Episode 82: Wize Factor Chat: Anthony Luvisetto - iCompass Professional Advisors

What if you could transform your small practice into a successful, autonomous business with a dedicated team? 

In this episode of The WizeFactor Chat of The Wize Guys Podcast,  we had a conversation with Anthony, a thriving owner of an accounting and bookkeeping practice, iCompass Professional Advisors in Australia.

Anthony's journey began in 2005 and, like many entrepreneurs, he started by taking on any client to generate income. His turning point came when he shifted focus to cater exclusively to businesses. Reflecting upon his evolution, Anthony credits his substantial growth to joining the Wize Mentoring Group, which provided him with accountability and a structure that has led his firm to become a well-oiled machine operating without his constant involvement.

The idea of letting go can be daunting, but as Anthony explains, it's an integral part of growth. He opens up about his personal journey through the art of delegation, a skill that has been pivotal to his firm's success. He admits it wasn't easy giving up tasks he'd traditionally handled himself, but the rewards were worth the leap of faith. Hear Anthony's insights on how finding the right person for each job and outsourcing tasks to his team has freed up his time. This allowed him to see the bigger picture, focus on what truly matters, and drive his business forward. Anthony's story reminds us that progress is a continuous journey - one where postponing is not an option. 

So, if you're looking to transition from a time-pull practice to a business that can run without you, then this enlightening conversation with Anthony is a must-listen!

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Transcript

Anthony Luvisetto: 0:01

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.

Wize Mentoring: 0:14

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.

Wize Claudia: 0:35

Thank you, Anthony, for being with me today. So, I mentioned a while ago that we're doing thes Wize Factor sessions with our most prized members because we think that they are making our community greater. They are always supporting us. They have been loyal members and long-standing members because I noticed that you have been on since 2020 if I recall correctly.

Anthony Luvisetto: 1:00

That would sound about right.

Wize Claudia: 1:02

Yeah, I think so. So that's perfect, and I wanted to go through a couple of questions about your firm and see what makes you the loyal member and the great member that you are. So, Anthony, let's start from the beginning. I want to know some backstory about you, your firm when you started, and why did it start? And if you have any interesting facts or anything that you want to share about it, you can go ahead.

Anthony Luvisetto: 1:29

Yes. So I suppose technically I got my tax agent license back in like 2005, I think it was. So I did do a little bit of tax work, but that was sort of on the side of what was my normal employee. It wasn't until 2010 that I officially focused on the business. It got to a size where I had to make a decision of staying in my old employment or breaking out and doing my own thing. So 2010 is when I officially started. All of that Subsequent to that built the business up from scratch and today we have around 12 people on our team I think most businesses.

Anthony Luvisetto: 2:12

When we started we would take pretty much any client we could to generate some income. But as we've moved forward we definitely focus on businesses. So we don't do individual tax returns. We focus on businesses and our setup is sort of like a family group where we look at their business, their investments, and their sort of individual members within that group and try to provide their compliance work, tax returns, and things, but heavily focused also on support and development and advisory work to help them achieve whatever their goals are. The reason that I ultimately joined the Wize Mentoring Group was that initially, I would often make comments to my wife about how if I only listened to the advice I give, our clients would be so much better off. But it's not so much the knowledge or the advice, it was the accountability that was the issue.

Anthony Luvisetto: 3:11

So, when I talked to a client we're going to catch up next week or next month, they had a number of tasks to do. Because they had to meet with me and tell me what they'd done, there was an accountability that came into play. I didn't have that accountability for myself, so I had my little listing of what I wanted to do, but of course, I justified it by not doing it because I had other things to do. At the end of the month, I didn't achieve any of my goals. The next month I didn't achieve it. I could potentially have six months go past and I haven't achieved anything. I needed that accountability more than anything.

Anthony Luvisetto: 3:48

So initially I actually got involved in I think it's called the WISE Vault, where it was like a lower subscription and it's a bit of a do-it-yourself type scenario. I was using that. I watched a few different videos, and read a few different things. I could actually see the value of it. But again, my issue was accountability that after a couple of months I wasn't using it and I was just paying this subscription and getting nothing out of it because I wasn't doing anything.

Anthony Luvisetto: 4:16

Not that the subscription wasn't valuable, but it was because I wasn't using it. So I did decide to then make the jump, and it was psychologically a big financial jump to invest in the mentoring pathway and I probably did that. I'm only guessing, but it would have been around 15, maybe 18 months ago that I did that and Tim is the mentor that I have and that's worked out really well because I suppose there is a structure and a process that you have at Wize Mentoring that was sort of stepped through and followed those videos that I was talking about earlier. I can then watch them to support it. So I found that quite good. And then I sort of had a structure that I had developed in the business prior to joining you. That was sort of in alignment, but not quite. But I could see the value of the Wise Mentoring one. So I developed our structure a little bit further in regards to our teams and the people within our teams to sit alongside that Wize Mentoring method.

Anthony Luvisetto: 5:28

And today, definitely that's great. We're still working through everything, but what it means is we actually now have a couple of teams of people that look after the client process all the work, review it, sign it off, and do everything, of which I really only do the very last glance before it goes out to the client, just to satisfy myself because ultimately it's my signature on it. But the other guys look after everything, and some of these are clients that I see the names pop up. I don't know who they are, but I don't need to know who they are. I just need to know we're following our processes and that everything's happening, and I can validate that by the way we do it. So it means more work is happening, completely autonomous to me and keeping our business running irrespective of what I'm doing, and I can then focus more time on the bigger clients that I want to deal with or just running the business.

Wize Claudia: 6:26

Wow, that's so, so, so cool to hear you literally answered all my questions.

Anthony Luvisetto: 6:32

I do have Sorry, okay, no, no, no, but that's amazing.

Wize Claudia: 6:36

I love to hear, like the storyline from when you started and where you are now. I do have one question. I'm curious to know what made you think because you talked about accountability you were doing this for your clients, but this was not happening for you. What challenge was going on? What was stopping you from growth, apart from accountability? But what you feel was not clicking enough was not there yet for you to grow when you started working with Tim, or when you started the Wize videos. Like why did you feel that you needed support? Apart from the accountability, what was going on? What was keeping you up at night, if you want to call it like that?

Anthony Luvisetto: 7:20

Yeah, I suppose in answering that I'll take an approach that and this is for anyone that might listen to this it's not a question of you not being capable. It's got nothing to do with capability. I started a business from scratch. I didn't buy a practice or buy things. I just went out and found a client, then found another client. So I've started from absolute scratch. We now have 12 people on the team. I wanna ease a little bit more pressure on my life from work, but really I'm getting very close to where I want to be and everything's running smoothly. So I consider myself to be quite successful in all of that. Yet I needed assistance. So I'm not saying I definitely don't think people should look at this as being I need assistance so I'm not achieving, I'm not meeting the expectation. It's got nothing to do with the expectation. It's got to do with getting your goals and how do you do it? So that challenge I had, which I think will be pretty common across the board, is that people will be overwhelmed by work, and that's what happened with me. I was overwhelmed by work. So the accountability aspect was I had two jobs in front of me the job of working on the business and dealing with certain things to make it better. And the job of working in the business and the in the business side was definitely when I was a little bit smaller. I didn't have an array of team members that I could refer to or they were more junior, so I couldn't give them certain complexities of work. So that meant that a lot of it fell back on me and that was just the structure of the business, and financially we couldn't afford to hire more people. We had to be very cautious, so that just meant I had an overload of work and the problem that happened was I would always put the pressures of getting a job out the door so we could get paid over making the business head in the right direction.

Anthony Luvisetto: 9:21

One of the things that I've heard in many of the Wize Mentoring sort of group sessions where Ed often makes reference to this, is that you're not actually incurring an expense by hiring a new person. You're investing in the business by hiring a new person. So simple words, easy to say. Potentially a little bit harder when it comes to the cash flow of a small business, but it's very true that what we're actually doing is we're wearing a bit of a cost today, but if you manage it correctly and you plan for it correctly, literally within a couple of months you should be generating more income. That's compensating you for that person's job that they're doing, and there may be a short-term reduction in your own salary to where that cost is. That might be a requirement. Now that we're 12 people. We're at a point where that's not the case. When I plan to hire someone, I don't have to take a reduction in salary. There might be a little bit of a hit to our cash flow but I'm able to cater for that. So we've got to that point. When going back, when we were sort of four people, that was a different scenario.

Anthony Luvisetto: 10:33

But one of the other things that I think popped up that Tim made reference to and I often refer to it myself is that all and it's a classic saying we often see is just do one thing a day, just one thing hand it over to someone, or do it. That it removes you from the equation and it could be minor, but each time we do it it requires a little bit of extra effort to do that, because you might have to write an instruction on how to do it. You might have to take someone through it, but if it's a minor thing and you do it every day, what you have to remember is that little bit of effort. Today is a real pain and it's an overload on everything else, but what it means is tomorrow it's no longer part of your day, it's gone, it's a job that's finished and someone else is looking after it and someone else is doing it. So if you could do that every single day with just little jobs, what you will find by the end of the week, is five little jobs that you're no longer looking after. Yeah, some of the things are just simple things that I look back at now, and I sort of chuckle to myself about the fact that I kept these jobs for so long and doing them so long, this routine.

Anthony Luvisetto: 11:46

But because of those things that Tim said and kept reminding me, I have been successful in being able to hand them over, and it's to the extent that have I handed them over. I actually know nothing about them. I've lost complete understanding because they've got nothing to do with my work. They're just things that I did because I historically did so. From that perspective, I think a lot of it is just recognizing what should I be doing in my role versus what should others be doing and trying to redirect that work and that support of someone who's independent, just reminding me that, Anthony, you're still buying milk for the office. Why are you doing that? Anyone can buy milk and it was just that I suppose I'd always done it, so I just pulled into the shop and bought it. I handed that over to someone, which was the easiest task to hand over, and I've never thought about milk again yet. We always have milk in the fridge, and it's just silly little things like that that someone just has to prompt you Not that Tim knew I bought the milk, and not that he's necessarily said that. It was just that prompt of saying, well, what do you do and what can you hand over?

Anthony Luvisetto: 12:56

So that little bit of feedback every single time just makes me reconsider what value I'm bringing to the bigger picture by maintaining something versus handing it over. And then the extension of that is, Tim will always ask me how that went, whatever it was, and so next time I know I have to sort of explain it. And occasionally I have to say to him look, I haven't looked at it, I haven't dealt with it. It's been a bit of a hard week or month, so I haven't addressed it. But it then becomes a bit more of a priority to address it the next month and actually achieve the outcome. So it's just making sure that someone external that's not emotionally involved or confused in the arrangement is just giving you feedback and that you're then having to explain how you progressed with it. And I might disagree with some things and I may not do them, but it's a structured and thought decision rather than just being another week gone by with no action.

Wize Claudia: 13:58

Absolutely, and from what you were sharing now about delegating and doing a minor task today teaching someone else this minor task and tomorrow not having to buy the milk. As you said, we always talk about this. This is kind of our big thing here at wise. We want to help practice owners withdraw from the business, to step back from their divisions, and some people are on our own track. Some are kind of scared about it, some are excited and running toward that. So I wanted to ask you particularly I think you are very comfortable with what you've been saying but having a business that runs without you, how does that make you feel like? How does that make you feel Like, how does that phrase make you feel? Does it make you feel excited, scared, and confident because you have a team? Now that's what it sounds like, but I'm not going to assume. I just wanted to ask you.

Anthony Luvisetto: 14:51

Yeah, oh, look, definitely, if we talk about it as of today, excited. I'm not there yet, but I've significantly progressed in that way from where I was before. When it all first started it was a run of comments of I'm going to do this and this is how it'll be and this will be great. But when reality hit and I had to do certain things, there was a hesitation in handling things, losing day-to-day visibility of certain things. So again, for anyone that's sort of looking at entering into the Wize system, you've got to remember that it's not an overnight activity and it's not an overnight business. It's not an overnight release of responsibility and all these other things. It does take a little bit of time to build that up. So what happens is, I suppose, have to work alongside your team. So we have a gentleman called Robert on our team. These days Robert's a senior client manager, so he has his own clients. He has his own sub-team that works on those clients and everything. Initially, he was always the senior accountant who was sort of my second in charge and would back me up. But what would happen is we devoted more effort to him coming to meetings with me and working on things. Now coming to meetings meant that we were duplicating the cost of him and me sitting in a meeting. He was quite expensive compared to a lot of the other team members, so definitely we wore a few costs there. We couldn't pass that on to the client. It was my decision to take him along, but what it meant was when we came back to the office very quickly he was able to just start taking over all of the responsibilities behind the scene. So I didn't have to then sit down with him, go through things, not even get involved in a lot of the things, and some of our clients, which are decent size clients and might have audit activities that happen later and they need someone to be heavily involved in understanding it all, it actually got to the point that I wasn't involved in it at all. Robert basically looked after the whole thing. So we actually, in the bigger picture, became financially better off by having Robert attend that meeting, taking on that responsibility because my charge outrate was higher. My cost to the business is higher, so I was just involved in the client direct meetings. Robert then took over 90% of the activity outside of that and the 10% that was left is just where we communicated, and touched on some sort of delicate matters, but he looked after the whole thing. It meant that he built confidence himself in dealing with the clients and dealing with the audit issues and other matters, and there were some challenging queries that popped up. So what resulted as an extension of all of that was I built up confidence in him and what it meant to them. When he took on his first round of clients direct. They were as Wize Mentoring sort of group referred to it.

Anthony Luvisetto: 17:55

You grade your clients from A through to D. A is a strong, positive client, that's of a lot of value. D being a client that our D is a client, that is not of significant value and if we were to lose them it wouldn't be detrimental to us. So he took over a lot of C and D clients, meaning if something went wrong we weren't running the risk of losing a big client, and he had confidence in doing that. So that confidence built in him, it built in me, and then eventually he got someone helping him and he ultimately broke away and became his own senior client manager.

Anthony Luvisetto: 18:32

Now that whole transition was probably over two years to get to that point.

Anthony Luvisetto: 18:37

He's now been running that for a year and that's been running beautifully and he's now, just in recent times, even started to highlight things to me that I was commenting to him, that I was very impressed with where he's progressed to, because he's now taking a new level of review of a client for both the client's long term future and our long term future with that client and trying to plan things that we might be at A to today.

Anthony Luvisetto: 19:06

That helps the client in the future, helps us and everyone sort of get a better outcome. So that's all worked out and that's helped us move into that development situation after a number of years of working at it. So now I can back away from pretty much 90% of those clients and, as I said, there's a number of clients that pop up that I've never heard of before. That sort of caught me by surprise because I don't know who they are. But then I think about it and I think, well, Robert does, and I don't need to know who they are, he's achieving it. So those goals of being more autonomous and not having to work in the business much are definitely more real and more, I suppose, palatable or accepting now. So it's a progression.

Wize Claudia: 19:52

Yeah, I love to hear that, and it makes so much sense with what you were saying earlier, that a new hire is a cost for the first few months but then, just like a perfect case of Robert becoming an asset.

Anthony Luvisetto: 20:10

Correct.

Wize Claudia: 20:11

He is crucial to your firm right now because he is allowing you to have more free time to delegate to not know the names of some clients to those clients, but know that they're very well taken care of. So that's amazing. So happy to hear that. That's actually even better than what I was coming here from you and lace to that, I have one last question that I wanted to hear from you. You were saying that you now have more free time, and I wanted to know what's one thing you enjoy doing in your leisure time, a hobby that you have, that you now get to spend more time, with that you are excited to spend more time in when you have even more free time.

Anthony Luvisetto: 20:55

Yeah, I think, like a lot of businesses, we got to the point where pre- COVID actually during COVID and post- COVID our workflow shot up significantly and became overwhelming. And I suppose, being the owner, the buck stops with me and I absorbed as much of that as I could. So it actually meant that Monday to Friday my hours became longer. At the moment they're definitely better, but they're still longer than a third. But the big issue was that my weekends started to be absorbed into work matters, sometimes all weekend, sometimes Sundays.

Anthony Luvisetto: 21:37

The thing I like the best at the moment is I've actually got a bit of life back in the sense that I don't really do work on the weekend. If I do, it's a rare occurrence and it would only be an hour over the whole weekend. So I now have my weekends free, which means that I get to enjoy time with family. I like a bit of gardening, so get to do that. It's just starting to warm up here with spring starting and there's lovely sunshine, so I get to go out, walk the dogs, enjoy the sunshine. So just the sense of freedom in being able to do things rather than effectively being locked up on my computer or at work is wonderful and it also mentally makes my Monday to Friday easier to do because I've actually got the benefit of the weekend when before there was no distinction and it was just another day, seven days a week. You were doing things, so it was exhausting. So freedom and time with sort of friends and family.

Wize Claudia: 22:42

Sounds so simple, but it actually is major for most of these practice owners who are flat out not even able to see the spring and the sunlight on most days. So yeah, that's amazing to hear that you've gained a normal schedule, like average schedules, like Monday through Friday back.

Anthony Luvisetto: 23:03

Yes.

Wize Claudia: 23:04

And yeah, the beauty and the simple it is.

Anthony Luvisetto: 23:08

I suppose, just as a side extension or an add on, is that my current goal that I'm working towards is.

Anthony Luvisetto: 23:16

So we're currently at the beginning of October. The goal is by the end of December so the end of the year to actually be at a point where I want to reduce myself from doing a standard 10- day fortnight at standard hours down to doing a nine- day fortnight. So I'm actually looking at recouping more personal time than normal, so not just bringing it into being normal, but actually starting to get more out of it, and I'm well and truly on track to achieve that. Still got a few hurdles to go through, but that will just give me a bit more flexibility. Now, whether I go in on that 10th day or not, to work is purely optional rather than a being a requirement, and that means that's when I feel that I've achieved what my goal is, that I'm now a bit more in control of my life and my workflow and I've got a team that's running everything and and none of our team do material overtime like they're all everything is all based on them doing traditional hours as well. So everyone's happy, which is great.

Wize Claudia: 24:22

Yeah, that's amazing and I love to hear that you're on track, because it does sound like you have so much progress going on. The team is working and things are slowly but surely getting there, so I hope you really get there. You're doing the work, which is the important thing. Yes, not postponing it. So that's the great thing. That's everything I wanted you to share, Anthony. I am so happy that you shared everything. I thank you so much for being with me here today and thank you.

Anthony Luvisetto: 24:55

Thank you.