What Comes Next After "The Most Important Question?"

This file was generated by Descript Thanks for listening to The Upstream Leader podcast. Busy season is behind us, which means we've officially entered what we at Upstream call "development season," the time of year when firms can finally step back, invest in their people, and focus on building a stronger future. One of the best ways to do that is through HeadWaters, Upstream Academy's Premier Leadership Conference designed for accounting firm leaders who want to think bigger, lead better, and connect with peers who are shaping the future of the profession with inspiring speakers, practical insights and meaningful conversations. HeadWaters is built to help your firm move forward with purpose. And this year is especially exciting as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the HeadWaters Leadership Conference, marking 25 years of leadership, innovation, and impact across the profession. If your firm is ready to focus on growth beyond busy season, now's the time. Visit UpstreamAcademy.com to learn more and register. That's UpstreamAcademy.com. Maximize your accounting career by becoming high yield and low maintenance with The Upstream Leader Podcast, your passport to improved knowledge, skills, and career potential. Stay tuned for insights, expertise, and thought provoking discussion. And now here's your host, Jeremy Clopton. Hello everyone and welcome to The Upstream Leader. My name is Jeremy Clopton. Glad to be with you here today. If you listened to my last episode on the show, we talked about the most important question that firms need to be asking themselves today and building on that. I want to tell you what to do once you have an answer. And the question for those of you that maybe have missed the episode was, who do we want to become as a firm? Who do we want to be? Retreat season is in full effect. It seems that every firm is starting to ask strategic questions, figuring out the direction they want to go, and I've been lucky enough to have the privilege of working with several firms already, uh, post tax season. We've explored the answer to this question and for several of the firms what has struck me. Is we didn't come up with some earth shattering, groundbreaking, transformative, identity crisis type of answer. We didn't take a firm that was currently local and they decided, oh, now we want to be multinational. I haven't had a firm that's global in nature that has said, you know what? We'd much rather just be a regional firm in every one of the retreats. We've given this question to the shareholders, the partners, the principals, however you want to think about it, the owners of the firm in advance so that they had plenty of time to reflect on it. What almost every firm came back with was we really like who we are. So far, that has been the most common answer to the question of who do we want to become? We don't necessarily want to change. We want to become who we already are. However, we wanna be a better version of that. That's been the most common thread that I've seen so far in retreat season, and even talking with firms where I've maybe not been at their retreat, but I've been talking with leaders. I don't know a lot of firms right now. That are looking to completely change their identity to transform into a completely different firm with a 100% different trajectory. And don't get me wrong, there are some of those firms in the profession right now, and it's not that they want to do that for the wrong reasons. That they're thinking, oh, well, we want to change because we just want to take the path of least resistance and we'll just settle for a new identity. The firms that are looking to be very transformative, they're saying we want to get somewhere new and we want to get there faster. What's interesting is if you were to look at the headlines and you were to read LinkedIn and all the other places that you can get news and thought leadership about our profession, you would probably start to believe that it's actually most firms that want to be somebody different, that they need to be somebody different, that they've got to completely abandon who they've been and become something new. Frankly, I just don't buy that. I don't believe that it's necessary, and I love the fact that the firms that I've talked to have all settled on the same identity. Relative to one another, of course, and that who they want to become is a better version of themselves. They want to become a better version of the firm that they are today because they still believe in their mission. They still believe in their vision. They still believe in their values, their why, who they interact with. They still value their people, their communities, their clients. And despite all the change, the consolidation, private equity, other variations of investors coming into this space, artificial intelligence outsourcing and all of it, by the way, none of those things, good or bad, they're just what's going on in the profession. But despite all of those. And the firms have said, you know what? We wanna become a better version of ourselves. The question now becomes, how do we do that? How do we become the better version of ourselves? And what I would offer you in this episode is it that question, how do we become a better version of ourselves? Might have the simplest answer possible as you think about the strategic direction of the firm. And that answer those simple is at the same time, the most challenging thing to execute. And the answer to the question of how do we become a better version of the firm that we are today is that you have to do the really hard things that you've been avoiding for the last several years. And if you're sitting there thinking, oh, Jeremy, we haven't, we haven't avoided that, I would ask you to become very reflective. I would ask you to go back through your last several years of retreats or strategic planning sessions or whatever your version of looking at the year or the years ahead may look like. And I would ask you to look at that and say how many of the things that we've talked about needing to do every single year have actually been the same things year after year after year. Really, they fall into this category of the things that you know you need to do, but unfortunately are very difficult to do. And these are not the run of the mill things. We need to get new clients. We need to do good work. We need to bill and collect. We need to ensure that we're compliant with CPE. Those aren't the hard things that you've been avoiding. Some of the hard things that a lot of firms have been avoiding that may come up as you look back and say, what have we not done? Investing in your people. And before you jump back and say, wait, we've done that. We have hr, we have l and d, we spend all this money on training. I mean, you investing your time in your people. It's easy to say, well, if they want to get better, they should go learn more. They should develop more. It's a lot harder to look in the mirror and say, my responsibility as a leader is to develop the next generation of leadership in the firm. What if you were to take 200 or 300, even just 50 billable hours and say, you know what? I'm gonna let somebody else do that work. I'm gonna invest that in my people because that's investing in the future of the firm. I would venture a guess that for many, you would look at that and say, that'd be really hard to do because I've gotta take care of my clients. That's one of the hard things that you've been avoiding that you need to do. To become a better version of yourself. It could be identifying the ideal clients of the firm and actually committing to only taking on ideal clients of the firm rather than operating sometimes out of fear that any client is better than no client. So we'll take any rather than ideal. Perhaps it's holding people accountable and setting a high standard of excellence because you know that it's hard to recruit people that you haven't maybe been having the success that you're looking for in recruiting. So you're thinking maybe. We need to widen the net a little bit so we can recruit more people, even though we know they're probably not right. So we're gonna lower our standards of excellence rather than expanding where we go look for excellence. Maybe it's tolerating lower performance in your people, in your clients, in yourself, but again, operating out of this fear that, but if we push too hard, if we expect too much, if we challenge them, if we ask them to do more, they might leave. The hard thing that you're avoiding is that recognition that if we ask them to do more and rise to our standard of excellence and they don't and they stay, that's actually worse. As I said in the previous episode, the most important question is who do you want to become because then it guides your next steps. For the firms that ask that question, and they come back to the realization that who I want to become or who we want to become is simply put just a better version of who we are. The path forward is quite simple. You've gotta start doing the hard things that you've been avoiding doing, and the last piece of that puzzle that's going to be critically important for you and is arguably for most firms. The hardest aspect of this is you are going to have to drive partner accountability. In doing these hard things, you're gonna have to stop allowing one another to find the reasons to not do the hard things. We talk a lot with firms, and I think I've talked about it on this podcast several times, that you get more of the behaviors that you tolerate. If I can be remarkably candid, there are a lot of us in the profession over the years that have tolerated mediocrity because it was a lot easier than dealing with mediocrity. We don't want to have to call it out. We don't want to have to raise the bar. We don't have, want to have to push for excellence, so we'll just say, you know what? It's good enough. Let's just keep it as it's, and I get it in business sometimes we're okay with that. We may accept that we're okay with performers that are just so, so. But if you want to become a better version of yourself, you've gotta raise the level of performance for everyone. And the one place you can't tolerate mediocrity is in the partner room. You've gotta figure out how do we stop allowing ourselves to come up with all of the excuses that we do? And I know you sell 'em as reasons, not excuses. They're excuses. How do we keep ourselves from buying into all of these excuses that we don't have time, we don't have the people, we don't have the whatever to do The hard things. And the hardest of those things is hold one another accountable as owners of the business. That is arguably the most important thing that you can do to become a better version of yourselves. Raise the level of performance in the partner room. Require, encourage, expect that everyone in that room will perform to the highest standard of excellence possible. If you can raise the bar there, actually, lemme say that a different way. I'm gonna use this, a phrase that I had a managing partner used recently. If you can raise the floor of performance in the partner room, you'll raise the floor of performance across the firm. But that's gonna require you to do those hard things, so. How do you get started on this? First and foremost answer the question from the previous podcast episode, right? You ask, who do we want to become? You figure it out. If the answer is we want to become a better version of ourselves, I need you to go back through the last three to five years of discussions at the partner level, what are the things you always talk about? Time and again. They come up, you talk about it, you agree to it, you don't do it. You talk about it the next year. I don't need you to make a list of 40 of 'em. I want you to identify what are the three most important hard things that as a partner group you've been avoiding, and then commit over the next 12 months to do those things. If you can do that, you can become a better version of yourself. I'm very confident in that. As you know, I like a good book recommendation and there are obviously several books on this topic and several that I would highly encourage you to read. But I'm gonna start with Do Hard Things by Steve Magness as I'm kind of looking around the office here, uh, trying to see which of my books I think would be best for this. Do Hard Things by Steve Magness is the one that comes to mind right out of the gate. It's gonna help you figure out, all right, how do I get to that better version of myself? How do we get to the better version of the firm? Doing hard things is exactly how you do it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that book if you're looking for others. Beat Yesterday is probably another one that's at the top of my list right now. Jake Thompson is the author. He's been on this show a couple times. A phenomenal author, great Mind. He'll actually be speaking at our HeadWaters conference here in July if you'd like to see him in person. Registration is still open and available for HeadWaters July 16th and 17th in Chicago, but Beat Yesterday is Jake's newest book. A great resource for you on that as well. So with that, as you move forward, again, revisit that previous episode, ask the most important question to firms today, but then ask yourself, if I'm trying to become a better version of myself, what are the hard things that I've been avoiding? How do I get some accountability there? If you're looking for some ideas, you want to talk about this more, don't hesitate to reach out to me. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, or you're welcome to shoot me an email at any time. With that, I thank you for joining me on today's episode of The Upstream Leader. Can't wait to talk to you again soon. Are joining us on The Upstream Leader Podcast. We hope today's episode has enriched your understanding of what it takes to become a high performing leader in the accounting profession. If you'd like to hear more episodes, subscribe on your favorite podcasting app and visit our website where you'll find full show notes and more TheUpstreamLeader.com. Professional productions.net.