasting a lot of your time, more than you think. Like, no one can honestly look at ourselves and go, there's nothing we could, um, there's nothing that we I can honestly delete. I have to do everything that I'm doing now. The truth is, there is a good proportion of what you should delete. Uh, but definitely doing your car loan service is a delete. Okay, but um let's say let's take a look at this analysis here. So, where was this person spending their time? A third of it in production, and and this one is a silent killer, a quarter of it in admin. That's about average for what I see a CEO do, um, an owner of a firm do about a quarter or more. Okay, and what actually is out of this list of a CEO? In this case, it was eight percent. So I quoted like 10 to 15. That's generally what I see. Go to this breakdown here. Okay, so quad one, or actually, of the things that he's doing, only one of those tasks that he listed down was a genuine quad one thing for a CEO.

SPEAKER_03 16:35

10% of it was a quad two, half of it was a quad three, and a third of it was a quad four. And this is pretty typical.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Pretty typical. We should kind of all look at the things that we do today, and if you have done your capacity planner and you have spare capacity, and you are not the senior client manager, uh, in addition to being the owner of the firm, then I mean, this person is actually also a senior client manager of the firm. You probably have half of your time on things

Firmwide Task Audit And Reassignment

SPEAKER_01 17:16

that you should really be delegating, but you can't, because staff push back, they're too busy. And a third of it you should delete. If you had to treat everything that you had as something that you should delegate, then your firm never really frees up space, does it? And if you don't teach your team and set the example that I'm going to be ruthlessly deleting things that I do, then they never learn to delete the things that they do. It's just inefficient. And so this exercise here shows that 35 of these tasks should go to the senior production manager, 28 should go to Haiti, 15 to Terry, and 12 to also to Haiti. But can you imagine going to your senior production manager today, even with spare capacity, and telling them that I'm going to give you 35 more responsibilities? They're going to scream. Okay, they're going to scream. So get your team to do this too, get everyone to do it too, throw it all into one bucket and then re-divvy it out.

unknown 18:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

So this is the four quadrants, right? Think on it carefully. Just how many things you take ownership of and you do really fall below this line. Okay, and if you look at the firm overall, if you put everyone's tasks together, try find a third of those tasks that should just be deleted. Um, I'm not a mega fan of this guy, but Elon Musk would say the best process is no process. The best part is no part. Because he was talking about his um latest Raptor engine for SpaceX versus the old models, where the old ones looked like there were wires all tangled up everywhere, and the new ones look like a solid piece of metal. It looked too simple, it almost looked just not even the same thing. The less moving parts they are, the better. Find things to delete, keep things minimal. The more processes you have, the more SOPs you have to write to back them, the more SOPs exist for you to have to keep track of and maintain and update, the more things you're going to have to train people in order to onboard them or get them up to date. So find ways to reduce. Right? Okay. So let me go over to this diagram here now. This is the I guess you can call it the logic flow of how delegation should actually be done. So you've done your task and activity audit. In fact, suppose you've done it for the entire company and you're leading a complete audit on your entire firm. You decide it quad one or two. Okay, you can also interpret this question as should we as a firm be doing this or should we as a firm delete this? Okay, ask yourself, should we as a firm even be doing it at all? Okay, can we get away with not doing it? If we don't do it, what happens? Does anything happen? Like if we stop doing research on the latest technologies, does anything change in the firm meaningfully, even for the long term? Probably not. Okay, if we spend all our time writing SLPs on how to like set up a payroll in zero where you click this button and that button, what happens? Like that do you really lose anything when the zero documentation already exists there? When it's kind of assumed knowledge? Like how how much like you know, how how much can you actually get away with not doing? Because if you don't do it, you just remove all this, all this processes and infrastructure and training you have to keep up. Okay, and then finally decide is this a communication or a production thing? And I really love this, how Ed and Jamie and Wise broke this down because we look at all the things that a firm does, and it feels like we could classify them into a million different places. And this falls into the topic of today a framework for triage. A framework for triage really is a framework for delegation. So here we have either you're going to delegate. It to client managers, or you're going to delegate it to the production team. And if

Pushback, Capacity, And The One-Bucket Reset

SPEAKER_01 22:06

you can't delegate it to a client manager or a production team, then it's not going to be clear if it's going to provide any value to the firm. Then you ask yourself, can I get away with not doing it at all? Well, we cannot chase up our debtors and make sure that they pay. So it has to be done. But it's not really it's actually probably that falls on the communication thing. Um, about updating your CRM, reviewing your CRM every single week and month, and trying to keep that thing up to date. I'm writing this script now called uh a group unifier. We got CRM data everywhere, everywhere. Accounting firms have we have we can never keep this thing in sync. So it's actually a very complicated problem to solve. And can and this is a this is computers trying to solve the problem, inferring it, trying to join and merge things together. If you get a human being to actually do this process, it just wastes so much time. So maybe maybe do it once a quarter, okay, if you really must. Or just fix up why there's even a data issue in the first place. So when we look at communication and production traffic here, client managers or production managers, we can break it down into high-level and low-level traffic. Okay, so this is a quadrant within a quadrant. If you have high-level traffic managing the expectations and relationships of your clients that are A and B, then this is a senior client manager thing. And it's kind of nuanced, and you actually want to go and test your team on this, but ask them is chasing up the clients for missing information is that communication traffic or production traffic? 90% of the time they're going to say 99% of the time they're going to say communication traffic. Actually, it's production traffic because production traffic is all about doing things that get the job done. Okay, so chasing up information is just a production thing. Um answering emails from clients that are asking for their TFN or their um copies of their financial statements would be at the bottom rung of low-level traffic. And to be honest, assistant client managers are so expensive nowadays. They're like, I think they're in at least in Sydney, you'd have to at least you'd have you'd have to at least um offer 110 to 115 grand for an for a mid-level assistant client manager. And senior client managers are coming in at about 140 to 150,000 a year now. Right? You couldn't like there's no type of request for a TFN or a financial statement that could even fit into this list here. So, how can you solve that? You can make it an admins division six problem. You can have the admin triaging this information. But what do you end up with? You just end up with a person who now has a hundred emails entering their inbox every single day, and then they have no time for anything else. I'll tell you a really funny story. Um, so we use carbon. I don't know if anyone here is aware of carbon, but they have a triage feature in there. And we used it for a number of years and really well. I haven't showed other firms how to use it, but the triage function in there, it kind of says that you should start your mornings sorting out all your emails, adding it to jobs, putting it in the right place, uh tagging it and assigning it to the right people. And I would see on my team's calendars, they started to block out like an hour every morning after the daily huddle just to do that. Um, especially the senior client, especially the client managers and the admins. I moved to a different system called Linear. Uh it was, it's not really an accounting app, but it's just a it's just your bog standard um project management app, but it doesn't have a triage system. So what did we have to do? We just went back to Outlook. And we just went back to SharePoint. And if there was really an important email, what do we do then? We can't triage it to anything. Forward it to your project management tool and forward it to your SharePoint. And I didn't realize this, but that one hour every single morning that sat there, it disappeared. And we only just stored the emails that we felt the need to. And if we actually had to search things out, it was right there in the Outlook. I've got I've got data in Outlook for the last 30 years, it's not going anywhere. Like it's all there, it's not going anywhere. Like that task of triaging emails every single morning and making it so important was actually bothering on a quad four thing that once deleted, nothing really meaningfully changed. The what seemed like a lot of client requests actually dropped because we weren't forced to deal with everything. And what we actually ended up doing was just focusing on the things that were genuinely important and just training the team that if the client's sending information in, then save it. There's information inside the email that's important, save it. Um, if the client's asking for something in the email, we're supposed to do something about it, forward it to the project management tool. Like, but when you go to triage in carbon, uh I know everyone talks about inbox zero, but my triage was sitting at like 6,000 emails consistently. I'm not gonna sit there and click the the tick button for 6,000 emails. Screw it. Like, I'm not I'm not gonna do that. Okay, it's gonna take me forever to do that. And you can't even clear it all in one go anymore. And then my team was doing that. And when the office gets CC'd an email, when multiple team members get CC'd from a client, they all receive the same thing. They all have to end up dealing with it, or they'll assign it to one person, and now it becomes their problem instead of just um for you could just really just go and forward it. So reduce reduce the amount of incoming noise that is entering the firm in the first place, and you're already going to feel like client requests have reduced. Like I could give everyone here a framework for like dealing with all of them. But I think the most important rule is if you can remove a process, if you can reduce the amount of noise that the team has to take a look at, it might be a good start. Okay? From your outlook, I don't know if it I think it applies for Gmail or Microsoft. You can start blocking, you can get your admin people or your IT team to start blocking domains from the server level. So just the amount of noise that your team redu uh receives reduces, or create a shared uh mailbox in Outlook called clients at whatever your firm's name is. Okay, and then just forward emails there. So we want to reserve our communication capacity, of which is honestly, uh it's that it's it's the thing inside a deeper narrow team that it has lease of. Think about it. The senior accountants are all set to 85% productivity, the assistant client manager is set to 70% productivity, yet they're still managing their C and D clients. But it's not always the C and D clients, right? Like they're also supporting the senior client manager, and then the senior client manager is set to 50% productivity. And so you've got this 35-40% productivity left to actually deal with clients. When we all kind of know that the more time you spend with the client, the more time you can get your senior client managers, the people that you pay 150 grand to a year, to spend time with the clients, they're actually going to produce you money. You can all work it out in the capacity planner. Go and put their $300 and $300 or $350 charge out rate into the capacity planner at $150,000 salary and even make their cap even make their productivity 85%. You won't break, you'll barely or won't break a three times multiple in their salary. Whereas when you get your senior accountants to do it and they're in the Philippines, you're going to approach six times, seven times. Right? There's just no point expecting client managers or even senior manager-level people to be fully focused on production anymore. They should be focused on generating value for the clients and engineering the processes of the firm and ensuring the quality. That's it, really

Delete Before You Delegate

SPEAKER_01 31:44

high-level things. If some of that happens to be billable, productive things as part of a job, then so be it. Okay. Um, take a look at this last decision that you have to make. There are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. I think one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. There are 10 different points here that you have to consider when you want to delegate something to someone effectively. If you have a thousand processes in your firm, I doubt you would be able to actually cover off all of these every single time. You'd rather have fewer processes in your firm, have team members take on roles and then teach them the scope and boundary in which they have um authority over, and then communicate to them the outcomes and context that they have to actually achieve. Okay, and give them the individual agency to go after it. Otherwise, you're going to be explaining something to someone forever. I asked Ed this question when we first he first started mentoring me. I said, okay, I know writing SLPs are important, but to what detail? And so he said, you can assume a certain level of assumed knowledge when you hire a person, because that's the whole reason you hire a person. SLPs should just communicate the extra. SLPs should never try and communicate what that person ought to already know when you hired them. Because if you hired someone and you and you have to like spell out their job to them, I don't really think they're going to be the right person for the job. If you hire a senior tax accountant and you have to spell out to them where to go and research for information on the ATO, I don't think they're a senior tax accountant. And this goes the other way as well. I've seen I've seen a lot of firm owners actually miss good employees because they don't strictly follow SOPs that were poorly written in the first place. Okay? Like around me, I'm seeing senior tax accountants who are taking up head of tax positions, working in incredible roles in commercial. They're doing great things. And it's so funny, those very same people applied to become production managers or client managers in public tax accounting practices, yet they make these great roles in commercial companies. Why is that? Well, one, that's probably why they're a billion-dollar company. But two, I find that the feedback that I get from them is this. A public tax accountant person doing the hiring tends to not be great at actually identifying what talent looks like. Okay? You will tend to ask questions like, so can you recite this part of the act? Or what is the depreciation on a uh on a when a business has above $10 million in revenue? Like, why would that even be important to remember when you can go just search it up on the website? It'd be it'd actually be a lot more important to know if that was their solution, that they have the ability to go and actually do research. Large companies always take the mindset of I just need a person who has the ability to learn, uh, a great attitude, a good fit, and we'll teach them, we'll get them to adapt because every business is different at the end of the day. Um public tax accounting practices don't have it's it's weird to say this, okay? Public tax accounting practices don't actually have a shortage of people or shortage of accountants where we actually tend to just miss talent and then they just never come back to our industry. It's just really, really normal. Um so when you hire a person, um it there is a level of assumed knowledge there, and then when you go to actually write the processes, then answer the question of what division, what traffic it is, the complexity of it, the time. Even better yet, communicate purely the outcome and goals you want that person to achieve and the scope they have to achieve it, and ask them to answer these questions for you. Okay? And you might not fully agree. You might give

Communication Vs Production Traffic

SPEAKER_01 36:33

it a slight adjustment. It's like, yeah, I don't know, I kind of do something a bit different. If it was me doing it, I think I'd approach it that way. You know what? Better they do it 80% well than you do it 100% well. Right? What's the point of interfering? The funniest thing I hear would be when uh Ed or Jamie talks about the fact that they have to go ask permission from the senior leaders of their firm to actually get things done. Um uh, you know, they they would they can't just go, girl, go and implement practice ignition. They would have to have a board meeting and convince that person it's a good idea. But at the end of the day, if that managing partner said no, they would respect that. And this should extend all the way through the team. Because if you have if you had to be the one to command and instruct every single team member, or at least your managers and micromanage them, you're going to fail. You're gonna find yourself doing a lot of quad three, quad four things. The three levels of management that I teach my managers is in terms of this. It's like martial arts. If you when you start, they don't train you on any complex things or any advanced things. They just go, here's how you punch with your left hand, here's how you punch with your right hand. Okay, it's just really basic. Just get that right. And here's how you kick. Just kick like this, just keep doing that. Don't learn anything fancy, no fancy combos. Don't try and like throw a punch by spinning around or anything, just do the just do these basic things and do it really well. Okay, and as you get better, then you can start to pick these things up. So any manager and any leader who starts by micromanaging, and it's really hard to notice. Everyone thinks micromanaging is a toxic thing. It's it we think it's obvious to spot. It's actually very, very subtle. Micromanagement is an extremely, extremely subtle thing. It can come out through you have to do the SOPs exactly like this. Okay, and then you haven't even communicated the goals or outcome to them. They could have achieved it in a far better way because they it's their job, they have time to spend thinking about it. You don't. Okay, it's it's telling a person your top 10 priorities for today are exactly this, without even hearing from them. What are your what do you think your priorities are? Oh, you don't know. Well, or are they? How do you know? And then asking them questions about it. Okay, so managers, the poorest managers micromanage, and it's very subtle. You you you won't even realize you're doing it, and your managers won't realize you're doing it. No one taught us how to be managers. The best managers start by macro managing, they communicate outcomes, implement the systems, put the right people in place, ask them what do you need to do your best job, give them those things, and then give them space and then trust them. Allow them to make mistakes, allow them to be able to come to you uh when something goes wrong and not be blamed, and you're there to help them. It's like a parent. Like a kid wants to do what they want to do, can't just baby them all the time. They want to do what they want to do. You can tell them what's right for them in their life, but then they won't listen to you. They won't always listen to you. You it's in those moments when they actually come out of their own way to ask you that they seem to take your advice on the most, right? So macromanage, set outcomes and goals and roles, and then let them go and achieve it and fail. If you master that macromanagement, that is the absolute basics, then you can move on to the next thing, which is then you can start to introduce a bit of micro. Okay. I'll explain how it's different. A great manager would macro first and micro second. It looks like this. Imagine in a imagine in a software company, you had a founder who's also a CEO, uh, who was originally an engineer who started the company, but now it's a large company. And he's he had to turn into a manager and a leader. So he's macromanaging a wide range of teams and divisions. There's marketing and there's sales and there's finance, and he's doing all these things that isn't engineering anymore. Okay. If he did anything else but that, the firm would that company would honestly fail. But the best founders, the best leaders somehow managed to keep that going, yet get into back into the weeds and do the research and development and get involved in the product. That's what made Steve Jobs so great. Okay. He how how is it possible he managed to run such a large company and then he had so many opinions about how the product should be? How it applies to a tax accounting practice is yes, you can manage all seven divisions of the firm. You know where it's headed, you can see it from the Fab Five. But then you might get into the weeds. You might get into the weeds on the marketing, you might get into the weeds on developing a training course, but you never ever lose sight of the macro. If you cannot get into the weeds of something without losing sight of the macro, then you're not ready for it. Just focus on the macro. And to be honest, if all you did was macro, you'd be winning 80% of the time. If you did nothing but macro, you'd be fine. You'd actually already be doing it the wise way. If you decided to go into that micro, you'd be in that top 5% of firms. Okay, there's one in uh Florida. He is growing by $1 million worth of fees every single year. He manages it great at a macro level, and on a micro level, he would hop into the sales team, start building that team out, training people, getting involved in sales. It starts to run without him. He goes, Okay, my attention is needed somewhere else, and he'll dive into something else. He's having a lot of fun doing that, and he's extracting that additional piece of performance because he's able to keep the macro going, yet still do micro things. How it relates all the way back to triage and frameworks is client request is all about getting things on your plate that really shouldn't be that really the firm shouldn't even be doing in the first place. Things that you should either be delegating or um it's just pulling on your attention. Okay, it's not the sort of micro you want to do. So either delegate it or delete that process altogether. Throw one's task into one bucket and then re Divi it out. If you find that you've been trying to get a manager to delegate a task and it's been three months before they've made any progress, it's not because of them. It's because of the firm overall. So they just need the firm just needs a reset. Okay. Um now if anyone has any questions, uh oh sorry, my chat was all the way on the other screen. Uh I don't know. Uh edit. Uh 30 um 30 33% non-chargeable time for me, admin sales marketing practice math. Better than I thought. Uh that's good. That's it's really good. I and did you how did you work that out?

SPEAKER_05 44:31

We've got time tracking going back several years before everything we do.

SPEAKER_01 44:37

Also your own time tracking as well. Seven did you say seven years?

SPEAKER_05 44:46

Yeah, so seven years, yeah. But last three and a half, I can see and you press up the button. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

Wow, that is such a delicious amount of data. Um what I mean is um like all that timesheet data can be analyzed and processed and see, you know, see if there's some like something that something it might say. Uh, but well done. 30 a 30 of time in uh those activities, uh just just happens. Okay, you could no one can avoid doing it. You just have to do it. Uh Beck. Is Beck still here?

SPEAKER_04 45:29

Uh yeah, Beck's here.

SPEAKER_01 45:31

Oh Beck, sorry, you're oh yeah. You you love triage. Why do you love triage? Maybe you look, maybe you know what? I I was thinking, maybe it's my personal opinion, okay?

SPEAKER_04 45:40

Like yeah, I I can't live without it now. Um, yeah, I can't. And maybe I maybe I need

Killing Inbox Triage Rituals

SPEAKER_04 45:48

to rethink that. I'm not sure. But yeah, I love it.

SPEAKER_01 45:53

Do you make it like uh how does it work in your firm? Do you make it a point to like clear it every day or um?

SPEAKER_04 45:59

I'm probably a little obsessed with it. Um and it's just because we're a bookkeeping firm um and we uh so it's it's very dynamic and there's there's a lot of a lot of things flying everywhere all the time. So to for me to forward an email I find harder than just assigning it to a team member. Um and I'm working on on getting less traffic to my email and more to the production team. It's a work in progress.

SPEAKER_01 46:29

Yeah. Excellent. Um, you know, yeah, you know what, I think it's maybe it's just me, but I I I kind of I'm jealous of people who like really attack their triage and like clear through it. I look at it.

SPEAKER_04 46:41

It becomes a bit obsessive though.

SPEAKER_01 46:44

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I know what you mean. Um people get up, yeah. Some people can get obsessed on it. For me, I'm like, it felt felt like a chore, and I'm like, you know what? I stopped answering these things and nothing happened.

SPEAKER_04 46:56

Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, yes, I know. Need to work on that.

SPEAKER_01 47:03

But but also, yeah, that uh I mean that's also a scary thing, right? To love something also makes it hard for it to go away because it it does genuinely feel like good. Like it genuinely feels good to like, yep, I'm on top, I'm literally on top of it.

SPEAKER_04 47:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

Does does the team share the same sentiment?

SPEAKER_04 47:28

Yeah, I think we all rely on it quite a bit. Um, yeah, and I'm just like new to why it's GPS, so I'm I'm starting to see kind of what I need to do. But um, yeah, we do we do all really rely on it. I couldn't live without carbon, I don't think.

SPEAKER_01 47:49

It is honestly a great app. It is yeah, hands down the best out there for sure.

SPEAKER_04 47:54

Um yeah, that's nice to hear. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:58

Uh uh, thanks for that, uh Beck and uh Natalia, yep, you have to go. All good. And Joy, I'm only 50% production. Um well done. What what uh what position do you find yourself um sitting in inside the team? Um generally. Joy Ford, yeah, yep.

SPEAKER_06 48:22

Yeah, um, I think another contributor say 50% is a chargeable time. So probably the other 50% is for amen sales, marketing, trendings, development. So a lot of time is non-chargable. Um, yeah. So I'm the business owner, but that's that's uh probably the classified as the business uh clinical crimes manager in a row in a map. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

Yeah, it's really co it's really common, right? Like business owners going to wear multiple hats. Um, and we kind of just only get to delegate things as we get the chance. Um, it just ends up like uh, but you know, when we do get to delegate it, the team members end up getting uh that delegation in order, like in the same randomness as the amount of hats we wear, right? Like if all you did was say client managing and then you delegated your task, then the only thing your team would receive is client managing. But then you wear multiple hats. And so it's like, damn, like the the the the more context switching, the harder it feels to delegate. But um good to see that you're aware of it. And um uh uh if you you know get a chance to do your activities and delegation, or maybe if you've done it already, uh uh it would be good to be able to um audit that along with your team. Uh Chris, Christopher, uh uh did you want to just go ahead and ask your question um verbally?

SPEAKER_02 49:56

So I think Thomas, um, thanks for sharing. One of the notes I took away was uh trying to look for these new software and tools as a quad for activity. So I think sometimes we get stuck doing these doing these things, this research and this innovation. So I guess the question is after doing this delegation exercise, is it and when would it be a good time to use some of these online or software tools?

SPEAKER_01 50:23

Yeah, it's a really great question. Uh and that's the best place to start, right? If you start, it's like uh I think the saying is like you either get a hammer looking for a nail or like there's a nail, right? And then you go looking for a hammer. Um the best place to start is the simplest possible. Okay, like the simplest, the the the simplest possible, the the worst solutions are the ones where we haven't even tried the easy way yet, and then we go and start doing like a migration somewhere, right? Um cut it. One firm's problem was with their working papers, they wanted it on the cloud. I said, okay, what do you use currently? He's saying we use a library that of working papers where we download Excel sheets. And he's like, Excel sheets are really old, they seem clunky. Like, sure, they they do seem that way. But then this was a service providing these templates and updating it. I said, if you want it on the cloud, why don't you just put the Excel sheet on a Google Drive? And then it's it's technically on the cloud. Because like, how much is he paying that Excel sheet library? It was like $50 a month. And if you move to like a fancy working paper app thing, it was like $400 a month. And then what additional value does it produce for the client? Like, do they care that oh your you know, your working papers are on the cloud? Like they don't even get to see that user interface.

SPEAKER_02 51:50

They don't care.

SPEAKER_01 51:52

They don't care, right? And like how much efficiency do they gain um over it? Okay, and it's uh maybe it might have been a better argument back then, but nowadays, with how much investment even the most basic tools are getting, like Excel from Copilot, kind of seems like a good place to be able to invest, but it's like it's it's kind of good enough. So if if you try the simplest way possible and that doesn't fix the problem, then you increase the complexity. Okay, let's try the next point up. Let's kind of just try something um a bit more involved. Maybe we're going to need a more fuller solution to actually solve this, and then try that. And then finally, if you do end up at the place where you need like a full-fledged solution, then it makes total sense.

unknown 52:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 52:46

I actually before I even arrive.

SPEAKER_02 52:48

Try simple first.

SPEAKER_01 52:50

Try simple, and the idea is delay complexity for as long as possible. Okay, the longer you can delay complexity, the better. Right? Um, the less complexity you have in your firm, the less to maintain, the more time. Uh having less complexity is an efficiency gain in itself, right? Um, a lot of apps uh would say that using the app uh increases uh efficiency. But what they don't realize is it the complexity that it adds actually reduces the efficiency too.

SPEAKER_02 53:23

Because you need to find that app and you need to log in and do all these extra tasks as one step.

SPEAKER_01 53:30

Exactly. And there's like retraining everyone and um and you know, there's a migration of like thousands of records over to somewhere else.

SPEAKER_02 53:39

If good tip, thanks.

SPEAKER_01 53:41

Yeah, no, it's a it's a great one. Um it's a really that's a really, really good, it's a really good question. Something I've been learning to live more and more by. I've uh been having this chief technology officer give me advice through my programming and coding journey as he's like sort of tutoring me. And he's always simple. I'll write out this stupid thousand-line code thing on AI, and he's like, Do you even know what it says? Like, can you even fix that up if it has a problem? Dan says no. Why do something where in um in many lines where you can just do it in few? The goal is to do it in as few lines

Protecting Client Manager Capacity

SPEAKER_01 54:17

as possible. It's so same thing for processes in firms. Get things done in as few uh systems and apps and processes as possible, and you'll find it that everything kind of feels more lightweight, it's a lot more easier to adapt to things, right? Um uh Edit, did you want to share yours? Um, to cap us off.

SPEAKER_05 54:39

Um, want to go ahead and share your I think Christopher has a point because um even if you look at how how far bookkeeping technology has come along, you know, like a few years ago, SAS wasn't default, you know, you didn't have automatic bank feats and things. And I I find sometimes I've said people in the past who say this is how you do it, but if in two or three years that process doesn't change, it's automatically inefficient. So I think Christopher has got a point, you've got to have a balance between the innovation and the production, and I think it's quite a hard balance, but you do need to keep innovating.

SPEAKER_01 55:16

Innovation's good. Innovation for the sake of it is not good because we end up paying for the latest thing. It's like buying the latest Mercedes, it's state of the art when the Toyota Camry works really well. But I think solving problems, continuously solving problems is good. If not all problems require innovation. If if it doesn't, it's good. Like then it's less complex. Sometimes some problems do require innovation. Um, and sometimes just solving problems for the future too, right? So like uh preparing the firm to be able to adopt AI and having everyone get across it, it's it's going to take a while for all of us to get used to it. So using tools that might have it embedded inside where they can start to experience it might be a good thing. But I I met with one firm, the most extreme end of this example, he had 150 apps in his firm. Uh yeah, he's a very extreme version. Um, it it had 150 apps. And looking at it from like a grid on Practice Protect, you know, you question what is the need for all of that? And from what I've seen working with firms, um cost of goods sold is always going to be 40%. A lot of firms are remote nowadays. The firms who somehow get away with the simplest systems, and like I really question it because like I'm trying to like teach them to deeper narrow team and to delegate, but you know, apps aren't always the answer to that. Um, but then they really are so picky. I would have to like really convince them to like take something up if they think it's worth it. Um, but they would run in like uh they would run in like 40 or 45% IBIT, well above the wirest benchmark of 25 to 30 percent. And so we don't realize more apps means you're spending for it, also means you have admins um needing to drive it, meaning that the accountant's productivity also gets eaten up and it pushes back up to us. So innovation is good. Uh yeah, balance with uh if it can if it can provide productivity, the safest approach would be start simple. I mean, if you manage to solve a problem with a simple solution, that's that's a big return on investment, right? Like if all something really needed was oh, we just had to turn on this one feature in the app that we already use. Or maybe there was just one little workaround and that's all we needed to do, and it avoided an entire change, it is actually uh it is actually a huge return. Um, so uh yeah, it definitely is a balance and it's a good point there. Um, Edit. Well, that brings us to the end of today. I hope we've all learned something from today and got something out of it. I think it's a really great topic. I've genuinely been talking about Discord activities with my team and the firms in the last few recent board meetings and in uh in the manager's training. So thank you everyone uh for joining today.

SPEAKER_00 58:37

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 favourite 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 of 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.