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Episode 100: Be a Next Level Client Manager

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 1 • Episode 100

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In this week's episode of The Wize Guys Podcast, Ed Chan, Jamie Johns, and Thomas Sphabmixay discussed the role of the Client Manager and what are the tasks they are mainly responsible for. They also talked about the essential skills that will help client managers be effective in their role such as managing expectations, same-day turnaround, handing over tasks to ACM, and no bypass policy. 

So, let's explore the essential role of client managers in professional firms as industry experts discuss the blend of technical prowess, communication skills, and leadership required for success. Gain insights into effective delegation, team dynamics, and nurturing emotional intelligence to enhance client satisfaction and internal productivity. Tune in to today's episode!

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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-poor practice to a business that runs without them. I hope you enjoy and subscribe!

Thomas Sphabmixay:

Today is about the next-level client manager. We've covered a lot about deep and narrow teams. We know that in a typical deep and narrow team we need to have a senior client manager, assistant client manager, senior production manager, and then perhaps three or four grinders with an admin attached. That's pretty much good for about a million in fees, regardless of whatever currency you're in. It's not enough that we just point to someone senior in our firm and go. All the emails and client communications are going to you now. They grew up grinding. They grew up through the ranks grinding and moving up because they were more technical.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

Being a client manager is something very few people can do competently. I don't know how accurate this stat is, but essentially, if you have a cohort of accounting clients, 80% of them will be grinders, 20% of them will be minders and maybe 20 of that 20 would be finding type personalities the finding type personalities usually characterized by their interpersonal skills. They are adept at talking to sizzle rather than knowing the sausage, so to speak. They can go look, I don't recommend buying a property under your own personal name. I suggest this instead. They can converse with the clients and be able to relate and advise them. That is definitely not an easy skill to train. What makes the Deeper Narrow team work really well is our ability to transfer these relationships from us as the owners and onto client managers in a team, and those clients become the responsibility of those client managers. We're here to get us started on a brief over the role of what a client manager is. Could you take us through again what is the role of a client manager and what sort of tasks are they responsible for?

Ed Chan:

Thanks, Thomas. Yes, in order to grow your business, you've got to set up a team. The team is made up of different skill sets, personalities, and so forth. The right at the top is the senior client manager. They've got to have the ability to communicate with their clients and to connect with them. At the end of the day, our business is about people. If you want to grow your business, you want to get referrals. It's about your relationship with your clients and how you're connecting with them. The best way to do it is through your ability to communicate.

Ed Chan:

Not everyone can communicate and not everyone likes to communicate. There are a lot of people who like to just sit there and do the work. If you put someone in the wrong seat and expect them to do something that they're not built to do, so to speak, then it's really, really difficult. I see people saying to me my client managers don't talk to my clients, they just send out emails because maybe they're not a real people person and they're more comfortable just sending out emails and trying to get that person to pick up the phone and talk to the client and they're not built that way. It's very, very difficult. The old saying it's very hard to change. A lipid spot is very true. It's much better to build an ideal team structure. You've got the right people with the right personalities playing in position rather than playing out of position. Right at the top is your senior client manager.

Ed Chan:

The senior client manager's role is to increase their portfolio. Firstly, so if they've got 600,000 fees, they need to grow it. If they've got a million dollars in fees, then they need to grow that. And, of course, if you don't have the right support structure underneath them, then they're going to hit capacity. O ften when they're not picking the phone up to talk to the clients is because they're getting overwhelmed with work and they don't have the right infrastructure underneath them or the team structure underneath them to get the work done. So the work ends up on their desk and they're grinding away instead of talking to their clients. Now, if you don't talk to your clients, or if you finish the tax return and you just send it out to the client to get their signature, you're not a senior client manager. You're more of a production manager. So a production manager's role is to get the product and get the production done. They're not particularly interested in growing their portfolio, they just want to turn that work around, get it done as efficiently as possible, run the team, and get the team trained up. So their role is completely different. So today we're talking about the senior client manager. So what's the personality of that person? What are their objectives? Their objective is to increase the portfolio.

Ed Chan:

Increasing the portfolio means that you're getting referrals from your clients, friends, and family, and the only way you're going to get more referrals is for you to spend more time in front of them, whether that's through advisory or responding very quickly to questions. So at Shannon, we have to respond on the same day and then, if you do that, you're going to get referrals from them. But if you're not responding because you haven't got the right team structure you might have a flat team structure and they're not able to respond to their clients then you're not going to get referrals from your clients. And of course, the other thing is I see firms just when they finish the text, which then just send it out for signature. You need to pick up the phone and talk to them about the result and that little bit of extra actually means a lot, because I don't see the six or seven hours that you put into doing the work, or they see that five minutes of conversation. And if you don't do that five minutes of conversation, you might have done a brilliant job. You know you spend five hours doing the work and done a brilliant job, but that five minutes of conversation is where the value is. And if you don't do that and you tend not to do that if you're a production manager, you're focused on productivity, getting the work done and out the door. But a senior client manager's role is to increase their portfolio. The only way to do that is to talk to your clients. So you pick up the phone and you talk to them about the results. But just that little act. You're going to get a lot more of a rapport with the clients and then they're going to refer your clients. So that's the first thing.

Ed Chan:

The second thing is to make sure your team is profitable. Okay, so our teams run at a minimum of 25% EBITDA. So as an owner of my firm, you know I need to get a 25% return on my capital, and most accounting firms sell on the basis of a dollar per dollar. So your turnover is basically the goodwill, and if you're doing an EBITDA of 25%, then your return on your capital is around 25%. So each team needs to show a minimum of 25% to show a reasonable return on the shareholders' capital. So everyone needs to win the clients need to win, the staff needs to win and the shareholders need to win. But if we don't run our businesses properly then you know, often through mismanagement, everybody loses, including the shareholders. So that's the second objective.

Ed Chan:

And how you measure all that is through your net promoter scores. So you've got an NPS. So we've got an NPS, which is the net promoter score. It's a survey with the clients and then there's a survey with our staff. So if the clients are giving you a 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10, they're going to go out of their way to refer you. So it's a very easy measurement. So if you're getting 9 out of 10s through your surveys and 10 out of 10s, you know your business is growing. But if you're getting like 7 or 8 out of 10, your clients are happy but they won't go out of their way to refer you. All right, so they'll be there, but they won't tell their friends about you. They're just happy but they're not ecstatic. But now if they're getting scores of, you know, 5 or 6 out of 10, they'll actually leave. So they're just waiting for someone to approach them and as soon as someone offers them something, they're gone right. And then if they're under 5, if they're giving you less than 5, they're going out of their way to say bad things about you, and that's yours.

Ed Chan:

NPS is the best measurement of how your teams are performing. So you need to run those net promoter scores to see how your teams are performing and, of course, there's an NPS for your staff. So the other role is to make sure the staff's happy. And we know that because we run NPSs with our staff. And if there's an issue, you address it very quickly. You don't leave it, because your body language when you leave something is that you don't care. But if you address an issue whether it's a client issue or a staff issue and you address it very quickly, then your body language is that you care about them.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

That's a pretty interesting thing there. Client managing is not just about the staff that happens with the clients and the work, but there's an element to the senior client manager especially kind of being responsible for the morale and the performance of the team overall. Even though the production manager is there to make sure the production is going, that senior client manager is their leader overall right.

Ed Chan:

They're responsible. They work very closely with the senior production manager. They work very, very closely together to ensure that productivity is flowing, there are no blockages to productivity, the morale is high and NPS scores are coming back. And, of course, if the NPS scores are not coming back, they're going to get together and work out what the problem is. I call that a blockage. So their job is to remove blockages. So if you get a poor NPS score, that's a blockage. You've got to get together and work out what it is that's causing the low NPS score and find solutions to the problem. So they work very, very closely together.

Ed Chan:

Now, if you don't get the personalities right and they're clashing they're not both rowing in the same direction you're going to have a lot of problems. But if they're both rowing in the same direction, you get huge synergy. You get this one plus one is five. Outcome the sum of its parts is the. Productivity is huge when they're working really, really well together. So getting the personalities right is very important and, as the owner, all I spend time is just working out, making sure my teams are correct, the personalities are correct, everybody's in the right seat and everyone's playing in position, not out of position.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

Yes, that has to be the comprehensive view of the client manager's role and what they're responsible for, from dealing with the clients to the team. Now I want to tap into you, Jamie. So look, Jamie, following on from this discussion with Ed going around the roles, I'm getting this picture that it's not just taking over the sales of the client manager. It is a huge leadership component, a team component. They're responsible for quite a sizable portion of the client portfolio as well as the team. Could you help us dive deeper into what are the sort of essential skills that would help them in this role? I mentioned, maybe some shallow ones, like interpersonal skills, but from your experiences, having dealt with dozens and dozens and dozens of client managers, up and coming and going from ACM to SEM, what sort of essential skills do you look for in these client managers and what sort of skills do you try to develop in them?

Jamie Johns:

First of all, they've got to be a people person, Thomas. So you know, if you don't like dealing with people, you're probably in the wrong seat. If you're a client manager, so yeah, you've got to like people. Ultimately, you've got to be able to learn to plan. So a massive part of it is planning your workflow, and managing clients' expectations. I mean, if you can manage clients' expectations, you'll never really lose a client. And so when we talk about that, you've got to be able to effectively manage expectations of the clients, but of your team as well. But from the client's point of view, when they're tax return or BAS or whatever they're lodging, you've got to be able to manage their expectations around when something's due, both in the lodgment and in paying the money as well. So no one likes surprises. That's the biggest thing. And often when you have a new client come on board, you should always ask them why you're looking to change accounts, and it'll always come down to a lack of managing expectations, and it can be just from not returning phone calls, not returning emails. I got an unexpected bill, either from the firm or from the government department, the tax officer, or RS or whatever. So they're the sort of things that and not all of us are born with that. You have to learn that, of course.

Jamie Johns:

So managing is much different from just doing the work itself. That's actually harder to often delegate the work successfully than actually do the work yourself. So delegation is really a big process in itself that you have to learn. So there are sort of five steps to delegation. But one of the first things in delegation is what's the desired result, what's the outcome that we need? And so one of the first things that comes to mind is well, here's a job that we've got and you delegate it to the team and you identify who's going to work on the job and how much time they should be spending on it. Got to learn the art of delegation, I would say, Thomas, that would be probably the biggest thing that I've seen over the last 20 years. Yeah.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

Yeah, that delegating aspect is something that I see in client managers. There tends to be this thing where if they have really great interpersonal and there might be a good project manager, but they might be weak technically and they struggle with that delegation. Could you like dive into further what that relationship between the client manager and the production manager looks like in order to help that client manager be better, sometimes they're not the most technical person and they're relying on their production person. How does that dynamic happen between the two?

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, well, often you know, in a fully blown, sort of $1 million team, if you've got a senior production manager, then often they can be just as technical, if not more technical, than the client managers. So it's important that one person's strengths complement the other person's weaknesses. And so you know of a very technical person Martin had the ability to articulate a very strategic approach. So that's where the client manager would come in to play and say, hey, I think we can do this structure like this. But let's ask our senior production manager, who is technical, whether a certain strategy can be done. But when you bring both together, I think, as Ed just said, that's where you get the synergy.

Jamie Johns:

I mean, the classic example is myself. I was really good at dealing with people and you know, probably optimistic and positive around their business, but I didn't always like know the exact technical aspects of you know setting up certain entities or structuring. But if I had, you know someone like Ash who would be, like, say, very technical, come into the conversation, often get a better outcome than just one person advising the client, and that's. I've seen that time and time again, both in a team environment and just in a business environment where you're trying to make decisions together, to advise clients on what to do, because, like, it's very hard to know everything.

Jamie Johns:

Thomas, so you know, you're very good with the technical aspect of. You know apps. You're known around wise for being very good with computers, very good with apps, very good with integration. But if you overlay that with someone who's very technical around entity structuring, asset protection, tax planning, you know, and then at the high level, say, a client manager as well, and you bring all those together, you're a pretty formidable team, aren't you? Yeah, because when a client comes to you, they want to know what's the best way to do cloud accounting, what's the best way to do my bookkeeping? At the very grassroots level, then, from upwards, right through to the strategic approach, or even you might say advisory or business coaching, and then the tax planning aspect of it, if you combine all those things together in a team, it's pretty hard to beat a team like that.

Ed Chan:

Did I just add to what Jamie just said? Actually, the people who are very technically, they're very strong technically. They're not so strong often not always the case but they're not so strong in their ability to communicate with the clients. You can see that whether it's in our profession or if you ever go to a doctor who's very technical and is using all these big words to you and you don't understand what he's saying, or IT people, they use very technical terms which you don't understand.

Ed Chan:

As the senior client manager, I had an ability to be able to explain something in very simple terms, but often I didn't have the technical skills as Jamie, my skill set was actually to be able to convert a very complicated technical thing into a very easy to understand layman's language In very, very simple terms. For example, the technical person will use terms like this they'll go are your debtors and creditors and that's a debit loan account. So they're talking very technical. The interpersonally skilled person, the client manager, should be able to take that language and convert it to layman's language. So he or she would use terms like the people that owe you money, or you owe people money or you've taken money out of the company which is a debit loan account. Now you owe it to the company, so the technical person has difficulty in being able to convert technical terminology into layman's terminology. And if you have the two together, working as a team, so often, you know, when I was still practicing, there were very complicated things with GST. I didn't understand the technical stuff, but I'd get the senior production manager and they'd explain it in their technical terms and they're not explained in layman's terms to the client, and the client used to always say you're the only accountant I've ever understood. That's what they used to say to me all the time.

Ed Chan:

But I was a natural client manager. I wasn't a natural production manager, the difference being that I was always focused on how the client could understand me, whereas the production manager was always focused on getting the work out the door. So there was a different focus coming from the client manager versus the production manager. So I was always conscious of being able to be understood by the client and I used to work really hard on dumbing down my terminology so the clients could understand what I was talking about, and hence I used to always have this. Clients used to always say you're the only accountant I've ever understood, and that's not trying to, you know big note myself.

Ed Chan:

It was just that I worked very hard at being focused on communicating with the client and getting them to understand me, and I often used to say to them do you understand that? You know, look, I don't mind. If you ask me, don't be embarrassed. And you know I can explain it again to you. And often I'd explain it. I had the patients explain it four or five times in different ways until they actually understood what I said, whereas the production managers I don't think like that. The production managers want to get it done, you know. That's why they sent it out for signature, whereas I used to pick the phone up and explain the answer, the results, to the clients, whereas the production managers were more interested in getting on to the next job. So they'd send it out for signature and that's why I used to get a lot of referrals, whereas they wouldn't. So just hope that helps a bit.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

That is a huge one. That's two concepts I can see there it's the red client and the blue client. You know, some clients want to talk about the kids and the weather. They're red ones, right, and then the blue ones are. Let's go into the P&L immediately and that client manager has to pretty much be able to switch gears depending on if it's a red or a blue person that they're working with right?

Ed Chan:

Exactly the way that you determine whether the client is a red person or a blue person is just to ask them how's your day today. The red person would say they will start to talk about their kids and all that kind of stuff. But the blue person would go yeah, it was fine, let's get into the work. And they just want to get into the numbers. And then you know, if it's a blue person, you just focus on the numbers. But if it's a red person, you don't focus on the numbers, because it will just go over the head. And then they'll say something like oh, I didn't understand what the accountant was talking about because you've just used the wrong language with that person.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

Yeah, you know, in addition to what you mentioned, Jamie, that essential skill set is being able to switch gears and conversations with people. Thank you, Ed. Thank you, Jamie. On that, I actually want to get some input. I'd love to hear from Tim If you wanted to share your observations about essential skills that you've seen in your client managers and that you tried to foster. What sort of skills were they and how did you go about developing them together with the client managers?

Tim Causbrook:

Yeah, I think leadership is underrated. I've got three senior client managers and two assistant client managers. When you've got a team of five or six people, they do have to be able to talk to clients. That's a given in the client manager role, because if they're not good at it, who are the teams going to be doing that? But the other really key thing is that they strong leaders and just good at managing the teams. That just takes a lot of work in terms of building up as leaders, in terms of giving them maybe some manager training that they haven't had in their careers up till now. That's why we put on these seminars as well, to bring people along so they can learn the soft skills bit about how to be a good team leader, and the key word there is a leader. Yeah, just fill in that gap that professional certifications and organizations just don't really do that kind of training.

Tim Causbrook:

It's all focused purely on the technical being. A good manager of a team, as well as the clients, is key. Yeah, that's absolutely key. The client managers always say they have to have a really strong EQ. Right, because they're dealing with clients. Jamie, I think, and Ed mentioned expectations management and being able to talk to the client and words they understand and figure out what the client cares about. Is it the relationship or is it the numbers?

Tim Causbrook:

Those EQ skills that a client manager has can come in handy with the team. So we had an incident a couple of years ago where the style of communication a production manager had meant that we were kind of at risk of losing one of the grinders underneath them, purely over just the way that their management style was. And the client manager of this team that I'm thinking of this is in my own firm. She stepped in and saw, because of her high EQ, she saw that this was a problem and was able to directly fix it with the grinder, or two grinders, in this instance the senior accountant's offshore and the production manager. And it was just a really good illustration to me of how those EQ skills and emotional intelligence can be put to helping a team as well, not just managing the client side of it, and she was able to turn around and say those two senior accountants who are still with us today. Hopefully, that's a good illustration that makes sense to everybody.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

Yeah, you know part of it. I see, Tim. It's just like that. Client manager has such a close and deep connection with the client they feel obligated that if they don't address the things happening with their team, the clients are going to continue to get disappointed if it's dysfunctional, right? So I guess it also comes from the need to just make sure the clients get looked after and then intern the team as well, right, totally, and we always say push down the work, build up the team.

Tim Causbrook:

In my own firm, the most senior, technically speaking, the most senior people are the client managers, and so they really have to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of the training, and the more they invest in the team, the further they go, and I'm just saying that my own firm time and time again. The client managers, who are really good at leading the teams and playing people in position and investing in them, they just find each year easy to get through the same workload without even having to put on more people, and I think that's the biggest underrated Apart from leadership, it's just being good at training and investing in your own team and your own firm, and that's really what leadership is is creating other leaders not having a much of assistance.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

That's pretty much what it sounds like. The essence of that senior client manager is it's really us developing the leaders for the team in the firm. They're more than just client customer service people. They're literally in charge of the client. We're counting on the client manager, Jamie, to be able to help us move on to the next parts. Would you like to share, maybe, a practical action item that we can all take away from this, from what we've discussed?

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, thanks, Thomas. I think one of the best things you could do is be a client manager. It's important for them to do the right type of work. So here's what we call the wise traffic quadrant, which just sort of outlines how the traffic should flow within a team. But it's important that a client manager is doing the right type of work, Thomas. So one of the best ways to do that is to document every single task that that client manager is doing.

Jamie Johns:

Years ago when I was working with Ed recalled we were fairly top- heavy at Sky going back and I had a couple of up- and- coming budding white managers. Ed Mott recalled they said, oh, there's no way we can do more than $300,000 or $400,000 in fees. They just said, oh, there's no way. The most important thing that we did was actually sit down, Thomas, and list every single task that those client managers did, and so in that process, you actually determine what level of admin that they're doing, and until you get down to the nitty- gritty, you don't really get the need to do that. You don't really realize how people actually process their work. So what you can often find is that one client manager is doing a lot more admin than another one, just in their processes of how they go about actually producing the work. What you ideally want is the lowest cost person doing the easiest or the least complex type of work. There's no point in having the most experienced, you know, most costly person doing the least complex work. So it doesn't work for either of them. You know it might be efficient, but sometimes I might do the work quickly. But then you know, often you'll have a paid audience or sometimes characteristics of the client manager is they can be a bit of a control freak as well. So you know, and often a client manager is promoted internally. So it's very important for the client manager to what work they should be doing and what work they need to let go of Right and don't be a perfectionist or don't be a control freak either.

Jamie Johns:

The biggest practical takeaway I could tell anyone is, as a client manager, list every single item that you do and then you know work with the wise philosophy around what it is ultimately that you should be doing. So you know when you find yourself processing the work or actually doing the work or doing the majority of the work, it's not the right process. So you know, and obviously that depends on the size of your team. The smaller your team is, the more hats that you'll wear within that team and the more you'll do. But often a big challenge of it, Thomas, is knowing when to let go. You know, see when the next client, when the next client you check your capacity planner do we need to hire, you know.

Jamie Johns:

And the other very strategic decision in any team is who you need to hire. So there are really two massive decisions that the owner and the client manager need to work together. And often if you are the client manager and the owner, you know you're obviously thinking about it yourself, but it's like who do you need to hire? Is it a finder, a mind, or a grinder, or a client manager or senior production manager or, you know, a senior bookkeeper or whatever? But then knowing when to hire is the other very important aspect that you should use your capacity planner for. And then again, as soon as you're hired, you have to delegate. So again, coming back to that was traffic quadrant, like get the right people doing the right type of work, and once you do that, the team will be humming, you know. So I think, coming back to that practical sense, Thomas, to list everything to do and then, once you've listed everything to do, you can classify. You know whether you should be doing it or not, 100%.

Ed Chan:

A very simple way of understanding whether someone's abdicating or delegating. So managers should delegate, not abdicate.

Ed Chan:

And a very simple way of knowing whether what they're doing is whether they're doing a task from start to finish. So often the senior client managers will say to you I don't have enough time to pick the phone up and talk to the clients or return my phone calls, it's because they're doing the wrong kind of work, so they're abdicating, they're not delegating. So what I mean by that is if a manager is doing a task from start to finish, in other words, 100% of that task, then that person is abdicating, not delegating. Now, if they're delegating properly and they're managing properly, they should only do the last 20% of a task, of any task. So any task that comes to their table, they should delegate it all out and they should only do the last 20%, which is checking it, reviewing it, that kind of stuff. But if they're doing it from start to finish that's one of the reasons why they don't have capacity is because they're abdicated and not delegating the work down.

Ed Chan:

So I try not to do anything from start to finish. I always get somebody else to start it and then I do the last 20%. That way I can increase my capacity by just doing the last 20%, which is the most important bit, which is checking and reviewing, training, that kind of stuff is the most important thing. So that's a good way to explain because the biggest challenge you're going to have is when a senior client manager says to you. Like Jamie said when I first worked with him, his senior client manager said that there was no more capacity yet. They were only handling $300,000. And I said to them well, my senior client manager's handling $1 million, so you're handling $300,000, and you're at full capacity.

Ed Chan:

And then how's it different? And then, of course, their response was oh, you've got different types of clients and it's all excuses. But it just came down to they weren't delegating, they were abdicating because, for whatever reason, they could be control freaks. They think that you can't do it unless you do it yourself. By the time I trained this person, I could have just done it myself.

Ed Chan:

Whatever the thinking was, that made them do a task and start. The finish was the reason why they didn't have the capacity. And as soon as we started getting them thinking the right way and then delegating effectively, then the capacity went up. So today they're doing $1 million because they got out of it. They are delegating. They're not abdicating, they're delegating. They're pushing the work down and only doing the last 20%. But as you said, Thomas, we all grew up as grinders. We're not taught to delegate, we're not taught to manage, we're just taught to do the work. So when you put someone in a leadership role, such as a client manager, they're going to do that, they're going to gravitate back to control and doing everything. And then you're going to get this pushback from them about they don't have enough time and I haven't got time to do this and that is because they're not delegating.

Thomas Sphabmixay:

That is 100% us and Jamie. Basically, client managers and owners do your quad activities. Because don't just go. I need to delegate my communications because if you lump it all in your head like that, everything seems high- level. You need to stratify it between high- level and low- level communication, and high- level and low- level production. If you just go, I'm going to delegate emails now. And what type of emails? Proposal emails, information emails. Some of them are production, but not all of them. I was talking to a firm today and he said out of 50 emails he gets, maybe two are actually important. So that has to be SOP'd and go off your plate because that's where the time suck is coming from. Yeah, thank you. See you in the next one.

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