To improve client service, spend time serving your people

Most CPA firms are founded by owner-practitioners, and most state boards of accountancy have made this a foregone conclusion as it pertains to ownership requirements. Not that they necessarily need to be practitioners on day one, but it’s the default expectation that owners will spend most of their time practicing while the firm gets off the ground.

The problem is that few owner-practitioners divest themselves of their client service responsibilities to effectively and intentionally lead their firms. Instead, most firms end up looking like a bunch of silos tied together by a common name and shared resources.

As CPAs, we know what successful businesses look like, how they’re structured, and how they operate. We know this because they are our clients and we are their trusted advisors. And yet, somehow, we’ve decided those org structures don’t apply to public accounting. Maybe it’s because we take ourselves too seriously.

There’s a certain investor class you may have heard about recently who thinks this is baloney (hint: it rhymes with Drive Inequity!) and a host of tech companies who think they can replace or displace the CPA (hint: Not Intuit!).

The problem with a partner group or solo owner who is spending too much of their time serving clients is that they are spending too little of their time developing their people.

The result?

Small firms depend on one or two people to handle all of the hard things the firm needs to do to keep its doors open. These firms are less a business than they are a book of business, and potential buyers strongly discount the value of that book of business when there is not adequate talent, systems, and processes in place to serve it in the absence of the seller.

What young, talented CPA is going to want to join a dead-end firm like this? The carrot of taking over the firm in the future isn’t enough when they could more easily and predictably build their practice the right way from the ground up.

And large firms? They become a slow moving, bureaucratic, political, commoditized firm that is the exact same firm as every other firm of its size. Private equity’s acceleration of the consolidation of our industry makes it impossible to see any meaningful difference in the Top 100 firms. How different can one firm that is gobbling up a bunch of firms be from its competitor that is doing the same? I can assure you they’re not scaling a unique culture and value proposition; they’re just homogenizing as a defensive strategy disguised to look like the firm is playing offense.

How did Apple scale a differentiated product and brand in the marketplace? It had a singular leader instead of a committee-nominated, term-serving managing partner who had one vision and standard he instilled in his organization and held everyone accountable to. Steve Jobs didn’t spend his time assembling iPhones; he spent it pushing his people to be better—albeit ruthlessly—and demanded that they take ownership of their work.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for the Jobsian approach to leadership. But I will ask the question: When was the last time you gave your staff enough agency to fail, enough grace to learn, and another chance to get it right? Too often, I’ve seen firm runners give a team member the freedom to make mistakes only to retract and take five steps backward once those mistakes were made, leaving that person in a compromised position for future growth in the firm.

This retrenching of work is the most prevalent mistake I’ve observed practice leaders make. It results in partners grinding away in client service and creates substantial dysfunction in the firm. It almost always results from a combination of the leader not creating the needed time and energy to develop their people. It also creates a deficit in their ability to trust and an inherent need for control.

In other words, if you tell me you have an underperforming team, I’m going to tell you that what you actually have is an underperforming leader.

A leader’s job is to create more leaders and up-level the entire team. A leader’s success, consequently, is not measured by their individual output, but rather by the collective output of their team and that team’s ability to continue to succeed in the absence of their leader.

It may just be the case that great client service starts with surrendering your ego and investing so much of yourself in your team that, at some point in the future, you’re no longer needed. If that doesn’t scare you, I would question whether you have a pulse.

And yet, the extent to which you are indispensable to your team is the extent to which that team has not yet reached its potential. To the extent your team has not reached its potential, the quality and scale of your client service will be bottlenecked by, and dependent upon, your time and energy.