The Wize Way

Episode 181: The Scalable Firm Blueprint: Structure, SOPs, Teams, and the Fab 5

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 2 • Episode 181

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Most firm owners try to “scale the business” by working harder or hiring faster - but never fix the structural ceiling that keeps them stuck.
 The result? Constant firefighting, team bottlenecks, unpredictable results, and a firm that can’t run without them.

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, we break down the real blueprint behind building a scalable, self-running firm - the same principles used inside $7M practices. You’ll learn:

✅ Why growth stalls when there’s no deep-and-narrow team structure
 ✅ How weak SOPs and unclear roles quietly destroy capacity
 ✅ The two divisions that determine whether you scale or spin your wheels
 ✅ Why the Fab 5 is the only KPI system that shows whether your firm is truly healthy
 ✅ The mindset shift every owner must make to step out of the day-to-day

If you’re ready to stop doing more and finally build a business that grows without you, this episode 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

2. Need to Hire right now? Book a 1:1 FREE discovery call with our WizeTalent hiring coaches to help find your next team member the Wize Way – Click Here

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

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to The Wise Way, the show for accounting and bookkeeping firm owners who want more time, profit, and freedom in 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.

SPEAKER_03:

And today we're going to be going into uh your business blueprint, okay? And focusing on around uh how to build uh a scalable practice, okay. Right, so this is a pretty important topic, and it is so easy to get a lot of coverage uh here. Uh we can almost talk about anything capacity, production, marketing, sales. Um but at the heart of it is it's about being able to keep your growth. Okay. So whether you know you're growing at a 5% rate or a 20% rate, 50% rate, I've seen some firms on their on their Fab 5, it's a hundred percent growth uh year over year. Uh mainly Americans. They it's just another that's another place over there. Okay, so we want to be talking about what it takes to layer a good foundation a little bit on this, uh, some mistakes that you should be uh avoiding and keeping in mind uh as you're growing, how important the metrics are uh in being able to manage and lead your firm through growth. And how can a team structure support your growth? Okay, and I'm I'm talking about more than just your client, production, uh, tax accounting, bookkeeping, deeper narrow teams. There are teams in every division. And whether you think your firm is not, you know, not big enough to warrant a deeper narrow team in say uh operations in division six or division seven accounts, you're still I'll show you how like you should still be thinking about it in terms of a deeper narrow team, even if it's just one person there for the next four years. Okay, all right, and uh our yeah, our hosts for today is myself and Raul uh from Wise Hub and Danny from Wise Talent. Okay, and you know where I'd like to start is with the Fab 5. Okay, and in building a scalable business, we have to remember the old saying of you need to begin with the end in mind by Stephen Covey and uh mentioned by Ed Chan a million times. Okay, so I'm just gonna be pulling up the fab five here. Uh sorry, the wise hub. Just give me a second, I have I just gotta blow my nose as well. I had it open, but you know, I just have this habit of closing the browser when I'm done looking at it. Okay, so a business ultimately serves you. I I think we're you know we're across that message. And it's really easy to feel overwhelmed by what you need to do for it. Um it's really important that you assess like what what what what are you doing all of this for? And then actually reassess it again. So something that we do and we recommend once a year, and to be honest, it's not even just a once-a-year thing. This is something that you should be thinking a little bit about every single day, adding touches to it, and that is your ideal lifestyle, okay? And it's it's I I've seen I've seen a lot of firms do this for their Fab Fire uh inside their Wise Hub. But in so many ways, it could be better. Okay, and I just want to go through each of these uh categories in brief in order to help you define what your ideal lifestyle is so that you can actually know and plan what uh what you're actually building towards. So I I couldn't find an example in here, but you want to start by just broadly speaking, thinking about in 20 or 30 years' time, what does a day in your life look like? What does a week look like for you? Okay, and it's it can be hard to imagine, but I'll give you an example. If my my ideal week is I wake up at like 9 a.m., I'll go to the gym, I'll eat, have a shower, maybe do a bit of something, uh maybe hop into a meeting or two, and then be done by like 4 p.m. And if that was it every day, I'd feel like that's enough work to like not make my brain rot, and uh that's perfectly fine for me. Mostly spending time with my family and just looking after my health. So it could be it could be as simple as that. Some of the things I've read here are like I want to uh you know win a competition in golf, I want to go on a holiday, I want to spend more time at my holiday home. I I I don't know, I've seen all sorts. But if that's hard for you, that's why you need to consider these other areas. Okay. So think about it in terms of your career. Okay, and a career is not just a place where you're employed and you're moving up your ladder. We all have a career here today. You are building your own career, running your own business. So define it. What does your aspirations career-wise look like? What are some quotes that resonate with this? What are some documents that you've read that inspired you to think about your career in a certain way? And probably the easiest thing is videos. What videos are people that you aspire and respect? It doesn't mean that you want to achieve their level. Like, you know, people can look up to Elon Musk. You don't need to be a 200 billionaire to be able to um have him as uh a person you aspire to. So have videos that remind you of like, you know, who you respect, who you aspire to. And the people who you aspire to, if you look closely, what it means is that there is a part of you that actually aligns with that. Okay. And then in terms of wealth, what does that look like? You know, what do you what is it going to take for you to be able to feel financially free? Um, do you want to pass things on to your children? How much is it going to take to fund your own lifestyle? Your health? Your relationship? And I've seen this this relationship one is really funny. Uh uh, you know, some people just don't value it and they're married. Like, uh, you know, why? You know, what happens when you're withdrawn from your company? And there was a Stanford paper I read on people who have exited uh from large companies and they end up with um, they're basically they call it post post uh what is it, post liquidity. Like they're they're beyond money. Okay. And the interesting thing is they spent all this time working on building up their business, and then now they're free. And they go to their wife, oh, I'm let's go do something today. Let's go and uh what are you doing at 2 p.m., 3 p.m.? And then she'll be like, or he'll be like, um, I'm going to Pilates, oh, I'm going to golf. And you're like, what do you mean? I'm free now. Don't you want to spend time together? Like, and then they would say, No, you you're always working. So this is my schedule. I just because you, you know, you um fulfilled your dreams doesn't mean that I can't. And that was really interesting. So if you neglect your relationships whilst you're building up your business, what are you going to have when you actually achieve it? So that's something really important to think about. Uh I think romance is tangently related, but uh it can mean something else to relationships uh or similar. Growth-wise, what do you want to do? Uh, how do you want yourself to develop? It's not just in terms of your career, but what values do you aspire to? What values do you want to develop and express more deeply? Okay, like are there areas in your life that you want to develop besides business and then building a career and making more money? Do you want to be able to get into music? Do you want to be able to uh be more creative in certain areas? Do you want to get into philanthropy? So think about your growth uh beyond the realms of your career. How would you be having fun? Uh, your environment, what does your environment look like? And the weirdest one here is your eulogy. And this can be an odd one to do, but what it's supposed to do is have you reflect on how do you want to be perceived and remembered when you've passed away. Because if you think about what people would say about you and how they perceived you at your supposed funeral, that's holding yourself accountable to actually achieving those things. Okay. Uh, I've heard something funny. I remember when I was a kid, uh, my parents took me to Hollywood, uh, and we were like on a tour passing all these houses, and there was like a graveyard. And they said the a funny story about one of those uh uh graves was that it belonged to uh a producer or an executive, and usually actors have to sign a contract, okay, and then uh you have to like be part of a TV show or a movie series for a while. That executive, and then you can't exit it, obviously, unless you lose a bunch of money. That executive would really make those actors work, okay? He'd be really tough on them. And hit the funny story was when he passed away, all those actors that he worked with uh came back to his funeral and grave and just like just abused it. Okay, so uh, you know, how do you want to be remembered? You know, uh, it does that matter to you at all. Okay, and look, what does this all do? It sounds abstract, and it is, and we're doing our best to break it down, but it all feeds into an ideal income, and that feeds into your growth plan. Okay, and then this sets a number that you want to achieve. Two firms this year that I've been in board meetings for have achieved this. I and they showed me, and and and they showed me their why their growth plan and ideal income even before the wise hub existed, even before Wise Hub 2.0. It was in the Wise Hub SharePoint as an Excel sheet. They showed me their uh their ideal income they wanted to achieve, and it was just so nostalgic looking at their ideal income on an Excel sheet and then saying, we hit this. So let's make the decision to start withdrawing and have a general manager come in and start taking over the reins. And that's exactly what they did. Um, another person hit it, and then he goes, Great, I'm a I'm at a million dollars USD in personal income after tax per year. I want to make it five. Like, oh, oh great. You know, you hit it, now you want to go further. Okay, so this is setting your goals, okay? But more specifically, uh, how does this actually relate to building up a scalable business? And why is that important? Well, if you have a shaky foundation and you're constantly losing staff and losing clients, if you're attracting the wrong clients because you don't have an ideal persona that you're targeting, then you you kind of just never get there. And the firms that I've seen actually get there, they've done all those things well. Every board meeting I would come into, they're telling me about how they're progressing hiring. Oh, we're talking to this person, this person's close. I have two or three people that I'm sussing out. Oh, Thomas, let's update the team structure and the capacity plan. Oh, let's review our charge out rates. They're constantly thinking about their team and the overall architecture of the firm in terms of the people. It's always front and center of their mind. And a close second is this is our ideal customer. How much are they paying us today? How much more can we push the price up? How can we generate more demand? And that's probably a close second. And they're able to focus on this because the production and the operational and the account matters and the quality matters are pretty much bedded down. Does it mean that it's never a problem? Does it mean that they're never losing a senior production manager and now a team is struggling? Does it mean that they've never finding out that an assistant client manager in a team is not pulling their weight and that they have to be let go? No, not at all. Does it mean that they're never getting write-offs or a whip balance every now and then? Does it mean that they're ever making a loss on a job? No, not at all. But what they've done is that they've built a system that can deal with the problems. I've asked Ed this question. When does it get easier? And he said, it doesn't get easier. Obviously, the more you grow this business, the more problems you're going to encounter, and the bigger the stakes would be, and the larger the consequences would be. What changes is that you have the skill sets to be able to actually deal with it. Okay? If you understand the deeper narrow team structure inside out, it's kind of second nature. Oh, I kind of feel like this person's a bit shaky. I'm already talking to three people. The whip balance is kind of uh going, it's kind of trending up uh a little bit beyond the average that I'm expecting. Uh I'm going to be uh point, I'm going to be stressing this upon the senior client managers to actually look into if there are any systemic issues. And let's kind of drill into this issue. Oh, we're losing clients. Why are we losing clients? How does it correlate with our client NPS? You can see from all the things and examples that I'm mentioning here that the metrics and the KPIs are an important part of actually understanding and making decisions and actually keeping in control of a growing business so that you can focus on pioneering your company in terms of the people that it hires and the marketing that it does. People and marketing, they never truly become a system that you can just step away from, if that makes sense. Because if you think about it, as you're growing your business, you're you're increasingly hiring more and more capable people. You're one day you're hiring a senior production manager, the next day you're hiring a senior client manager, then you're hiring an assistant client manager for them, then you're hiring an operations manager, then you're hiring a general manager. Like as your business grows, the capability of the person that you need in your firm increases. And it always feels like you're discovering new ground and you're learning new things in terms of so what makes a person good in that area? That that never really goes away. Of course, when it comes to hiring a bookkeeper, an accountant, when there's so many layers uh disconnected from you, sure, you can entrust it to like a HR manager to do that for you. But almost always you're going to be closely uh involved in the HR process. Okay, the hiring and the recruitment and your human resources. So if you don't like hiring people, if you don't think that it's important, if you came from a larger company before you started your own accounting firm and then saw HR as like this administrative function that sat in the corner, then you really need to change your thinking. It is the number one most hands down most important thing that you can do as a leader, as hire. Sam Altman, the founder and current CEO of OpenAI, you would all know, you would all know him from ChatGPT. He professes that he is a non-technical person. Yes, he can code, but he's not getting involved with the neural networks, the machine learning that the talented data scientists are doing at his company. He's not a researcher. What he is, however, is extremely talented at bringing the smartest people in to work on a mission together. So if you think about it, when you're hiring, this isn't just an administrative thing where you're doing admin, you're reviewing resumes, you're writing out job descriptions and SOPs for them. It is a process where you're actively defining your mission so that it attracts talented people. If you're a firm where you feel like there are no good people out there, I've done so many resumes, uh reviews and interviews, and it just seems like people are just not that great. I've had people come into my firm and they flounder and they don't really do a good job. The industry has a problem. The industry does not have a problem. Okay? Your company has a problem. Your company has a mission problem. Your company lacks a vision that is actually attractive enough for other people to come and work for. When you work on this, you are working on the marketing that helps your capacity and your production. Likewise, when you're working on division two, your marketing, it is recruitment, but for a different category. It is recruitment for the clients. If you're complaining about the sort of clients you have, oh, you know, they're always pushing my buttons, they're rude, they don't give, you know, they don't give their information in on time, they don't really take my advice, they kind of just expect me to do compliance, they send things in at the last minute, they pay the invoices late. And generally, there isn't just much prospect for them. They're just not very driven or ambitious people. I don't really see how serving them and giving them effort is going to help grow this firm. Well, your clients aren't the problem. Again, it's your firm that is a problem. What problem are you trying to solve? Who are you trying to target? What mission do you have? What vision do you have? We can't underestimate that as we're running professional services firms, we're talking to business owners as well. And they would understand this as much as you do that a mission and a vision and a purpose actually attracts them to you. Okay, so lead with your philosophy, lead with the problems and specialty and the niches that you're solving. Don't present yourself as a broad services, compliance-only, processing-centric accounting firm. And besides attracting the wrong staff and clients, that's not even a good strategy given the way we're headed with AI and technology. If you go that direction and you continue to think that high volume and cheap prices is your business model, you're at a huge risk of being automated away. Where accounting firms provide value today is using those tools, okay, and allowing it to become the system that does the tax returns so that your team can spend more time proactively developing the relationships with your clients. Okay. So you can see this is all connected. If you had to pinpoint two major core components of building a scalable business and the mistakes to avoid, you can simply categorize them under your approach and philosophy towards hiring people. Your approach and philosophy towards the clients you attract. Okay, so those are the two core ones. So uh and just generally other mistakes. Okay, I'll just list out a few from what I've seen in my experiences.

SPEAKER_04:

Um sorry, I'll try to blow my nose again. I'm just gonna scan through all seven divisions, okay?

SPEAKER_03:

Starting from right to left. Division seven accounts, the mistakes that you can make, not having someone in it, not having someone in it who's going to take responsibility for actually reporting and completing your KPIs, not having someone in it who takes the accounts receivables and accounts payables off your hands. If you have to personally produce invoices, and what I mean is, I'm not talking about just like reviewing the final amount and then making a call as a firm owner to ensure that you're profitable and injecting more value into the invoice. I'm talking about like you actually do it yourself because you're worried that your staff are going to see how much you charge. I could go into a long spiel about why that's not a good idea. But if being a successful business owner that running a business where it's an asset and not something that you're trapped with in matters to you at all, then you need to grow up and then let someone else do it. Like that's just the simple thing. Division six, operations. I know we call it administration, but somehow I feel like it undersells that division. It really is operations. Okay. And given the way firms I've seen recently hire individuals for this division, they're not just administration. They're asking for things like: I want this person to write SLPs, I want this person to tell me where the workflow is inefficient, I want this person to be chasing up uh a workflow schedule and making sure information comes in on time. You're asking for analytical ability, you're asking for conscientiousness. So look to division six as a division you flesh out that focuses purely on ensuring that the operations of your firm uh are smooth. And then where you can find areas uh for for that is by looking at what your accountants are doing over to the left at division four and division three. If the accountant, if the if the production team in division four, I know I skipped over division five, if the the if division four is doing anything but reviewing the work, training their accountants, and production, and I seriously mean it, anything but that, they're doing too much admin. As much as you can help it, you want annual workflow scheduling, whip review, write-offs, everything that is but what I mentioned going into division six. They can handle it. It's operations, it's not admin. Their job isn't just to put coffee on the boardroom table that your client prefers. Their job is to improve the scalability of your firm. Okay, and they use division five, the quality division, in order to be able to achieve this. That's where divisions three, four, six, and seven produce a shared understanding of what we do in this company. How do we collaborate together? It is the programming of your firm that lives in division five. And that programming, that system defined in the SOPs of your division five achieves the outputs of the Fab V. Client NPS, team NPS, profitability, hitting the budget, whip write-offs included. That is the mandate of Division V. In Division Four, there are some aspects to division four that we would consider quad two, as in, like an owner uh should be doing it for the long term. But 99% of what is in Division IV needs to go to a team. What you could be doing in Division IV is being on the ground to be able to develop uh and map out uh the instructions or workflow templates for your jobs. Okay, that might be something that you do initially because you're looking at it from an efficiency team collaboration point of view. But even then, that is something that can go into division six to drive. Um, you might be implementing far more advanced forms of professional uh accounting services or tax services within your company. You might be thinking, I want to move away from compliance and start developing more proactive advisory-based services. So, how do you do that? How do you do this without having it bleed over into division three where the senior client managers are doing it? How do you do it without bleeding it over to you where you're the only one that does the advisory? So you look at division four also in terms of the structuring. Okay, you have accountants that get the production done, but how are you going to get the advisory done? Who is doing the analytical work? How can you train? How can you mandate analytical work, critical thinking happening within division four so that they're more intelligent? One example that I'm implementing in my firm is I created these two roles. I created a tax analyst role and a revenue analyst role. The tax analyst lives in division four. The revenue analyst lives in division three. The tax analyst is 50% productive versus the 85% productive of a senior accountant. What does the tax analyst do? The tax analyst will do two things. The first thing is they would take pain points and goals that the client manager has uncovered from uh meeting with the client and through communication, and they will answer the how we could actually solve their problem without actually solving it. So they put all these options out there. Then this tax analyst gives it to the revenue analyst in division three, and the revenues analyst's job is to map out the engagement lifecycle. So in year one, we can do it, we can start with this for$1,000. And if we achieve, if we complete this and the client achieves these conditions, uh, this is the next engagement we can offer. And this is how we're going to track and make sure that we're developing this client against a plan. The tax analyst and the revenue analyst would work together and debate against each other, then present their report to the client manager in which they can provide the client a recommendation. So, why would we do that? How are we getting the work done if a person is doing tax analyst 50% of the time? Well, that's how you prepare for a world where AI and technology are going to automate most of your work away. We don't want production people just doing production. We need our team to leverage intelligence so that we can survive and thrive into the future. So that's where an owner might be thinking strategically over division four and then division three. How they collaborate amongst each other. In division three, in sales, what are you doing in there as an owner? Well, depending on the size of your firm, you're probably involved in the sales. You're probably involved in the business development and you're very uh you're pretty much a part of it all. Depending on the size of your firm, that's actually okay. Because I mean, you can do a lot of things, but growing your firm isn't a wrong one. Okay. Developing client relationships isn't a wrong one. If anything, it's a great way to be able to collect feedback on what they really want. But very soon, and very, very soon, you need to be training a client manager that handles the client relationship. And what do I mean by handling the client relationship? They only need to do these two or three things, okay? They need to do discoveries with new prospects that have been qualified by Division VI. They need to be able to look at a client's problems and goals and extract that information. They don't need to be thinking about how to solve it. They don't need to be there to actually answer the client about how we actually solve it. They need to just listen and answer this question. As a business owner, like this client, I want to be able to pay less tax, or I want to be able to pass on my property to my children without them incurring some weird tax thing, uh so that they can be set up for the future. That is the that is the absolute level that the client manager needs to get into. And what they do is they can give it to division four, and you guys, you guys, you technical team, you tell me how we can actually achieve this. This is what the client wants, and I only know enough that I'm telling you it in this way so that you can tell me how we can actually achieve this. The client manager doesn't need to sit there and figure out how to solve it, they need to go and talk to the next client. They need to be spending client time, their time with the client. Okay. And that's where I see a lot of business owners make a mistake. They think that the client manager needs to be this super technical person. No, you're confusing it. That's like looking at a software company and expecting a product manager whose job is it to understand what the user wants and at the same time be the lead engineer on figuring how to figure it out. That's like expecting a car salesman to also understand the engineering and be involved in the architecture and design of a car. You can't have it. There's no one in the world that can do that. There's no one in the world that can do that at all. None. They simply need to be an interpersonal person with enough understanding of your services, but they need to just mostly be a good listener. And they need to be able to communicate with their senior production managers to allow them to practice the technical side that they love. The senior production manager loves. Like, let me figure out the problems. You know, you're rushing to the next client meeting. Let me figure out the problems. Let me come with the end, let me engineer the solutions for you. And then I can, we can work out what's the best thing for them. And you present it to the client. You spend more time with the client. That's the number one area I see business owners make mistakes. That's probably where I see most business owners don't scale beyond themselves. Okay? That's division three. Now, division two is less of a concern, but where I see business owners make mistakes in scaling up their firm is not that they're not doing social media or writing one article a week. Where they make the mistake is that they haven't identified their ideal persona. Simply that. They haven't identified their ideal persona and they haven't thought about a brand appearance and a brand in terms of company culture that appeals to this persona. Before you even go start redesigning your website or whatever you do, or making social media posts, think about who you're actually talking to. Think about who you actually want to attract and then dress for that person, behave for that person, and then teach your company to behave for that person. If you can't figure this out, then get a consultant or a strategist who can. Okay. Get someone who will show you a positioning uh compet competition quadrant and say, based on the competition, I see two axes: specialists and broad services, um, traditional and contemporary. Where I think there's space for your firm to um attract clients is in this quadrant. And you will appeal to this persona. Get someone who's actually an expert in doing that. It you will learn a lot. And then do your marketing, and then make a new business card, and then build a deeper narrow team for your marketing as well. Ideally, what you want is to hire a full-time marketing person so that when you bring in these strategists, it's their job to execute on it. Because if it were up to you or up to me, I'll never get it done. There was a time where I saw like six different strategists. I paid all these ex-CMOs and blah, blah, blah, blah, and accounting marketing people. They gave me all this advice that I never implemented. It wasn't until I hired someone, and actually it was honestly thanks to Danny and Paulina, the wise talent day, helped me hire a full-time marketing person that helped me through three to four years do our SEO strategy. And in June, I haven't checked it, but in early June, it was about 80,000 views uh per month, and then about four to five prospects booking in for discoveries a week. And we're converting on them because I'm getting a division six person to qualify them before they even speak to a client manager. Okay. That's division two, where you just simply make a mistake is not being strategic enough, being too tech tactical before you're strategic. And then finally, division one. I could really sum it up as it's your fab five. As simple as it sounds, it's your fab five. I've never started a board meeting without looking at the fab five. Every action item that we come up with during the board meeting comes from the Fab Five. And if the Fab Five is all looking good, then we talk about growth. Then we talk about strategy. I'm doing uh a board meeting right after this at 10 a.m. Um with a firm who has their growth strategy nailed down into a suburb. And a s and this suburb is like they're just like manufacturing uh for the construction industry. And they got so specific that we found a research report that listed all the industries and the revenues of all these uh companies that resided within this location. And I said, This is perfect. You figured out your persona, we got here because you figured out your persona, we got here because you figured out your brand. Now you've got a list of names. Put these list of names, print it out on the biggest poster you can in your office and start crossing these names off. You're done when you've got 80% market saturation in this suburb. Then you can go and figure out the next thing. That's how you know you have a good strategy. When it boils down to a list of things, you basically just tick off. Um, I know we are going over time and we have a breakout room, but then given that uh, you know, I I don't think I don't I don't know if we're gonna split it, but we have Raul here as well, and Danny here. Uh Peter, Aaron, Justin, Mina, Syrindra, Yvette, uh, Adam, Simon, if you've got any questions for Raul on the Yeshub, how you can actually do those things, uh, feel free to ask. If you want to, if you have questions on the hiring or the talent side of things, uh, we have Danny here as well. So I just want to open it up now. Um, I'll take a breath. And uh yeah, look, let's uh, you know, let's kind of go into that. You know, if you don't have any questions to ask, then think harder. Think about your people and your marketing. Are there any questions around there? Think about your Fab Five. Is it is it set up? Is it meaningful to you? Um use this clinic today to address that specific topic before the next clinic where it's something else. Um, does anyone want to go ahead and unmute themselves and uh go ahead and share?

SPEAKER_04:

All right, you know, this is this is really easy. Uh I'll show you.

SPEAKER_03:

Uh Thomas, can I squeeze in a question?

SPEAKER_02:

Oh yeah, I was about to put everyone's name on a wheel, but you go, go Thomas for the the Fab Five, right? So when you like obviously most will have some record keeping of their budgets and and their etc. But it might not be in the prescribed Fab Five, right? So what what's your advice to uh make sure that how the task doesn't seem so daunting and who in the firm is typically then assigned that that task?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, Raul, I wanted to take this one.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, give me one sec, just let me log in.

SPEAKER_03:

Did you want to share your screen as well, Raul? Uh in answering um okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Can you guys just repeat the question, please? I was just logging in in the Wifer.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that's all we're doing. If you're if you if you haven't done the FabFire, right, but you've got other reporting mechanisms, how do you make the task not so daunting? And and and who gets assigned the responsibility to upkeep the task?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, okay. Uh in my recommendation will be like doing by the tax task management. Try to allocate like everything that you need to accomplish in the task management and identify which who's on charge of who. And uh the main point start uh identifying uh which person it's working in in which division or or in which part of the process. So uh after that, like identify how's the workflow on this and in which sections are taking uh more time from the employees, or or people need more training, or just have this interaction. Last few weeks we have uh like uh put this on on the place of the owners to have encouraged the owners to have these monthly 101s that can push uh or open space that when the people can discuss and and have an open discussion in which section they are struggling, the employees. So this can be also an a good opportunity just to see which things they are doing, uh which things they're on charge. If you would like to give them access here to the wise of and just being allocating the work to them, this is also uh good idea. I don't know if I'm going just around the the the answer, Mina, or uh in which section uh can I be like more than Mina, what um what specific part do you find daunting?

SPEAKER_03:

Uh what did I think?

SPEAKER_02:

Because there's no automation, right? So in terms of the the data, so you obviously work with probably a lot of practices, right? So who typically is the one feeding the data?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, the assistant CFO. So that there is a person uh that can uh manage all your information, you provide the this the access so they can feed uh uh add the fees, all these. Uh let me go here. Here this information, the fees, the Vita lockup. Obviously, sadly, I'm not have that access, but they don't have access for the salaries and all that that sensitive information, so they will be able just to basically add the information. And I I also get on charge to train them so they can provide this information to you. So I have meet like many employees that can there are are on charge to provide these reports to you guys, and yeah, you you can design one person who has the the knowledge and the the access to go and review this information and present to you.

SPEAKER_02:

And and then last one for lookup, who who's generally like doing that one?

SPEAKER_01:

Same all of them, they're the assistant CFO. Yeah, so I will share with you guys here in this section in the support center, you have the knowledge center that it's gonna open here, and here's the security matrix. In the case that you would like to double check uh which things these people can see, but basically the CFO can see everything except the sensitive information. Can be salaries and in the in the task for personal meetings. If you run these these kind of meetings, uh you can give them access just to be uh view access or edit access. So you can run a weekly meeting or monthly meeting about the Fed5.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, yeah. Um that makes sense. Could I throw a tip in there, Raul? Um uh what I recommend is in your zero PL, uh, just make a custom report PL that is structured in the wires format. So you have your revenue. Smart. Yep. And you have a cost of goods sold. Yep. And usually when you're doing payroll, it ends up in all this, like um, it usually ends up in like this whatever default you went with, right? Yeah. So just create like in your payroll settings, just create like uh like uh a payroll account, uh, expense account for your accountants, like the the division three and four people, yeah. And then one for the non-billable people. And so the billable people, you would group them into the cogs. Okay, and then right underneath, you have your gross profit, and then you have your uh operating uh uh expenses, your overheads, and then that's every everything else. It it could include your salary, uh, it definitely includes the salaries of your uh non-billable people, and then you have your Ibidda. And then you run this report month to month, like in like a like a monthly view. And so, Raul, if you go to the fees metric uh in the wise hub. Okay, so if you run it month to month, you can see like it'll be really easy to fill this in. Like you just it's just uh it's 24 um entries to make into here to get and then uh in total, right? Like you put your last years, and then if you can go to the fee breakdown, yeah. Uh you put your last years in there. That's important for being able to because our budget it uses the seasonality based off your last year, and then every month they just need to update the current finance the current year's actuals for that month uh at the end of the month. If you go to a bidder, Raul. Okay, yeah. So as you can see, the way it's structured here, because it's um your zero PL would map to this, then and then you use the how-to guides because like there are buttons that you can click um to get like the actual numbers in there, but that's where I see the main challenge with the revenue and profitability reporting. With the lockup and the right ons and off, that's usually the harder one to get because it's it's about implementing timesheets, it's about implementing uh per job budgets, and then you're running reports to be able to figure that out. If you're using XPM, that's pretty easy. Uh carbon, where the the key thing here is that wherever you're doing your timesheet, it must be the the system where you're doing your timesheet also needs to be the same system where you record the job's budget because you need to pull that report together. I'm working with one firm and they have workflow in one app in Monday and timesheets in another app in toggle, and it's been two years, they can never get it. Like the only way for them to get it is like I don't know how, because you'll write someone's name and job in a different way in Monday versus in toggle. So just wherever you do your timesheet and the job budgeting, just do it in the same system, and your lockup and write-ons and off will be easy. Um, if the if that's not an issue, the second issue that I usually see is that there's a lot of junk old data in there. And honestly, the best move is just clear it out and just start start from today. Okay, like pick we're at almost at the end of the financial year. If you've got whip or whatever, just write it all off, like get rid of it, and just start from zero and like because it doesn't matter looking into the past anyway. Like, you can't do anything about a write-off nine months ago. Um, and the most important whip is the one today. So, you know, just start from scratch. The other the only thing that they need to do um that requires constant entry, right? If you go to the CRM uh here and the lead pipeline, so this one's pretty straightforward. Uh, you just need your division six person or even usually it's the admin uh operations person that would drive this. It just needs to have good pipeline hygiene. Like if you just have someone who's in charge of good pipeline hygiene, you'll have your prospects, the client percentage one, your new fees one, your fees uh loss, and that's that KPI done. The client NPS use customer thermometer thermometer. Okay. Uh that's fine. Like that works really, really well. Uh, it looks like it was made in Microsoft Paint, but it's like it works really well. Okay. Uh, and then for your team NPS, you have two options. Use Office Vibe. I love Office Vibe. Every Monday morning, we do an Office Vibe review where as a team we're just going over our Office Vibe together. That's important because it the team feels like it actually matters that they do it. The alternative is make a Google form or a Microsoft form, and you're just asking the simple question to your team, the same way you would ask it to your clients. On a scale of zero to 10, how likely are you to recommend our firm as a place to work? And then they rate it. And that's your NPS score. So if you think about it, the Fab5 is actually designed as a KPI system that is uh it's actually easy, right? I've seen some people create KPI systems where they're like, they're like 50 metrics on there. And and I'm like, how do you die? How do you digest all of this? And a very uh uh, you know, Fab5, it's it's high level, it's easy to do, but then what if you need detail? Okay. The way I described it to one firm, because we were debating it with each other for like four months now, an American firm, they're like, these KPIs, they need to be customizable. I need this, I need that. The way I finally been I got them to understand is that the f the Fab5 AP uh KPIs are your rocks. Like then they're your solid pillars, they will never change. But the KPIs and metrics that underlie these things that are leading metrics into these metrics, okay, they could change depending on your strategy. If your marketing is you're doing marketing because you want to increase sales and improve your prospects to current percentage one, well, if you do social media, there would be a different set of metrics versus if you did um referrals or monetization, right? Like the you can think of sub-metrics are temporary. There are temporary measures that you hook up to see how uh you're going against your strategy. But what the Fab Five does is that it is unchanging because no matter what we do as a firm, there's pretty much there's pretty much in no like in no situation we would you would be aiming for anything but uh these Fab Five KPIs. Like that shows you that I'm actually it's actually I'm actually doing the right thing. It's it's how like people talk about marketing, like they talk about vanity metrics versus the metrics that actually produce revenue. Like who cares about your website traffic? Does it actually produce proposals and revenue? Right? Well, we can't just website traffic is a submetric, it is a leading indicator into these metrics. So if your submetrics connect into these fab five KPI metrics, then um you know you would you would go ahead and track that. But yeah, the the Fab 5 itself should be fairly uh easy to get going. Uh and honestly, the role is assistant CFO, but it takes like 20 minutes to do it. As long as you've got your PL custom template, uh, you've got your report for the lockup right ons and off, and the admin was already doing pipeline hygiene, you're you've done it. You've got the Fab5. Um, does that help me know?

SPEAKER_02:

And no, it does. Like you said, it already exists, which is not transferred. So I don't think it's assistant CFO high level. I think the PA could probably do it, Thomas, to be honest.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I I think it's just the name of the AC system, but uh essentially like the the person you can select, and guys, take advantage of the new financial year, it's starting, so it's a fresh start. You can start like uh keep tracking your your numbers, these this new financial year, and see the difference between uh last financial year, and maybe uh you will feel like more in control if you start running this by the Fed file.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. I I'm gonna apologize for jumping off quickly, but there's like a board meeting booked on this on this hour. Uh, but I want to thank everyone for joining here today. I I love how you're always here and you're discussing and you're interacting. Um you know, you're getting uh uh I'm so glad that you're getting value uh from these uh sessions. And uh if you're not, share your feedback with the questionnaire at the end.

SPEAKER_00:

Uh thank you everyone. Um, we'll see you soon.

unknown:

Bye.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Wise Way. If today's episode sparked an idea or helped you see things differently, please don't forget to leave us a review. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast on your favourite platform yet, please go ahead and do that as well. Let's continue the conversation here through YouTube or any other social platforms that you can find us on. And just remember, if you're not a subscriber of our weekly Friday tip newsletter, you can get that to your inbox every week going forward. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, you don't have to do it alone. Let's build a business that works for you the wise way. We'll see you in the next episode.