The Wize Way

Episode 140: The importance of time management for every business owner

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 1 • Episode 140

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In today’s episode of The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants and Bookkeepers, Brenton Ward and Ed Chan discuss the importance of time and focus for every accounting firm. 

Ed explains that growing the right way is about transitioning your workload from working IN the business as the technician to working ON the business as a business owner. As we often hear the Working ON vs Working IN argument but many coaches and colleagues, find out how this journey plays out and how a firm owner can free up 8+ hours of a week working on their business.  

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Brenton Ward:

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. Switch gears a little bit. Ed to the topic of time, because it's still our number one um challenge. It's still our number one objection when we're working with the firm, I don't have enough time to implement the steps that you're recommending the things that you're recommending, the advice that you're suggesting.

Brenton Ward:

I just don't have time to do it so again the the whole move from working in the business to working on the business. It's very vague on the surface. Everyone understands the term, but when it comes down to specifically how we do that in an accounting bookkeeping practice, bringing up time or where to focus time, is one of the biggest things we focus on at the beginning of anyone's journey. So can we come back to how we look at, you know, personal time management and this journey of freeing up time to get to a point where we can start that withdrawal journey and accelerate through it when I was, you know when my practice was really small and I was really working over 100 hours a week.

Ed Chan:

You know, you're just overwhelmed with just not having enough time and as I said earlier, you know, where do you find time to work on the business when you don't?

Ed Chan:

And I think you really touched on you know we should be working in Quad 2, which is important but not urgent. And the activities in Quad 2 are like training someone. Training someone is not urgent, but in quad two is like training someone. Training someone's not urgent but it's important, and we tend to just do things that are urgent. So a tax return is there to get done, it's urgent and it's important, so we jump in and do it. Correcting a mistake. It's urgent and important, so we just jump in there and put out that fire or fix the problem. But we don't have time to do the Quad 2 activities, which is to train that person, because it's important but not urgent. But where really effective businesses work is in Quad 2. It's in those activities. If you spend time in those Quad 2 activities then you have less and less fires to put out over time. So developing a checklist it's important but not urgent. That's working on the business, and the more you work in Quad 2, the less you work in Quad 1. So today I only work in Quad 2. So the things I'm doing today is training firms like yourself, which is important but not urgent. And so anything that's in Quad 1, I don't do, I delegate to somebody else and I only do the things in Quad 2, which is urgent not urgent but important. All the preventative activities managing clients' expectations, and educating clients are important but not urgent. But the more you work in Quad 2, the less you work in Quad 1.

Ed Chan:

But just going back to what you said earlier is not having enough time. So what helped me manage this? Because you know you're overwhelmed when you go to work. There are a lot of activities, but what's really important is to identify there's a lot of stuff that you do that shouldn't need to be done. Being busy is not the same as being productive. You know, especially in the admin area, there's a lot of work that gets done that doesn't need to get done, and people say to you I'm so busy and, as I said, have you ever been busy all day? And at the end of the day, you felt like I hadn't done anything. Well, it's because you've been doing the wrong kind of things and there's a lot of work that shouldn't be done, and if it's not producing an outcome, just don't do it. So what has helped me when I was just overwhelmed with everything was to break it down into bite-sized pieces.

Ed Chan:

So short-term, medium-term, and long-term. So in the short term, yes, it's all hands on deck. You've got to get the work out and meet those lodgement dates, and clients are screaming and mistakes need to be fixed up. But then you always have to have at the back of your mind what the long-term agenda is. The long-term agenda is to have people trained up in the right seat, in the right bus and they're doing all the work, and that helps you determine the medium-term journey, which is, yes, you got to put out the fires, get the work done, but then at the same time medium term you're looking for the right people put in those right seats and you've got the ideal team structure to work with and you're looking for people. So your journey is from.

Ed Chan:

You know I don't have enough time to do all the work. Here, too, I've got to find good people, and now all I do is just you know wherever I drive my wife nuts, because I go to a restaurant and a waitress comes up and she's really good, and I say, gee, I've had her in my business, I'd like to hire her. And so I'm talking like this all the time. Because now my thinking has changed, from you know the workload through to finding good people. So I'm just constantly looking for good people and place them in the right seat in the bus, in my business, and because good people are just so hard to find and um, but if they have, if they have the right attitude, you can train skills. But you've got to start with attitude first and if you get the right attitude you can always train them. And you know so I drive her nuts because I'm always talking about I'd hire her and she'd be fantastic in my business and she's going let's just have some lunch, can we, you know? So my thinking changes, you know from you know doing the workload to finding and training people. So that's important.

Ed Chan:

So you break it down into a short-term meeting term. Long-term, the long-term goal is to have all these people in the right center, right bus, just running the business. It runs from the bottom up and they're running it. They're driving it and then th e short term is just getting the work out the door. But with it, with an eye on, you know, finding people, constantly finding, looking for people and recruiting them and training them in the short term, and then if you do those in that sequence, you'll end up long-term. Because often it's very easy to get really, really busy at work and then you just put fires out constantly and you know, when you're 65, you're still putting fires out because you haven't worked and invested in your balance sheet, which is the medium to the long-term side of things. You've just been putting fires out and working in your P and L, so to speak that makes perfect sense.

Brenton Ward:

I think it's just something that needs to be a constant reminder, to the point where we're going to just think. As you were talking there, we want to design some posters for you guys to reinforce these time management quadrants that you can put in your offices, your screensaver, in your wallet, in your journal, and wherever you like. Because it's something. And if you ask Jamie about his journey of focusing on this time management quadrant, on the time management quadrant, he used to have a post-it note on his screen at all times reminding him what quadrant am I working in and for everyone. Again reverting back to the Wise Hub, there's a fantastic tool within the WizeH ub, that talks about the quadrant activities and starting to create a log of those activities and actually dissect and analyze where you're spending your time, which will help you then transition those activities and move through the delegation process, uh, which which we're also spending a bit of time on in the background at the moment as well, building out some processes for you on that.

Brenton Ward:

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 wisementoringcom forward slash 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!