36: A Revolution in the Accounting Industry: Thriving on Flexibility

In this episode of Accounting with Confidence, I delve into the unique and effective employment model I've developed for my firm—permanent part-time positions. I discuss the journey that led me to embrace this model, including the challenges and lessons learned along the way. Hear about the significant advantages, from reduced stress and better work-life balance to superior client service and more efficient hiring practices. I'll also share insights on how this model can appeal to young professionals and those with family commitments, making it an attractive option in the accounting industry and potentially other service-related fields. Tune in to learn how you, too, can build a business you love by adopting innovative employment strategies.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Beth Whitworth
• 0:36 Permanent Part-Time Employment Model
• 2:18 Challenges and Adjustments
• 7:00 Hiring Practices and Lessons Learned
• 10:00 Implementing a Successful Part-Time Model
• 15:44 Benefits of the Part-Time Model
• 24:18 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. I'm your host, Beth Whitworth, and I am here today to talk to you about a. Employment model building my team that I have really leaned into and have managed to make it something that. It's all I do. And that model is having a permanent part-time model.
 
And what does that mean for me, permanent part-time means in our industry that you are working the same amount of hours. All year long, you are working part-time hours, which means you are working less than 40 hours a week and you are able to maintain that. It's not seasonal, it is all year long. And for us, those permanent part-time people, which is everybody on the team, it's something that we hire to.
 
And it is something that we can manage to, and it's also something that is really important to me. So in the accounting industry, typically when people talk about part-time, they are talking about either seasonal, where they're working January to April or May, and then they'll come back the next January or they're talking about part-time.
 
And those people are typically in positions where. They aren't managing, they don't have a lot of room for moving up for advancement, and they are really kind of stuck there because they have chosen to only work part-time. So as a firm, I have had Accounting Solutions Group for a number of years, so I would say probably 17 years now and.
 
The history there is that when I went out on my own, I didn't have any employees and then I had a partnership that was very short-lived, but in that time we had some employees, so we had already gotten to maybe three or four employees at that point. They were full-time employees and when the partnership broke up, I retained the employees and it was, it was very, very difficult.
 
So we didn't have a lot of systems in place. We didn't have processes in place. Everybody was in the office and there was lots of pressure on me to make sure we succeeded somewhat in a trying to overcome veiled partnership. Also, there was a lot of hours managing those for people and for me there was. A lot, a lot of stress and not a lot of benefits.
 
So the cost was high, the stress level was high, and I don't know that with, since we didn't have a lot of processes and we had probably did not have enough work for those four full-time people, it became really something that I was not enjoying. And so we kind of worked in that environment for, for a few years, really.
 
And we started to make changes as, as reaction, not necessarily proactively in having people go part-time. And so one person, you know, so I, I had one full-time person who just, she wasn't great at. Doing that public accounting thing where you are hopping from task to task client to client. Sometimes you're doing tax returns, sometimes you're doing bank reconciliations and you're always working with different clients and that was something she wasn't great at.
 
And so I sacrificed her to a client who we had a lot of work for and said, okay. If you hire her, you can do all the work that we're doing in-house. And so I, I didn't keep that client except in a tax capacity for many, many years and she was able to go be successful somewhere else. So we kind of, it was mu mutually beneficial at the time.
 
And so that started to reduce some payroll costs. We also had a long-term member of the team that she left to, or she didn't leave, she went on maternity leave. And I knew that that was going to be a risk that she was gonna wanna come back part-time, and I was prepared for that. And she did. And so she was full-time and she came back part-time.
 
And so that worked out well in again, starting to reduce that level of management on the team and having, you know, not enough work to support everybody. We also kind of, we lost some people to some personality conflicts, whether it was personality conflicts that were impacting client service or personality conflicts with me, and we chose not to replace those people on a full-time level, but we were struggling with replacing people on a full-time level.
 
I hadn't quite embraced that let's everybody be part-time yet because that was not the norm. That is not what the industry. Typically dictates it is salaried personnel that are working in the firm and they're full-time, they work 40 hours a week. And, and that was just industry standard. And as I was hiring to those one, it was, it was costly.
 
It was difficult to find. But also, you know, I had, I ran into a situation where. Even though they were signed on with me full time, they were working a side job, or they were working a side job plus doing accounting and bookkeeping for other clients. And so it was, you know, so they were exhausted. They weren't giving good client service and so that didn't work out.
 
Or we would get some people who. I believed in the interview we were great and knew how to do all the things they said they could do, and they ended up being unproductive or unreliable, and that was very, very discouraging for me. Very. I was really struggling. I was really struggling, and it was probably around 20 14, 20 15, you know, so a good 10 years ago.
 
And I felt like I was on this hamster wheel of trying to get the right people in the right seats who really understood what I was doing. And at this point, I didn't really understand my leadership style as well. I didn't understand, you know, kind of some of my things that are, I need to hire to, you know, there's some characteristics I have that I need to have people who can balance that out.
 
So as we. Started to hire again. We started with. Bringing in the administrative position where we hadn't had one. We, when we started and I had those four full-time employees, there were four full-time accounting people. We didn't have an administrative person. We didn't have somebody answering the phones.
 
So everybody was kind of sharing in that load. And so when we finally got to the point where we're like, okay, we need to hire an admin. I said, okay, let's do somebody who is part-time. I'm thinking a mom whose kids are going to school. They get 'em on the bus, they come in, they do administrative work for us, and then they leave to go get their kids off the bus, and I thought that would work out great.
 
What we ran into a lot of times was that that administrative position, the person actually either wanted to really be an accountant. And so they were coming into work for an accounting firm hoping that in on this administrative level, since that's what we were hiring for, maybe they could move into a bookkeeping role.
 
And we did that a couple of times and that was hard on the administrative job because we never had any consistency there. And the other part we would get sometimes is, is, and part of it, I will admit that it is just, it was very poor hiring practices on. On my behalf, but we would get people who didn't take the job seriously.
 
They would say, okay, it's part-time, which means it's flexible, which means I can deal with what I wanna do personally while I'm on the clock. I had somebody who actually was taking classes, like online classes while she was working for me. That was a little. Again, discouraging. It was very discouraging. So it was on me for not hiring to the role, not defining the role, all of those things.
 
But we did realize that part-time is all we really needed. That's all we needed, an administrative person. So, you know, we, we found some people, we had friend of a friend, we, we tried that and super part-time people acted like it was, they could just get the work done whenever they wanted, and. We were still stressed out with trying to keep the full-time people productive and a certain percentage billable and all of those things to maintain their salaries, and it was, it was stressful.
 
Still very, very stressful. I. So I figured out a lot of things going through those years and years of just kind of painful hiring processes and I figured out that I had to structure the part-time people as if this was, you know, a very critical job to the company. It wasn't just something you do in your spare time.
 
This is really something that you wanted to do. You wanted to be a part of the team. They needed to be reliable. And they needed to have the right skillset. It couldn't just be, Hey, I know somebody who is looking for a job and I wanted a warm body. And we went down that route a couple of times and it never worked out well.
 
So it took me years to learn this, but I finally took and invested in myself and in a course that was. Teaching on hiring, and it was after we had lost the last full-time person I had on the team that was back in 2021. And when that happened, it really opened my eyes to what I had been doing in order to keep that person.
 
And that was, I was, all the big clients were on that person's plate because that's the only way I could justify 40 hours a week. I so. Any CFO clients, any full service, you know, clients that you were spending five to 10 hours a week on that person had all of them, and when they left, it was a surprise for me, but it was also one of those eye openers again that said.
 
You gotta do something different. And so I invested in myself and I learned from someone. Her name was Theresa Lowe, and she ran a program that was called Streamlined and Scaled, and her podcasts are probably still out there and probably still very relevant. And she was phenomenal at coaching me into a really, really good hiring practice.
 
And when I had the last full-time person leave in 2021, that left me with three part-time people and I knew I needed to hire, but I knew I needed to hire. The right person. And so I did something that was super scary for me, which was to hire my first manager. And I've talked about her many times in on this podcast.
 
And she's Sarah, my Unicorn, and she came on part-time. And for her, that was the first time she'd ever worked part-time, the first time she'd ever worked from home. She was coming over from industry where she had been working in a company that had, was being sold again. And so she'd been through that enough times that she was ready for a change and I was able to put this hiring practice in place and it was pretty rigorous.
 
I think she'd probably attest to it, and I still do it to this day, but it really made it obvious. That this is a permanent part-time position. That's not gonna be something where you're gonna work all the hours at the beginning of the year and then kind of go down to five or 10 hours the rest of the year.
 
No, this is permanent part-time, and especially with this management position, it was very important to me. I could offload things from my plate. To this manager, the things that I was doing, reviewing, reviewing month ends, reviewing tax returns, helping manage the team so that I could start to kind of take that higher level, look at the business and see what was next.
 
Did we have the right people in the right seats? Do we have enough to cover capacity? Do we need to? Grow. Did we need to let go of clients? What processes did we need to learn what softwares needed to be implemented? There was so much more that I was never getting to including this podcast back then, and when I landed on Sarah, it was one of those things that made me say, why did I wait this long?
 
And I. Really grabbed onto that feeling of this really works and I love it. We're, we're hiring right now, we're looking to add to the team and one of the things that when we're interviewing, Sarah and I are both on those calls, but one of the things she always says to these people, and it really. Made me know that we were on the right track, is that she says it's a, it feels like a full-time job, not in the hours, but in the expectations.
 
So you have the benefits and you have the responsibility, and you have the accountability, and you have the opportunity for advancement, and it feels like a full-time job. It's managed like a full-time job. You have the flexibility to still be able to work, you know, on yourself, on your family, on that balance between things.
 
So when she says that it feels like a full-time job is not a negative, we try to encourage people to understand that we want this to be. The thing that when you're working, that's what you're focused on. You're not, this isn't, isn't one of multiple part-time jobs that you are putting together to kind of fill your needs, but we want you to be balancing your family with your job.
 
Not, you know, balancing, you know, four part-time jobs just and doing our stuff on the side. So I get a lot of pushback when I talk to other people in the industry saying part-time people are too hard to manage. It just doesn't work. They don't work when I want 'em to, or they don't wanna work as much as I want them to.
 
And, and I would say, and I say to this. All the time is you have to set the expectations, and when we set the expectations that it is like a full-time job, except that you're only working five or six hours a day, then that puts it out there. This is what we expect from you. We don't, you know, it doesn't mean that we're so flexible that when you feel like working, you can come and do some work.
 
It doesn't work that way. So it's been a game changer for me, and I know it's not for every business, and it's not for every industry, but our current situation is something that is working. We are, we now have like six part-time people working 25 to 30 hours a week. We are a hundred percent remote. So nobody comes into the office anymore.
 
So that means it's really, really important that they're self-managed, that they are good with time management, and very good with communication and using our systems, our softwares. There's never any overtime, even during tax season. Occasionally, you know, you may be working two to three hours extra a week, but never anything where you're never at 40.
 
Everybody qualifies for a retirement plan. If people are averaging 30 hours a week, then they qualify for health insurance that is partially paid by the company. There's paid time off, there's paid holidays, and you still have some flexibility in your schedule. We provide the, the equipment just like we would for a full-time person.
 
We've, we provide it for all of our part-time people, and there is still a level of management where you're speaking with management at least once a week on a team call and biweekly you're speaking with somebody who is. Directly addressing your workload, your issues, all those things. And so it's been something where we are treating it as if everybody is full-time.
 
'cause that's all we know. That's everybody's part-time. But the expectation is you are part of a team and just like you were full-time. And it also allows for people to recognize opportunities for advancement. Or opportunities to make more money by saying, yep, I've got extra time. Let me help you with this project.
 
So it really works. It works well in our industry, but it also works well from a planning perspective. So a, a and a cost perspective. While we give all those benefits, when someone's not working, they're not getting paid. We everybody's hourly and so they really can adjust how much they make by how many hours they work.
 
But they know they can't work more than 40 and there's not generally not a need to work. Up to 40, you're, you know, 35 is probably the max. And usually that's a week where maybe we've had extra training or strategy sessions or something where we're putting in some extra hours. But nobody is really working 40 hours ever.
 
I. There's still tons of flexibility to manage your family. They manage their, their self, their work. There's room, and I remember when I was working full-time and having to, it was even before I had kids. Just managing everything else that goes on in your life when you're working full-time, plus meaning full-time, plus overtime and maybe working every.
 
In my case, one day a weekend I was working, so I was working six days a week. It was really hard to find time to do anything that I enjoyed hobby-wise, or if I was doing it, my mind wasn't there. I was exhausted. I. I found that working with a bunch of part-time team, they aren't as exhausted. There are times, there's seasons when you know there's a lot of things going in on in your life and maybe there's a lot of things going on in the work world and you just start to feel exhausted, but it's not.
 
All the time. It is somewhat seasonal, so that means that the team is not overtired, they're not stressed out from working all the time, and they're giving better client service. That is a benefit to our clients. They recognize that they're talking to people who care about doing a good job and are focused on their work and not exhausted from having worked 50, 60, 70 hours during tax season.
 
The other thing that makes having permanent part-time people better in my opinion, is that when we feel like there's a need to fill, we need to, we need some hours, you know, because maybe we're growing, we've got some more clients, we've got some more enough hourly work or client work coming in that we need to fill a certain number of hours, you know, and that's when we start to look and we start to hire and we're like, okay, we need to get to.
 
Find somebody to work 20 to 25 hours or 25 to 30 hours and we start to say, okay, how long, how much time does this client take? And how much time does that client take? And, and if we moved these things around and made room and did some workload analysis, it is so much easier to do that with filling part-time hours than filling a full-time.
 
Boat because if there's only 20 hours of billable work and they only are gonna work 25, that other five hours can easily be filled up with training, with, you know, helping with projects and processes and there's all kinds of things there. Whereas with a 40 hour week person, another 20 hours. Yet that's not, that's not something we can easily fill.
 
The person's gonna be bored, they're not gonna have enough work. So it makes it much easier to plan for capacity and to hire two capacity. I. I also think that we are finding that the permanent part-time is appealing to the younger generation. Maybe people who have gotten outta school and said, yeah, I watched my parents work all the time.
 
I. And I don't wanna do that. I want, you know, to have some availability to go away for the weekends and not be exhausted and do, you know, do things with my kids' school. And a lot of times this permanent part-time appeals to those people who are in between where they're raising their kids or maybe they're caring for their parents or maybe both.
 
Where you've got some hours to give and you want to work, but you don't have the availability to work full-time and, and with that expectation and that pressure. So I think that it is, it's appealing. I mean it to people. I think that, I guess I should ask my team. Does it appeal to you because you, you can raise your kids and take care of your parents?
 
Probably. I. And like I said, it has reduced my stress level in trying to keep a full-time person productive because once that full-time person is on board, they automatically qualify for all the benefits and they are starting to be expensive, whether or not they're working or not. So I think that. Being able to attract part-time people by offering benefits is working.
 
And I think before I was offering the benefits like health insurance, it was something where people didn't, weren't able to kind of make that transition because a lot of people are, are needing to have health insurance and if they're not gonna work full-time, they are going to have to have someplace to get that insurance.
 
So that was a huge pivot for me that made this. Model work was to offer not just benefits in retirement and paid time off, even though you're part-time, you ne we now have health insurance, full health insurance benefits, so that, but it's limited to, they have to be working at least 30 hours a week to qualify.
 
And so that makes it, that everybody's not on it. And so that that works. It works for us. So why am I sharing all this? Well, I just wanna throw it out there that it is something, whether it's in the accounting industry or even in another industry, it probably leans towards service. Related industries, but it's something that should be considered, especially as it gets more and more costly to hire.
 
If you put a good hiring system in place and hire to the number of hours you need filled, I think it works. And for me, having permanent part-time team. With them still being able to give great client service and be available for the clients. I don't know that I will ever hire a full-time person again. I, I mean, I should never say never.
 
I'm guessing that's probably something I, I should throw out there that, you know, there could, could be a time, but. I don't think so. Not anytime soon. I'm working towards being part-time in this business as well, and I'm not quite there yet, but there are weeks where I'm less than 40 hours a week. There are weeks that I'm more than 40 hours a week, typically not in the same, usually not consecutively.
 
But I would love, love, love if we could make the industry of public accounting be more attractive to people with family. Stay at home moms. Stay at home Dads, new parents, caregivers, you know, people who are. Experiencing things with, you know, a, a loved one or a spouse that's going through an illness and you still need that.
 
I guess that, that structure of working and something to keep your mind going. And I think if we made public accounting something where. That is something that can work for those people who only wanna work part-time and structured it that way and it, you weren't penalized for working part-time, meaning you weren't able to qualify for promotions or raises or having any type of client responsibility or anything like that.
 
You know, I fully intend to continue to add management to our firm, which means I would love for that to come up through the ranks of our part-time people and those managers would still be part-time. And that is, that's my goal. That's I, I want to have this permanent part-time model that benefits everybody.
 
It benefits me, it benefits them, and then it benefits our clients. So by having such a. Thing in place where we can hire to a certain number of hours we can promote from within and maintain the part-time status to you can still qualify for benefits. It is, it's like having that full-time job without having to work the full-time hours.
 
So that's my, what I'm passionate about this week is. Sort of defending my permanent part-time model because it is something that is unusual in the industry and it is something that people often say, yeah, I, I tried that. It doesn't work well, I'm here to say that it can work. You have to work at it though.
 
You have to treat every part-time position as if it is. A full-time position. You need a job description. You need expectations, you need. What are they going to be doing? When are they going to be doing it? You have to define it all, and if you do that and stick by it, then hold them to it. You can have a great team, and I currently have a great team, and everybody is, you know, they're reliable, they're accountable, they're getting their work done, and the clients love them.
 
So for me, it is a win-win. And hopefully you listen to this and you think, okay, maybe it's something I can, I should try. It's like I said, it's not for everybody and it's not for every industry, but for the accounting industry and other service industries, I think it could be a model that is very successful.
 
I. Okay, everybody. That's all I have. I will hop back off my soap box. I seem to say that a lot lately, but you can tell when I'm kind of passionate about something. So I will remind you that if you wanna build a business that you love, it's up to you and I'll talk to you next time.
 
Thanks for listening to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. My hope is that my experiences can help you navigate the realities of owning and operating your business. Please subscribe or follow the podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform so that you never miss an episode. Feel free to leave me a text by using the, send us a text message link in the show description and let me know how I'm doing.