Get Work Done - Issue #4
Why employees don't speak up plus Erica Goode's workflow for working 15 hours a week as a Fractional CFO
Welcome to "Get Work Done," where we dive into the nitty-gritty of running accounting and bookkeeping firms efficiently. This isn't your average newsletter – we're all about down-to-earth tips and insights that cut through the complexities, helping you streamline processes, embrace practical tech solutions, and boost your team's productivity.
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Small change, big difference
It’s a far too common scenario.
You discover a problem in your firm and as much as it’s news to you, one or five of your employees knew about it all along but didn’t speak up.
It could be that a problem client has been subtly victimizing and frustrating one of your employees, or an operational issue has led to a significant drop in work quality, or workplace theft.
Being outspoken in the workplace takes guts. Employees fear being labeled snitches and crybabies, getting victimized for speaking up, or becoming the reason someone loses their job. This is why it’s critical to build a culture where transparency and difficult conversations are encouraged.
Imagine the issues you’ll avoid (and salvage) when your team feels comfortable bringing up difficult conversations and sharing observations with you long before things get bad.
If this kind of culture is your goal, here’s a small change you can make to create a big difference: resist defensiveness and appreciate the risk that truth-tellers are taking and listen, assuming goodwill.
- Margaret Heffernan in a podcast episode with Financial Times.
Firm spotl💡ght
After a successful corporate career that led to some burnout, Erica Goode CPA temporarily hung her boots to stay at home with her young children. She wanted to be fully present in her children’s lives, especially in their formative years.
Then a chance encounter with her child’s Taekwondo teacher led to her ‘accidentally’ starting a Fractional CFO firm that now allows her to work only 15 hours a week.
In this podcast episode, she shares her workflow for being as efficient as possible while working 5 hours a day, 3 days a week.
Take a listen below:
Excerpts below:
Roman Villard (Host)
To work just 15 hours a week, you have to be tremendously efficient and very focused. How do you think about that? Do you do calendar blocks? How does that tactically work on a week-to-week basis?
Erica
At the end of every month and the beginning of every quarter, I have this four-hour time block, I call it my think session. So looking into Q4 (2023) right now, I put down all of my priorities for the next three months. What that would mean for things outside the normal course of client work, if there’s any admin work I need to do in my business, any new tech that I’m bringing on, marketing that I’m doing, I just spell it all out. Then I map it out like, what do I think I can do in October? What can I do in November? What can I do in December? Then I parse out what I am going to do at the end of every week, so I work Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. At the end of every Thursday, I calendar block for the next week. When I sit at my desk and open up my calendar, I know exactly what I need to do and how long I have to do it.
H🔥t topics
How to “manage” your 4000 weeks of life and be productive
The average person has about 4000 weeks of life to live, which works out to about 76 years of life.
Think about that for a moment. Then think about how we can possibly “manage” that time.
In his book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman shares simple yet powerful insights on how to approach time management. He suggests that the term “time management” gives an illusion that we have some control over time but in reality, what we can control is what we do with the time we have. The first step is to face the finitude of time
In a Forbes article, Hanna Hurt breaks the insights from the book down into:
Embracing the finitude of time
Making hard choices
Choosing some constraints
Valuing the here-and-now
These insights aren’t just valuable for life in general but productivity at work.
Burkeman’s central tenet is both obvious and mind-blowing. We have a limited amount of time (about 4000 weeks of life) and if we mean to live well, we need to acknowledge the math–we can’t do everything–and make choices about how we want to live.
- Hanna Hart
10 tips to write GenAI prompts for accounting
Ever asked chatGPT a question or requested it to complete a task for you but the result was underwhelming, to say the least?
As smart as GenAI is, it’s still heavily dependent on the human in front of the screen for guidance. And the difference between a superb output and one riddled with factual errors is often in the prompt.
Prompt crafting is a skill that some people are already monetizing and there’s no better time to learn it than now.
So before you give up on generative AI, try these prompt-generating tips by Andrew Kenney:
Add structure and specificity
Provide context
Ask for multiple variations
Try multiple revisions
Ask for explanations and citations
Use it as an editor
Save what works
Use alternative input formats
Experiment with advanced techniques
Keep exploring
How to Build Your Firm’s Tech Stack
In building your firm’s tech stack, you should consider your goals, the specificity of the platform, scalability, pricing, and reviews by firm owners like you.
To find out what accountants like you rely on, we asked the customers in our accounting community what their must-have tools are based on different needs — from expense management to accounting practice management to CRM and time tracking. Here’s what they said.
Swipe this workflow template
Get the step-by-step checklist for tracking leads and prospects so you can convert them to paying clients.
Meme
You can’t win either way 🙄
FOMO events
APRIL 11
Automate your processes: From proposal to onboarded to paid
APRIL 16 – 17
PS: If you’d like us to spotlight your event in the next issue, send an email to marketing@financial-cents.com
Noteworthy
Brandon Hall’s Advice for Resetting Clear Expectations During Busy Season: It’s normal for expectations to change as your team goes through the busy season and that’s where effective communication comes in. You want to ensure everyone is on the same page and has the same definition of success from the beginning to the end of the busy season.
The Emergence of the Big Stay After the Great Resignation: The "Big Stay, a phenomenon, in which more employees are staying at their jobs compared to the massive number of employees who quit their jobs two years ago, has positive implications on company productivity and the economy at large. Companies are retaining more employees, labor churns are reducing and skilled institutional knowledge is increasing. But is this a temporary situation?
The Ultimate Bookkeeping Checklist to Streamline Your Firm (+Free Templates): To execute bookkeeping tasks efficiently, you must have a streamlined bookkeeping process, which a well-structured checklist helps with. Read this detailed guide to learn how to streamline your firm with checklists.
“Think of checklists as milestones. Your base checklists are the milestones of workflow steps that need to be done. Then you add the subtasks, descriptions, and best practices."
- Kellie Parks
Should You Rehire a Boomerang Employee? Over 4 million people left their jobs during the Great Resignation of the last few years. They left hoping for greener pastures like better pay or fully remote work but soon realized that they had it good at their previous jobs. If a former employee wants to return to your firm, should you rehire them? Sandra Wiley says “It depends.”
Until next time,
