84 CAS Growth: Your Focus is Limiting Your Growth

Trying to grow your CAS firm without burning out? This episode is a wake-up call for leaders buried in chaos, distractions, and reactive work.

Roman shares firsthand lessons from taking time off for family—while still scaling Full Send—by building rhythm, protecting time, and choosing ruthless focus over busywork.

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 – Why I Took a Break from Recording

02:00 – Time as an Investment: Aligning Tasks with Your Mission

04:30 – Why Saying “No” Is a Superpower for Firm Owners

06:00 – Creating a “Not Doing List” to Maintain Clarity

07:00 – Focus Requires Systems, Not Just Discipline

09:30 – Kill the Chaos Loops: Protect Your Time from Slack & Email

11:30 – Asynchronous Updates to Preserve Focus

13:00 – Why “Slow Is Smooth and Smooth Is Fast” for CAS Firms

14:00 – Guardrails Equal Growth: Build Systems That Prevent Burnout

✅ Key Takeaways

✔️ Time is your most valuable asset

Treat it like an investment. Align every task with your firm’s mission.

✔️ Saying “no” creates space for strategy

Eliminate meetings, distractions, and low-value activities—even if they seem “productive.”

✔️ Build rhythms, not just to-do lists

Systematize your week: block focus days, use async tools, and create deep work zones.

✔️ Guardrails > Chaos Loops

Structure protects your energy and mental clarity. Slack and email shouldn’t run your firm.

✔️ “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast”

Speed comes from smooth systems—not rushed execution.

📌 CAS Leadership Action Plan

• Write your “Not Doing” list
• Set a full-day focus block on your calendar
• Choose 1 firm priority per week
• Track where your time goes and trim 3 distractions
• Share your clarity goals with your team

🔗 Learn more at thefullsend.com

Thanks for listening! Come Say Hi 👋

Full Send | Accounting & Data

LinkedIn: Roman Villard, CPA
X: @FullSendCPA
YouTube: Full Send - Accounting & Data
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Transcript

You may have noticed that I've taken a little bit of time off of recording episodes of CAS Minute. Now my focus on growing our firm hasn't gone away at all. However, I. I had my third kid and my priorities have shifted, and so I didn't want this to be a distraction, this being a child, but rather something that I was investing quality time into.

So my priorities have shifted as a firm leader, as a parent, Trying to figure out how to best use the limited amount of time that I have. So in the world of running a CAS practice, staying focused isn't, isn't optional. Like this is the game. You're trying to stay focused to accomplish a goal, a mission to drive value, whatever that outcome is for you.

So on this episode of CAS Minute, as we dive back into it. I'm gonna kind of unpack the real cost of distraction, what it takes to run a firm that scales without losing your mind. And just try to understand how most successful CAS leaders that I know today manage their time, how they eliminate friction, and how they build some discipline into using their time most effectively.

And here's the secret. It's not by working more, but it's by being a little bit more intentional.

So if you run a CAS practice today, you're probably kind of feel like you're drowning in client requests, scattered systems. You're being a bit reactive to the work that's coming in. This is gonna be the wake up call to help you step back from all of that to focus on the things that matter. 'cause the firms that win aren't the ones that are doing the most.

They're the ones with the most ruthless. Focus of their time. So based on my experience the last two months on how I've kind of changed and shifted my focus, given the new addition to my family where my priorities went, I'm gonna show you how I've kind of cut the noise, stayed focused and continued to build a firm around clarity that has been given to me in some of this white space that has existed.

If we haven't had a chance to meet, I'm Roman founder of Full Send. You can find thefullsend.com. We run a lean, fast and super intentional CAS practice with also a focus on operational services as well. So today I'm sharing the mindset and methods that I've used to stay focused, even while taking some time off and continuing to scale with discipline.

So. One of the things that I want to hit on here is that time is your only non-renewable resource. It is the most valuable asset on your life's balance sheet. You can get more clients, you can get more money, you can have more software, but you can't get more time. And in fact, whenever you get more clients, you get more money and you have more software.

Oftentimes that's a direct. Correlation to the amount of time that you're investing to get those things. Ultimately, what we need to be doing is treating our time like an investment. We're investing capital for a return, not just spending it on something that provides some degree of temporary fulfillment.

So when I ask myself, how is my time best spent? Is it aligned with the missions? I wanna make sure that every task that I'm doing, every minute that I spend is actually aligned with the mission of the company. So when I take two months to focus on my, my newborn, my new daughter, and spending this bonding time with her, I wanna make sure that the time is intentionally spent with her.

Now while. She may be napping. I'm gonna shift my focus back towards the things with the firm that can help people continue to make progress that can help people get unstuck. And so what I'm asking myself with every task that I spend my precious time in is. Does this align with our mission? And we at Full send have a mission of elevate outcomes, period.

We want to elevate outcomes for our team, for our clients, for our community. We wanna do that through the services we offer, through accounting, through operations, through Ai. So if I can take the tasks that are on my list and stack rank them based on how do they fulfill the mission of elevating outcomes for our team, our clients, or our community, I can say with certainty that my time is being invested well.

Now there may not be a direct correlation instantaneously to the desired outcome, but if you know you're building towards something towards that shared mission, you're spending your time. Well now a good way to start figuring out how. Aligned you are with a time that's being spent is just track your calendar for the week count, how many hours we're reactive versus strategic.

We're mission aligned versus maybe not value add. When you do that, you take a look at all these things, all this white space in your calendar that you may instinctively be drawn towards a certain part of the business. Once you start to document that, you can say, oh man, like I actually spent six hours in my email this week.

Well, if you can figure out a way to get that time from six hours down to two hours, you now have 10% of your entire week back that you could dedicate to something that is more. Scalable that is more mission aligned. So for me as a firm owner, when I'm looking at a reduced schedule, I have a limited amount of time to dedicate to work.

So I need to make sure that every minute that I spend is very intentional. That's because my priority right now is with my new daughter,

the number two focus principle for CAS leaders saying no. Often drives more focus. So over the course of the last two months, I have said no to a lot of things, whether it was speaking engagements, conferences, meetings with vendors, or meetings with referral partners. I've had to say no to those because those didn't immediately drive towards the goals that we have, the outcomes that we're driving.

Now, I, I, I say that the focus is important. Saying no is important because those in and of themselves are good things. But when my priority right now is first my, my, my newborn child and making sure that she's taken care of. And then my second priority is obviously the rest of my family, but then the firm, what is it in the firm that I need to spend my time with to help other people continue [00:06:00] to work towards a mission in this limited amount of time that I have?

It's not meeting with outside parties, it's not meeting with referral partners. It's not traveling to conferences with some limited exceptions in there, of course, but you need to be very intentional about saying no. Saying no, frees you up to focus more time on your mission. So if you can narrow your scope of time, narrow your services, narrow industries, narrow your priorities, it helps you to stay focused.

You wanna be aligning those things again with your mission. So a, a not doing list could sit right beside your to-do list, to stay more focused. We all have these to-do lists. We scratch things down on a piece of paper, but we never really write down the things that we don't want to do or we're not doing.

Hey, this month I'm not gonna focus on meetings with. Outside vendors, you're gonna get solicited for those meetings on a daily or weekly basis. Now, if that's not on your priority list, don't do it for a month. Just put it on a not doing list. It may help you stay focused there. So another fast principle for, for staying focused, I think is building rhythms and not just goals.

So staying disciplined in focus is, is not necessarily about motivation. It's not about discipline in and of itself. It's just about the systems you create around your ability to, to accomplish your goals given the amount of time that you have. So, with a limited amount of time that I have. To dedicate to the firm, to dedicate to my family, to dedicate to, uh, physical activity and mental wellness.

I wanna make sure that there are rhythms in my day to day that enabled me to spend more of my time and energy in each of those areas really effectively. So for me, It is a system to enable me to do that. There, there's a cadence, there's a rhythm to my day to day when I'm taking care of my daughter. That I think works really well. Maybe it's uh, uh, you know, getting some physical exercise and taking her for a walk because. Vitamin D is good and I want my exercise that that is a contributor to my success when I need to expend mental energy on something to get somebody unstuck at the firm, the physical element helps with that, but it's, it's a rhythm.

It's a system that's embedded in my day and not something that just happens. In the event that I have free time, so for your firm, that could look something like, Hey, do you have team check-ins? Do you have a single day or two days dedicated to deep work or creative thinking in which you have no meetings whatsoever, that white space.

Allows you to have better clarity. It allows you to make better decisions. If you're in back to back meetings all day and somebody asks you to make a decision, your mind is on 16 other things, and so you need to take time to step back, have some white space in order to make really clear and confident decisions, which is ultimately your highest and best use.

Your biggest value to your firm is your ability to make quality and clear decisions. Maybe it's a pipeline sales review, maybe it's content creation. You know, these, these cadences that you have in a week need to be calendared in. And this isn't just a function of time blocking. I've never been able to actually re respect my own calendar when I've tried to time block.

It's really been more of a force function of creating systems and cadences that really cater to the areas of my firm that create the most value. So the fourth thing that I wanna think about here as it relates to principles in, in staying focused in your CAS practice. So we want to, I'll, I'll say kill the chaos loops there.

There's a lot of chaos that can happen in your firm. Maybe it's. Slacks, maybe it's urgent emails, client fires, everything that pops up that distracts you from your cadence, that distracts you from your mission, kills your momentum. So these chaos loops that exist, it's a slack, it's an email. It's things that are constantly distracting you.

You need to protect yourself and protect your time from these loops that can just drain an entire day, can drain an entire afternoon. Now, one way to do that, and this is something that Jason Staats talks about a lot, is like. Hey, just don't have your email up on your computer all day, every day because you know what?

You will look at it and it will create a distraction. Inevitably, there will be something that pops up that requires your attention, or you perceive that it requires your immediate attention when in reality you could actually schedule that out to solve at a time in your calendar that makes sense for you.

For me, I like asynchronous communication to help reduce the context switching, like, yes, we use slack. Slack is popping off all day. I'm not necessarily looking at it all day long. I really like the usage of loom or notion or recorded updates that I can digest at a time that makes sense for me. And what's gonna happen is that inevitably, whether it's your clients or your team, they will seek your attention to provide them with their highest and best outcome.

Meaning they need your time and attention to help solve their problems to make. Their work easier, their life easier, and to some degree, that may not necessarily be your highest and best use of time in that moment. Now you need to be really clear on how you communicate this to your team, how you communicate your availability, how you communicate, what the team should be communicating with you.

That again, requires. Process. It requires documentation on how your team should be communicating with you, what they should go to other people for, or what they should resource themselves to get their problems solved. So we need to adopt a structure in order to not inherit the chaos that inevitably exists in the firm.

So last thing here as a focused first principle for CAS leaders is discipline is not rigid. Discipline is not A, B, C, X, Y, Z. 1, 2, 3. Get this done. Discipline is freeing. There's a myth that, that, that structure and process equals constraint. It limits creativity. But, but the truth is that, is that the structure actually drives speed.

It drives discipline. Now, when I say speed, one of the things that I, that I like the absolute best, uh, as a phrase that comes from the Navy Seals is that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. We tend to fall into this, this rhythm of, of seeing data out there that's saying, you know, accounting firms, CAS practices are the fastest growing and we have this, this desire or this impulse to feel like we have to move really fast into this territory that's growing or else we're gonna, we're gonna miss the boat.

Truth is if you go slow, that will create a lot of smoothness in your operations, and smooth ultimately is fast because you're not going back and having to rework what you designed, maybe inadequately or too quickly on the front end. It's something to really think about as you're moving into new waters.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Now, the discipline, the structure, yes. The mapping out of how your time is spent, that will enable you to move more smoothly through your work. It'll better align you with your desired outcomes, and ultimately you'll be moving faster because of those things. A firm that runs on discipline is a firm that doesn't burn out.

Its leadership team guardrails equals growth. So if you could take anything from this, take a look at your week, cut three time wasters out of your schedule. Install a focus block into your calendar a full day, maybe where it is completely free and allows you mental clarity and time to provide quality, judgment and quality decisions for your team.

Write a stop doing list, right? A not doing today list. Share it with your team. What are the things that you've actually deprioritized so you can stay focused on your mission and your outcome? That will actually help you a ton because inevitably when that request of your time comes in and it's on your stop doing list, sorry, it's not on my priority list, this, this month, this week, this day, let's check back in later.

What is your one line weekly firm priority? Do you have a weekly priority? You have a monthly or quarterly priority, do you stick to it? Is this the thing that will drive the highest and best outcome for your team this given week? When you have that clarity, it helps you to create a lot more focus and confidence in moving forward.

Ultimately, discipline setting, goal setting. Uh, time management focus. It's not about doing more, it's about doing what matters. If you wanna run a CAS firm that scales, you need to treat your time like gold, like an investment, get clear, get focused, and that will lead you to outcomes that you may not thought possible.

If you just continue to run the rat race of this chaos loop that exists in your firm, take this, run with it. Drive a more sustainable growing practice as you move forward.