Episode 88: The Different Concepts of Quad Activities for Every Firm

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In this week's episode of The Wize Guys Podcast, Ed Chan with Wize Mentors, Thomas Sphabmixay, and Timothy Causbrook discuss their understanding of Quad activities which can help in making a robust effective system and strategy for getting referrals for your accounting practice.

Discover the transformative power of self-leadership in elevating your accounting and bookkeeping practice, as we unpack the wisdom shared by our guest, Ed, on this enlightening journey. From mastering the art of self-discipline to the nuances of managing emotions, this episode is an essential guide to leading not just your business, but yourself to unparalleled success. We also delve into the dynamic impact of Wize Mentoring's Quad activities framework, offering you strategies to enhance both business operations and personal efficiency, while steering clear of the dreaded burnout.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn more about boosting your referral marketing!

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PS: Whenever you’re ready… here are the fastest 3 ways we can help you transform your accounting/bookkeeping practice:

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Transcript

Ed Chan: 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.

Thomas Sphabmixay: 0:35

It's so important how a lot of this comes from within. You know the structure, the deep and narrow team, the understanding of the roles. There are a lot of key concepts that come into play and there is no concept talked about as much as we do at Wize than the Quad activities. And it'd be really interesting now actually to see how the Quad activities will help us gain the perspective to build a robust and effective system and strategy for getting referrals. So, with this deep and narrow team, it's also something we can educate them about the Quad activities too. They understood that doing that at a client approval meeting would be a Quad B activity. It's building up the balance sheet. It's building up that emotional bank account rather than just sending it out and trying to get the work done. We can start to see a lot more referrals come through and with the client's NPS improving as well. So, Ed, would you like to just share with us how we can think about building that system and strategy for getting referrals? You know, for that lens of the Quad, the 4 Quads.

Ed Chan: 1:48

Sure, and for those of you who are with us on our WizeG rowth in the growth program, we take you through this and we take your staff through this as well, and everything that you do in your business, or even privately, forcing to these four Quadrants and you just want to get rid of Quad 3 and 4 and that will really give you so much time back. You know, when I remember when I was working in Quad 1, which is urgent and important, that's the Quadrant where you're putting out fires, you're just putting out fires you know I was working over 100 hours a week and then, when I learned this from Dr. Stephen Covey, and I spent my time in Quad B which are urgent things, sorry, which are not urgent things but are very important things then my workload started to drop and it's things like, you know, preparing a tax return, doing the grinding work, is a Quad A activity or Quad 1 activity and you should be delegating that to somebody else to do. Quad 2 or Quad B activity is training someone. If you're training someone, it's important but it's not urgent, so it's a Quad 2 activity. It's very important to train that person, but when you've got disasters and fires, you know, out of control, you drag you back into Quad 1. But quiet to more preventative activities. So when someone says to me 'Oh, you know, I can't trust somebody else to do the work, well, prepare a checklist.' Now preparing a checklist, I'll say, well, I haven't got time to do a checklist, but the checklist is important, but it's not urgent. But as soon as you prepare that checklist then you get more confidence in handing that work to somebody to do and they fill in the checklist to make sure everything is covered. But trying to do that checklist is where it's really important, where it's hard because it's important but it's not urgent. So we jump back into Quad One, which is I've just thought myself, it's quicker. So that's the attitude that I get from client managers it's quicker if I just thought myself right. But by the time I train someone I could have just done it. That's all Quad One activity.

Ed Chan: 3:52

If you spend your life in Quad 1 activity, you'll be working really long hours, like I was, and until I understood this from Dr. Steven Covey, I was working 100 hours work. I was burnt out, I was thinking of getting out of the place and I was trying to address the symptoms and not the problem. And the problem was I was doing the wrong kind of work and I can't stress that enough. And look, it's not easy, I know, and I still have that trouble without my own senior client managers. They still want to jump in there in Quad 1 and they won't spend the time training their staff. So it's not I admit it's not an easy thing, but you've got to lead this. Without leadership from your side then it won't happen. And because they won't know to do it, because they're under pressure with lodgement dates, under pressure with keeping jobs to budget, they've got a lot of Quad 1 activity that they're working on. So he tends to drag them back into Quad 1.

Ed Chan: 4:56

But that's been my most difficult challenge is to get the client managers out of Quad 1 into Quad 2, which is training their staff. If their staff don't know how to do it, then train them. Don't complain about them. Train them and then make sure that they're right, that are the right kind of staff, because some people are not trainable. Doesn't matter how much time you put into trying to train them, they're just not trainable. So if it's a junior person you're training, you have to see improvements every day. If you're not seeing improvements every day, then they're incompetent and it's best to get to move them on. So you've got to get your client managers to do this now.

Ed Chan: 5:35

If you're a small firm and you're doing this, then it's a lot easier to do it.

Ed Chan: 5:38

But trying to get somebody else to do it is always going to be a lot harder.

Ed Chan: 5:41

But, at a very minimum, you've got to be doing it yourself first in order to be able to then train somebody else to do it and show them the way.

Ed Chan: 5:52

Because if you can't see the outcome, it's very hard to tell someone who can't see the outcome or has experienced the outcome to follow you.

Ed Chan: 6:02

Whereas if you do it yourself and you can see the outcome, you can see the results you can see then you can go there with confidence too, because you're always going to get pushed back. So the staff are always going to push back on you and you either follow them or they follow you and you want them to follow you. And in order for them to follow you you've got to have conviction, and in order to have conviction you have to have done it yourself and seen the results, to have that conviction to bring them along in that journey with you. So it's not easy. I'll admit that it's much harder to lead people than it is just to do it yourself. But in order to get scalability and in order to get a better lifestyle, in order to run the business properly so that your clients are winning and your staff is winning and the shareholders are winning in your organisation, you've got to manage the business properly.

Thomas Sphabmixay: 6:54

Thank you, Ed and Tim. I really love the quote that you put into the chat. Actually, people who don't have time to work on Quad 2 activities are the ones who need to work on Quad 2 activities the most. Must have had some first-hand experience working through people to get them thinking Quad B and Quad 2 as well. What are some of the? If you want to share some insights from the journey you're going so far in getting your client managers thinking Quad B thinking, training the staff, and then how's that affected the outcomes of achieving more referrals or more satisfied clients?

Tim Causbrook: 7:37

It's tough. Like Ed said, it's really hard to get other people if you're not your own client manager. It's really hard to get other people with my experience to buy into this and you've got to kind of look at what's motivating them. But in my case, I just kind of showed them that it was impossible for them to scale what they were doing. They couldn't scale themselves. So I had one client manager who took on her assistant client manager's fees. So she went from doing 500K to a million overnight and to avoid having a meltdown we had to really position her to train up the team because it was a fairly new team she was working with as well.

Tim Causbrook: 8:16

We always have that one-year perspective we always talk about and she does a really good job with this. Now she says this is the first year. Training everyone up is an investment. She talks a lot like Ed now, which is a good sign. She said the second year will be easier. I've seen this in my own firm and a lot of firms. You'll have people who are CPAs or CAs with 10 years of experience who don't know a heat more than a graduate. It's just a real shame that people haven't invested in them. I think in Australia anyway. We've got lodgement lists. If we're late we get penalties.

Tim Causbrook: 8:51

I've never met an accountant who isn't really busy or snowed under. It's really really hard in that context, to get people to focus on the really really important things. You've got to do it nicely. But you can talk about the soil metaphor that Ed talks about, which I mentioned in the chat. You can talk about the long-term. This isn't sustainable. What we're doing is not sustainable. You don't need a huge change. You just need a bit of time each week, each day, each week set aside for training, or a little bit more time to set aside for client meetings. As long as you have that mindset every month getting better and seeing improvements that's helped me. Because I'm quite impatient, I want to go from 0% to 100% the next day.

Tim Causbrook: 9:38

What I've noticed is nothing changes until people's mindsets change. The best way to change people's mindsets is through numbers, through facts. Accountants love. They're quite logical people. The Fab5, whichever one should have access to in their SharePoints, has been a big one for me. We've got the capacity planner in there, the Fab5 KPIs Looking at the same numbers each week, looking at the lodgement lists, looking at all that stuff, and then dripping on them, as Ed says, has really helped change people's mindsets.

Tim Causbrook: 10:08

It's taken a year for some people but as long as I have that incremental progress, I'm patient. Now it's not worth persevering with someone over a year where you see no progress. It's a waste of time. You do need to see progress, but people take their own time to fully come around and buy into their thinking. Once they do, it's so much easier to manage. That's the other thing. I'd much prefer someone who's not perfect, who I've been dripping on for a year, than a brand new person who might take themselves a year to come around to the way we're running it. I hope that helps. But you do have to be patient because you're dealing with people and people.

Tim Causbrook: 10:48

There are early, middle, and late adopters, as Ed says, and it just takes time to get people to come along on the journey. There is a light bulb moment where all of a sudden they'll be using the right language, they'll be thinking the right way. I look back and I think when did that happen? It's like having a kid grow up. All of a sudden they're there and it's quite edifying. The best bit to me it's taken about two years. I've got a much bigger firm, but it's taken about two years, but the client managers have come to me independently and said this weighs a lot better and they've acknowledged it. The ones that push back the most have actually come to embrace it the most, which is another reason why it's worse persevering with late adopters, and they're at least likely to change from it as well, which means they take the least amount of managing. I actually look at late adopters now as positive, not negative. For that last reason for me.

Tim Causbrook: 11:37

That makes sense. There's a lot there.

Ed Chan: 11:40

Yeah, Lee said where do you get this training? We'll bring them along to your sessions and let them listen. There is a saying that the teacher will appear when the student is ready. Now, when will the student be ready? Well, often they might come to these sessions and they might have to come to these sessions 20 times before the light comes on, what Timothy talked about just then. Sometimes you feel like you're saying these things like 100 times and all of a sudden it's a different person. At what point that happens we don't know, because the teacher will appear when the student's ready. Why are the students not ready? Well, certain things have to happen or they have to fall in place before that person's ready. Often it could be 10 sessions like this, sometimes it could be two sessions like this, and it's like third-party endorsement when you're trying to prosecute it that doesn't have the same impact as a third-party doing it. So maybe the third party for them listening to us switches the light on for them. And then other times it's just repetitiveness, hearing the same thing over and over again, and we get this all the time. People say I've heard that 10 times. It's only on the 11th that I got it. The light came on Again. The teacher will appear when the student's ready, and people learn at different rates and in different ways. But repetitiveness is a very good way of doing it.

Ed Chan: 13:16

So bring your staff, bring your managers along, bring the leaders in your organization to come along to listen to these things, because it doesn't just happen by accident. You've got to actually lead it. They might do it on their own because they're so busy at work. So you've got to lead. You've got to bring them along, encourage them to come along, and then, yes, they'll push back. They'll say look, I've got this amount of watchments to do and my budgets are behind my budgets.

Ed Chan: 13:47

But it's a bit like saying I'm not going to exercise because I've got too much work to do at home. When I get the work done at home, then I'll go and exercise. But you've got to get the balance right between the two. You've got to start that exercise. This exercise is a Quad B activity. Quad 2 activity. It's important but it's not urgent. So we tend not to do that. We tend to do all the things that are in quite one, which is urgent and important, but if you don't do your quite two activities in this example exercise you'll end up with bad health.

Thomas Sphabmixay: 14:22

So I'm going to try and you know part of that driving the staff to perform a certain way as per the job descriptions, with the training all helps guide them in the right direction.

Wize Mentoring: 14:39

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. com/ podcast to download a free copy of The Accountants 20-H our WorkWeek Playbook. We've included a link in the show notes below. See you in the next episode!