The Wize Way

Episode 137: The benefits of having a deep and narrow team structure

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 1 • Episode 137

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In this week’s edition of The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants and Bookkeepers, Jamie Johns with Kristy Fairbairn delves into the transformative power of a deep and narrow team structure for scaling your accounting firm. 

Discover essential Wize strategies that emphasize the critical importance of implementing an effective team structure to achieve business growth. 

Tune in to learn how you can start applying these practices in your firm today!

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Wize Mentoring:

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants & Bookkeepers, 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 all right!

Kristy Fairbairn:

So we will jump in, and today's topic of part of our trio is recruit. So recruitment, looking at your team structure and how to get that freedom for more travel while still ensuring that you're fulfilling for your clients. So scale scale your business you must have a deep and narrow team. That's a really important part of the wise way of getting a business that runs without you allows you that freedom and ensures that the work is delivered. So we're going to hear a bit more about this process with Jamie. So the different roles that make up a deep and narrow team.

Jamie Johns:

Yep.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Thanks, Jamie. I guess, firstly, hearing the term deep and narrow and the different roles, can you briefly explain to us the roles that make up the deep and narrow team structure?

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, well, maybe, and I'll copy Ed's lead here. Ed always mentions context and everyone probably remembers that. But just to give you the context first, guys, all around the world, obviously, there are businesses and accounting firms bookkeeping firms are no different and as we add people, if we're sort of not knowledgeable and don't know how to manage a team, we're just going to sort of add people organically. The easiest way to do that is just to add someone and say hey, look, you start next week, you can report to me, and what happens is you'll win a few more fees, you'll win a few more clients, and then you'll think, oh yeah, I'll just hire someone else and they can start in a couple of weeks. And then you'll say to that person you can just report to me, and so that goes on and on. And so this was my experience before I knew it, on and on, and so this was my experience before I knew it. I think at one point I had like 10 people a few years ago now, but they were all just reporting to me.

Jamie Johns:

The opposite, the deep and narrow team is shallow and wide. So if you pitch yourself as the owner or the partner, if you like, and you just keep hiring, you end up having all these people just reporting to you and you can imagine what the traffic is. Most of that traffic is what we call production traffic. And for those who aren't familiar, it's good if you can jump into the vault and have a look at what we call the wise traffic quadrant. But in a firm, in practice, there are two types of traffic. One type of traffic is just getting the work done. It's the production traffic. And to get the work done, obviously, you need to hire people. Initially, you do the work, you do the production traffic yourself, and then the issue is as you hire, you're not aware as I wasn't aware of how to structure a team to get the most out of people and how to utilize complementary skills. The other traffic is communication traffic. So communication traffic is just traffic with your clients, and the Wise Vault's got some really, really good videos and some templates explaining that.

Jamie Johns:

What communication traffic is? In that context, if you can sort of go back to what the worst scenario is, as I just explained, the worst scenario is you just keep hiring people and you just keep getting them to report to you the communication lines. It just gets overwhelming. And not only that. What I haven't mentioned is that most of us, as firm owners, when we start out, have all the clients reporting to us as well. You know, I just started from the home office, you know, by myself, years ago, and what I found was not only did I have all the clients coming to me and clients just added, but I also had all the team members coming to me and you know, years ago, at one point ended up in hospital just from the stress and I thought, Nah, there's got to be a better way. Yeah.

Kristy Fairbairn:

It's a lot to be the one that funnels it all through.

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, and it's crazy, isn't it crazy? Like you, you know, when I started my firm, I never had any training on like how to manage people or how to structure teams and all that sort of thing. And then when I met Ed, he really started laying down the foundations for how to structure your team and then how to scale your firm as well. There are three barriers to growth that I learned from a chap called Vern Harnish, and one is leadership and that's just knowing the how. If you're going on a journey, you've got to know how to get there, so you're going to have the know-how. The other one is logistics and the other one is marketing and sales. But the second one with the logistics, that's logistics with people, or you know how you structure people. It's so important to have the deep and narrow teams and with everyone, um, on the benefits of that and um, why it just really leverages off of people.

Jamie Johns:

I think the biggest thing to say, Kristy, is you get leverage out of yes, out of your senior people, and then all the way down, so at a really high level or sort of a helicopter level, as we say, you've got three different groups of people. You've got your finders, your minders and your grinders and your finders are people of really quite good interpersonal skills, that are people, person. They love dealing with people and clients. And then you've got your minders, who are quite technical, very well organized and are happy to oversee the production of work and not necessarily speak to clients. So straight away you can see the complementary skills that we're after, no different to a sports team, where the strengths of one person complement the weaknesses of the other and vice versa. And then the last one, you've got your grinders, which are the people who just love getting the work done, getting the work done as fast as they can, but not necessarily 100% right. They may sort of follow the 80-20 rule. They might be able to get sort of 70% to 80% of it right and then let minder that.

Jamie Johns:

So that's at a high level, the finders and the grinders. And you really should structure your team around that and hire on that basis as well. So we do a lot of that work in WizeT alent of really trying to filter down. Someone's a finder, finder, finder and then someone's a minder, and the grinder as well. So you can't just throw bodies at the problem like Ed used to say so. You've got to be very strategic in your hiring. There's a book called Good to Great by Jim Collins, and he talks about finding the right person, putting them in the right seat on the right bus and heading them in the right direction, and that's a really good analogy of what you've got to do in your practice.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Absolutely, and I think too, even with existing teams, Jamie, when you analyse, when you start looking into the Wize Way and deep and narrow structure, looking at the qualities of your team members and not trying to put a square peg in a round hole or on the wrong bus because it's not there.

Jamie Johns:

That's right. That's a great point and a lot of the work that we do with the one-to-one mentoring is we always do a deep dive analysis of each team member and we make sure we try as best we can to get them in the right seat. And then part of that process is change management as well. So you've got to be very careful on when you do restructure your teams and for those who are here, there's big firms and the small firms, so you've got to get people's nose out of joint or getting them upset. But once they're in that seat and people are working, these teams work really, really well and, most importantly, they give the owner leverage. The reason it gives people leverage is just because of the reporting lines and if you haven't had a look already yesterday I posted in the Wise Mentoring Tribe a diagram that actually one of my senior client managers found. So I thought, oh geez, they're living what we're teaching. But have a look at the Wize Tribe. There's a post there I just literally did yesterday on the benefit of deep and narrow teams. But essentially in that post, it showed that when you have three people, there are three lines of communication. When you have four, five, and six, the lines of communication expand exponentially. It's just crazy. So, again, so important to have these deep and narrow teams.

Jamie Johns:

So if we start from the bottom, for example, we've got the intermediate bookkeepers, the leads, and media accountants as a rule of thumb they should have a buddy. I call it a buddy system, you call it whatever you like, but in that particular team they should have a buddy, and that should be the person who's a bit more experienced than them. Often you'll say look, your buddy is such and such and if you have any questions, go to your buddy and schedule a time during the day, and it might be one to two o'clock, whatever. So you've got to make sure that you control people's calendars so that you allow time for learning and training and so that intermediate person. Then with their day-to-day queries, they can go to someone who's more senior than them but it's on their team, and that's the diagram that Kristy's got up there. And then, likewise, as the Pareto principle works out 80-20 rule that person will be able to answer 80% of their questions. There's never an exact science, so we don't want to get sort of bogged down in perfection, but that person will always be able to answer a really good percentage of their questions.

Jamie Johns:

If you structure the team right, then the next one is like the senior person, the senior accountant, the senior bookkeeper if they've got a question right, they go to the senior production manager.

Jamie Johns:

So if you almost sort of think of this reverse, if you had, like, the senior client manager at the top and all those people on a flat line all going, that's the wrong way to do it. This is the right way to do it, where the senior production manager will probably answer, you know, 95% of the production team's questions and so if you think about it, who are we protecting here? Who at this stage? The senior client manager or even the assistant client manager? They haven't had a question yet, right? So that's like hours and hours and hours of time protecting the senior client manager and the assistant client manager from. So that's where we're getting leverage. Leverage is everything in an accounting firm or in a team, and it's particularly leverage for the senior client manager because the senior client manager's productivity should be set at around 50 to 60% and the reason it's set at 60 or 50%.

Kristy Fairbairn:

So I think yeah. So if you've got your senior production manager being less productive on the tools, if they're bogged down with simple tasks that could have gone up to the senior accountant or bookkeeper, you're clogging up the time of your senior client manager. So you really want to start filtering things through, isn't it, Mick, where you're just buffering off a diamond? It starts off really rough and raw down the bottom with your intermediates and by the time it gets to the senior client manager, it just needs a little polish and delivery to the client.

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, exactly. The idea guys, is to make sure that you have the deep and narrow team structure and that the reporting lines are up and down. So it's really good that you control the reporting lines and, as the leader, you have to set the reporting lines. And the other thing to mention in this everyone is the no bypass policy. Maybe one of the other mentors, Kristy, can explain the no- bypass policy and why it's so important.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, Mick, I'd love to get how you worked that in your practice.

Michael Ferris:

Yeah, how did I do it? It's a good question actually. It's making me reflect on how I did it. But, following Jamie's advice, first of all, I started dripping on the senior people in the team just to start getting their buy-in around the deep and narrow team structure. And that's very important because ultimately it's like a movement within the team. But you need key people to influence everybody and show, particularly the production team, that this is the way to go and we're all on the same bus here.

Michael Ferris:

So, in terms of the no bypass policy, the way I like to think about it is if you don't use the no bypass policy, that's how the client managers get dragged back into production work.

Michael Ferris:

So, if you can imagine, the line sits just above the senior production manager there. So the point is that the client managers can't go straight down to the production team and ask them to do a piece of production work and, equally, the production team shouldn't come straight back up to the client managers with any of their queries. If you fall into the trap of taking on a query from one of the production team as soon as you entertain that, you've instantly taken ownership of that job again and all of a sudden it's back on your plate and that's a very fast way to get choked, particularly if you've got a full team with four or five production people. The no bypass policy. You just have to be really consistent with it. You need to educate the team, make sure they all understand it, make sure you've got it documented, it's circulated, everybody's read it, they understand it, and then just be very, very vigilant and enforce it at all times.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, absolutely, I'm a little bit newer to the no- bypass policy. I've been implementing it for a good few months now, but I sort of look at it. I have it printed out on my wall because I am still a bit notorious for stepping back in and just getting things done at times, especially around deadlines, and using it sort of as that filtering. Who should this really go to? What type of communication traffic is it? Is it communication or production? Who's responsible and making sure that I use that on a regular basis to keep the work moving through?

Jamie Johns:

In a practical sense too. Once you start doing it everyone it can be really hard for people to break habits. So what I mean by that is you might have a graduate accountant or a junior bookkeeper and they might come to you as the owner of the firm or the practice principal, whatever. They might continually come to you. So you have to continually remind them, once you've had your meeting about putting your teams together and everyone knows what their role is. Just be aware that it can take five, six, or seven times until they know who their direct report is. Another way to pitch it is this is just direct line reporting in a deep and narrow team. So I remember years ago, one of the accountants I think came to me five times with a query and I would say oh, look, just reminding you who's your direct report now or who's your manager now. So that might just take a little while, Kristy, for them to get the idea of who their new go-to person is if that makes sense. And so, because old habits just die hard, and as Mick outlined here, particularly when you put, say, a senior production manager in place or a senior client manager, it's really important to honour the no bypass policy in two ways, and one is don't instruct their team, so don't bypass them. Because if you bypass them you just undermine their job, you undermine their accountability, you undermine what they're actually hired to do. So you don't want to instruct their team to do, so because you'll just make chaos.

Jamie Johns:

Then there's just a lack of communication, so you'll tell a senior account what to do and the client manager won't even know. So you cannot do that. You can always ask questions. You know I still do that to this day. I'll ask any team member. I'll just reach out to them randomly and say you know, have you got enough work on How's everything going? You can always ask questions. So it's important to realise you can speak to the team under the client managers. That's not a problem and it's the same as a client. Once you put client managers in place, you can speak to the clients and ask questions, but you can't tell them what to do, because then you just create chaos. So you can't bypass your client managers and tell the clients what to do as well. So that's the other angle, Kristy.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Absolutely. I think that's why it's so important to remember what is the end goal here. It is to exit from the business, essentially, and exit from that role. So the more you keep stepping back in, the longer the journey is going to be, allowing your client manager to do their role fully, and your production team to do their role. And, as you said, Jamie, it's not that you can't speak to people, it's just you need to be mindful of what you speak to them about.

Jamie Johns:

You can still manage your relationships within your team and client base, but don't get stuck committing to things, or agreeing to things, that someone else then has to try and work out what you said and the biggest thing is, what you can't say, Kristy, is oh, it's quicker if I just do it myself. I'll just ring the client or I'll just speak to say, oh, it's just quicker if I do it myself. How many times have we heard Ed say that?

Kristy Fairbairn:

Absolutely. It's so much more in the long run, doesn't it? And you know, when you've got a team there and you're not utilizing them, you just pay them to be entertained by it so don't need to pay our audience that's right.

Jamie Johns:

So don't micromanage microtrain if they don't know how to do something, just you know, be intense with microtraining and then you won't have to micromanage and just set them strategic big picture goals and that's the fab five. Tie it all in.

Kristy Fairbairn:

What if the client sucks you back in? You've made the handover to your senior client manager or assistant client manager but that client just keeps on ringing you direct or emailing you and you can't block them. How have you handled that, Jamie?

Jamie Johns:

What happens is just to give you the context again with anyone anywhere in the world, there are early adopters and there are middle adopters and then there are late adopters. There's a lot of statistics around this, but there's the 80-20 rule. There's also the bell curve, if people Google the bell curve of learning, it just reflects that there are early adopters and the great majority is often the middle adopters, and that's why you get this bell curve of learning. So when you start this process, you'll have a group of clients, particularly when you're introducing a client manager. You'll have a group of clients to say, oh yeah, no worries, oh yeah, I'm happy to work with me. You know so, and you'll get very little pushback. And then you know straight away that that group of clients will just start working. We'll just use Mick's example. So they'll just start working with me, with Mick, straight away, and they won't really come back to yourself. And then you'll have the middle adopters where, yes, you're actually right, they will call you, they will email you, so every type of interaction that you can imagine, they'll come back to you.

Jamie Johns:

So the way to do that is, particularly if you've done the handover meeting and you've done the introduction. That's where it starts off, and so you've got to gauge the clients. And another concept is some clients are crystal glass clients. You make the slightest little change and they'll crack. They'll stress out Other clients they used to tell me a rubber cup client, you can make a mistake and they'll bounce around and they'll be fine. Just to give you the context understand the nature of each client, and we all know which clients are easygoing and ones that aren't.

Jamie Johns:

But the important point is like if, once you've done the introduction, the handover is, you know, often you'll get an email or a phone call.

Jamie Johns:

And this used to happen to me all the time when I went through the process and I would just, I would say, look, hey, Mick, you met such and such the other day in an introduction, and I would say to me can you draft an email, mick, to their question? I'll check your email, then you can send it and CC me, right? So what would happen is your client manager would then draft the email, you would check it, you would just fine tune it that's micro training and then send it, and then the client would say, oh, thanks for what I needed to know, mick, and away we go so soon. The client would learn you just have to be persistent, and they might two or three more times again. As I said, some clients will be really quick and some will be a small percentage. They could take a year to get over to me. A nother time that used to often happen to me is when clients would ring my phone all the time.

Jamie Johns:

And so I wouldn't answer straight away, but what I would do is I would call them straight back and then with technology these days, whether it's in the office or whether even with your iPhone it's fantastic you can just loop in Mick into the call. I would call the client back and I would just conference with the new client manager, you know, and then start talking to the client, and then I'd say, oh, what do you reckon? What do you think, Mick, you know? And then Mick would say, oh, yeah, I reckon we could do it this way.

Kristy Fairbairn:

I like that strategy, Jamie. I like that strategy, Jamie. I've done the email thing and I love seeing it in our workflow timeline. Now clients are emailing the client manager directly, but I hadn't thought of conference calling with the client manager too.

Jamie Johns:

When you're on a call with a client, I think that's oh, they're just real practical ways and I just do them all the time. All the time and sooner or later, most people just want service, Kristy. They just want an answer. They just want someone who's friendly, who can give them the professional advice they need, and they need it in a timely manner. And as long as you stick to that system, believe in your client managers, believe in and micro-train them, be there 27 to support them in their role, because your role as the leader is to make them successful. So you do whatever you can and make sure you don't bypass them. And there are just a couple of practical techniques. I shared that work but, as I said, with the context, make sure you understand the client. Some clients are crystal glass, some are rubber cups. And remember you've got early adopters, middle adopters and late adopters. That's the key.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, that's awesome. Thanks, Jamie.

Wize Mentoring:

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 Accountant's 20-Hour Workweek Playbook. We've included a link in the show notes below. See you in the next episode!