The Five Tips You Need for Creating the Time You Need to Work on Your Accounting Business

Growing a business doesn’t happen overnight. It takes planning, patience, but most importantly time. But many business owners feel like their time is never enough to have a freedom business.

Many of the conversations I have with my clients revolve around a familiar topic. That is, they feel overwhelmed with the business. They feel as if they don’t have enough time to develop a good content marketing strategy.

Do you also feel like you’re pushing water up a hill sometimes? If you do, you’re not alone. So many others in your position feel your pain, as do I.

Fortunately, I identified two main reasons why you’re probably overwhelmed. To be precise, two reasons why you don’t think you have enough time to work on your accounting firm.

The first reason is that you’re unclear on how to move the needle in your business. By this, I mean that you don’t know what to do to make a difference. You don’t know the appropriate strategies. And you don’t know your goals.

Another reason is the lack of task delegation. Even if you have a plan in place, you still don’t find enough time to pull the trigger.

Why?

Because you don’t know what parts of the plan you should implement yourself and which ones to delegate. You don’t know when to trust other people in your firm to shoulder part of the load.

And I speak from experience here, as I also used to occupy the position of jack-of-all-trades. It happened when I was a sole practitioner, like many of you are now.

The “Jack of All Trades” Dilemma

But what is a jack-of-all-trades?

Simply put, it’s someone that does too much of everything. 

Do you wake up every morning to answer emails and service clients? Are you the one that works on accounts and looks after clients? Do you also take on admin work and handle the marketing? 

If that’s the case, you’re a jack-of-all-trades.

Let’s say that you’re not a sole practitioner. You have a team of accountants and bookkeepers working for you. But, you still handle everything else in your company. This means that you’re still the jack-of-all-trades. You still take on too many tasks to remain efficient.

Why does this phenomenon happen, you ask?

It’s because many new business owners rush to grow their practice. And their mistake is in thinking that growing a practice means hiring more accountants to service more clients. 

While that’s important stuff, it’s not the only thing that matters. You still need to give them their responsibilities. 

Maybe you’re thinking you’re the only one who knows the ins and outs, so you’d rather do the tasks yourself. But it’s that thinking that often deprives you of the time you need to work on your business.

If you want to avoid remaining a jack-of-all-trades for years to come, it’s time to rethink your approach. Reconsider how you should take action across different departments and tasks.

To help you with that, here are five tips to challenge your current approach.

Tip #1 – Make Your Huge List of Actions

A bit of background. Currently, I have around 10 employees that help me leverage my time. While not all of them are full-time employees, everyone plays their part.

Help is necessary across the board if you want to have time for content marketing to position yourself as VITAL. 

But how do you decide how many people you need? How do you determine your priorities?

The first thing I did – and I recommend the same to you – is to make a list of actions. 

Think of all the actions you take in a single day. You can include things such as waking up in the morning or posting on social media. Answering emails or liaising with prospects. Even if you’re just taking time every day to talk to leads, not prospects, that’s also an action you must put on your list.

Once you get a sense of everything you do in a day, you start realising where you lose the most time. 

I fixed this issue by going into business owner mode, which I’ll explain right now.

Tip #2 – Go Into Business Owner Mode

The second tip revolves around the idea of looking at your practice as a business. 

Yes, you have an accounting background, but you now run a practice, right? 

Now, you want to grow.

You can’t look at your activities from an accounting perspective. Treat your practice like the business that it is. Always remember that you’re an owner first and accountant second.

And once you put yourself in that mindset, you start noticing that you do many things you shouldn’t. You notice that you take on small menial tasks that no owners of any business do themselves. 

And this brings us to our next point.

Tip #3 – Create a Priority Matrix

When you’re in your business owner mode and you have your list of actions, it’s time to prioritise.

Assign different values to all the actions you take in a day. For example, if someone calls you to ask about your services, how do you rank that action? How do you rank responding to an inquiry from someone that already wants to buy your services?

It’s a good idea to categorise your actions in a priority matrix. Find out which are your $10  and $10,000  tasks, as well as those in between.

I found that many accountants spend most of their time doing the small $10 and $100 tasks themselves. And that doesn’t leave enough time to take on $1,000 jobs, let alone doing something valued at $10,000.

This happens because too many business owners don’t filter out low-profile actions and don’t prioritise.

Without having a clear understanding of what’s most important for your firm, you get stuck with doing those $10 and $100 tasks. They’re time-consuming and don’t bring in enough money to justify your time.

Tip #4 – Switch from Doing Low-Priority Tasks to High-Priority Ones

Here’s an example of a $10,000 or high-priority task:

When you look at a growth strategy for your business, that’s a high-priority task. After all, you’re doing it to scale your business.

This is what a task of high-value looks like. I can say the same for focusing on your sales funnel or creating a webinar. Basically, it’s a task that helps you get more and better clients, which, in turn, will increase your revenue.

This type of task doesn’t involve servicing standard compliance work. It also doesn’t include checking your inbox. It’s also not scheduling something on social media.

Do you see a pattern here?

In a nutshell, low-priority tasks are the ones that you can easily outsource.

Another excellent example of a high-priority action is to define and choose your hunting niche. That’s something that you can’t really outsource. But it’s something crucial that you need to grow your business.

If you want to free up more time, start eliminating these low-priority tasks from your daily routine. Find alternatives to get them done without your personal involvement.

Tip #5 – Get the Low Priority Stuff Off Your Plate

So, how do you get low-priority stuff off your plate? 

As mentioned, you start outsourcing the stuff that you don’t want to focus on daily.

But who exactly do you outsource it to and free up your time? 

It depends on what you’re working with or who. 

If you have a team in place, start to assign low-priority tasks to other people within the firm. Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your employees or partners. Find out which one is best-suited for a particular job by matching their skills with task requirements.

Assign someone to handle daily inquiries from leads or prospects. Get someone else to handle all the admin work or tech-related stuff. Have someone schedule your social media content marketing.

Meanwhile, you stick to implementing unique solutions that establish you as VITAL in your audience’s eyes. You focus on coming up with a high-value video or article that can engage more people.

You can also outsource some low-priority tasks outside your firm. For example, you can do this with scheduling, uploading posts, and other things that require automation but don’t require your direct input except in the beginning.

Others Succeed in the Same Number of Days as You Have, So Why Shouldn’t You?

If you think about it, there are many successful business owners in many fields that make so much money. Yet, they still have freedom businesses.

Why?

Because they own that business owner mentality. They’ve surrounded themselves with trusted individuals that do a lot of the low-profile work for them. 

That way, the visionaries can focus on the most important things. And they can do so without wasting half a day.

You can do the same thing with your accounting firm. 

Earn back your time and focus on positioning your firm as VITAL. Prioritise actions to figure out how to outsource them until you only have the high-value tasks on your plate.