Fast and Broken Is Still Broken

Speaker A: Hey there, firm owners. I'm Ryan Lazanis, and you're listening to the Future Firm Accounting Podcast, the place where you'll get one practical lesson each episode to help you unlock freedom and growth in your firm. Thanks for tuning in today. I want to talk about something that I think is one of the most common mistakes I see firm owners make when they start getting serious about automation and efficiency. And it's not that they automate the wrong things. It's that they automate before they've asked the right question. Here's the question most people ask when they look at a process in their firm. How do I make this more efficient, faster, with less manual work at lower cost? That's a reasonable question, and automation is often a good answer to it. But there's a question that should come before that one, and most firm owners skip it entirely. And that question is, is this thing actually working? Not is it efficient, but is it effective? Is it doing what it's supposed to do, achieving the outcome it exists to achieve? Because if the answer is no, making it more efficient is one of the worst things you can do. Here's the pattern I see play out over and over. A firm has a process that's broken or not working as well as it should. It's too slow, too manual, creates friction, produces inconsistent results. So the firm owner looks at it and thinks, we need to automate this goes ahead and does it, and suddenly they're doing the broken thing faster. The cost savings look good on a spreadsheet, and the manual work is reduced. But, uh, the underlying problem, the waste, the rework, the client frustration is still there. They've just made it faster and cheaper to be ineffective. And there's a psychological trap here worth naming. When you automate something, it feels like progress. There's a real sense of accomplishment in building a workflow, setting up the integrations, watching the tasks move automatically. That feeling of progress can mask the fact that the outcome on the other end hasn't actually improved. You've modernized the machinery without checking whether the product coming out of it is any good. That's the trap. It creates the feeling of improvement even when it's delivering the same mediocre result more efficiently. And automation doesn't fix a bad process. It amplifies whatever the process already is. If what you're amplifying is a problem, you now have a faster, cheaper, more consistent version of that problem running in the background of your firm. And this is where the cost argument gets interesting. Firm owners are often justify automation purely on cost savings. We're reducing manual labor. We're cutting processing time. We're eliminating a role. Those things might all be true. But if the process being automated wasn't producing the right outcome to begin with, you haven't saved money. You've invested in scaling a problem. The cost of fixing a broken automated process once it's embedded in your operations and clients have been through it, is almost always higher than the cost would have been to fix the process before automating it. Take client onboarding as an example. Because it's one of the most common processes firm owners want to automate, and also one where the effectiveness question matters most. You can turn your onboarding into the most efficient process in the history of accounting. Automated welcome emails, automated document requests, automated task assignments. The whole thing running without anyone needing to touch it. But step back and ask whether this process is actually doing what it's supposed to do. The purpose of onboarding isn't just to collect documents and set up the client in your system. It's to create a feeling to give a new client the experience of thinking, I made the right choice signing up with this firm. They should feel welcomed, confident, and genuinely taken care of from the moment they sign. If your automated onboarding process is technically efficient but leaves clients feeling like they just filled out a form for a government agency, you you've built a very fast way to start a client relationship on the wrong foot. Screw efficiency. In that case, honestly, getting the experience right matters more than getting it done quickly. A new client who feels genuinely welcomed is more likely to stay, more likely to refer, and more likely to upgrade to a higher tier of service. A new client who feels like they went through a checkout process is going to stay as long as they don't find a cheaper option. And the same principle applies to just about every process you might be tempted to automate. Before you ask how to make something more efficient, ask whether it's effective. Ask whether it's achieving its intended purpose, whether it's delivering the right outcome for the client or the team member or whoever it exists to serve. Now, this doesn't mean efficiency doesn't matter. I love efficiency. Maybe even a bit too much. Sometimes efficiency is real, and it creates real value in a firm, and the firms that get this right are genuinely more competitive. But the right order of operations is effectiveness first, efficiency second. Get those reversed and you end up working very hard to optimize something that shouldn't exist in its current form, or to scale an experience that's quietly frustrating your clients. Here's the practical version of what that looks like. When you're looking at a process you want to automate, start by asking whether the process is actually the right process, whether it's how you should be doing the thing, and and whether the outcome it produces is the right outcome. If you have a client onboarding process that takes three weeks because it involves manual handoffs between five different people, automating those handoffs saves you some labor. But you still have a three week onboarding timeline. You haven't solved the real problem, which is that the process itself is unnecessarily complicated. This is why the best firms think about their processes in two distinct phases. First, design the right process. Get clear on what a good outcome looks like, what steps are actually necessary to produce it, and what can be cut without affecting the result. Do that work on paper or in a whiteboard session, or in a conversation with your team before you touch any software. Then, once the process is clean, build the automation around it in that order. Automation does exactly what it's supposed to do. It removes the human labor from a process that already works. Standardize. First, look at a process and ask whether it's actually the right way to do the thing. Simplify it, make sure it's producing the outcome it's supposed to produce, Then automate. Once the process is clean and repeatable, at that point, automation genuinely amplifies what you've built before that point. It's just an expensive way to do the wrong thing more consistently. So the next time you find yourself looking at a process and thinking about how to make it more efficient, pause first and ask the effectiveness question. Is this process actually working? Achieving what it's supposed to achieve and creating the right experience for whoever it touches? If the answer is yes, great. Go ahead and make it more efficient. If the answer is no, or even maybe fix that first. Automate a broken process and you get a very fast, very consistent, very automated broken process. Get the right outcome first, then get it efficiently. That order matters more than most people realize. And getting it wrong is one of the more expensive mistakes a firm can make. On the operational side, there's one more dimension to this worth naming. Effectiveness isn't just about whether a process produces the right result. It's also about whether it produces the right result for the right person. A technically correct tax return delivered without any explanation or human context to a client who doesn't understand their own finances and isn't fully effective. An efficient system that routes client questions to a generic inbox instead of a specific person who knows that client's situation isn't fully effective. Efficiency without warmth, without judgment, without the human elements that make a client feel genuinely served, can be just as damaging as a slow manual process, sometimes more so because it scales. This is the thing about automation that doesn't get talked about enough. The real risk isn't that it replaces people, it's that it replaces the parts of what you do that clients actually value. And you don't notice because the metrics still look fine. Tickets are getting closed, documents are being collected, invoices are going out. Everything looks efficient, but the relationship is quietly eroding because nobody is actually paying attention to whether the client feels taken care of. I've seen this happen with billing, with document collection, with communications. The process works technically. Emails go out, deadlines get met, the client gets their deliverable. But somewhere along the way, the warmth disappeared, the proactive communication stopped. The sense that someone actually knew their situation faded out. And clients don't always tell you when that's happening. They just quietly start looking elsewhere. Or they stay, but they stop referring people or they push back harder on fees because they don't feel the value anymore. So yes, automate absolutely create efficiencies in your firm wherever you genuinely can. But keep asking the effectiveness question at every step. Not just when you're setting a process up, but as you're running it. Is this working and is it doing what we actually need it to do? That question should never stop being asked. Hopefully that helps. And if you want more help, be sure to check out my future firm Accelerate Program. We'll help you unlock freedom and growth in your firm through proven systems, expert coaching, and a like minded community of hundreds of others just like you. For more info, just head on over to www.futurefirmaccelerate.com. so that's all for today. Hope you found today's episode helpful and I'll catch you in the next one. Take care.