The Wize Way

Episode 68: Why WizeTalent is the #1 solution in finding the right talent

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 1 • Episode 69

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In this week's episode of The Wize Guys Podcast, we'll delve deep into the secrets of building a dream team. It's not just about recruitment; it's about mastering self-leadership, harnessing self-discipline, and controlling your emotions to create a team that will drive your practice to new heights.

We'll share insights from the WizeTalent recruitment method, renowned for its detail-oriented approach. This method has the potential to be a game-changer, helping you find the right people to join your teams.

Are you ready to rethink your hiring strategies, redefine team building, and revitalize your accounting practice? If so, then this episode is a must-listen.

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PS: Whenever you’re ready… here are the fastest 3 ways we can help you fix and grow your accounting firm:

1. Download our famous Wize Freedom Strategy 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 at 1:1 FREE hiring assessment with our WizeTalent recruiters to help find your next best employee locally or offshore – Click Here

3. Book a 1:1 Wize Discovery Session – Spend 30mins with our Wize CEO, Jamie Johns, a $7M firm owner who is ready to give you his entire business plan to build a firm that can run without you – Find out more here

Ed Chan:

You've got to master leading yourself. So that's about self-discipline, that's about experience, that's about controlling your feelings. So you've got to lead yourself.

Brenton Ward:

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Guys podcast, a show about accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and the many stories, lessons and tips from their experience of transitioning from a time-pull practice to a business that runs without them. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. I've got a good few things to talk about today. When we reflect on this topic around recruitment and finding the right talent for your practice, it's single-handedly the biggest challenge, the biggest issue that we get feedback on and we face in our own firms the feedback that we get from you guys. It's, without a doubt, the biggest challenge finding, keeping training, leading the right people.

Brenton Ward:

So, although it may seem like we're a bit of a repeating ourselves on this topic around team structure and leadership and finding the right people and find us, mine us, grind us if you really invest in looking at the wise way of things, we can't stop reiterating this message because, again, it's the single-handedly biggest challenge that everyone faces.

Brenton Ward:

So some of the principles, or the core principles again, on what makes a really good team scalable, about getting the right people in the right seats and your recruitment process to find the right people today and, of course, whoever hiring is a horror during pretty much sums up the feedback we're getting. So what we want to focus on today, guys, is really a couple of points around this. So, as everyone remembers, we've got three pillars that we like to focus on and theme our months around, and we're in the recruit month in July, but, as always, like to kick it off with yourself. As I've just said there, this is a never-ending quest and challenge for most practices. From your experience, how do you ensure you have the least amount of headaches and worries when it comes to finding and managing good people in your practice?

Ed Chan:

Yeah, that's a great question, Brenton.

Jamie Johns:

We've got two days to answer it.

Ed Chan:

For those of you who do WizeG rowth with us, where we're coaching one-on-one, most of our time is spent getting the right team, getting the structure right, getting the right people in the right seat, and most of the time is spent there, because if you get that right, the rest of your business works pretty well. If you get that wrong, it's just a nightmare. So this part of the whole thing is so important, but the answer, though, is not to throw simply to hire bodies and throw it at the problem, at the workload. That's not the way to do it. I see that often where I go into a firm and that's what they do. There's a lot of work. Everybody's complaining about the amount of work. They just hire more and more bodies, and they think that's going to fix the problem. In fact, it actually adds to the problem, and I'd like to just explain it in this way.

Ed Chan:

Have you ever seen little toddlers play soccer? Some people call it soccer and some people call it football, but they're four-year-olds and they all get together and there's 11 on each side, and all 22 of them are all chasing the ball, and it's just chaos. And that's a bit like the way accounting firms run their businesses. They just hire people and get them all chasing the ball. And then, as they get a bit older, they get a coach and a coach works out that there's a goalie and there's a winger, and there's a fullback, and there's centers and there's the forwards, and then they start playing positions. And then it gets a little bit more sophisticated than that. Then they start identifying the skill set of the individual. So if you've got really good reflexes, you'll go into the goalie position, if you're really really fast, you go on the wing and if you're very instinctive, you can play in the centers where you're setting up the forwards to score the goal. So it gets very scientific and a lot more strategic. And then accounting firm is exactly the same. So in an accounting firm you've got to manage your traffic flow. There's two types of traffic flow. There's communication, interpersonal, strategic traffic flow, where you're getting in front of your clients, you're talking about strategy, you're doing advisory, that kind of stuff, and not everybody can do that. And then the other kind of traffic flow is your production and getting the production right.

Ed Chan:

Most accountants that graduate from university are in the grinding area, so I call it the 80, 20, 80% of them in the grinding, the production area and 20% have communication skills. And that's not to say one is better than the other. They're all just as important as each other, because you need all skills you need grinding, you need the minding and you need the finding. They're all just as important as each other. They have different roles in the organization and without one it doesn't work. You just take one out of there. It's like a cog in the wheel. You just take one cog out of the wheel and the whole wheel stops. So you just got to get that right.

Ed Chan:

And when we develop our ideal team structure and that's developed over many, many years 30 to 40 years of trial and error and so forth and we've got it down to what we call the wise ideal team structure, and it's made up of the senior client manager, who has interpersonal skills and communication skills and he likes people, but people person.

Ed Chan:

And then you've got the grinder, who just likes to do the work, and if you play them in position and not out of position, that you get the synergy. You're getting complimentary skills working together so the outcome becomes much more than the sum of its parts. And so you get one plus one is five, and not one plus one is two and often you know if you just throw people at the problem you get one plus one is like one point five. You get less production because there's so much inefficiency and clunkiness in the whole system. So how do you find these people? We'll break it down and go through what we've done with wise talent in locating these people, so wise in the way we recruit is quite different from you know the recruitment agencies out there. Generally they just hire an accountant that you feel is right for you. Ours is a lot more detailed than that. We'll get into it.

Brenton Ward:

Yeah, Jamie, tell us about your experience before putting up a thoughtical system in place for recruitment, but also for your team structure and what it now looks like compared to what it used to be.

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, look, probably before I started mentoring with Ed, it was just like everyone else. I was worked for quite a few different firms and then started my own firm and really had no rhyme or rhythm in terms of hiring. I just hired accountants and simply in the early days probably got them to do everything and wasn't really strategic about the approach in both hiring and what seat to put them in. So I'd have to say it wasn't strategic at all. It was just like, oh yeah, I had enough work and the staff that I did have said, you know, oh, we're flat out, we're busy and we need to hire someone else, so I'd sort of just go and do it.

Jamie Johns:

So I probably made every mistake in the book. To be quite honest, I didn't know what a capacity planner was and I just sort of had more enthusiasm than the smarts. So that was a big part of the problem that I'd just never been taught how to manage. So once you hire one person and you put another person on, all of a sudden you're a manager, you're not just an accountant, because we're all born out of production doing the bookkeeping and the tap returns and the financial statements. But the question then becomes how do you become a manager, how do you become a leader? How do you keep your firm highly organised and keep scaling it and in the process, so that you don't go crazy at the same time?

Jamie Johns:

So every week I meet, you know, accountants and bookkeepers all over the world now, and everyone tends to have the same problem as they've got no time and don't know how to hire the right people. And if we do hire people, how to actually strategically get them to do a role that they're actually good at. So yeah, my experience, brent, is just I really wasn't very strategic in the hiring and didn't take advantage of complementary skills, a bit like Ed explained with the sports team. So you know, going down his path and working with Ed was a whole new enlightenment in how to hire and how to manage people as well. It's just something that we just don't learn at university and if you've worked with other firms, you know you often don't get the opportunity to learn how to structure teams and how to manage, and that's what we hear today.

Brenton Ward:

Yeah, yeah. So adding a remote team or even a remote onshore working situation can complicate that if you haven't got the right structure in place, which we'll touch on during for you today. And, jamie, you know you've spent the better part of having your firm, but, let's say, the last six years working with Ed and restructuring your teams. You've built out a really robust system for recruiting people which I want to go through today. But then Jamie has touched on something there which I want to get your thoughts on before we move on, because you know there's one side of this situation which is the actual implementation, the team structure, the recruitment process, finding the right people to put in the right seats.

Brenton Ward:

But one of the biggest shifts in getting the people situation right and building scalable teams in your practice is the shift that you have to make yourself as a practice owner, and that's, you know, one of becoming a manager and a leader, which you know when we talk to a lot of practices and there are a lot of, I'm talking like thousands of practices around the world who go I don't practice owners ago. I don't want staff, I don't want to deal with people. I've had staff before without headaches. But I mean, ultimately, if you're going to build a business that runs without you, someone's got to be in there, yeah, flying the flag for your practice. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Ed Chan:

Yeah, absolutely. When someone says to me that trouble with staff and you know, I rather have no staff and I'll do it myself what they're doing is just treating the symptom and not the problem. If you address the cause and not the effect, then you fix it. And the problem was that they hired the wrong person. And the problem was deeper than that they had the wrong recruitment system. So if you don't get the right recruitment system, you're hired a wrong person. And even further deeper than that, they didn't have their team structure in place. They didn't know really who they were hiring.

Ed Chan:

In accounting basis, they were just hiring an accountant and you need to get the blueprint right. So it's a consequence of all those things. But if you get it right from the beginning like if you're going to get built a house, you get an architect to design the architecture for you before you get a builder to build it right. So you get the architecture right and then you know decisions that you need to fill and then you go out and be very, very specific about the person that you want to hire that fits, that fills those positions and then you got to lead them. Because even with the best system and the best people. If you don't lead them, the whole thing falls apart. So it's a combination of all those things put together by addressing the problem.

Ed Chan:

If you address the problem and you find the right people working in the right seat in the right bus and they're really happy, then the whole thing works and they can be managed from bottom up and not from top down. If you get all that wrong, you tend to manage it from top down by controlling Kamar. You're watching everybody and you're controlling everybody and it just doesn't work. And you need to do that because you've just got wrong architecture, the wrong blueprint, the wrong people in the wrong team and it's just a dog's breakfast. And to hold the whole thing together you've got to do it by brute force and that's where control and command comes in.

Ed Chan:

But if you do it right, get those things in place, as I said, get the right people in the right seat, and when someone's in the right seat and they're in their flow, they're really happy. You don't have to manage them. You know they're looking forward to coming to work. You know they can't wait to get to work and they can't wait to get down and doing work. So you got to get those pieces right. And if you don't get those pieces right, the symptom is you've got this supposedly bad person and I'll never hire another staff again because they give me so many problems, but address the cause.

Brenton Ward:

Yeah, and as a smaller practice as well, when you've got fewer people. We often experience this, where you do have an issue with putting someone in the wrong seat, it can certainly disrupt things at a greater scale because you've got fewer people to manage within the practice. So getting the right people in the right seat in amongst the blueprint of the team structure is just such a perfect way to position the practice moving forward, because you just have less of those headaches. Absolutely so I want you to talk a little bit about this, because your views are quite contrary to some of the commentary in the opinion you know generally about how to run a practice, which I love, because when you actually start talking about it makes so much sense. But one of the things you do talk about which is contrary to many popular opinions is when looking for good talent for your practice. You talk about qualifications versus productivity. Can you walk us through this?

Ed Chan:

Yeah, absolutely, when we help people recruit and you know we've got a recruitment offering product. When they put in an ad in they always go for qualifications CPA or CEA and so forth and for me it's qualifications are important but and I don't want to downplay that, but for me it's more about productivity.

Ed Chan:

I've seen people have got degrees you know three, four degrees but they're really slow in the work. And in our industry it's not just any old accountant you got to hire because some accountant should not work in our industry and they should work in the public service or they should work in commerce because you can take your time to do things over there. But in our industry you've got to be quick. And if you hide somebody who took three hours to do a task as opposed to somebody else who took only an hour to do the task, you might pay them the same, but the one that takes three hours to do it is extremely expensive because they're just so slow and their productivity is so low. And the other thing with qualifications is it doesn't guarantee productivity. When they're fully qualified and they're very sort of sought after, if you like, because of their qualifications, because everybody out there is after qualifications and you can just see the ads, you know they need to be CPA and this and that. And then, because they're so sought after, often when things don't go so well in business they'll just move. It's so easy to move, but when they got less qualifications, it's harder for them to move because they're not suited to the advertisements that are out there.

Ed Chan:

For me, if I had a choice, it's all about productivity and obviously if someone was qualified, and that's great. But more important to me is can you do the work and how fast can you do it? And in the accountant side, in the grinding side, you know, when we recruit we put them through a test that not only tells us they can do the tasks that they say they can do it, because often someone will say to you yeah, I can do that, but we actually get them to do the task. So we know that. You know their definition of can do it is not different to our definition of can do something. And then we measure how slow or fast they are. So time them.

Ed Chan:

That's the key to the way we recruit, whereas most of the other recruitment agencies don't do that. They just look at people's qualifications, look at their personality and look at their experience and they don't identify productivity. So I know I think differently to most firms. People always say that to me oh, you just write out here in your thinking and it's always opposite to whatever everybody else is thinking. I know that, but it's about outcomes. The decisions you make each day starts with your thinking, because those decisions you make leads to actions and actions leads to outcomes, and outcomes determines where you end up in life. So you've got to start with your thinking. Part of these programs is to help you think the correct way so you can make the right decisions.

Brenton Ward:

Qualifications versus productivity. Jamie, you have hands on helping firms at the moment. You know recruit for certain roles and you've had pushback when you've told you know practice owners to remove the need for certain qualifications on job ads and then, having seen the result of you know, an influx of decent candidates comes through as a result. Any comments on that?

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, I think it's just where we get the advice from Brenton. So you know, over the years when you start your own firm you know most of us got your own bookkeeping company or a counting company and you know you've either got a cert for you've got some sort of qualification, you've got a university degree or you know you're either one of the members of the professional body. So it's almost instinctive that when you're hiring on your position description you know you put CPA or CA, you know required or preferable. So I think it's just instinctive that we do that, given our own education process and four years or whatever at uni, so all the time. So when we go to hire we just instinctively put that on there and you can get lost in the translation between having the right qualifications versus having the right experience.

Jamie Johns:

Or it's pretty easy thing to focus on because when I'm helping people do their job advertisement we want to go really wide in the recruiting process. So if you just sort of have on their CPA qualification or whatever qualification we require, you're really limiting the scope, or the net, if you like, of who you're going to hire Brent. So it just reflects its experience and the practicality of seeing who is actually productive. For example, this morning I was on a, you know, a mentoring call and, going through team design, one of the people that we had actually had like a PhD in management or an MBA in tax and I was like, wow, you know, this person must be super awesome and actually the firm owner said, oh no, I'm thinking about getting rid of him. So you know, I wasn't a laughing about this email. You're reading that the fact that you can just focus too much on qualification, qualification in missing the whole point. We want to focus on productivity and getting results.

Ed Chan:

Two of the best people I've ever had in firm and we've got 160 people right across Australia and two of the best people I've had. Two ladies, and one of them worked for me as a receptionist when I was quite small and she was such a nice people person and she indicated to me that she wanted to bookkeeping. So I trained her up on bookkeeping and then she did accounting and then, before you know it, she was managing around, in today's terms, around 700,000 Australian dollars in accounting fees. Had no qualification. She came out of school at 15 years old. She came to me with one of these you know government where they sponsored half their wages so that it encouraged you to hire them.

Ed Chan:

This is when I was quite small, and so I put her as a receptionist and she was really productive and she had really good interpersonal skills. So she was a real people person anyway. So I trained her up on bookkeeping and then she did accounting no, she didn't even finish year 12, right. So she came at 15 or 16 to work for me and then she managed this portfolio of 700,000 or 800,000 fees. But I partnered her up with a CPA, a chartered accountant, and the chartered accountant was very, very strong technically but he couldn't communicate with the clients. You know, whereas Trudy that's her name she had this really easy way about her and communicating with the clients. So I partnered them up together and they looked after 800 grand in to this day and she went and became a full-time mum and no longer worked but to this day clients still asked where's Trudy. You know, I just loved the way she was able to connect with me. So now if I had put in the ad CPA, I would have missed that person. And I've got another person called Elizabeth and she's the same. She has no qualifications.

Ed Chan:

But the other good thing about it was and this might be a really selfish thing is that firstly loved where she worked. So she loved where we were. But because everybody else when she looked in an ad, everybody else was asking for CA and CPA and all that, she couldn't apply for those jobs. So from a selfish point of view I got to keep her and I know that's a selfish way of looking at things, but it's great because you know what it's like in life.

Ed Chan:

You go, things go up and they go down, and sometimes you have bad days and sometimes you have good days and when you've got too many options. You know, when you have a bad day you tend not to stick it out, because everybody knows that when you have a bad day it will come good. You just got to stick at it and it will come good. But when you have too many options, you tend to take the easy option.

Ed Chan:

And you know, when someone's head-hunting you because you've got so many qualifications and you're so attractive to everybody else, it makes it very difficult. When you've got so many options in front of you, it makes it very option, very difficult to stay, stay the course, stick it out, fix the problem and will come out of the whatever the challenge is at the time. So I'm looking at it from a selfish point of view. But it truly stayed there for, you know, good 16, 18 years and she won out of it because she got great experience working from a receptionist's order way through to a senior client manager. She was getting paid really well at the end there because she was so valuable.

Brenton Ward:

So she won out of it and we won out of it.

Brenton Ward:

I think it as well, certainly in the current environment, that the feedback we're getting from Australia is that it's very hard to find really good talent for certain roles at the moment, and that's been voiced as well in other countries. So you know, and you're also smaller practices are constantly competing with the bigger end of town and also now larger tech companies and industries taking accountants becoming more attractive as well. So having that sort of out of the box thinking certainly allows you to broaden your talent pool that you're working from for when you're recruiting Tim you've been hiring any commentary on, you know, this approach of what Ed and Jamie have been discussing today.

Tim Causbrook:

Yeah, sure, I've hired five offshores this year and three onshore production managers, and in the past we'd go two or three years without hiring anyone. I looked back on it after we kind of had this rapid fire hiring season rather, and I thought the only reason we were able to hire so many people so quickly was because we had the capacity planning, we had the team set up and it just made the hiring just so, so, so easy to do. So I would recommend really getting a sense of, as Ed and Jamie said, don't throw bodies at the problem. What do you actually need? Look at the resource mix, look at your capacity plan, and that can tell you whether or not you need people.

Tim Causbrook:

So you can't do enough planning in that stage, in that early stage, and I've felt at my own business. It is better to have a seat empty than a seat filled by the wrong person. It just is. It doesn't seem intuitive when you're there, but there might be more work to do without that person gone, but it's more pleasurable and the team just clicks. And because we're building these interdependent teams and the firms are interdependent, you really need everyone to be clicking, otherwise the high achievers have resentment. Or if the admin, for instance, is not doing too well, goes back onto the accountants, and so the more that you're building these interdependent teams, just the more important is that you get the hire right off the get go, keep team morale high and keep building these interdependent teams.

Brenton Ward:

That makes a lot of sense. Thomas, you've also been doing quite a bit of hiring over the last 12 months. Would you concur with Tim? And any comments on Ed and Jamie's thoughts?

Thomas Sphabmixay:

Yeah, 100% with Tim. We were in a situation sometime earlier this year where we had a senior production manager left. That basically froze our production and it was really dialed. Work basically did not move. So having a team structure in place makes it really easy to know who you need to get back into that role and that seat. It's not just getting anybody to come in and fill up that role. It's okay. If I lost a senior production manager, I'm going to get a senior production manager or I'm going to restructure the team so that this client manager might have to fill that role for a bit while I get a senior accountant offshore underneath them, and then we'll work our way back up to having those two roles separated again.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

So it makes the whole process a lot more strategic and it's just factual. You're working from the capacity planner the ideal team structure, and that's become very clear. It shouldn't be too difficult of a thing to get Teams admit design to scale. So with your structure it makes it very simple to go about that.

Brenton Ward:

Yeah, that makes perfect sense and Kristy said that certainly tests your systems and processes in place when you have a key seat sitting vacant, Absolutely. So you start to see now all the foundational pieces of the puzzle for why it's overlay each other and how they connect, because the team structure bolts into your traffic flow system, which bolts into your systems and processes. Ed, I think it's important to go back to the roles that we are looking to fill on a daily basis For everyone's benefit. Can we recap on the sort of the find and mind of grinders and what we should be looking for with the lens on of recruitment?

Ed Chan:

Oh, absolutely. This is so important because it's in the spirit of bringing complementary skills to the team. So you know, like, if I use that soccer team analogy, if you've got the wrong person as a goalie and you need someone who's got really good reflexes to stop goals, but they don't have any reflexes, they just stand there whilst the ball gets kicked past them, then they're in the wrong seat and of course they let everybody down, and it doesn't matter how hard the forwards are working. If the goalie is just letting goals in on the other end, it's just counterproductive. So in this team structure here, the senior client manager is only as good as his or her second in charge, and the second in charge the 2IC, if you like is the senior production manager.

Ed Chan:

If the senior production manager the green avatar that you can see is not very good, then the workload just ends up on the senior client manager's desk.

Ed Chan:

You know, and often when you go and talk to a senior client manager, because their role is to increase their portfolio of clients, increase their fees, and the only way that you can do that is to spend more time in front of your clients. Now you talk to them, you do strategy work with them.

Ed Chan:

You do tax planning work with them. You call them up and you have a meeting and tell them the results of their accounts, not just send it out to them in a post. In order to do those things, you need to work below you to get done. But if the senior production manager below them is hopeless and they end up having to check everything themselves and they're caught up in just doing grinding work, which in this case is checking and reviewing, then they can't do their job properly. And Tim can share with you an experience where you had the wrong senior production manager in place, which is the green avatar, and we kept thinking that the senior client manager was hopeless, but in fact it was the senior production manager and as soon as we replace that person, the whole thing flowed. I'll just throw it across to Tim to share that experience with us.

Tim Causbrook:

Yeah, sure, we've got a senior client manager and every month she'd failed to hit her targets for about six months and her two ICs, it says, wanting to be a client manager, they didn't want to do any production and or they didn't want to manage any production and so the people underneath weren't being used. And whenever we said what's going on, they said I don't have enough time and she was working back late the two IC. As soon as she said I don't have enough time, something clicked in my head and I realized that she had a grinder mentality and she was in the wrong seat. So you can see there at the client manager there we put her in the production manager seat, but she really wanted to be in the client manager seat and she was actually fulfilling the grinding roll underneath there. And what happened was when we got rid of her, she actually left her own accord. She didn't want to manage people. We put someone else in there and that person said I don't have enough resources and we started hiring more people offshore for her. And I realized the crucial difference between the manager was not saying I don't have enough time because they're thinking of grinding and doing it all themselves, but saying I don't have enough resources. They're thinking about a whole team leveraging basically their knowledge across a whole team to get it done.

Tim Causbrook:

And once we put that production manager in place, her team was doing the fees they'd scheduled each month and it's upwards of 100k a month and it was that one person that made all the difference. It wasn't a body count thing. Initially. We only had one grinder offshore underneath her by onshore. Rather, we actually subbed out the 2IC that wasn't doing. It. Put in the right manager in the 2ICC did not increase the head count and they were flowing through more work and that was kind of that Ed's whole thing of two plus two equals five. It's just not about head count. Before I met Ed, I would have just kept throwing more and more people at the team and they would have all it, just wouldn't have had any significant output increase.

Brenton Ward:

So that was a huge lesson for me. So, Jamie, you're actively obviously again hiring for yourself and other firms between these three roles of finders, miners and grinders, where we've got client managers, senior production managers and accountants. Any commentary on the different recruitment approach for each of those three roles?

Jamie Johns:

Thanks, Brenton. Particularly with the client manager roles, it's really a focus on those people being the classic people, person type skills, so they've got to have good emotional intelligence, They've got to have good interpersonal skills. That's like the number one thing, particularly with the client managers. You couldn't stress that enough. I mean, across the board and all the highs, we always look at attitude, Attitude. I think we often forget we might find someone who's fantastic, fuel-wise or qualification-wise, but you just can't train attitude. So often, when we're so close to hiring it ourselves, we forget to see the attitude, the attitude displayed in literally every time there's a contact point in the hiring process the ability to fill out forms, the ability to respond quickly. It's just every contact point you have just shows the attitudes like. And if you've got attitude, that's one of the main things to work with across all the different areas, all the different highs.

Jamie Johns:

But talking about the senior production manager, those type of people they're not so much a people person but they're very technical. So you need someone in that green avatar to be a very technical person. The ability to review work, the ability to fix areas and not just say, oh it's quicker if I fix it myself, that's like the number one thing. You should have someone in that role who has the ability and the right attitude where you can say to them well, can you review the team's work and send back review points? Don't just fix it yourself, because send back review points so that the whole team learns in the process and not just say it's quicker if I do it myself. So the senior production manager's role, along with the assistant court manager and the senior court manager, they're really the stable terminals that you want on the team and particularly as you've got a fee base that goes from $600,000 and then up to $1 million, they're really the two barriers and on that journey, if you can fulfill those two roles, you're well on your way to building a solid team.

Jamie Johns:

The senior climate manager is there the hardest to find, I think. Ed always says that people with good interpersonal skills you're sort of just born with that DNA in that sense and you're either like people or you don't, and there's about 20% of the population, I guess, because it can be very hard to teach interpersonal skills, whereas it's a lot easier to find people who are like the accountants and the bookkeepers and that just get through the work, do that production work. So once you design this team and you find each person in that seat from a very strategic level, then you can get that traffic flowing right, and we always talk about what we call the communication and the production traffic. So, yeah, hopefully that's a bit of a summary of the different roles there and the skills that you require.

Ed Chan:

Just wanted to add to what Jamie said is that in that senior climate manager role, where they're facing the client and they've got the relationship with the client, you want to hire an intrapreneurial person, not an entrepreneurial person. Tim was looking for a senior climate manager and Tim's dad's from the old school and he chose this guy that was very, very entrepreneurial. The problem with an entrepreneurial person is that eventually they'll leave and take those clients with them and then you'll have a problem long term. The intrapreneurial person is more inclusive. They want to work in the team. They don't want to go out there and work for themselves. So you've just got to be very careful that you don't hire that entrepreneurial person. And I remember Tim and I was debating Tim's dad about the person that he chose, because we thought that, yes, on the surface he looked, really he was perfect. He was just a perfect person, but he was just too entrepreneurial. We had to convince dad that we needed this other person that was more suitable. I'll let Tim talk about that.

Tim Causbrook:

Yeah, thanks, buddy. The person that my dad wanted is the CEO and founder. They really had good personal skills and they were able to sell themselves and we caught them out in a couple of not lies but they exaggerated what they knew about something and we actually went with the second person we interviewed it was probably the worst job interview I've ever been in my life, like she was almost crying. She kept stuttering, muttering. My dad said have a glass of water, calm down, it's okay. It was so bad.

Tim Causbrook:

I learned something pretty important there Most accounts cannot sell themselves. I had to bring it out of her. I was like have you managed? She said yeah, yeah, yeah. I said offshore, onshore. She said offshore, but how many? Five? And I was like, oh my gosh, this is it.

Tim Causbrook:

She left and my dad said there's no way we'd hire her. She can't talk to clients or she just wasn't impressive. I don't want to say she's the best production hire I've ever had because I've got someone's spouse also in that role, but she did an amazing, amazing job and I put her with the pickiest account I've ever met and she cannot say a bad word about her, which floored me. Ed and Jamie say be objective. My gut feeling was that she could do the job.

Tim Causbrook:

But if I didn't have this image in my mind of what I needed in that role, I definitely would have passed on her. Like, if you know, if I'd interviewed her six months before I met Ed and Jamie, 100% without a doubt would have passed on her. And I love this because when you're being objective about it, I'm sure a lot of other firms would pass on her as well. And what you can do is, as Ed says, he's looking for something that other people aren't looking for but that gives you an actual advantage when you're out there in the market. And it's a very, very tough hiring market right now really tough hiring. In the last six months, offshore and on shore, it's just gotten tougher and tougher, probably because of the closures, the border closures but anything that gives you that edge over your competitors in hiring is just a huge benefit to you and your firm.

Brenton Ward:

In my opinion, what has been for me Jamie, can you just take us over the four steps of the hiring process you've developed out? I mean, I know over the last two months you've helped firms hire. I think we've hired about 25 people in practices over the last two months. So, using this process, can you talk us through it?

Jamie Johns:

Absolutely In terms of the process. It's all about the process. If you've got a goal, the goal is one thing, that's the what. But you must have a process or a system of how to get to the goal and that's part of why I was telling of what we do. It's interesting to see what Tim says. I've been on interviews where the person just hasn't talked. We've done an interview like this and there was one interview with an offshore accountant. They were almost like rude you could have seen it as rude and the firm was like we said oh no, that's a. You know, I can't work and that's a bad hole out and they just wanted to like the person. I said you don't have to like them, that's just their personality. You're not hiring on personality, not in this particular role as an accountant Anyhow. So we went, you know we followed the process which you've got there on the screen, and in the end, you know it turned out the person was just nervous in the interview and they turned out to be a fantastic hire because they were just such an outspoken person. So I just come back to being that objective. You don't have to like the person that you're interviewing, that's number one and just follow the process. So you know, analyze.

Jamie Johns:

The first sort of steps are in this analysis is do we actually need someone? So go back to your capacity plan. Do you have enough team members or have you got too many? So you know, that's sort of the first thing is, if you need capacity, well, which person do you actually need on the audio team? You know, is it a client manager, is it a senior production manager or is it a bookkeeper or an accountant? Like, actually determine who you need. Then make sure, if you're going to hire, that you take the team on the journey. You know, I've seen firm owners but they just go and hire someone. They don't even tell the team about what they're doing. So importantly, communicate with your team and go together on that journey, don't just hire someone. And so you know you've really got to determine who you need. So, capacity, the resource mix, who do you actually need?

Jamie Johns:

Then you've got to go through the process of testing the candidates and, as Ed said, give them the array of tests you know, give them a thousand tasks to do and if they do the task successfully and look at their time that they respond in, or the time they take to do the test and what score they get on the test and they compare that with two or three candidates. You're well in your way of being objective. So the biggest thing is that you must have a process, and the process that we've developed to wise recruit is you know all my 20 odd years class of experience and Ed's as well and everything that we see every day in this recruiting area, which is really hard area to nail, and you know one of the biggest problems we've got, but it's followed the process that we have right down to assessing them and then onboarding them as well. You know what's the process to onboard them and bring them in the firm, I think. Just finally, brent, the only comment I'll make is it's really a marketing and advertising role.

Jamie Johns:

You've got to really cast a wide net and that starts with the job description. A lot of the firms that we work with we ask them to do a video of themselves. You know, and people really shy away from that because it's outside their comfort zone. But people in this day and age, they want you to be authentic, they want to see you and they want to know why they should work for your firm over someone else. So it's an old saying a picture tells a thousand words and then also manage the expectations up front what's salary, what are the working hours, where are we working, what's the logistics? So get the big rocks sorted out. You know, I've seen processes where they've gone through all the interview and got down to it and they didn't agree on the salary and just wasted everyone's time. So, yeah, very important to follow that process, Brenton.

Ed Chan:

Really important that you don't judge a book by its cover. It's so, so, such a big mistake. And both Tim said that and Jamie said that. People that don't look right and not necessarily the wrong people, and the only way you can identify those right people is through the process and put them through the process, and then that makes it easier. I mean, it's only human nature to hire someone that you like and someone that you know simulates with your personality and so forth, but it's all about productivity. If you like the person, that's a bonus, but the first thing is about productivity. Can they do the job and how productive are they? They shouldn't take three hours to do something when everybody else is taking one hour to do it.

Ed Chan:

And so that's the first priority, then the second one. It all sort of falls in around that. But the process will identify that productive person for the right role. So the person who's a senior client manager has a different recruitment process to the senior production manager Just different positions on the field and they do different things. So the process that you take them through is different because the roles are different. So I can't stress enough, reaffirm what Jamie is saying you go through the process, don't take shortcuts and once you find that person, be really quick in taking them on, because good people go very, very quickly. I've seen firms do all the hard work identifying the person and spend too little time and start to hesitate and before and then they offer them the job, it's too late. Candidates accepted another job application. So be quick, they don't hang around.

Brenton Ward:

As we mentioned a couple of times throughout this process, one of the things that we've noticed over the last couple of years with Wize is the fact that this is just such a big challenge for practices and, as Ed mentioned, we've spent the better part of 30 or 40 years defining the team structure and each of the positions within the team structure and then the hiring process around that.

Brenton Ward:

So over the last couple of months we've had a lot of requests and we've been working quite hands on with the firms that we mentor one to one in actually helping them hire, certainly directly offshore roles Now there are a lot of more people hiring directly offshore but also for senior client manager roles and onshore roles. So we've actually bottled up that process into a service that we've been testing with a number of firms over the last three months called WIS Talent, and essentially what we've created. Wis Talent is a service that we are now offering and keep it in your back pocket whenever you need to hire. Next, if you want to know more information about it, you can go to wisementoringcom forward slash wise talent. Yeah, we'd love to see you guys use that whenever you need to. Jamie, any comments on that?

Jamie Johns:

Like other than yeah, it's just the combination of fine tuning, fine tuning, fine tuning, between all my experience and Ed's, of course, and the other mentors and even the 25 or 30 highs that we've done. We just continually keep improving at Brenton and it's just the pure process to follow. One thing I've realized in business over all these years every time I go away from a process that I know that works, I end up holding the baby. So I couldn't stress to follow the process that's proven to work. Don't focus on the 20%, always focus on the 80% per day as principal, and that's the best way to think to assure the outcomes that you want.

Brenton Ward:

Absolutely, Ed anything to finish that off.

Ed Chan:

Probably the wrong person because I'm a bit biased, but it's the best thing since sliced bread. I'm sorry, but it absolutely is. Just makes that complicated part of running your business. You get it wrong and just so much drama. You get it right and the whole thing is just beautiful, like, yeah, I just can't say good enough things about it. But again, I'm biased, you're very biased.

Brenton Ward:

That's fine. We're all out of it, In terms of talent, what's your opinion on referrals from current employees?

Jamie Johns:

Excellent. There's many different avenues and ways to seek out and define talent, and referrals from your existing team is fantastic because often they'll have a friend that works somewhere else and they're not doing things like what you're doing. Again, one of the biggest hurdles, brent, is just seeking out that white casting, that white net, and just getting that referrals is great. I even come down to the point where, if you're happy to pay a small fee, a small referral fee for the successful hire- yeah, but still put them through the Wize Talent process.

Ed Chan:

Because quite a few years ago a friend referred a colleague to me and I knew this person and it was so embarrassing because I put them through the recruitment and they failed it. So I had to tell this friend I'm sorry you didn't cut the grade. It was really embarrassing but it was the right thing to do, and for him as well as for us, because the last thing he wants to do on his resume is to show he's been here for six months and being there for six months and that doesn't look good on his resume.

Jamie Johns:

Exactly yeah, put them through the process.

Brenton Ward:

Shouldn't the job be different from the job description?

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, the job at itself should be quite wide. The problem is you can make the job advertisement quite narrow and so you limit the number of people that apply for it, and you just got to realize there can be sort of cultural differences there as well. So I've had the direct experience where I've seen a job ad quite pinpointed in terms of the role, the years of experience, very specific if you like. And then I've seen through discussions and networks and just talking and dialogue with people who have actually been very, very qualified to apply for that job, but they thought they weren't up to it threatening I think that's a little bit like in the Philippines culture. It's like, oh, that job's beyond me, when in fact it isn't. So you've sort of got to take into those idiosyncrasies.

Jamie Johns:

But I do believe the job advertisement is a marketing exercise and you want to cast a wide net in that sense, and then from that we use an applicant tracking system. Then you work on just filtering that down to the ideal candidate. So that is a process, and the quicker that you can do that process is the quicker that you'll find the right candidate and ultimately it's really building trust. Britain, you've got to have the ability to go on the recruitment journey, build trust with the person and then ultimately say, look, this is where I think you fit and just reveal information as you build rapport and trust with that person and then eventually put them in the right seat. It's that rapport and trust and you build that as you go and find the right person from the right seat.

Ed Chan:

And I just add to what Jamie just said very quickly. So it's really important that you don't put titles like a senior production manager or a senior client manager, because their terms that we use here, but out in the bigger market they don't use those terms and you could easily put somebody off because they're thinking a senior production manager needs to do certain things, but they've got a misunderstanding of it. So just be very general in your titles, like a senior accountant that manages people or something that's very general, so that you're casting a wide net and then when they come into your net they go through this process and you'll filter them out to the right person. So that's really important. I think some people make the mistake of using our terms on their ads and people just don't know what they are and it puts people off. Well, people weren't applied because they think they weren't qualified for it.

Brenton Ward:

Yeah, thank you so much for joining us for another what I hope was a valuable session for you. Let's continue on this conversation in the Wize Tribe. For anyone who hasn't joined the Wize Tribe, it's on Facebook. Join the conversation, ask as many questions as possible. We're on there 24, seven and Jamie, Tim, and Thomas. Thank you, guys, for your insights today. Have a fantastic afternoon or evening or night, wherever you are. Thanks, guys. Thanks for tuning in. If you liked this episode, please remember to subscribe and leave us a five star review For more practical, wise tips on how to build a business that runs without you. Head over to wizementoring/ podcast to download a free copy of the Accountants 20 hour workweek playbook. We've included a link in the show notes below. See you on the next episode!