The Wize Way

Episode 159: Implementing the 4 Quads in Your Firm

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 2 • Episode 159

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In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants and Bookkeepers, Kristy Fairbairn and Tim Causbrook dive into the power of the Quad Activities framework — a simple yet transformative tool that helps firm owners break free from the trap of busy work. 

Learn how spending time in Quadrant 2 (important but not urgent) is the key to scaling your business, empowering your team, and reducing owner dependency. Learn how top-performing firms shift their focus to strategy, training, and systems — and why doing so leads to calm, scalable growth.

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Wize Mentoring:

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants and 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.

Tim Causbrook:

Looking at the quad activities itself is a quad to activity, so we'll look at that now in terms of what the quad activities are. Kristy, I was wondering if you could take us through a little bit of what we've got in the WizeH ub around the quad activities, and really, how you implement the quad activities in your firm.

Kristy Fairbairn:

So it's so important, and the two go hand in hand in recognizing your quad activities and being able to delegate successfully to your team members or even outside of your firm. So, looking at the small things each day that you're doing, what is consuming your time, and using your quad activity sheet in the Wize Vault or, if you have a Wize Hub set up, starting to use this to filter through all of the things, because so often we get caught up in the busy work, the noise of getting things done, and we feel like, oh, we just did a 10-hour day, we must have achieved so much. But if you actually break it down, how many things did you complete that day? Would you actually look back on it as a leader and think it was a successful day? Or you know, I think of Jamie, who's running a four or $5- million firm now, and he works seven hours a week.

Kristy Fairbairn:

So often we can think that that can't be possible. To have a firm that size, you must be working 40- 50 hours. You don't have to. If you recognise what you're doing with your time, what quadrant you're spending your time in, and ensuring that you're spending as much time as you allocate to your firm, you can be in quad two, not in quad one. Build a team that can support you to take the quad one activities away so you can develop and grow your team?

Tim Causbrook:

Yeah, that's really well said, Kristy. Calls itself a delegating demon, and delegating is a large part of it. And then we'll look at how you do that really implementing the four quads. The first part is actually doing the quad exercise, which I'll show you in a second, how we can do that in the new Wize Hub, some of the best IP they've put in here. And then, once you've analyzed it, well, what do you do with the things that you shouldn't be doing? You've got to delegate them, and we've got a way of doing that in a systematic way as well. And it really is important for the owner to do this. First, because the owner is probably the most expensive resource in the firm, and therefore the one that you should be using. The business should be used in the most appropriate way. But also, if they can get into strategic things, which is Quad 2 and improving the business, it's going to filter on to employees and clients. It can't be overstated how important it is for the owner if they're able to be taking on more of that activity, a lot of those things in Quad 2, they're not urgent, so they don't necessarily get done, but, like my friends who run these really big businesses $4-5 million businesses. They're stuck, and they're kind of stunting the career growth of their employees as well because they're unable to do these not urgent but important things. So, just quickly, if you haven't heard of the quads before and we're talking gibberish, it's something that Dr Stephen Covey came up with or is famous for talking about. Maybe you didn't invent them.

Tim Causbrook:

There are four quadrants. Quadrant one is urgent and important, and that's the stuff that kind of tends to distract us because it's urgent. So it might be something like a client calling or a client emailing or an employee saying I've got this huge issue. It's those urgent things where you kind of have to stop what you're doing and deal with them, and they're also important things. So they're not things that you know some urgent things you can kind of ignore, if that makes sense. So, there are things that you shouldn't really or you can't ignore because they're important, but they are also urgent. The other quadrant at the top, which is important, is quadrant two, which is important, but it's not urgent. If you can think of things like in your personal life, it might be like getting fit, eating healthy food, it's not urgent that you do those things. You know you won't go to the hospital from having a heart attack immediately as a result of it, or you won't get diabetes immediately. It's very gradual, but it is important that you do those things, and it's not urgent. If you can put it off without feeling any stress, it's definitely not urgent, right, but it still might be important.

Tim Causbrook:

And really, when we think of a business, when you're working in the business, seeing clients or what have you, or managing staff, you are in quad one. So it's not that quad one's bad. It's not bad because it's important. So this is something that's really crucial. It is important, so it is good to be in that quadrant. The issue is when you're only in that quadrant. If you're in a leadership position and you're only in that quadrant over a long time, the business is going to suffer as a result. It either won't grow, which means no growth, which means no possibilities or opportunities for staff. It means that the owners aren't going to get capital growth either. It means that the clients won't be serviced as well as they might be, for instance.

Tim Causbrook:

So something like training is a Quad 2 activity, unless it's kind of legally mandated, which it is in Australia, I think it is around the world for accountants, you don't have to train, and a good example of this is junior staff. You don't have to train junior staff. I think it's the norm out of all the firms I've worked with, and wiser than my own firm, not to train staff. I've seen people for 10 years not really improve in terms of their professional ability. It's kind of amazing to think about, but it's true because it's not urgent and because firms don't know how to do it. But your staff are your greatest single asset and resource, so it's crazy not to train them. Think about how much compounding happens. If you could train someone for over 10 years, how much better would they be by year 10?

Tim Causbrook:

But, yeah, recognising new opportunities, jvs, marketing, doing tuck-ins, networking, educating staff, using acknowledgement letters, scheduling the work, these are all quad two activities and you'll notice that doing all these things takes extra work. And because it's not urgent, you might not feel like you should be doing this, especially if you're kind of drowning in quad one, as a lot of people are. But the kind of paradox is that if you do these quad two activities, it results in a more calm, more peaceful business. So Ed always talks about sharpening the saw. That's another kind of way of looking at it. There are two people with saws in a forest, and one is hacking down trees with a blunt saw. One stops to sharpen the saw, and the one hacking down the tree says, oh, I'm going to you know why would you do that? You could be chopping trees right now. And the guy who sharpens the saw quickly overtakes the one with the blunt one. A classic kind of quad two, quad one. Little parable, I guess, for you. If quad one is working in the business, then quad two is working on the business. Everything we do in Wize is quad two. It doesn't matter if you're an employee or an owner, if you're coming to these monthly calls, if you're having internal meetings about the business, not about clients, but about the business. We use the Fab Five for the manager's meetings, for instance, even a daily huddle. While it's dealing with quad one things, doing a daily huddle, the act of having a daily huddle is a quad two activity. You don't have to have a daily huddle, you can put it off.

Tim Causbrook:

Three is urgent but not important. It could be like a Facebook message getting pinged on your phone, or you know, a social media update pinging on your phone, junk email, or a phone call from a salesperson. They're urgent because they're grabbing your attention, but they're not important, and they take up a lot of our time. I think even me today, I still take up a lot of my time in these things, and the more you can ignore these things, the more time you'll have back to do Quad 2 activities. Because what a lot of people say is they don't have time to do Quad 2 activities, and they think it's because they're in Quad 1. It's because they're in Quad 1, 3, and 4. And obviously you can't not do quad one because it's important. You can not do quad three and four. Four is not urgent and not important. That's like literally going on social media without having that prompt. Things that just don't have any output at all or a reason for doing them.

Tim Causbrook:

And why do people do quad three and four things when they're not important? It's relaxing, maybe it's enjoyable, it feels like they're being productive, even though they're not, especially in admin. I found a lot of people in admin do quad three and four, not realizing that it's not important. Doing an audit of every admin task in your business is a quad two activity and I highly recommend that if you haven't done that yet, because you can see I would say I don't know what the percentage is, but a large portion of admin tasks that I've seen across my time working in my own firm and other firms it doesn't have an immediate output. That's another way of looking at it. So that's just a quick snapshot of the quads. If you don't work on the quad two activities, they do actually become urgent eventually. You're kind of putting things off, if that's another way of looking at it.

Kristy Fairbairn:

It's really about being strategic, isn't it? In quad two. So you prevent as many things as you can becoming urgent and then you also put in structure to deal with the things when they are urgent and you can't fix them, yeah, and that kind of stuff just isn't even on my radar, and I think that's the case for a lot of quadri things.

Tim Causbrook:

They're not things that come to mind immediately until you have situations that trigger them, like that one.

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.