In 2020, Inspire faced a pivotal moment. With seven team members reporting directly to me, it was clear we needed a better structure. After some soul searching (and navigating COVID), we introduced the Diamond Team Structure.
This approach not only improved my capacity and mindset but also created clear reporting lines, enabling sustainable growth for Inspire. From 2020 to 2024, we scaled by simply duplicating these teams
An accounting firm owner asked, Whens the right time to have a leadership team?
We started ours when our team had nine team, with seven out of nine joining the leadership meetings.
Using the EOS methodology, we held weekly sessions to tackle challenges, improve, and grow.
Even if youre a small firm, start now.
Gather your core teamwhether its just you and a few othersand carve out weekly time to focus on the business.
Trust me, its a game-changer.
Have a listen to Ben’s talk on “Training Your Team To Identify Great Clients”, here’s what he said –
The kind of clients we attract can differ based on how they come across our services.
Oftentimes, when our top-notch clients suggest someone similar to themselves, the referrals tend to be of high quality.
We also took a look at the services that our top clients prefer. It turns out they’ve chosen a mix of services from us—things like the usual tax and compliance work, additional structures, investments, and SMSFs.
During this exploration, we spotted some common themes. Relationship statuses seemed quite alike, and even the general industries they’re in shared similarities.
The whole point of this exercise is to figure out who our fantastic clients are and how we can attract more of them. Where do they hang out? Who do they interact with?
After that, it’s all about training your team to recognise your ideal client. This helps them identify who’s a great fit and who might not align perfectly with us. This is especially important if your team is just starting to handle initial inquiries at your accounting firm.
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In 2022, we were pleased and proud that our team got nominated as a finalist at the Accountants Daily Awards. The nominees are:
It is a great honour to have our team recognized for their hard work and dedication in their respective areas of expertise.
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Ben Walker, Founder of Inspire Accountants and High-Performance Accountants share the lessons he learned from building an A-team in the recent webinar called, “Creating a High Performing Accounting Firm”.
Here’s what he said:–
In terms of building teams, these are the lessons over the years:
Inspire 1.0 – All the mistakes I made
I hired the first person who rocks up for the interview, and I started learning the challenges of managing people. Delegating is hard, we think that’s hard throughout every stage but especially harder if you haven’t done it before.
Inspire 2.0 – You hire the smartest person
You’re not at a size where your people do just one thing in their role. But you’ve got two sets of expectations on one person which can be hectic at times, and still unclear on team roles and progression.
Culture seems to be hard to manage. People burn out, including me from a flat structure wearing too many hats. You’re concerned that people are unproductive from home, that was also a bit of a question mark. No time sheets, I wasn’t concerned, but maybe thinking how do we keep a track of what people are doing?
Inspire 3.0 – You rush your hiring process to keep growing
Your team culture becomes more complex because you’ve got more people and more dynamics. Your teams create silos and develop different ways of doing the same thing.
Communication between teams becomes a challenge as well. It just makes things more complex. So, you need to build the systems on the backend that can accommodate that.
Discover your firm’s performance score and identify opportunities of low-hanging fruit to increase your firm’s profit, value and overall enjoyment as the owner of the accounting firm.
For more tips and trick around creating a High Performance Firm, follow us on our socials:
Ben Walker, Founder of Inspire Accountants and High Performance Accountants is introducing HPA as the newest program to growing a fun, super rewarding accounting firm that runs like clockwork.
Here’s what he said on the recent ‘Creating a High Performing Accounting Firm’ webinar –
We will be starting a group mentoring program that kicks off in March next year. We’ve already got dates in place for that program and it’s called High-Performance Accountants.
Over that time, you will grow your firm while working less hours and earning more profit. And hopefully, you ever thought possible in the first few months after starting that you will have clarified your vision for the firm that you can relate to.
These words I’ve chosen specifically because sometimes we had visions, I just did not see myself in. And you would understand where you’re adding the most value in your role, and have discovered some quick wins to grow and boost your profits – your firm’s profit and evaluation. And then we turn our attention to working through each of those remaining steps to creating a high-performance firm.
If you do want to have a chat about what that looks like, then please book in for what we call a Right-Fit Call, where we work out if we’re a right fit together to be able to help you.
Discover your firm’s performance score and identify opportunities of low-hanging fruit to increase your firm’s profit, value and overall enjoyment as the owner of the accounting firm. Take the high-performance accountants scorecard.
For more tips and trick around creating a High Performance Firm, follow us on our socials:
Have you ever experienced a really bad team culture where good team members don’t stick around and you find it extremely tough to find good people to join the team?
Things that helped:
1. Coals To Diamonds Team Development Plan
Inspire has created a Coals To Diamonds Team Development Plan that covers from Undergraduate Accountants right up to what a Partner looks like at Inspire. This includes the key milestones and expectations at each level. We do pay raises based on the Coals To Diamonds, and the team knows where they’re sitting and what they need to work on to get to the next level.
2. Implementing A Leadership Team
We implemented the leadership team in Inspire 2.0 and we’ve been perfecting it ever since. Having a leadership team makes the boss’s job easier and help[s them to delegate certain tasks to certain people.
3. Culture Club
We have an authentic approach to culture and have created rhythms with the team to be able to promote that close, trusting, fun culture.
The results:
We’ve got a team of A-players who love what they do and advocate the firm to clients and prospective team members. We’ve had a few good team members who’ve come from referrals from our existing team. They may have worked together in the past or they went through CA together.
Discover your firm’s performance score and identify opportunities of low-hanging fruit to increase your firm’s profit, value and overall enjoyment as the owner of the accounting firm.
For more tips and trick around creating a High Performance Firm, follow us on our socials:
Growing a firm or starting out in business, there will be a lot of ups and downs. Ben Walker shares the common struggles he faced when growing his firm, Inspire Accountants. These common struggles can be the difference between a surviving and thriving firm. Here’s what he said –
I am wearing all the hats and I do everything. I’m doing the notice of assessment letters as well as the preparation of the tax returns for the group. There’s waves in workflows which causes the turnaround time to blow out. I didn’t love having a non-leveraged team.
It’s the opposite of Inspire 1.0. You’re the bottleneck for reviews and technical questions. You have to turn away clients or you’re taking ages getting their stuff done, which can damage the relationship.
New work comes in faster than your team can deliver. We still get waves with workflow, as I’m sure every firm will. At the same time, we are hiring new team members to deal with that capacity. You’re still on the tools way too much. The team is too big that you don’t have a handle on all jobs and all clients. Some clients come on board and I don’t even know their names. That was a really weird thing for me compared to Inspire 2.0 and not having that ability to know everyone.
If you want to learn how to grow a fun, super rewarding accounting firm that runs like clockwork, join our next High Performance Accounting webinar. You’ll learn the 7 Steps of creating your High Performance Firm.
It’s been extremely difficult in the last 12 months when it comes to finding and hiring accountants.
We think that’s not a surprise, not only in the accounting industry but in ANY industry.
We’ve just hired 3 accountants in the last 3 weeks!
There are 4 ways that have worked well for us:
So, those are the 4 areas we are looking at when it comes to finding and hiring accountants for our firm which has resulted in 3 accountants in the last 3 weeks.
If you want to learn how to grow a fun, super rewarding accounting firm that runs like clockwork, join our next High Performance Accounting webinar. You’ll learn the 7 Steps of creating your High Performance Firm.
Grow a fun, super rewarding accounting firm that runs like clockwork. We help accountants go from feeling burnt out, working way too many hours, making an average profit and struggling to grow.
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