Look before the story, one minute on what this show is from here on on. I spent the last two days in a room with a few hundred business owners, and I kept noticing the same thing. Every one of them had somebody they copy. Not a course, a person. Somebody who showed them a life, the family, and the business in the same picture. And then they move it towards it. And I've had that person. Damn Martel is for me. Most accountants never get one. So that's the job of this show now. I'm going to document how I lead a team and how I talk to clients, one story at a time, with the math on getting home by six. Not because I figured it out, because somebody did it for me, and it's now my turn. If you're an accountant who wants a different kind of career, I want you to have something to copy from. So here's the first one. Year five. I want you to picture year five. For five years, my accounting firm was me, myself, and I in a pantry. Not in a nice office with a pantry. The pantry was the office. I was an employee at the bank from eight to five, and I was an owner from five to seven in the morning, and then again from eight to eleven at night. Five years of that, and listen, I'm not telling you to impress you. I'm telling you because for five years, I thought that schedule was the business plan. And you know, somewhere in year five, the math stopped working. I'm the numbers guy, so I actually did a math well myself. I was spending my best hours, the 5 to 7 a.m. hours, the sharp ones entering payroll and doing data entry in the books. Work that did not need my license, work that did not need me. And the work that actually needed me reviewing the returns, sitting with clients, that work was getting my 11 p.m. brain. So I did the thing everybody tells you to do. I hired two people actually, part-timers. One person took care of payroll, the other one took care of bookkeeping. And the two of them combined didn't even add up to one full-time person. And I remember the feeling when the second one said yes, I felt like I made it, right? I got the team out. I'm about to get my evenings back. I'm about to be free. But that's the story everybody tells you. Make the hire, buy the freedom. Here's what actually happened. The first week I worked more. You know, like I wanted to be fair. They were good people. You know, they show up, they wanted to do well, and they did what I asked. And that's exactly what made the next part so confusing to me. Because every task I handed off came back with questions. And not dumb questions, fair ones. You know, which client goes with each payroll schedule? You know, what do I do when the numbers don't tie? How do I want to this categorize? And every fair question walked through one door. Mine. I would sit down at 5 a.m. to review a return, and by 5 15, I'm answering payroll questions, and my review moved to 11 again. The exact hours I hired them to give them back to me, gone. You know where everything lived in my head. Five years of decision, client kirks, you know, this client pays late, this client sends the receipts in a shoebox, all of it. On my head, nowhere on paper. And I handed these to the people to log in and listed this task and basically said, Good luck. And here's the part I really don't love admitting. There were nights I redid the work quietly after they log off. Not because it was wrong, just because it wasn't the way I would have had done. And I have never told anybody what was my way. You know, I was grading them against a test that I never wrote. Now, let me turn this to you because I bet you're somewhere in that store. Maybe you're a CPA in year two of your own pantry version, no hires yet, and you're listening to this thinking, that's my future. Maybe you run a firm and you got three people on payroll, and somehow you're the business you've ever been. Or maybe you're you're not the owner at all. You're the manager, a senior, you know, the one who just got handed two staff accountants in a review queue, and you're living in the fog from the other side of the desk. And you're starting to wonder quietly, maybe if you just got the wrong people, you know, hold that thought because that's exactly what I thought. I've spent a couple of months convinced that I had a people problem. Like, I remember venting about it, and like I can't find good help. Nobody cares, like the owner cares. And if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. All of those greatest hits, every first rated owner has said these exact same sentences, and every frustrated manager in our phone says them too, right? So they feel true when I said them. You know, they feel like wisdom. You retire by 11 p.m. and you're fixing a spreadsheet that somebody else already touched it once, and the evidence looks obvious. You know, the problem is them. I even started thinking, hmm, maybe I'm just not built to have a team. Some people are, some people aren't. Maybe I'm the second kind. Maybe the Pantry is just my comfort zone, and I should accept it. And then one morning, the realization, and I'll be honest with you, it wasn't new. You know, people smarter than me wrote in books before I lived, but it resonated with me so much. My two part-timers were doing exactly what I hired them to do, the tasks. You know, they were doing the tasks, but they were not doing winning because I've never told them, either of them, what winning looked like. So think about it. If I had walked up to the payroll person and asked her, hey, what does a great wig look like in your seat? What would you she said? She could have not answered. Not because she was slow, because she was unamed. Your team is not slow, they are unnamed. That sentence because one of the most important sentences of my life as an owner, and I want to make sure it lands on you the way it landed on me. The fog wasn't in the people, the fog was in the seat who hired them into. There was no seat. There was a pile of tasks and the guy in the pantry hoping. You know, a bad hire, most of the time, it's not a bad person, it's just an unbuilt seat. So here's what I did about it, and this is the part I want you to steal. One night, instead of redoing somebody's work, open a blank document, and you know, that you wrote the seat, not a job description. I had given them a job description on day one and list the tasks that it never been done. Because again, the list of tasks tells a person what to touch, it never tells them what winning is. So this document was different, and it answered three questions. The first question is this what does winning look like in these seats, in these numbers? Not handle the payroll numbers. Every client's payroll on time, zero correction after he falls, you know, questions batch to one question instead of 10 interruptions. Sometimes, you know, a stranger could walk in and score on a Friday, and that's my test, by the way. And I give it to you. If you have a stranger haven't couldn't look at your person's week and score it, you haven't written an outcome. You've just been written a vibe. So, question number two is this What are my standards? You know, the one I was silently grading against. All of those nights I really did the work, I was enforcing rules that existed nowhere except my head. So I wrote them down. So, and this is where the name files goes. Like this is what the ties out means in this firm. This is what we double check before anything leaves. Why what write what you tolerate? Because whatever you tolerate and never write down, that is your standard, and you're making everyone guess it. Okay, so here's the question number three. When did they have the question? And I'm not there, where did the answer lives? This one changed the most for me. Every time a question came through my door twice, the answer stopped being a conversation and it became a thing. A note, a checklist, you know, a recorded walkthrough of me doing it once and narrating. Slowly, the answer moved from my head into a place where the part-timers could reach without me. Today, you've got AI that will write the whole standard from one recording of you working. I make my team do this now, and it takes an hour. Back then, it was me typing at midnight. Either way, same move, answer once, pointed to it forever. That's it. That's the whole document. What winning is in numbers, what the standards are, and where the answers live. One page, maybe two, and it cost me exactly zero dollars. And I want to name something because the business books, and I love Dan Martel's books, and I've debited a lot from them. The books will tell you your first hire should be an admin. For an accountant, that's a hard sell. An admin is costs without billable hours. So I went the different way. Two part-timers who pay for themselves the moment my rates were right. My point is this the shape of your first hire matters less than everybody argues about online. Part-timer, contractor, admin, whatever fits your math. What decides whether you hire frees you is not which seat you feel at first. It's whether the seat exists on paper before a human sits down in it. Now, the after. And I'm going to keep this honest because you know, after the quieter than it was before, nothing changed overnight. And that's the truth because within a few weeks, the questions started hitting the document before they even hit my door. My payroll person stopped asking which schedule a client was on because it was written. My bookkeeper stopped guessing how I wanted things categorized. Because my standard was written. And here's the thing the work stopped coming back to almost right. Almost right worked, and that's the most expensive work in your company right now. Because you pay for it twice. Once when they do it, and once you when you redo it. And then one morning I sat down at 5 a.m., opened a return, and I revealed from start to finish with no interruptions. First time in a month. I finished and I actually looked around the pantry and was like, huh, nobody needed for me for two or a whole hours. And the firm ran, anyways. And that's what the first hire actually buys you. And then nobody says it this way the hire doesn't buy your freedom, the higher plus the written seat buys you back your seat, the owner's seat, review, clients, pricing, the work that actually needed my license and my brain. Two people combined were less than one full-time. Gave me my firm back once I gave them the seat instead of just a fog. So let me turn it to you one more time. And if you got somebody in your team right now, a staff accountant and a bookkeeper, a part-time who's you know helps his busy season, doesn't matter. Ask yourself my stranger question about them. If a stranger walked into your firm Friday, could they score whether your person had a winning week? If the answer is no, so hear me in this. You don't have a hiring problem. You have an unwritten seat. And the person sitting in that, it's probably better than the fog of letting them look. Look, and I will say the quite part, because I led people for leaving. The accountants I want on my team are the ones who write the seat for the person under them without being asked. That's not a manager's skills, that's a leader. And if that's you, you are rarer than you think. So here's the one thing I want you to do this week. One, not five. Pick one seat. If you own the firm, pick the person whose work frustrated you the most. Yes, it's on purpose, that one, because that frustration is almost always the fog, not the failure. And if you're the manager, pick the person on your team who will keep quietly redoing the work for. And you hear me, and you don't need the owner's permission to write the seat. And that's the most leadership you can do from where you sit. And it's how people notice you. And if you're still solo in your own version of the pantry, pick the first seat you'll ever fill. Even if the hire is a year away. The document doesn't wait for the hire. You can write a seat in the winter and fill it in the spring, and the hire walks in already aimed. And write the three answers on one page. What winning looks like in numbers, a stranger that could score on a Friday. You know, what are the standards that I've been forcing silently? You know, where do the answers live when I'm not in the room? That's the whole assignment. One page, one seat this week. It cost nothing. And I've watched it turn I can't find good help into I can't believe what my team handles without me. In my own firm and in my business coach, over and over again. I make sure you actually write it down. Don't do the version where you think about it on a drive home and call it a done. The whole point of my story is that everything already exists on my head. And on my head, it was worth nothing to anybody but me. Because here's the whole thing that circles back. The guy in the pantry, five, yeah, five, 11 p.m., redoing a spreadsheet, somebody else already did. He thought the next hire would save him. Then he thought no hire could save him. And then the answer was never in the hiring at all. It was a one page he hadn't written yet. Your team is not slow. They are unaimed. Go aim somebody this week. And if this hit you, the two the letter is where I go deeper on one system like this every single week. And it's the international intentional operator. It's free. The link is right there below on the show notes. Follow the show, send the episode to one accountant who's living in the fog right now. And I'll talk to you guys next month. December 1st, the next story. And if you are a CPA listening to this and thinking, I want to work the way this guy works, write me. Seriously. That's the whole reason this show exists now. Let's keep pushing. Same revenue, half of the hours. I see you next month.