#263 Everyone In Your Firm Is Busy (Your Pricing Might Be Why)

And, uh, one of the things, yeah, in terms of, you know, we are at the stage, we are...

You know, you f- you'll face different challenges as your business grows, as you kind of start your practice.

The first couple of hundred thousand is, uh, probably you can do on your own.

You get in some outsourcing to assist you, getting an admin.

And, uh, yeah, the challenges you have to deal with at that stage are fairly straightforward.

It's just about winning work.

Just got to win the right work in at the right price, and as you get, uh, you're probably doing everything at that stage.

As you get busier, then you start to hire.

I'd say hire an admin first, take the admin off you 'cause that's a lower level activity, and then start to hire.

Uh, you might hire some outsourcing and depending on how brave you are, you then bring in a senior accountant that can actually take work off you, so you can focus on the stuff that, uh, only you can do, the higher lev- value stuff, the more, uh, you know, the high value clients, the winning of work, et cetera.

As you start to build a team, you get to 500K, different challenges.

You need to, you know, more systems in place to make sure that all workflow is being tracked and, uh, uh, you know, everything is being done efficiently.

You need to start, need to think about structure.

When you get to a million plus, then again, you've got, uh, other challenges where things start to creak.

You start need to, need to bring in kind of a management layer, a review layer on top of what, uh, client managers are managing.

So we're at that stage now where we're undergoing a bit of a restructure in terms of how, how our practice is set up.

We previously had two teams.

We had a client services team that used to do all the bookkeeping and another team which done all the compliance work, and just found that, um, there was just a, uh, a disconnect between the work and the capacity of, uh, of each team.

So we rej- rejigged that, and I've talked about this before that, but one exercise that I've done that I have been Also shared with my Mastering Mind group yesterday and also a few of the one-to-one clients that I'm working with is a way to work out where capacity lies in your firm.

Now, if you're anything like me and others, then your team will tell you we're busy.

Like everybody is busy.

But how do you gauge whether someone is genuinely busy with productive work or whether someone is just busy because they're inefficient at how they operate? Well, the only real way is not by looking at a timesheet because anyone can make up what goes on a timesheet, but no one can make up work.

No one can make up productive output.

So how do we measure productive output? Well, really, the only way of measuring that is to work out, okay, what comes into the practice, what fees are coming into the practice, and let's divvy that up between the people that are responsible for the output, for the fees that the firm generates.

So how do we do that? Well, if we just work out, right, okay, we've got a list of all our clients, what they pay, and then divvy that up amongst anyone in the practice that touches, that has a role to play in the production of output of work for that particular client.