Episode 90: Wize Factor Chat: Tim Causbrook - Causbrook & Associates

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To kick off 2024, we invited our very own Mentor and WizeTribe member, Tim Causbrook of Causbrook and Associates to share his journey pre-Wize and how his firm evolved through the help of Ed Chan.

Step into the shoes of Tim, whose voyage through the intricate dance of mentoring and leadership has forever changed the trajectory of Causebrook and Associates. 

Tim's narrative isn't just about profit margins and spreadsheets; it's a heartfelt chronicle about embracing change, the dynamism of self-leadership, and the profound influence that a mentor can have on both a personal and professional level. Discover the inner workings of transitioning a family-run practice into a thriving enterprise, and how operational management can become a passion that drives success, even for those with roots planted far from the world of accounting.

As we traverse the mentoring landscape with Tim, we touch upon the serendipity and rewards that unfold when one takes on the roles of both student and teacher. His dual journey reveals the delicate art of balancing the scales between nurturing a flourishing business and cherishing personal time. From the cultivation of an autonomous firm to the personal pursuits that color our lives—running, reading, and the eclectic allure of vintage synthesizers—this episode offers a tapestry of insights for anyone navigating the complex pathways of business leadership. 

Tune in for a revealing look at how a mentor can ignite a transformative spark, guiding us to achieve work-life harmony while fulfilling our most ambitious business dreams! 

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Chapters

• 0:35 Intro
• 1:06 Tim's journey with Causbrook & Associates
• 3:13 What primary challenge motivated Tim to become a part of Wize?
• 4:25 How is leadership vital for every accounting and bookkeeping business?
• 6:39 How did Tim become a Wize Mentor alongside with Ed Chan and Jamie Johns?
• 9:42 Tim's POV re: building a business that runs without you
• 11:32 Discover the 3 hobbies Tim engages in when he's not working in the firm.
• 13:28 The importance of having a mentor.

Transcript

Tim Causbrook: 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

Hi, Tim, thank you so much for being here with me today. Apart from being a former Wize Mentor, like a Wize member, you are actually now a mentor, which I find the most interesting part about this interview, and I've been wanting to do it for a while. So I'm going to ask you some questions for our Wize Factor Chat the usual ones that we do, but I'm sure they will be more interesting because you became a mentor somewhere along the way. So let's start with the basics. When did the business start? How did it start? How did you get involved? All of that?

Tim Causbrook: 1:12

Yeah, so Causbrook and Associates was founded in 2001 by my mom and dad in Sydney, Australia. So I was a kid at the time, about 10 or 11. And I got involved around 2008, 2009, when I finished up at school. I started helping out here kind of casually, and then a bit more formally as time went on.

Wize Claudia: 1:32

Nice, and what made you want to be in the business? Was it like a financial decision? It makes sense for me to do this or you genuinely like the logistics to be involved to learn?

Tim Causbrook: 1:45

Yeah, no, it's a good question. No, I didn't do accounting. I'm not great at maths. I wish I was better at it. I'm just a more language guy. So I kind of did everything except for follow dad's path. I studied languages at Cambridge, like medieval studies in the UK. I did another few arts degrees back here in Australia and it was just a gradual thing. I could see that the family had been taken care of by the business over most of my life and I could see my parents getting older.

Tim Causbrook: 2:17

And, yeah, I came back to the business in 2019. It was a pretty turbulent year for the family. We had a whole lot of issues that happened professionally and personally and I came back and I met Ed that same year. It was quite kind of serendipitous. But I came back in 2019 and said I'm going to work on the business, not in it, because my mid dad were kind of drowning in the business and I thought it was too late to become an accountant. But maybe I could learn more about the management part of it, the operational part, and that definitely was exciting to me. That part of the business, wow and fast forward. I'm still in it today.

Wize Claudia: 2:52

So, yeah, worked out pretty well, still interesting, still relevant, yeah, so more so with every year, for sure.

Tim Causbrook: 2:59

It's kind of weird. I'm really really into it, like yeah.

Wize Claudia: 3:03

I really love that. It became something like from languages to accounting and being mad at math. That makes two of us. That's what I said because I feel like I could not relate. I also was very interested in knowing, that you were there when Wize was involved in the process of making the firm grow. But what was one challenge that the firm you remember that the firm was facing back in? That year made you say, okay, we probably need help, we need mentorship.

Tim Causbrook: 3:34

Yeah, I mean, one of the major issues was cash flow and profitability. Again, it comes back to thinking of it like a business. We never really thought of it like a business before and up until 2019, we very much came to work to help build up our clients' businesses and we were way more invested in our clients' businesses especially the really big clients than in our own. And meeting Ed kind of was like a mind shift moment where we realized, no, this is a business. And when we started looking at it like a business, I changed everything. And I think there was some imaginative constraints as well. I thought, behold, a third profit's, a third overhead's, a third salaries was broken and it was kind of a thing of the past. And yeah, meeting Ed kind of showed me that it was very much doable still.

Wize Claudia: 4:23

No, that's awesome.

Tim Causbrook: 4:24

Love that.

Wize Claudia: 4:25

So, when you were trying to work these things out, what was one of the things that you found out when you met Ed when you met the Wize principles, everything which was the Wise principle that made you say this is it? This is what's going to help us like the most valuable one that you need to know.

Tim Causbrook: 4:45

I think this is a bit abstract, but I think it was about the leadership piece. Ed said that the business is a reflection of the personality of the owner. As soon as he said that, I could see an explanation for every aspect of our business and every issue we had in our business. It was structural with the issue for us. So I remember when we were bringing out the deep and narrow team to get a bit more specific. That was the turning point for us, setting up this deep and narrow team, because we had about 18 employees and there was just no team whatsoever. We had a list of about 15 or 20 serious issues in our firm and we realized that every single one of these issues, like every single one, was a symptom of running a flat and wide, shallow team structure or no team structure.

Tim Causbrook: 5:33

I think I got paralysis by analysis. I didn't know where to start. There were so many issues and just meeting Ed in a very short space of time, all the issues came together and there were really only one or two major solutions we had to implement to fix a lot of those. The whole adage of this comes from Ed as well. He always says that 20 percent of things cause 80 percent of the results. The 20 percent that caused 80 percent of the issues in our firm was the team structure. That's one of my favorite things I do today. Helping firms in Wize is especially the larger firms. It's like Tetris or some game, just trying to get everyone to maneuver them so they're in the right complementary position and get the team set up. It requires a lot of leadership.

Wize Claudia: 6:14

Yeah, as you said, that might sound very abstract, but actually, I've talked to many people, like many Wize members in Wize Factor Chat, and most of their answers have been deep and narrow team structure and leadership. I think that's one thing that stuck with lots of people and was a game changer in many firms.

Wize Claudia: 6:35

You mentioned something that it's key for this interview, which is going from learning something working with Ed as your mentor to becoming a mentor. This is very interesting. When did you learn that you wanted to be a mentor? What called you from mentoring?

Tim Causbrook: 6:54

Yeah, the same year I met Ed, I was moonlighting as an English teacher teaching English to Latin Americans. That's where I learned a bit of Spanish there. I've always enjoyed teaching. If I wasn't doing what I'm doing here, I'd probably be an academic at a university teaching. That was in my DNA, so to speak.

Tim Causbrook: 7:13

Initially, I didn't think Ed would want to work with us. I thought he'd be too busy. I couldn't believe it when he said, yeah, he'd happily coach us or mentor us. Ever since I've known Ed, that's this pattern in my life. Things that I can't believe happen end up happening.

Tim Causbrook: 7:29

I think about two years into being mentored by Ed, I thought sounded creepy. Probably. Hopefully, he's not listening. He probably isn't. But I was like I wish I could spend more time with that guy and see what he's doing with other firms, just because I wanted to learn more. Once a month wasn't enough for me. Then I never really said this to him.

Tim Causbrook: 7:48

I don't know, maybe six months. Nine months later he said he thought I'd make a good mentor. He asked me about shadowing him on about six or seven firms. I mean, I would have done that for free. I didn't tell him that it's probably good that I didn't. But, yeah, I was so stoked when he said that that could be a possibility for me and, yeah, I really enjoy helping people.

Tim Causbrook: 8:09

It's different from teaching English, but it's really, really rewarding. And in a weird way and I knew this would be the case from teaching English but when you teach something, you learn it way even better. So I think I'm very, very protective of my time because I really want to invest in my business, invest in my personal life as well. I really didn't want to do something that would take away from my business and it's one of the only things I can think of mentoring other firms in the industry. That has a feedback loop and it makes me a better business owner or a better business manager. Mentoring and vice versa, I think I'm a much better mentor, and one of the things that wise is you have to be running your own accounting firm to be a mentor, and so this is an awesome feedback loop where if I'm doing one of the things and actually doing the other at the same time, which is just so, so neat.

Wize Claudia: 8:58

Yeah, and that's amazing because meeting other firms and seeing other firms' problems actually helped you with what we call the rule of 33%, which is you are actually living and breathing by this. You were working with Ed, mentoring other people. Then you were also working on your firm and learning a lot, so it was a constant feedback and it helped a lot. From where I see it, it helped a lot to your being protective of your time, so you weren't wasting time at any second.

Tim Causbrook: 9:30

Totally Exactly. It's one of my favorite things I realized this year if you can do something one thing, but you're actually doing two things, it's just the best. It just really compounds, but yeah.

Wize Claudia: 9:42

Love it, and so you know that we talk about building a business that runs without you. So, I asked to remember. How do they feel about this? I want to know how you feel about this and how you feel about helping people do this.

Tim Causbrook: 9:59

Yeah, it's different for everyone. Everyone's got different lives and different desires and goals in their life. For me and my family, we love working and we work even if we don't need to. You know we don't really need to, but we love doing it. For me, it was more about longevity.

Tim Causbrook: 10:15

So my parents are getting older, I've got two sons of my own and it's that thing of if the business is reliant on the owner and something happens to the owner, the livelihood of the business is at stake and the livelihood of all the people the business is employing is at stake. And I think, the more and more I think about it recently, I've just been really proud of the fact that we've got about 20 staff now, that we're able to provide incomes for 20 people around the world. That's an awesome thing, you know, and so it's about longevity and sustainability and scalability. For me, it's not about going to the beach every day just because we're not wide that way we wouldn't do that anyway. But everyone's different and the beauty of it is it's kind of the same journey even though the destination could be different, which is kind of wild.

Wize Claudia: 10:59

But yeah, yeah, really good answer and noted because you work with other firms and you bring this up for other firms. So they tell you how they feel about it and many are scared about it, like what will my life be without working like I wouldn't want that, and many are just excited to get there. So the fact that you do it, I find it is strategic. Like how you do it, it's like longevity, and scalability is just like staying in time. So maybe your kids will be accountants who know yeah.

Wize Claudia: 11:31

I have one last question for you, Tim, and it's related to what you were saying. You don't want to spend the whole day at the beach, but I'm sure you do have some hobbies, yeah, so what's something you enjoy doing when you are not in the firm?

Tim Causbrook: 11:45

Yeah, there are maybe three main hobbies I've got, so the first is running. So I love running and I'm really, really happy I've done a lot more running this year. It's only January, but a lot more running this year than in previous years, so I'm going to try to keep that long-distance running. I love reading and again, I'm trying to do more of that this year. A lot of my heroes read 12 hours a day.

Wize Mentoring: 12:08

And so I love reading I used to read a book a week.

Tim Causbrook: 12:10

Yeah Well, I used to read a book a week, but since the boys came along, it's a lot harder to keep that up. The third one, which is probably less relatable, is I love vintage synthesizers, so I've got this collection of vintage synthesizers at home.

Wize Claudia: 12:24

Oh, that has been so cool. You should share a video of this and the mentoring tribe you must.

Tim Causbrook: 12:32

Yeah, I could post one after this. People would be like what Brenton would know about it and, I feel, others, but it's pretty esoteric.

Wize Claudia: 12:38

Oh, okay, that's very cool. Actually, I was going to ask you like do you have a goal, or would you set up a goal of reading X amount of books per year or per month?

Tim Causbrook: 12:49

Yeah, it's funny and it's cause of business, I guess. But everything's kind of quantifiable. So I'd love to run like 150 Ks a month, maybe 200 Ks a month this year. I'd love to read maybe a book of Fortnite, which I'm so far maintaining, and then with the music I've got a bunch of friends, so it's very much a social thing. So maybe a couple of times a month or even once a month, meeting up and making music with them would be great. You choose, it's quite quantifiable.

Wize Claudia: 13:17

Yeah, I think that's the less quantifiable and you can still do it. But those were some awesome answers. I want one last words of wisdom from you. What would you say to someone who's stuck in the business getting paralysis over analysis? What would you say to them?

Tim Causbrook: 13:35

Find someone who can help you. That's the key thing. Find someone who can help you and then make time to spend time with that person. There's an easy way in life and there's a hard way, and there's a no virtue for doing things a hard way when there's an easier way. And you know easy doesn't mean easy, it means easier. So don't keep banging your head against the wall, you know, in the vain hope that one day the wall won't be quite as hard. Find a way to get around the wall. You know I'm obviously biased. I think we're in the business for accounting firms that I'm aware of. But don't settle. If you find a coach or a mentor and they're not getting the results you need, move on to someone else. It's too important. Like life's short, don't waste time, you know. Do it the best way you can.

Wize Claudia: 14:22

Great advice. Love it Well. Thank you, Tim, for spending time with me and for all your awesome answers. I'm going to see you around, of course.

Wize Mentoring: 14:31

Yeah, yeah.

Wize Claudia: 14:32

But this is it for now. Bye.

Wize Mentoring: 14:34

Awesome. Thanks for tuning in. If you liked this episode, please remember to subscribe and leave us a five-star review. For more practical Wize 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!