Episode 211: Meet the PUB: The Productivity Meeting Your Firm Is Missing

Somewhere in your firm, there's a desk where every problem ends up. Maybe it's yours. Maybe it's your senior manager's. Either way, the work slows down every time a question lands on it.

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Kristy breaks down the PUB Meeting, the Daily Productivity Unblocker. One structured hour a day where blockages get cleared, questions get answered, and your team learns to solve problems instead of passing them up the chain.

You'll learn:

 ✅ What the PUB Meeting is and how it picks up where your daily huddle leaves off
 ✅ How to run it at two levels: one for your senior managers, one for your production team
 ✅ How to turn every blockage into micro-training that lifts your whole team
 ✅ Why recording these sessions gives you a training library for every future hire
 ✅ How to tell whether a struggling team member has a confidence gap or a competency gap
 ✅ The simple checklist that stops your team coming to you without doing the thinking first
 ✅ How to withdraw from the day-to-day without your senior manager inheriting the bottleneck

If your firm feels out of control, there's a meeting missing from your day. The PUB is probably it.

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

Transcript

Welcome And The Promise Of Freedom

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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

Why The Pub Meeting Exists

SPEAKER_01 0:38

So today's topic is the daily productivity unblocker. For the Aussies in the room, you'll know it as the pub meeting. It's not held at the pub. Some firms might choose to hold Fridays at the pub, but it's probably best held in the office, even virtually in the office, to get the most out of it. Now, this is a fairly new meeting style for us, where you know, as as where our firms grow as mentors and founders, and also the firms that those we work with recognize that the daily huddle is fantastic and absolutely should be the very first thing you implement in having that quick three-question meeting with your team of what are they working on, what are they going to finish, where are they stuck. But we don't want our daily huddles to blow out for everyone and have a lot of conversation around where people are stuck. So we've realized there's a need for a pub meeting to be conducted. So this is where we're really focusing on removing the blockages in production, making sure that the bottlenecks are removed. And you know, for those of us in the room who've more recently been the withdrawing firm owner, it can be a lot still. You're still heavily involved in answering questions for the team. But then sometimes we transfer that to our senior managers, to our senior client managers.

Senior Pair Alignment On Workflow

SPEAKER_01 2:04

So this is a great opportunity for the senior client manager and senior production manager to meet every day, have one hour in their calendars blocked, ideally after the daily huddle. You know, sort of 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. is nice. Everyone sort of settled into the morning. And then your senior team get together and discuss any challenges, any queries that maybe your production manager has, any expectations of completion your client manager has, and they can really ensure that the workflow is clearly mapped out and everything is hummy. Then off the back of that meeting, we go to the pub again, but with our production team. So that is led by the senior production manager. And it's almost like an open door where the production team know that for this one hour period every day, there's a spot for them to book in some time with the production manager. It's allowing there to be consistency and calm in the chaos that can be our very busy compliance seasons. So we want it to be still honouring the calendar that you're not just sitting there waiting, twiddling your thumbs, wondering who's going to pop in today. That's not a good use of anyone's time. But if your production team are stuck on a job, they need to have some assistance, or maybe the production manager and client manager have recognised someone's going down a bit, someone needs some help. The production manager might say to the team member, let's have 15 minutes in our pub meeting today to look at this client or this process. And then they can be micro-training the production team in that meeting and making sure that everyone's on the same page of what needs to be done. There's also great value in recording those meetings so that they can become future trainings and it can even be used sometimes as a training. If you're finding a common theme coming up when the production manager is doing the technical review, if things are just going a little bit off track, you know that you've got that time committed to be able to bring the team together and focus on what needs to be elevated

Open Door Support And Micro Training

SPEAKER_01 4:12

in everyone's skills, what process has changed, what adjustments need to be made. And then everyone is able to be on the same page. You have a recording of that training. It can go into your resource center wherever you store your internal trainings. And when you have new team members come on, they're able to watch those recordings themselves as well. If you've got the wrong people in those seats, do you just need to move them on? If it's a competency issue, but if it's a confidence issue and they're getting to know you and they're, you know, still a bit nervous, how can you help them further? Do they have a checklist that they follow before coming to you that things that they have to identify before they meet with you? And you don't meet with them until they've done that checklist. Keep the daily huddle short and sweet, where you've got everyone in the room, and then have the pub meeting with the team members who are stuck on their work and see it from the micro training perspective of okay, bring your checklist so we've identified where you're stuck on the files, and then let's go through it and record it so that they've got it to refer to next time, so that when they're faced with the same problem, they have a resource to look at, and that might just reduce some of the the back and forth and the load on you. It it's still time, but it's it should be more quad two time than quad one. You're not putting out a fire, you're building out the team's skills and helping them do more of the job next time. It's a challenge of growth, but it is it is the goal to build that deep and narrow team that can become interdependent with each other, but we all start being dependent and and that can be challenging. It's kind of want to shake the kids off sometimes, like the toddler wrapped around your leg, needing you for everything. You want them to just be set free, be a bit more independent, then they can become a bit of a grumpy teenager. It's like, oh, okay. And then they blossom into interdependent and everyone works together in in synergy, but it's a journey, particularly when you have junior team members or less experienced team members come in. I think when when we're used to having more experienced team, I know for us, we still primarily hire senior bookkeepers, we don't hire intermediates, we don't have the capacity, and I've raised my kids, I don't have the patience for less experience necessarily either. So we go for senior and it it's really great, but you know, there are still moments where a bit more guidance is required and there is an element of dependency in the early

Building Independence Without Chaos

SPEAKER_01 6:52

stages. So we work very hard on our internal resources of how we can empower our team to know what needs to be done without being given all of the answers. So again, the the pub meeting is really great to recognize where the blockages are happening, where the gap is in skills. It really helps shine a light on the kind of things that are being stuck in that senior manager's pub meeting. What's the client manager and production manager seeing as a challenge? And then being able to see from the production manager's perspective what are the issues that their team are coming to them with and where's the gap in the resources, really honing into that quality division. That's where your production manager is such an integral part of overseeing that division, division five, of ensuring that the firm runs consistently and the processes are always being developed. It's it really flows into a lot of great opportunity, whether it's um restructuring your SOPs, restructuring having a monthly team training, or maybe it's the Wednesday pub is a bit of a training for the last half an hour and everyone comes into that section, really gives you the leverage. And again, the more the more structure you can bring into your day, the more calm there is. When we're having these fire-fighting meetings all over the place, it can become very destabilizing for everyone. And you know, I know my nervous system used to be really dysregulated when it was just things firing at me all the time. And having meetings, having the structure is a lot better to be able to say, we're catching up tomorrow at two. Let's pop it on the agenda for there. It just takes the sting out of it. There are going to be things that have to be dealt with urgently, but the more rhythm and routine you can bring into your firms, the more calm they can be. And, you know, we all have very busy compliance times, varying times throughout the year. We've got people from around the globe in the room today and in our membership base. But it doesn't really matter when your compliance season is. And be really clear in the agenda. Make sure your team are coming to you with their questions clearly mapped out, not just a I'm trying to do this job and I don't really know what to do. That's that's bordering on a competency issue, and we first see if it's confidence. Are they a bit nervous? Are they worried about asking a silly question? And I'm sure we've all heard the expression, the only silly question is the one not asked, or there's no such thing as a silly question. It's not asking it is the silly thing. So it's about encouraging your team to speak up, but also help them build out their critical thinking skills. And that's what can also come in the pub meeting. Most people get sick of being asked the same things over and over again. So if you keep asking your team the same things over and over again, hopefully they get sick of it pretty quickly and they learn to have the answers prepared before

Faster Reviews Through Prepared Teams

SPEAKER_01 10:08

you even ask the questions. I know for us, when we used to do our um BAS or GST return reviews, they used to take a little while. They used to be 30, 45 minutes easily on every single one of them. Now, five minutes max on quite a few of them because our team have been micro-trained to improve the quality of their work and they also come fully prepared to the meeting. The production person presents on the screen all of the various reports that we will be looking at in that review, and they lead it. They take us through, they point out the things that are unusual and explain why it is of, you know, we haven't received the statement for that loan, so we haven't been able to amortize interest, or they purchased some um advertising dollars in in that period, or whatever it might be, the production person becomes empowered to actually present the financials to the client manager or production manager. But it does take time, it does take consistency in that micro training, but it's what creates the freedom. We can now smash through a whole heap in the same amount of time. We only got one done. And I know if if the pub meeting had had been structured back in the early days of my business, it would have helped me withdraw in an easier fashion, I think, and and not cause such bottlenecks for my team. I used to be the biggest pain in their backside. It's every time they're reliant on me, we do everything we can to avoid that because my day is full of other things. So it's it's really great to have the structure of the pub meeting to help empower everyone. And again, we don't want our senior client managers who replace us as firm the firm owner who withdraws and has a senior client manager in place. We don't want them to become the bottleneck of the business because that just transfers from you to them. So this really helps establish the freedom for them also.

Closing Thoughts And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 12:04

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 platform that you can find us on. And just remember, if you're not a subscriber of our weekly Friday tip newsletter, 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. See you in the next episode.