Episodes 175: Why Most Accountants Never Reach Their Genius Zone (and How You Can) with Gay Hendricks

Most firm owners try to “fix the business” without ever fixing the real ceiling that’s holding them back. The result? Burnout, endless busyness, and a business that feels more like a cage than freedom.

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Gay Hendricks, best-selling author of The Big Leap, shares powerful insights on:

✅ The Upper Limit Problem that keeps even successful people stuck
✅ How stored emotions and limiting beliefs sabotage growth
✅ What life looks like inside your Genius Zone (and why most never get there)
✅ The simple daily commitment that can unlock extraordinary results

If you’re ready to stop hitting invisible ceilings and start operating in your zone of genius, this conversation is a must-listen.

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PS: Whenever you’re ready… here are the fastest 4 ways we can help you fix and grow your accounting firm:

1. Download our famous Wize Freedom Strategy Map for FREE - Find out the 96 projects every firm owner must implement to build a $5M+ firm that can run without them - Download here

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3. Book a 1:1 Wize Discovery Session – Spend 30mins with our Wize CEO, Jamie Johns, a $7M firm owner who is ready to give you his entire business plan to build a firm that can run without you – Find out more here

4. Work with Jamie and our mentors for 8 weeks - Build a custom business plan for your firm - Apply here

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Wise Community Origin
• 3:50 Meet Gay Hendricks & Mentorship
• 8:50 Creativity, Publishing Breakthroughs, Stanford Path
• 13:30 Embracing New Media & Teaching at Scale
• 17:20 AI, Coaches Portal & Somatic Work
• 22:30 Love, Vows, and Conscious Partnership
• 27:30 Upper Limit Problem Explained
• 36:10 Zones: Incompetence to Genius
• 41:50 Commitments, Recommitment, and Integrity
• 46:40 What Genius Zone Life Feels Like
• 51:30 Wonder as a Practical Superpower
• 55:20 Retention: Cost, Culture, and Wellbeing
• 1:02:30 Values, Career Paths, and Leadership
• 1:10:40 Red Flags: Micromanagement to Burnout
• 1:20:30 Action Steps & Ongoing Check‑ins

Transcript

SPEAKER_05: 0:01

Welcome to The Wise Way, the show for accounting and bookkeeping firm owners who want more time, profit, and freedom and a business that can run without them. I'm Brent Ward, your host, and each week we deep dive into the real stories, proven strategies, and battle-tested tools from successful firm owners just like you. Our wise mentors want to share their journey of how they've scaled and systemized their way to freedom so you can too. If you're stuck in the grind or you're ready to scale smarter, this is your blueprint. Let's get into the episode. Gay, welcome to the show. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much. I'm uh happy to be with you. So, for everyone listening, it's Brent Ward here from The Wise Way, uh, and I'm very honored to have Gay with me here today. Uh, he's a bit of an outsider to our normal uh lineup of uh conversations on the Wise Way. And for your context, Gay, Wise is uh is a bit of a passion project to start with. So I, along with my two wonderful business partners, uh Ed and Jamie, who are in that poster behind me uh on the wall there, um we went on this mission seven years ago to help public practice accounting firm owners uh originally in Australia on a journey of kind of getting themselves out of the prison that they'd built for themselves that they called their business, and and helping them take steps towards being able to stabilize that business and then just step away from it and have more choices in life, ultimately achieving whatever their version of freedom was. And uh, you know, three Aussie blokes, I was here in Ireland and the the two other guys in Australia, and we never thought you know, we were happy if we got a couple of firms, you know, listening into us and and uh implementing what we suggested. But before we knew it, we had this incredible community in over 40 countries listening in and then starting to tell us that we are actually helping them make dramatic change in their business, which we're incredibly grateful for. Um so now, seven years on, uh, we've got this thriving community of uh accounting and bookkeeping firm owners. We've got an amazing team across the world. And we're really passionate about helping our community uh achieve their goals. And for the conversation today, and um I was listening to something that you said last night where your journey started as a healer, healing yourself. My introduction to you started uh from that journey myself of healing myself, and it really resonated with with me and had a massive impact. Um but I I just see so much of what you talk about in so many of your books really having an impact on our audience. And I'd love for you to touch on a few of those things today if you're okay too. Totally okay with that. Brilliant. So before we get stuck into some of the the tactical stuff, if you like, I wanted to go a little bit high level. And for for the audience, those who may not have had the pleasure of coming across uh one of your 60-something books, um, I wanted to ask you. We're very passionate about mentoring um and having a mentor in your life. And I just wanted to ask you, looking back over your life, was there a mentor or a significant guide in your life that had a such a profound impact or or a specific impact that has stayed with you and has seen how you've lived out your life?

SPEAKER_03: 3:47

Yes, I have. I've been blessed to have several folks like that, but the one that comes to mind immediately is um Dwight Webb, who was a professor of mine in 1968, 69, and 70 when I was getting my master's degree at the University of New Hampshire in counseling. And Dwight Webb, the late Dwight Webb now, he passed on a few years ago and lived a rich life until 88 years of age. And um Dwight Webb, he was one of my counseling professors, and he did several things for me that are just I wouldn't be here without him. Uh, because one thing he did is he spotted that I was a creative writer, and but that I was kind of bored writing normal theses and papers and that kind of thing, because I could do it in my sleep. And he said, Well, why don't you write a creative master's degree thesis? And I said, Well, what do you mean? And he said, Well, you like to write poetry, which I did. And he said, Why don't you write a number of poems about the counseling process and have that be your master's thesis? That just opened up a huge possibility for me. And then some magic happened. I turned in, I believe it was 37 something like that, poems about the counseling process. And Dwight picked out three of them, and he said, you've got to send these in to Leo Goldman at the counseling journal, the journal, uh the big counseling journal at the time. And that had not occurred to me, the idea of publishing them. And so I sent them in to Leo Goldman, and he published them in the journal. You know, it was the first poetry they'd ever published, and but it was uh a significant breakthrough because like at the next um annual conference, I did a seminar on the poetry of counseling, and I had something like 300 people wedged into this big ballroom. And so they'd started publishing more and more creative things in the journal. And so I I feel happy about uh kind of setting a trend there. Uh so Dwight was responsible for that, but here's the real magic. Two professors at Stanford in the uh PhD program there saw those um poems, and that I was at the University of New Hampshire. And then Dwight Webb ended up recommending me to go to Stanford for my PhD. And that was a huge breakthrough because they only took something like three students a year. And to be one of those, it was just like, you know, uh having the Mount Olympus of educational opportunity there. Uh and the program at Stanford was just incredible. So I was there for three years. And but Dwight Webb, you know, every step along the way, he was there. And then later on, I got to help him get one of his books published, and that was so satisfying to be able to have the circle come around.

SPEAKER_05: 7:05

That's incredible. Dwight was one of the people who I who tapped into that creativity or allowed you to express that, which now we're sitting here with 61 books published.

SPEAKER_03: 7:19

Yeah. So far, I've got nine in the pipeline.

SPEAKER_05: 7:24

Wow. Um, so touching on that, gay, 61 books, um, 500 TV shows, like it's an extraordinary creative outlet. Um, you said you got nine books in the the pipeline. What at this stage, what really stokes your fire um about having these sorts of conversations and the books, the nine books that you've still got left to go?

SPEAKER_03: 7:49

Well, I love taking advantage of any new technology or new channel or outlet or platform to get our ideas out into the world because um, you know, like I come from a time when there was no self-help books. I started out before there were self-help books. And so there were, you know, to see that channel develop and to contribute a number of self-help books and then to see people like me getting on television, you know, whoever heard of a psychologist or me and Katie, a couple uh getting on a show like Oprah, you know, the next day after Tom Cruise had been on it. That's a whole different thing. Also at the University of Colorado, where I taught for 21 years from 1974 to 1995 in the counseling psychology department there, they asked, they said, we're gonna start a TV thing for people who can who aren't around the campus but want to take a course, you know, 300 miles away across the Rocky Mountains. And, you know, and would any of you guys be interested? Boying up with my hand, you know, because here's an opportunity to talk to people in a hundred of different communities on television. And so I I taught that first course. I had like maybe 40 or 50 live people in the room, uh, but it was really great to be able to craft things so that people at home could be able to do what the people in the room were doing. So it always turns me on to take advantage of getting the ideas out in a new format. Um, you know, same thing with downloads and videos and um things like that. And um, but um that that's always turned me on. And also, I remember being at the University of Colorado, and I was in a department where there was a bunch of us on a long haul. Um, there may be 10, 20 different professors, and I was the first person to get email. And I remember a couple of the other professors coming in and looking over my shoulder while I was doing email, because I told them, this is going to change the world, guys. This is fantastic, you know, this is a great. And um uh it takes all the drudgery out of you know, licking an envelope and stuffing, and um, especially for research, because you can trade data back and forth. In those days it was very clunky to do it, but now it's very easy. But um anyway, getting back to my point, I remember two professors looking over my shoulders and at me doing it, and both of them saying, I don't think that'd be very useful to me, you know, and walking out, you know, there's Hendrix doing this crazy new thing again. And so anyway, that's the I think that's one of the things that I I love to do podcasts and things for because they're kind of a new way I can, and thanks to uh technology, I can sit here in my magnificent uh home and with my cat on my lap, not at the moment, but uh um and actually at this very moment Katie is out in our studio doing another podcast with someone.

SPEAKER_05: 11:10

It is incredible and it still blows my mind. You know, I can talk to my business partner 18,000 kilometers away instantly on this tiny little device. Like I just it still doesn't comprehend it. But um without going too far down the rabbit hole on that conversation uh or that topic, you've you've seen some pretty big technical technological revolutions uh in your time. What's your uh what's your look outlook on the current massive uh phase we're in with the AI revolution, evolution?

SPEAKER_03: 11:46

Well, my response to it has been to include it in our work because for the past oh four or five months, I've had a team led by Steam Steve Ray um from um MIT. He lives in Chicago now, but he's an MIT guy, and um he's been in charge of developing our AI tool called the Coaches Portal. Right. And then just over the past month, we've been working on developing the voice aspect of it where you know let's say you're walking along in Ireland and um and you all of a sudden want to know what gay and Katie think about oh what? Um telling the truth in relationships, let's say, because you're in a squabble with your girlfriend. You can say, hey, gay, Katie, what's your big take on whether it's a good idea to tell the truth? And how do I tell the truth in a way that's gentle to my partner? Broom, then you get us talking to you in uh your ears while you're walking along there in Ireland. And so that that's what we're doing with AI is we fed our um our proprietary training materials. We have a 900-page training manual, and uh gradually uh when people get it, you know, they can barely carry it away. But now we fed it into the AI portal, and so anybody can with that subscribes to our AI portal can pull out anything they want to do from our tools and techniques. And um, there's 200 videos in there, so if you want to have us explain something to you on video, you can just say, show me a video of you talking about how to take responsibility or how to tell the truth or how to appreciate someone or whatever the or how to breathe. Uh, we we're big on uh somatic processes here. We we include the whole being in our work uh because so many things that come up in relationship are old things that are stored down in the body somewhere up in your shoulders or down in your chest or in your belly. Um and so unless you're willing to become a kind of a master of your whole being, it's hard to have a good relationship because if there's any part of unloved part of yourself, you can bet it's going to come out in a close relationship.

SPEAKER_05: 14:16

Absolutely. And on that topic, uh it would be remiss not to mention your wonderful partner who you've shared this journey with, Katie. Uh, and I think from what I saw, you said October is your anniversary month and you celebrate the whole of October. Is that right?

SPEAKER_03: 14:34

Yes. Well, thank you for picking that up. First of all, um, you must have done some research on this. Yeah. So, yes, we got married three times in the month of October in 1981. So this um, I believe is our official 44th. Uh, we met we met in January 1980. So we've been together 45 plus years. But anyway, why we got married three times in the month of October is that the first one was an official one, you know, with a judge and all of that. And then a second one was with our selves privately up on a mountaintop. And that's where we made our vows, the ones that are in conscious loving in our other books. Uh, that's where we made those original uh vows, like promising to do our best to take responsibility when things came up rather than blaming and speaking honestly rather than defending and all of the things that are valuable to a close relationship. So we spoke those to ourselves up on a mountaintop, and that was quite a magical moment because Incredible. Yeah, it was it was beautiful there in Colorado. It was this glorious day. But when we did that, Katie looked up into the sky and said, Oh, look, and there was a a hawk circling around above us. And we said, Oh my goodness, a blessing, you know, and so we and had we spoke our vows, and then we looked up again, and there were two hawks circling up there, and so we didn't miss the cosmic significance of that. Um, but then we got married in a sensational climactic way on Halloween in the month of October in California with our California friends. And in that, we feel so blessed because it was a wonderful event, but in that one of the people, Mary Graham, found a poem that she read to us by the Union um Sheila Moon.

SPEAKER_04: 16:47

Right.

SPEAKER_03: 16:47

And called The Fool and His Bride. And it is a poem that sounds like it was written for me and Katie. We were just, everybody was just stunned by it. And at the time, Sheila Moon, I couldn't thank her in person for it because um she had um gone into Alzheimer's, bless her heart, and uh then she has since passed away. Um, but I feel like that poem, which we put in Conscious Loving, in our book Conscious Loving, right at the f uh first part of it, was such a blessing to our relationship that we we still get that out in the month of October. And uh so anyway, we stopped trying to remember was that the ninth when we did the judge thing, or the tenth when we went up on the mountaintop, so we just celebrate the whole month and then we come to a a big climax on Halloween.

SPEAKER_05: 17:37

I love it. I love it. It's a great tradition. Um with your journey with Katie and everything that you've achieved together and done together and worked through together. I I thought when I was looking at uh the questions, I I I really wanted to dive in with you. Quite a few of them are tactical with the the business owners within our community, which I think is important. But there was one that just stood out for me that I feel transcends both working with business partners and also into our personal lives working and growing with our partners. And I just wanted to get your insights on looking at over years, we grow as individuals, we change as individuals. Um and where we may have been aligned in the past on things and our principles and our values, they may change over time as well. Um how do we how do we keep ensuring that we come back together on that journey? Um, because there's a certain fear, certainly, with the business owners that we work with that if they actually achieve the success that they they really feel they want to, they may grow apart from their significant other or their partner. So any any thoughts on what you'd say to someone asking that question?

SPEAKER_03: 19:00

Very much so. And I've been blessed with that question many hundreds of times in various ways. Well, I want to interject um a couple of things into our conversation. One is something that we discovered in ourselves and in relationships and out there in the business world too. We call it here the upper limit problem. And the upper limit problem is the tendency to mess up or sabotage yourself when things have started to go even better. And so we kept noticing this, especially in our corporate consulting, because a classic example of the upper limit problem would be uh we had a client who uh was a middle-level engineering manager at a firm and had developed a big product that they finally released and it was making money hand over fist. And one Friday afternoon, the CEO came by my VP's office and said, Congratulations, at a boy, we love you, and here's a bonus check for$150,000. At the time, the engineer that we were working with was maybe making$180 to$120, something like that. So$150,000 in his hand was enough to trip a switch. Now I've worked with billionaires since then that it takes a lot more than that to trip their switch. There's always a switch and it always gets tripped. What happened was he felt like a, you know, the king of the world. And the boss said, take the rest of the afternoon, go home and tell your wife and family the good news. You know, it was Friday afternoon. And so he gets in his car at two o'clock in the afternoon, drives to his beautiful home, parks, goes in, and proceeds to have the biggest argument with his wife that ultimately involved the kids that he'd ever had in 12 years of marriage. How can that be? Well, that's I kept seeing things like that over and over. And it sometimes it would be the other way around. Like uh another, I keep picking on high-tech entrepreneurs, but that's who I end up seeing a lot of times. Okay, but it's in other businesses too. But it's just that over the last 20 years, I was around when Silicon Valley got started at Stanford. I was still a grad student there and then became a research psychologist at Stanford. So I got to work. Yeah, it was very close to home. And so I have a kind of a uh a love in my heart for high-tech folks that oftentimes, you know, can get to be a billionaire while still carrying around the emotional maturity of a 19-year-old, which is when they started to get rich by dropping out of Harvard, let's say, you know, and uh so a lot of times having a lot of money when you're young is not exactly a friendly thing to your nervous system. But so sometimes, like one of my high-tech guys uh had a lavish wedding, you know, 150 guests at a faraway location and all of that, and then came back to work, and his entire executive team blew up at him. So he'd had this gigantic high. Then he came back into the quote real world and bloom, had this big blow up. Now, what accounts for that kind of thing? I started looking into this 50 years ago because I kept seeing it happen. I kept seeing it happen in my own life. I was fat at the time, and I would go on a diet, and things would go great for about three days, and then I would get an overpowering desire for something I didn't even think about much before my diet. You know, I'd suddenly get peanut butter lust or something, you know, and I'd just have to have it, and I'd blow my diet. So that's the upper limit problem in action. So here's what's underneath the upper limit problem. And why this is so important is it's everywhere. It's not just in business, it's at home, and it's in our health. The upper limit problem is triggered by old limiting beliefs that we store way down in the basement of our minds and bodies. And they're literally in our bodies as well as in our minds. And so you have to take it on kind of as a whole person project rather than just a it's not like software where you can install a new program in and everything runs differently then. It doesn't work quite that way because it's whole body software that has to be installed, not just in your mental apparatus. And so, for example, we have three feeling zones of our body that carry a lot of stored feeling. Like one is the shoulders and back of the neck and a lot of places that flare up when we get angry. If you, you know, the hackals on a cat. Yeah, yeah. And but they don't teach that in school. I had to become a graduate student before anybody ever told me that, you know. Like, you know, if a person's talking to you and they're touching the back of their neck a lot and everything, take a wild guess that they're angry about something. Or if they're touching their chest a lot, take a wild guess that they're sad or hurt about something. Bellies is a fear zone. So I want to teach people that in the first grade, you know, because there's no reason why you shouldn't. And so underlying the upper limit problem, what's underneath it, what's that makes it keep happening, is old upper limit beliefs that are stored down there. Like I don't deserve the good things of life for whatever reason. I'm the wrong color, I'm the wrong weight, I'm the wrong height, I'm the wrong whatever. I don't have enough smarts, I've got too much smarts, whatever it is, I don't deserve the good things of life because of what happened to me in the past, or be so that's a limiting belief because it's not true that you could easily have the past you have and make a commitment to enjoying the good things of life now. And the second thing that's underneath all upper limit problems is not only negative beliefs, but also old feelings that we haven't owned in ourselves. Like a lot of people just haven't ever owned their anger and they haven't ever owned their grief. My mom was a heavy smoker. And I don't think she ever let herself feel the grief of her husband dying. And unfortunately, he died while she was pregnant with me. So my whole upbringing, I think she was just going further and further into addictions to keep from owning that grief feeling it, you know, because she had such a a stricture on not letting anybody underneath her strength, you know, and so she had to smoke it away instead. And so addictions run rampant in a lot of people's lives, including my own family. And I feel uh very blessed to uh escape that in myself, although I had my overweight problems earlier in my life. So fear is big underneath our upper limit beliefs. So pay attention to fear, because anytime you're hurt in your heart or angry, you're also feeling scared about something, but it's a feeling that you can't cry out fear, or you can't pound pillows to get you rid of a fear. You have to uh embody it and put it to a good use. And the use I want to put it to is fueling your uh genius in you. Um you know, energy can't be destroyed or um created, it's there. The energy of our feelings is always there, and we have to turn that into something productive. There's no value to keep on being angry for 30 years about something that happened 30 years ago. You can acknowledge it, but you don't want to carry it around in the back of your neck, you know. But we we get people all the time here who are having daily headaches because they're trying to carry around their emotions stored in the back of their head. Usually anger is a tough one for that area and low back pain also. A lot of people um stuff low back, I mean, stuff anger in the low back area of their life. Uh yeah, in fact, if I could give a book recommendation, John Sarno, M-D-S-A-R-N-O-M-D, fabulous study of low back pain. He was the Rusk Rehab low back guy in New York for 40 years and just a genius of curing low back pain. And he treated most of it as stored anger and got people comfortable with their anger. And so a lot of his famous clients, like Howard Stern or Rosie O'Donnell, give him a lot of credit for you know having them transform their rage into something that was useful to them in their life.

SPEAKER_05: 28:53

Rosie O'Donnell's our neighbor here now, and there's still a good bit of rage going on with uh certain friends in the States.

SPEAKER_03: 29:02

We haven't seen what the new skinny Rosie is up to. We we know what the chubby Rosie is up to, but uh bless her heart, she's uh making changes in her life, and um in her heart, I have some of the same sympathies that she has. And uh so um I wouldn't I would be the last to condemn anything that Rosie does.

SPEAKER_05: 29:21

No, she's uh she's brought some life to the community here, that's for sure.

unknown: 29:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 29:28

Okay. Okay, when we have um you know ordinary good people, you because everything you've just spoken about there, it's it it's not a certain subsection of the human population, I'm assuming it's everyone. So we're all in that camp. We have great ordinary, hardworking business owners knock on our door, and they normally knock on our door really frustrated. They're they're burnt out, they're stressed out, they're they're anxious. The end of their tether with this thing that they've created and the impact that it's had on their life. And often the first thing they want to do is fix the business. You know, it's all about fixing the business. It's all about better marketing and better team and better, better this and that. And having now been in the space for 15 plus years and you come across the work from the likes of yourself, it's like we can we can fix the business. We can work on the business as much as we like, but for some reason, we always bend up back in this position of I still don't feel free. I still feel stuck, still don't have time. So what what do you say to that person knocking on our door at Wise, that that accounting firm owner?

SPEAKER_03: 30:47

Well, first of all, success in business is only partly about the business stuff. A lot of it has to do with your underlying intentions and any old programming that's getting in the way of you living out your full expression. The way we put it here is that everybody has four zones that they're operating in. And one of those is the zone of incompetence, where you're doing things that you're not very good at and you don't like. We say as quickly as possible, get rid of those, delegate those, find some way out of that. The second zone is the zone of competence, where you're doing things that you're good at, but somebody else could do just as well. In my Big Leap book, I talk about the moment of enlightenment where I'm standing in the line at the post office at Christmas time waiting to mail a package, and there's 15 people in the line and one clerk, and everybody's got a package. And I realized I'd already spent 15 minutes in the line. And I realized, well, at that time I was charging$1,000 an hour for my consultations. And so in 15 minutes, I'd eaten up$250 worth of time to mail a$10 package. And so that was a moment of, oh my gosh, here I am in my zone of competence. I've never done that again, by the way. And the second and third or third and fourth zones that are so important, though, the third zone is the zone of excellence where you're doing stuff you're good at. You're getting lots of atta boys and atta girls, and yay, and they're electing you chairman and say, do more of this. And your spouse is saying, Oh, yeah, we like the new country club. And oh, can we fly first class again this week? You know, and all of those kinds of things are beginning to mount up in your life. And so that's a problem that you stay in the excellence zone too long. And what's beckoning, though, and what I've helped people discover fortunately thousands of times now, millions of times, I guess, now, including the books, is that we all have within us a genius zone. That's the fourth zone. You haven't topped out in your zone of excellence. There's this other thing that's beckoning, and it's made of two components, and you can tell right this minute where you are with both of them. One is you're doing what you most love to do, and you're doing something that makes a contribution that feels satisfying to you. These are deathbed issues. It doesn't matter if you're a young sprout such as yourself or an old geezer such as myself, you've got the same problem, which is to express and it and make the biggest contribution you can. Because, I mean, I've had the, I guess you'd call it the pleasure of being at the deathbed of people when they're exiting this life. And I can tell you, nobody's, even if it's a billionaire, nobody's talking about the office or how much money or how well they're stocked at. Oh, no. They're saying, oh, why did I disown my brother 40 years ago because he was an alcoholic? You know, oh, why did I do that? Why couldn't I have been more compassionate? You know, those kinds of things. So what I'm talking about are the big issues of our life. And one of them is, can I get out of my own way? Can I get my programming out of the way? And it's all upper limit programming, you know, and I show in the big leap about all the different ways that show, you know, the different limiting beliefs and how those impact different um lack of success later on. And so we need to take it on as an inside job. A place to start is starting with commitment, because commitment, you can tell at any given moment whether you're living a commitment to something. If you think you're committed to your health, but you're smoking two packs a day, you know, your body's gonna give you feedback on that eventually, on that lack of integrity. Or, you know, like this is a great example of back pain, too. We had a business, I mean, a uh executive here who owned owned a big chain of resorts and hotels and things like that around the world. And they lived in a foreign country. And um, in the course of our work with them, when they finally came here, he had had back pain for years, and he'd had something I'm thinking of like 175 chiropractic adjustments over that period of time and some large number of massages, you know, you've got a massage every week and acupuncture to make his back going away. Well, my treatment took 10 seconds, and if you're willing to go radical, a lot of things can be solved in 10 seconds. My 10-second treatment was what did you start lying about three and a half years ago, and what are you still lying about? Um and you know, it was like reading a comic book. It was so obvious. Three and a half years ago, he'd started having sex every Tuesday with his secretary, and that got worse, but he couldn't fire his secretary, and he couldn't tell his wife, and so here he is acting out this thing every week and gradually trying to fix the back pain. You know, but and I'm not saying that all back pain has to do with infidelity. Don't everybody run home and confront their partner about that. Um, it has to do with lots of different things. But the interesting thing was two things. Wow, still blows my mind. His back pain went away after the big confession, and it blew up their relationship for about three months. They gradually worked it out, but during those months, she lost like 40 some pounds. Wow. And she didn't even go on a diet, it sort of fell off her. And how many times does stress cause our addictions? You know, like a lot. I remember my friend David Hubbard, who's a great neurologist uh down in San Diego, when he was in medical school, I remember him excitedly calling me because I was still at Stanford in the graduate program and he'd gone on to medical school before I graduated. He said, I just finished my first day in the hospital and I learned something I'd never known before. And I said, What is it? And he said, I learned why everybody's in here. And I said, Oh, you know, because I thought of as a complicated set of diseases. And he said, everybody in here is because of smoking, drinking, obesity or stress. Wow. Wow. That was a wake-up call to me that all of our health dollars are into fixing three things mainly. I mean, you know, smoking kills a thousand people a day here in the U.S. anyway. And um, when I've been into Ireland, uh, I don't think they've got less of a problem than we do with that over here. We're up there. Yeah. Um so um um I think that so many of the things that we blame on physical illness have to do with how we live our lives and the lifestyle choices we make. And one of those is in the area of relationship. And so, hey, by the way, I should, given your audience, I should say that I narrowly missed being an accountant in my life. Uh, I I'd probably be in the world's worst, but when I was a little boy, I remember asking my grandmother, who I was very close to, she lived next door and she pretty much raised me. And um she uh I said, you know, you you've seen me around and I was, you know, nine or 10 years old, and I was trying to figure out what do I want to do with my life? Because this was Leesburg, Florida, 10,000 people. There was nothing like a psychologist or a psychiatrist in town, you know, there were 10 Baptist ministers, they were all doing pretty well, you know. Um, but this was in the deep south. And um, so my grandmother said, Why don't you become an accountant? And I said, Oh, and and uh I said, I'm not especially great at math. Why would you say that? And when I pinned her down about, she says, during the Great Depression, they all had jobs. Oh, you know, I didn't realize that I was being uh giving guidance counseling by somebody that was uh you know working out of the Great Depression. Yeah. Fortunately, my high school counseling uh teacher gave me a test and made me realize suddenly that there are three things I should avoid in life. The absolute thing I should really avoid is being a farmer. The absolute other thing I should avoid is accountancy or anything to do with numbers. And the third was anything to do with working outside with your hands. And um uh so I've avoided all of those things.

SPEAKER_05: 40:39

You narrowly escaped and narrowly escaped.

SPEAKER_03: 40:42

I I do this heavy lifting with my fingers called typing.

SPEAKER_05: 40:45

Yeah, yeah. And uh I love my cohort, but uh we we had we had you escape to the right place. So we're we're not happy we we lost you to we we we're okay losing you to the profession, I should say. Um okay, I I'd really like to um I know we can't do the upper limit problem and the genius zone a whole heap of justice in the time that we've got together today, but I wanted to send people on their next step of their journey if they haven't been down the road of the big leap or um some of your your other books on the topic. So for me it's about creating awareness. So a lot of the things that you've mentioned today starts to spark up the idea of maybe the the neck pain or the back pain or just starting to have a bit more awareness on maybe there actually is something here and it's not a business tactic that I need to fix. So what in the spirit of creating more awareness and sending them on this journey, where where should we look to what questions should be asking? What things should we be doing to go on the journey?

SPEAKER_03: 41:53

I want to hark back to a point I made about commitment. Because commitment, almost nobody understands the power of commitment because, you know, like you make a commitment to going on a diet and then you blow it in three days, you say, okay, well, uh, I guess I'm destined to be um that weight. And so what happens is commitment gets a bad name because it doesn't include a second factor that's even more important than commitment itself. And that is how to make a recommitment once you slipped off. And here we stress recommitment because it's the ability to get back on the horse after you've been dumped off. That's the key thing. You know, because all of us are going to get dumped off the horse and we're going to have losses and things like that. Uh, as a matter of fact, let me just take this opportunity. I've never had this opportunity to, I've never been on an accountant's program before, but let me give a great deal of heartfelt appreciation to our accountant, Mr. David Ellis, uh, who has been working with us for many, many years and happens to be freshly on our mind because we had a massive influx of cash a couple of years ago. And uh we were looking at, you know, like a half a million dollar tax bill. And so David crafted it out. So, you know, it's uh it's still, you know, plenty of money, but it's not as sizable, but not as painful. So uh appreciations to David and everybody who labors to uh do good for folks like myself. Um I had an author's dream come true a a year or two ago where a big company offered me a giant chunk of cash for the rights to collect my royalties after I'm no longer on the planet. And um, so I uh I thought about that. I thought, hmm. At the time I was 79, I'm 80 now. At the time I thought, hmm, I'm 79. What would be the downside of taking a bunch of money right now instead of having somebody collect it after I'm dead? And so I gave it about 0.2 seconds of thought. Anyway, David Ellis is has been working on it all year long. He's in Christmas party. He came came up last night with the magic number, and Katie and I uh breathed a sigh of relief.

SPEAKER_05: 44:21

That's amazing. They uh they're they're great people that do great work. Um but they also suffer in silence a lot as well. Because I I do feel with our profession that there is a uh a false perception that they need to show up as the business owner. You know, accountants have to have it all together because we're giving advice to every other business. Um so there is pain behind the curtains of it because they don't have it all figured out. And a lot of them do aspire to be in a position working in their genius zone, whether they know it to be that or not, of helping their clients more, like like David's done with yourself, uh as opposed to working in that chaotic rhythm of tax and compliance. So to move towards that genius zone, is it fair to say that we can't step into that zone until we've really identified and addressed the ceiling that these upper limit problems place on our potential?

SPEAKER_03: 45:29

Say first, make the commitment. Make a simple commitment. And here's one I use, and I'd love for you all to take it on. And the idea is I commit to expanding my genius every day of my life. I commit to expanding my genius zone every day of my life. So make a commitment to that and write that down on a little piece of paper and stick it on your dashboard or stick it on your mirror because you need repeated inoculations of a good idea in order to get it established in you. But if you could just make this miny, minor, tiny adjustment of making a commitment to it, that opens up the door. And then occasionally you'll say, Oh, I realize I forgot that. And I have been looking at it on my mirror for two weeks and haven't even seen it, you know, and then you'll see it again. And so gradually keep introducing this new idea to you and then begin to look at what's under the hood, what's beginning, what's under there that's making that ticking noise that starts ticking every time I get to 90 miles an hour, you know, and so gradually fixing those things, using, you know, I've tried to write my best guidebook in The Big Leap, but there may be other tools and technologies you could use to do that. Um, but whatever it is, take it on as an inside job and make a commitment to expanding your genius zone and get willing to remove all the little glitches and itches and limitations that are in your way, uh, that um that life wants you to be a genius. That's the way I like to think of it.

SPEAKER_05: 47:15

So for those aspiring to head in that direction, give us a taste of what the genius zone feels like. Like what is life like in the genius zone?

SPEAKER_03: 47:25

Okay, well, let me just tell you uh I live in a place that I love living in, a house that I love living in, and a part of the world I love living in. I've lived in it now for 25 years, and it has magnificent plantings all over it. And um, so I live in a place I love. So I wake up every day loving my life. And then carefully, about 30 years ago, I started making choices is this in my genius zone or not, when I would be offered whatever it was. And I gradually started only doing things that was in my genius zone. So for the last 20 or 30 years, I've only done things that I love to do and that, in my opinion, make my biggest contribution. And so um, that's what I've been up to. I just don't do stuff that I don't like to do or um don't feel that I'm suited to do. I get at this stage of the game offered tons of stuff that are not exactly in my genius zone. You know, a big Europe.

SPEAKER_05: 48:34

That's an easy answer.

SPEAKER_03: 48:36

Uh yeah, you know, I well, I I give you there's a a piece of candy that you've seen on uh on uh counters all over Europe. And they came to me at one point and they say, we're opening up the United States, and we're looking for a person to be our spokesman. And you wrote a book called Learning to Love Yourself. And we've decided that our whole pitch is going to be learning to love yourself by eating our chocolate. And here's a bunch of money we'd like to get you on our side with this, you know? And uh so, oh and so I had to go through a little bit of anguish about that, you know, because at the time they offered it, I wasn't living quite the life I was living now. Uh but anyway, that that's a second thing that I think that everybody needs to do. Is so I've been doing that. I've been teaching my or uh what do you call it, uh applying my own methods for the last 30 or 40 years. There's an old Turkish saying that says if a man finds a cure for baldness, he will surely first use it on himself. And I use my own medicine to create, you know, a life where I, you know, we, you know, we we have a little bit of light planning we do every year, where we sit down on New Year's Day and usually go out to a particular place we like and sit on a bench in uh a place we like and think about how we want to craft this year. You know, what do we want? And so we do yearly stuff, but we also do bigger things that last a lifetime. Like one of our uh our mantras that we live out of is that all of our investments are paying good dividends and doing good in the world. That's the idea. And so at this stage of the game, you know, we have a large investment uh portfolio that we want to be doing good in the world. And so we've crafted investments that we like what they're doing. And uh so we feel good about that. So the idea is to get yourself really aligned with your deepest values and what you really deeply want in life. And then things really start flowing much easier once you're on the right path. Like in the beautiful Kathleen Rain's poem, The Invisible Way, she said, birds have an invisible way across the sky. How do they do that? Well, we can have the same kind of thing. We can get on the right wavelength in life, according to our own values, by simply aligning with what we most want. And my big suggestion in the big leap is to focus on what your genius zone is. You may not know it at first, but a little bit of inquiry, gentle wonder and inquiry will be able to uh reveal that for you.

SPEAKER_05: 51:27

Okay, I think that's a a perfect place to land a plane on. Um I must say the the big leap had a significant impact on my own life. Literally the first few pages where you say, if you're reading this and you're thinking about this, and I was just like, yes, yes, yes. And I just got absolutely addicted to the book. And creating that awareness around the upper limit problems and um heading towards that zone of genius has had a profound impact on my own life. And I I I really wanted to share that message with our audience. So thank you so much for doing that, and thank you for the work that you've put out. Um I have one final question to to ask, if you don't mind. Um, and I thought I'd throw a bit of a curveball at you. Because you've done thousands of these interviews and uh podcasts and everything. But I was curious, what's one question that you wish someone would have asked you, but no one ever has?

SPEAKER_03: 52:30

Um whoa, that's a good one. Well, let me just think of what the question would be. I know the topic would be. It would be tell me about how to use wonder as a practical tool. Um what what's the ultimate power and use to which you can put wonder? And so uh you can't see it from here, but on my wall over here, there's a photograph of me uh with the big word wonder written beside it. And uh the uh some photographer was making traveling around the United States making pictures of people, and uh he he asked me if I would let him take a picture of me. And then at the end of the picture session, uh he said, write a word that's sacred to you here next to your picture. And I wrote wonder. Amazing. And here's why. Because wonder, I believe, is an unused superpower. That when you wonder, genuinely wonder about something, you're free from your past conceptions about it. And you're free from whatever these future use of it might be. You can't sit here and wonder, oh, I wonder what the best thing I could create would be to make me a million dollars tomorrow. You know, it it wonder doesn't work like that. Wonder is good for solving problems that nothing else can solve. Like Einstein in his notebooks, he wondered about a particular problem for 27 years straight every day, until he finally, oh, I got that. You know, so be willing to go straight to the universe with an open heart of wonder, like, hmm, what do I need to do to transform my marriage? Or, hmm, what's happening at work that I'm not seeing that's causing this little niggle in me, this little stressful niggle in me at the end of the day. You know, asking big questions, but leaving huge room to answer them in. So you're not coming in with your old past preconceptions.

SPEAKER_05: 54:45

That's amazing. Thank you so much. Uh, and thank you to Katie. So I wish you both uh a wonderful anniversary month. Look forward to the the next nine books coming out. And for for anyone who's wanting to uh go down the path of exploring more about your work and some of the books we've mentioned today, how do we best find you?

SPEAKER_03: 55:09

Well, yes, and I I should also mention that in about a week or two, and I don't know when this is being broadcast, but um in October, in the month of October, we're going to be releasing my memoir. It's it's called Loving Life. Uh it's uh the subtitle is Tales of My Wondrous Journey. And Loving Life will be out, I think, on October 14th, but you'll be able to find it. And um I'm very excited about that because I've been working on it on and off for 10 years and uh gradually finally able to get it out into the world. Uh that makes two of us. Yes. And um so um the second thing is uh Hendrix.com, H-E-N-D-R-I-C-K-S.com, was um uh one of the um first websites on the internet, I'm happy to say, way back 30 years ago. And so it's now in its 116th interaction, I think. Uh and we're very proud of our website. We got tons of stuff there and lots of things that you can do there and lots of free videos and things like that. So Hendricks.com.

SPEAKER_05: 56:18

Perfect. Gay, thank you so much for your time. And again, it was an absolute pleasure to have you.

SPEAKER_03: 56:24

Thank you so much. It was great talking to you too. I hope you enjoy your uh life there. And uh if you are a Guinness man, uh sink a pint for me sometime.

SPEAKER_05: 56:32

I will. And if uh you're ever in this part of the world, you're uh more than welcome to clink a few point glasses together.

SPEAKER_03: 56:40

Well, good. Well, I don't know if I will be or not, but I I certainly will look you up. I have a bunch of invitations along that line. So uh I it'll be a massive Guinness-filled weekend if I do come together.

SPEAKER_05: 56:52

Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 56:55

I think we should get into it. So with today's topic. Um, so yeah, it is about retention. And I think I might actually I'll stop sharing because I feel like it's a bit more intimate, like just yeah, talking to you guys this way. Um but basically you know, when you're hiring someone, sometimes it can you can spend uh weeks, months hiring the perfect person. And then once you've actually found that great candidate, you know, it's amazing. But then they leave in like a year. And I'm sure everyone's had that sort of situation before, and that's not good. I can see a Christy here nodding. Um, because yeah, unfortunately it does happen. And uh it's sort of uh, you know, it's it's jarring like for a firm owner, you've done all these things, you think that you've you're doing the right things, and then all of a sudden your staff members are like, Well, I'm leaving. Um it's not good. So I guess the biggest thing is that uh talent retention is it's no longer about just perks or you know, ping pong tables back in the day when everyone was was in the office. Um it's about it's about deeper engagement and uh it's about aligned values, you know, you need to make sure that you're on the same page, but it's about uh future-focused leadership as well. You know, you need to make sure that you're growing your team, you know, you're growing them, not just saying, okay, I'm promoting you to a different uh uh different uh level or whatever, but actually growing them internally as well. Uh these days, like I mentioned, there's so much going on in the world. So and life doesn't end at 5 p.m. You know, it keeps going. And I think it's uh it's important for firm owners to know that, that to know that their staff uh have a life outside of work. They're not just grinders. You might have a grinder who is really good at their job and they you know they can get the work done, but it's yeah, it's more than just they go to work and they switch off. Like there's there's so much more happening. So firm owners need to be aware of that. Um and you know, replacing, I did some research and replacing an employee can cost uh anywhere between 50% and 200% of a staff member's salary. Like 200% is crazy when you stop and think about it. Um it's yeah, it's very, very expensive. But not only that, it's also uh the the loss of knowledge, especially if you have lost a manager. Um, you know, the manager leaves all these staff who would generally go to that manager. They've they've lost that person and they're either not going to do their job properly or they're gonna start asking you all these questions. And You as a firm owner, you're already busy. Um, so that's really hard. But also um team morale drops as well. Because if someone, you know, is a really good team member and they leave, you start going, well, why do they leave? Maybe I should leave. Maybe this isn't the job for me either. So you start to think about these things. Um and it's also the reputation of your firm, especially like if you've if you've hired a senior client manager and then six months later or a year later, they've left and you've had to rehire another senior client manager, and this happens again, your clients are going to start wondering what's going on in your firm, why you can't keep you know, these people. So are they the right person? You know, is your firm the right, I guess, firm for them to be working with? Because if if you can't keep staff, then then what's going on? Um yeah, so uh it's not just about retention isn't just about keeping people, it's about uh protecting your investment and building long-term stability. Like that's that's the the best way that I can put it. Um but uh yeah, so uh here like in in 2025, uh especially with um Gen Z and Millennials, um people want to work for organizations that stand for something. You know, with all the research that I've done on this um and everything that I've seen with candidates that I've spoken to, they do want to make sure that they are, yeah, with a firm who actually, yeah, they like I said, they stand for something. Um it's not just about salary. Like salary is not even something that I'm gonna touch on today, um, unless, of course, you've got questions on it. But yeah, it's it's more than salary these days. Um, it's even more than work from home. Work from home's not even something that I'm gonna touch on. Um it's it's more more than that. So firms need to have a clear vision um and and a clear mission as well. On and they need to have strong values. And if you have that, if you've got a good mission statement and you and you know that that's what you're working towards, then your staff are going to be proud of that. I know that's something that what like we have here at WISE. We've got a great vision in mind and a great mission, and we're just we're working towards that, and everyone is involved. So it's not just up like leadership, it's the entire company is involved in that. And that makes such a huge difference because you feel like you're a part of something, um, knowing that you're helping people every day. And the another fact that I found is that the fact that so firms uh who don't have or firms who do have a clean mission have 40% lower turnover. So that's that's a big thing as well. Like 40% is uh is big. Um and I think it's important to remember that you've got to move past the whole uh one size fits all. Um, because it's that's not the case these days. You know, you can't just go, oh, this person's doing well, so I'm just gonna move you in this position or whatever it is. Like you need to you need to do those one-on-one meetings. Uh because when you start doing those one-on-one meetings, then you you find out what your candidates or or what your employees are actually interested in. Um, and when you find out what they're interested in, you start, you you can start tailoring things and and working with them to, you know, to go, okay, well, you it everything that you've told me, let's work towards you becoming, you know, a manager or an SPM or a senior client manager or whatever it is. Um, but if you don't know your employees, if you don't know anything about them, they just come to work, do their work and leave, then you're not gonna know what makes them happy. You're not gonna know you know if they are unhappy and they they are looking for another place. Um so I feel like I'm I'm talking like I I hope I'm not giving everyone like too much um information too quickly. Um, but I would like to hear, Christy, from you if it's okay. Um, in regards to your staff retention so far, what you've seen with your own firm, is there like a key factor of something that's made like what's something that you've noticed staff are if they're leaving, why are they leaving, or if they're staying, why are they seeing?

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:51

Yeah, well, uh gone are the days of churn and burn, thank goodness. I had some very short, uh, short-term team members because I didn't really know what I was doing. I needed to work on my own leadership skills and have better processes in place to retain. I think it's I'm sure at some point in our careers we've all been an employee. So it's being able to think through that lens of what did you used to like and dislike when you worked for someone else and bringing that into your own leadership skills, of creating a space where your team members feel supported, they feel seen and heard. And, you know, sometimes you need to make the tough call of moving someone on too. You know, the cost of a mishire, the cost of the wrong values or cultural fit in your business can cost you good people if you don't act fast as well. So it's being able to identify how the team dynamics are with each person and seeing everyone as individuals. We're not all the same. We don't all need the same things, we don't all like the same things. So when you're looking at your team member engagement, you know, one of the best things for me is having team NPS in place, having that weekly survey go out to my team and helping identify where my team are not feeling appreciated or valued or supported or connected with their team. And then I have to think globally because it doesn't tell me who's feeling out of alignment. So I have to think globally of what I can do that will support improvement in this area across my whole team. So looking at initiatives that you can bring in and you know, making sure that everyone is working for the same goal and vision. You know, it's as when you were talking earlier, Danny, it reminds me very much of a team member I hired must be three and a half years ago now. Initially, when we made the job offer to him, he turned it down because he was in the fortunate position of having a few offers being made, and our offer wasn't the highest. But he came back to us within a day or two and said, actually, I really like your business. I like how it sounds to be part of your team, and I'd really like to work with you. So we were able to get a great hire who's still here because of the clarity I have around my vision, my mission, and my values, the way that we frame that on our website, the way that we framed that in our recruitment process, in having a video in a job ad talking about the culture of my business, so we're able to attract and retain the right person. You know, I think about when we do our career wheel with team members, it asks about values alignments. If a team members don't know my values, they couldn't score that one, or they'd score it low if it felt out of alignment. So these are all the little micro pieces that help you attract and retain the right people and also know when you've got the right people and the wrong people, because as business owners and leaders, we should also look at our value system and when we're assessing our team, do they align with our values? Even when it comes to clients, do they align with our values? Do they behave in a way that we can support, or is it against our beliefs? So, you know, these are these are all the little pieces to pull together when you're looking at attracting and retaining people.

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:40

Yeah, thanks, Christy. You've just reminded me, um, I'm currently uh hiring for a client at the moment, and we had an interview yesterday, and the the person that we interviewed, they had all the technical skills, but there was just that the the firm owner couldn't see this person working with their team, you know, especially because this person was going to be like an assistant client manager stepping into that client, like senior client manager position. And yeah, the firm owner was like, I cannot see this person actually managing my team. Um, they're not going to work well together. And that's really important. So seeing that stuff from the very beginning, um, that way you you can avoid a mishire. Um, but yeah, something that a lot of firms are starting to do, and I think it's it's great. Um, so they're bringing in like wellness programs. So um I know one particular firm, and I'm not sure if if the firm owner's here today, but she does like a wellness Wednesday. So they they pick a different topic. Um, I know some firms will do like a book that they'll read together, like a little book club, um, and they'll read like a wellness book. But yeah, you pick you you pick a different topic, and then you basically just you talk about it, you you sort of rate yourself from one to to ten on how you're feeling, and then you go from there. So I know Christy, we do this as well with um with Jamie and Brenton. And if it's anything lower than an eight, then we need to have a one-on-one meeting with Jamie. Um, yeah, and it's just it's all about that that career will as well that you mentioned, Christy. And um, even now the IP that Jamie's uh created with the um the career audit, that's really important. And I think it's something that if you can, you do it with your staff when they are first onboarded, like when you first onboard someone, it's good to do it, do it then and there. Um, but of course, doing it because it will change as well as they develop different skills and everything. Um things will start to change. So doing that that career audit from time to time is really important as well. Um, there is also like a personal audit that um Jamie's created, and that's you should be doing that with your staff like monthly, because again, their personal life can affect their work life. So, you know, if they're not happy in their personal life, then it it is it is really dangerous because something small could happen at work and they can go, okay, that's it. I'm I'm done. Um, so yeah, just checking in on them. So doing those one-on-one meetings monthly. Um yeah, and again, it's not just about work. So, you know, uh Jamie, when I first met Jamie, and this is the first time this has ever happened with like any of my bosses, um, Jamie started asking me questions about like my personal life. He started telling me stuff about his personal life. And it just like, yes, he's my boss, but it's just nice to know that if I do have an issue, I can, I can go to him and I know that he's gonna listen. And that's what people want as well. People want to know that they can they can trust their boss, um, to know that if they do come go to them with their issues, their boss isn't gonna be like, okay, you've got too many issues, I'm gonna let you go. It's it's you know, they're gonna, their boss is gonna build them, like build their their their resilience, their their strength, like they're going to help them get to that stage where they they're able to handle things. Um, and that's why it's really important to build your leaders. Um, because obviously you're gonna be your as you build your firm, you're gonna want to work on your firm, not in your firm. So as firm owners, firm owners, it's your job to actually build your leaders, your senior client managers or you know, your SPMs, to be able to do that, to to detect if your staff do have personal problems going on. So, you know, if it you know, if your leaders aren't trained in this, then again, you're gonna have problems. Um, it's just gonna keep going down and down, and then people are gonna start leaving. Um so there is another fact, a little fact that I found. Um so firms with embedded well-being strategies report a 30% increase in employer uh employee satisfaction. So that's like 30% again is big. Like you, you know, obviously we'll look at it from one 1% to 100, 30% isn't that that big, but it's still people that you're working with, it's still your staff, you've still invested time, money, energy into finding these people. So, you know, Christy, there's this awesome saying that I I love, um, I think you say it about, you know, if you train your what happens if you train your staff and they leave?

SPEAKER_00: 1:13:48

Oh, yes, it's not from me, but it's definitely something that I repeat that um it's something about yeah, gosh, sorry, my brain's gone blank, but it's something about, you know, if you train good people and they leave, but what if you train bad people and they don't leave?

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:06

Yeah. And you know, Ed often speaks that oh uh is it what if you don't train people and they say sorry, yes.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:15

Uh yeah. That's okay. I'm gonna add it to my sticky note list so that I remember it perfectly.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:24

You need a hand there.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:25

Yeah, Peter, please, Peter, if you remember it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14:28

Yeah, I do. So um, yeah, if you if you if bad if you keep bad people and you don't train them, what happens? That's it. Yeah. Yeah, but if you yeah, if you train them and they leave, that's a problem. But if you keep bad people and you don't train them, that's even worse.

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:48

Yeah. Okay, and Chris, I think that is what you said. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:52

Oh yeah, and and Ed often speaks to, you know, it's better to have an empty seat than the wrong person in a seat in your business. So, you know, it's yeah, you really have to get to know people. It's not about, you know, we're not flooded with grinders anymore. It's it's difficult to attract the right people in any role and to retain them, but retaining the right people and and wellness is is a big part of that. I know for us, we we have a few different well-being and wellness initiatives. We have a well-being allowance. So we're a fully remote team, and our team members have an allowance or budget every year for wellness improvement. So if they need something in their office to feel more comfortable, we've had a team member invest their allowance in a sit-stand desk. We've had another set up in a really cool keyboard mouse that just really excites him. He's he's a bit of a nerd, it's really cute. Um, it's it's like an old Atari. If any of you are my vintage, then you'll know what I mean. So it's, you know, for him, that just makes him feel excited to be at work. And for another team members, she was having back issues. So to be able to have the flexibility of a sit-stand desk was important for her. And, you know, others, if they just need to get an extra massage, then they can use that well-being allowance towards that. So it's looking at, you know, not everyone has the same needs, but how can you accommodate under the umbrella of well-being? A team created, um, which was started by one of our team members' husbands, I don't know how he's still alive, to tell the tale, but he suggested to his wife that she should walk more because she sits at her desk. So he bought her some shoes, some really cool shoes, and then he bought her um like a Garmin watch or something. And she thought, well, this is great. I'm gonna get my team members on board as well. So now they've created this online walking group where everyone can track their steps per day. They set mini targets. On a Monday, they look at last week's stats and they all support each other and say, Oh, you didn't get as many, you okay? How are you feeling? So it's just created this little conversation with them. Our office manager often sends wellness emails to the team, reminders of stretching, some good ways to move when you're at your desk and just keep it fresh. So, you know, it's just seeing seeing everyone as people, not just cogs in in the wheel that that turns your business.

SPEAKER_02: 1:17:32

Thanks, Chrissy. That was perfect. But yeah, what you just said, because yeah, it's a great way to to sort of to sum up what we're what we're trying to talk about today. Like, obviously, there's still more that we're we're gonna cover, but yeah, just to that people like you are dealing with people that it's they're not just another number. Like I know some firm owners sort of have that mentality of, well, if it doesn't work out, there's so many other people out there. But why would you do that when you could just invest? You know, you you invest in your people and they will grow, they will stay with your firm.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:09

Um, so there's just on that, Danny. Sorry, if I can sorry to interrupt you, but one of the things that I really love about wise deep and narrow team structure is, you know, we often think that gone are the gold watch days of employment. People do tend to change careers every two to five years. And I'm sure, Danny, in your uh toolbox of stats that you would have that somewhere to refer to. But you know, this generation does move between jobs, they move from one business to another. What you can create in a wise structured firm is career pathways that sustain people for 10, 15, 20 years, because you can start off as a grinder, as an intermediate or a graduate, you can move up into senior, product um senior bookkeeper or accountant, then there's a production manager position, then you've got client manager positions, and then you've also got the executive positions. You've got assistant CFO, CFO, you might have a COO, CEO. There are all of these opportunities that you can create as you grow and scale your business with the clarity and tools and resources that we have in our wise vault to show you how to get there. So there's this opportunity to always be offering new career pathways within your business. So you don't have to lose people because they want a more senior position, or you don't have to give them equity and partnership in the business. There are other ways to retain team members and grow a really long, successful career together. And that's yeah, I think that's really special.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:52

Yeah, absolutely. I just um you just reminded me of Jamie and um Sha, who Sha works with Jamie at Sky Accountants, and she started, I think it was about nearly 10 years ago or something, as I think like a junior accountant. Uh Shah's like she's in the Philippines. Um, and now she's worked her way up to I think it's C O O. And I think they're gonna they're trying to help her actually get a sponsorship and come to Australia. Like that is a perfect example of what happens when you invest in your people. Um even here at WISE, I don't think we've had anyone uh quit because it's yeah, um our like Jamie, Brenton, Ed, they they invest in us. They actually they see us then more than just a number, basically. Um another cog in the wheel, as you mentioned, Christy. Like it's it's more than that. Um because and like I said earlier, life doesn't it doesn't end at 5 p.m. Um yeah, so you've just you've got to keep that in mind as firmowners. But I I I wanted to sort of touch on the red flags, I guess, of um you know, undermining retention and and all of that. Um so the biggest one, and I feel like everyone should know this one, micromanagement. So nothing nothing drives um, you know, your your top people out more than feeling like they're they're being watched over constantly, especially if you have a remote team. Um if you if you feel like you can't trust your team members to do their job remotely, maybe remote work isn't the right thing for your firm. Um like if you constantly need to be checking in on them and and being like, well, what are you doing now? Or whatever it is, um, if you just if you're constantly complaining about the fact that you can't see them uh daily or you know every couple of minutes, then yeah, maybe work from home isn't the right uh setting for your for your particular firm. Um yeah, because if people do feel like they are being micromanaged, they're not gonna stay. Um But the next thing is lack of role clarity. So um and I've uh I've dealt with a lot of candidates who have said to me that the reason that they're leaving their firms is because they don't know where they're going. They're they join the firm. Um, the firm owner's like, yep, this is sort of what we're thinking at the moment, but you know, we'll just work towards it and nothing happens. Um or they just the firm owner's like, I just need you to do this for now, and then yeah, we'll we'll look at things later. Like if if people don't know where they're gonna be, and it doesn't necessarily have to be 12 months' time, but even two years' time or three years' time, then they're gonna start getting like restless because no one wants to be stuck in the same role doing the same thing forever. Um, you could still have your grinders doing that sort of thing, but if they if they don't see like if they can't see themselves stepping into like a manager position or even just training less um experienced team members, um, if they're just constantly doing the same thing day in and day out, they're not gonna be happier, they're not gonna stay, they're gonna want to um, you know, join a firm that challenges them. And that sort of leads me into like the the next one, which is stagnant growth. So yeah, uh it's the same thing. No one wants to feel stuck. People want to know that they are achieving goals and everything. And this is why the the career audit is so important to do with your staff, because when they when you do the career audit with them, you can see what their skills are, where they're actually what they're actually passionate about, um, what would be a good uh fit for them in terms of the role and everything. Um another thing is so the the fourth thing is over reliance on perks. So uh, you know, uh and I've a little I've written this little thing down, free coffee and a ping pong table won't fix a toxic culture. That's yeah, it's so true because uh yes, perks are nice, but they're not uh it's not a substitute for respect um or you know, feeling included or having meaningful work. Um, you know, you need to focus on building your team. Um again, I've had candidates say that the reason that they're leaving their firms is because they do feel um like they're they are in a a toxic culture, or there's like little clicks or things like that. Um, and clicks can still happen, even if it's remote work, like they don't have to be in an office to feel that. Um, offshore team members can still have clicks or whatever it is. Um another thing, so number five is communication. So again, this is where the one-on-one meetings they come in handy, that's so important. Um, but also lack of transparency. If you're not being honest, if you're not giving feedback to people as well, you know, if you're getting angry with someone because they're not doing a good job, but you're not giving them the right feedback, that's on you, that's not on them. Because how are they going to grow? How are they gonna know what they're doing wrong if you're not telling them? Um and again, like unclear direction. Um, it basically if you if you're not if you're not giving them the right direction, um, it can build that untrust, basically. The employee is not going to be able to trust you to to give them the right guidance. And uh employees want to feel like they're they're included. So and you know, even heard. And that's why the like the the what's it called, Chrissy, the NPS school? Yeah, that's why the NPS is so important to do with your team members. Um, we do it every two weeks here at WISE. And it is really important because that means that Brenton and Jamie can get our feedback. Um, and it is like it's it's anonymous. They don't know who it is unless we tell them. Um, because you there's a setting that you can, you know, uh say that it's it's from you. But uh yeah, your staff uh if you if you're not putting those things into place, your staff are never they're not gonna feel heard. Um and that that's not good either, because uh, like we've been saying this entire call, it's just it's more than work. You know, you want to you want to build that that team culture, that that family, that respect so that people feel comfortable enough to tell you their problems. Um, you know, you're not a counselor, but uh if you're if your staff can can trust you enough to go, okay, this is what I'm dealing with, um, and just feel heard, uh, then you're on the right track. Whereas if they don't feel comfortable enough to tell you anything, uh, that's when there's a problem. Um, number seven is no work-life balance. So again, burnout. So burnout is is real. Um I it's again, a lot of candidates who leave firms, they tell me that they're they're leaving because of burnout. Um and Chris, you would know this as well. Like you've heard it so many times from from candidates. Um, you know, you'll have a conversation with them and they're like, I'm leaving because of burnout. Um, you know, if you're if you if you're constantly getting your staff to stay back and do more work um and not giving them any notice either, if you're just saying, okay, I need you to do this now, um, without, you know, talking to them about it earlier, you know, maybe the day before or whatever it is. But yeah, if you're constantly getting them to do overtime, your staff are gonna go, well, what am I doing? Like, I'm I'm not spending any time with my family, I'm just basically working all the time. So that's that they'll leave. That's the reality of it. If they feel like they're being overworked, they won't stay. Um number eight is inconsistent leadership. So leadership that frequently changes um directions. So if you'll if your managers are basically just going, okay, we're doing we're gonna do something this way, and then a week later they're like, this isn't working, we're gonna do it another way. And they just keep constantly doing that because uh you haven't actually trained them to be good leaders, uh, that's really dangerous because if you haven't trained them, how are they supposed to manage their team? Um if they're figuring things out constantly and just uh they're not being guided themselves, uh that's you know, uh it it's not good because your staff are gonna go, what's going on? Like you can't even manage me. Um it's uh yeah, it's basically going to ruin that that relationship. Um so I think we sort of touched on this earlier, but number nine is ignoring employee feedback. So you know, if you ask your employees for feedback, but then ignore it, like that you just go, okay, well, thank you for that, but don't actually address it in the one-on-one meetings or or whatever it is, um your your staff are gonna feel like they're not they're not being heard, they don't they don't matter, they don't care. And yeah, it's just they're gonna leave. That's I know I've said that so many times, but it's true because uh people want to know that their voices are being heard and the that what they're going through actually matters. Um if the if your staff are telling you, okay, I don't have the capacity to do this, in do the capacity planner, you know, see what's going on. Um because yeah it that could be the case or maybe they're not the right fit for the role. But yeah, actually do something about it. And then yeah that's that that's pretty much it. Like that sums up everything. I do have number 10 as being toxic team dynamics. But again we sort of touched on that earlier with the whole toxic culture and everything. But yeah I will just sort of add sometimes it can take one team member who has like that toxic um uh I don't know what the word is but like a toxic team member can ruin it for everyone basically and I've seen that in a lot of firms um staff members will leave because of one person um especially if they feel like that one person basically controls everything and the and the team doesn't feel like they have a say um so you know what's the point of saying anything to my boss and that's where that that good communication with your you know with your staff come in handy so that if your staff member do have an issue and I know we talk about the no bypass policy and and no triangles that is 100% true but if your staff are having issues with their team leaders and their team leaders are toxic and not doing anything about it, if your staff don't feel comfortable to come to you and be like there is an issue I am being micromanaged I'm being disrespected spoken down to whatever it is if you don't build that that relationship with your staff you know they they they're not going to stay but they won't tell you what's going on either because they'll be scared um they'll be scared to mention anything about their their team leader and because they don't have that relationship with you they'll just say well there's no point in sticking around I'm just gonna leave so yeah just something to be aware of there as well um so the I guess the actionable points the the steps that firm owners should be taking and you're probably gonna be like you sound like a broken record but have your regular one-on-one meetings don't just do it you know every six months like it's not just about the performance reviews it's about that constant open communication with your staff and if the and when you do the career wheel or the career order or whatever it is if they do get below an eight put steps into place to fix that you know have that have those meetings and go, okay, well this is what we're gonna work towards this is how we're gonna resolve this actually take the time to invest in your people