How to Stop Struggling and Start Thriving as an Accountant

The mistake I hear accountants often say is “I wish I could find someone just like myself.” This is a mistake. You need to bring in skills that complement your own and the others in your team. 

You need to see your business as a separate entity from yourself and view everything as a return on investment and do the right kind of work…This is extremely important as I see Accountants doing the wrong kind of work and struggling with productivity 

This first thing to do is to offload your admin work because that skill level is the easiest to hire for and the most cost effective.  

If you are doing admin tasks then, it is costing your business an enormous amount of money because you as the owner is the highest cost person to your business and you should not be spending your time on admin tasks  

As soon as you do this you will free up your time and create capacity.  

Capacity should be created from the bottom up because it is the most cost effective and the easiest to recruit for. 

Pushing tasks down to the lowest cost person in your business is the direction you must head constantly. Train, train, train and invest in your staff 

Hence the next person to hire is the person who can do the bookkeeping, accounting, and tax work — constantly pushing tasks down. 

Eventually you will simply be managing your staff and not doing the tasks yourself 

Taking this path will allow you to create capacity and each time capacity fills up you hire from bottom up and drive the workload down.  

This will allow you to scale up and grow to a point where you have nothing on your job description to do because every single task that needs to be done in your business is on someone else’s task list.  

Your job is simply to jump in to help in emergencies and or deal with problems or handle complaints and convert leads to clients and do staff training. 

This is called working ON your business, and not IN your business. 

Do the right kind of work. Life is short so invest in your staff and you will see them pay you a dividend in the medium to long run.  

Start with the end in mind and picture in your head what you would like your business to look like when you have finally finished building it and break up your journey into short term tasks (putting fires out) , medium term tasks (hiring the right staff and training them to prevent fires ) and long term (having the right staff doing all the work and properly trained up) so you don’t have a single thing on your task list other than to keep a helicopter view of how things are going and managed by KPI’s.  

The 5 Key Performance Indicators I track are fees trending up each month against budget and against last year's fees. The cost of Goods Sold is under 40% which will give you an EBITDA of at least 25% (after Partners' wages). Lockup days (Debtors and WIP under 20 days). Net new clients over loss clients are growing. Net Promoter Score from clients above 9/10 and from Staff above 9/10. 

These KPI’s will show that you have a healthy business.   

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are 4 ways we can help you grow your Accounting practice:

1. Download a free copy of our book - The Accountants 20 Hour Workweek
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4. Build your firm to run without you
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