What is a modern accounting firm team? Before we discuss how to build such a team, it’s important to start with some definitions. We actually defined this in our recent webinar, Building the Modern Team for Your Firm . To begin, we defined two things in the webinar:
- What is a Modern Accounting Firm?
- What is a Modern Accounting Firm Team?
The modern accounting firm
Here is the definition we used in the webinar: A Modern Firm recognizes the need for Organizational and Service Structures that allow for more efficient movement of work and service that can be scaled to accommodate higher volumes of revenue and larger teams.
Modern firms pay attention to their need for the structure needed to run their firms well. They will focus on the Organizational side of the business (e.g. operations, like creating and sending contracts to clients), while they also focus on the Service side of the business (e.g. revenue production, like selling and completing tax return). Modern firms recognize that this structure aids in their efficiency so that they can scale appropriately in sustainable ways. Here, ‘sustainable ways’ means in ways that don't consume the owner’s life and the firm doesn’t operate in chaos.
The modern accounting firm team
Here is the definition we used in the webinar: A Modern Firm recognizes the need for Leadership and Service Movement lanes that change and become more complex as team roles change to accommodate the context teams work in with higher volumes of revenue.
Leadership is key to teams moving in the right direction as the firm grows. As teams and work become more complex, the focus on the movement of teams through service becomes more important. To improve the movement and structure of work, it’s important to recognize the context the teams are working within. Knowing the team’s context, or their lens, help the firm leaders begin to lead with more clarity and empathy. We’ll touch on the work structures and team context of modern teams in this article.
As modern teams grow larger and firm revenue moves into the firm faster, it’s important to mention the reason why we are focusing on the modern work of firm building. This image from our webinar paints the pictures for us:
In the above picture we see the view of the Journey Map we’ve seen throughout the Scaling Growth webinar series. You’ll note that as the complexity on the Service side increases (see the right side), it often means the team’s efficiency decreases (see the left side). It is this phenomenon that leads us to study growth and how to manage the balance of firm complexity during times of growth with a team’s potential decrease in efficiency. These two go hand in hand - making decisions to take on more complex revenue, to move into new markets, or to take on new technology products into your firm’s tech stack means you must consider the impact of these decisions on the team’s ability to serve efficiently. It all goes together.
Work structures
There are 2 specific work structures we want to cover that can aid in scaling complex firms seeking to remain efficient: Movement Disciplines and Team Care Rhythms.
1. Movement disciplines
These are disciplines modern firms building modern teams need to consider when seeking to remain efficient. There are two specific disciplines.
The first is visualizing the team’s work capacity. Since the professional capacity of your team is really all you have to sell, it’s important to have a handle on what you are selling. Professional capacity is essentially invisible - meaning you can add it up and look at it. And this is not the same thing as tracking hours. Tracking hours is simply humans trying to keep track of their past. First of all, this task is just inherently inaccurate. Second, knowing the capacity of your team has nothing to do with what they’ve done in the past. Knowing a team’s capacity has everything to do with what they can do in the future. So how do you visualize your team’s capacity? We have our team track what they are going to do in the upcoming week on their work calendar. That way, we can see everyone’s plan for the use of their valuable capacity.
The second movement discipline is clearly documenting the client’s scope. The clarity of what services the client wants, matched with what we have planned to do is key to efficiently completing the work. If the scope is unclear, or the team doesn’t understand what is written in the service contract, the team slows down, and it bottlenecks the service. This is inefficient. Thus, we are hyper focused on discovery around what the client wants from us, clearly stating what we will provide, and then interpreting what we meant as we lead our team. Scope is always murky, especially when a firm is growing fast or working with more complex clients. How do we do this? We use a Project Management system to clearly manage and document the scope. All contract details are listed in a project management system and assigned to each team member. In this way we ensure that our scope is being assigned to a human.
Being this disciplined means we are planning our growth so that we stay ahead of the clarity of our service. It’s truly hard to do, but we have a leadership team that helps us keep all of this in order and moving along.
2. Team care rhythms
As your team grows, there are rhythms of care you need to provide to keep them invested in your culture, and make sure they are growing as service providers. There are two specific rhythms.
The first rhythm is training. Growing teams need ongoing training. And training happens in rhythms. We meet once a week with our team and that is where we provide a lot of our training on new pieces of technology, new processes, and new ways we plan to teach our clients. Training is a large part of the new team onboarding we do with our team when we hire someone. Our training on culture and processes can be between 4 to 6 months. The training may be more hours in the first few weeks of new employment and then it moves to less time each week, and eventually they are watching internal videos and training themselves. The rhythm of training is a team retention strategy too. Firms need to be focused on retention because of how hard it is to replace a team. The rhythms of training make this possible.
The second rhythm is accountability. This may be difficult to implement at first, but it can be done. We recommend implementing ‘Quarterly Conversations’. Quarterly conversations provide dedicated time to meet privately with each team member once per quarter to discuss anything they are confused about and to work through trouble spots in their work patterns. We learn so much about how they perceive their work, their perspective on their capacity availability, and what barriers they are feeling that we need to move out of their way. With strategic questions, we explore our team’s thoughts about our work, our firm, and our leadership. This creates immense amounts of health for our team building.
Team context
There are multiple lenses firm owners need to consider when leading teams. Context is another word for the lens or ‘glasses’ people unknowingly wear in their life and work. We all operate in our own situations and behave in unknown ways because of our past experiences. Leading teams have a ‘context consideration’ inherently embedded in leadership. Being good at leading teams has a lot to do with the context people are approaching in their work and the firm.
There are 3 specific work contexts that need to be considered when leading a team through work movements and team care rhythms. They are: Overall Team, Leadership Team, and the Owner(s).
1. Overall team
Overall team has a context we call Individual Contributor Mentality. This is a mentality where the team feels the weight of serving only within their particular role. You want a team to have an individual contributor mentality so they remain focused on what they were specifically hired to do in their role. However, tunnel vision can be a result of this mentality, making it difficult for a team to know how to forgo their own focused work at times for the greater purpose of the team. Wise leaders will continually pull the overall team out of their role, and remind them that they are part of a broader community with ever changing needs.
2. Leadership team
Once a team member is promoted to the leadership team, they need to take on the Greater Good Mentality. This is an important mentality for anyone serving a group of people because the role of the leadership team is to make decisions that are for the greater good of the team. When a leadership team fails to have a mentality of making decisions based on what is best for the overall team, leaders are often making decisions that are only good for themselves. That can be detrimental to the service and care for the overall team (since the overall team is meant to focus on their specific roles). The result is that services don’t move forward, processes bog down, and culture can suffer as a result.
3. Owner(s)
The owner(s) can embody the mentalities described above, but they must also take on a context that others cannot, called a Risk Management Mentality. Much of an owner’s role is to manage the daily risk of running a business. The context lens is even higher than the greater good mentality. Of course, owners must consider the greater good of the team, but they must go further and take risks, often risks that affect the team in unknown ways. The larger a team gets, and the more complex the revenue, the more owners must consider which risks to take and which ones not to take.The hard part of this lens is that owners may sometimes decide to take long term risks to grow the firm knowing the burdens it may create for the overall team in the short term. This mentality can often be misunderstood by the overall team and can truly make owners unpopular at times.
Conclusion
Let’s revisit the definition we started off with to define a modern accounting firm team: A modern firm recognizes the need for Leadership and Service Movement lanes that change and become more complex as team roles change to accommodate the context teams work in with higher volumes of revenue.
You can see that our discussion in this article is all embodied in this hefty definition. Modern firms are focused on leadership and what the strategy of movement through the firm looks like. If leaders of modern firms continue to allow themselves to remain deeply embedded in their technical service, they will fail to see the greater needs of the whole firm, how that team fits together, and how they can collaborate for their greatest effect in service to their clients.
This article is a follow-up to our webinar, Building the Modern Team for Your Firm that is part of the Scaling Growth Webinar Series. Sign up and follow our Scaling Growth webinar series to hear from today’s industry thought leaders on what it takes to grow a modern firm.
