It’s FRIDAY!

Here’s a topic that resonates with me so much and is so important to keep top of mind year round when running a service-based business.

I’ve been mulling over a question for a few months..

and it’s lingered unanswered until this week.

What does true excellence look like in CAS and for my firm?

It’s not a PDF, it’s not fast work, it’s not doing everything for our clients.

I listened to a Founders podcast episode on my way down to Chicago this week about the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Basically, this guy has spent 60+ years perfecting his craft, creating incredible sushi. People spend $400 for a 25 minute meal at his 10 seat restaurant in Tokyo.

His philosophy is simple: amazing ingredients, simplicity, and mastery.

He controls the number of variables to focus on, and that allowed him to create the best sushi in the world.

He picks a few details and perfects them.

And it hit me…

That’s what most firms are getting wrong.

We’re trying to do everything for clients.

Every request. Every process. Every system. Every exception.

But how can we do great work

if we’re spreading our attention across a thousand details?

So this is a problem that I’ve had working with mid-market clients. There is always more.

You win the accounting work. Maybe payroll too. It’s clean, simple, and consistent.

Then a few weeks later…

“Can you help with sales tax?”

“We also need some HR support.”

“Can you fill out this state form?”

“Oh, and can you take a look at this too?”

And because we can do those things, we decide it’s easier than their hiring someone else to do them.

You might even price this in and update scope. But this isn’t really a scope creep issue.

It’s a skill issue.

Every time you say yes, you add another variable to the system.

Another SOP, another person, another workflow to track, another complexity.

One more area where the team now has to be “good enough.”

And slowly but surely, you go from a solid accounting firm, to a generalist firm that’s just “good enough” at lots of little things.

Excellence requires structure and limitations. Focus requires you to subtract.

How can you deliver world-class work when you’re being everything to everyone?

You can’t.

Excellence isn’t more service, more tasks, and a bigger to-do list.

Excellence is being truly great and different at what your firm specializes in.

For my firm, excellence is three things:

In accounting speak, this is all of the transactional accounting work, the financial reporting, and communication about the past & future performance of the business.

Everything else is noise.

What is excellence like for your firm and what is the noise? Do your proposals and client expectations reflect those things?

So, now that you’ve defined what excellence is for you, how can you protect it?

Excellence disappears unless the firm protects it. You need a system to do that.

If you’re doing everything, nothing can be excellent.

Pick the things that matter.

Then defend them like your firm depends on it, because it does.

My friend Paul showed me this yesterday.

NotebookLM is pretty crazy.

Paul basically recorded himself doing a financial assessment for a potential client and took the transcripts and input it in NotebookLM asking it to create a visual presentation he could share with the client.

It then, within 2 minutes, spit this out(some example slides):

So clean and nice to read right? Without hardly any effort. This is a HUGE step up from the manual process of this in the past.

Here are the steps to try it out:

Step 1 - Record yourself talking through something or talking to a client.

Step 2 - Take the transcript, put it into AI and have it provide a story arc from the transcripts. This could be any LLM.

Step 3 - With the output of the story, take the file and put it into Notebook LM, just click on “create a deck” and that is it. You can tweak after, but it’s usually very close on it’s own.

Apparently, there’s also a paid app called Gamma, which might be even better. Give it a shot!

Until next time,

Tailor Hartman, CPA

P.S. We’re working on building a custom triage system in Missive for a massive new client. Stay tuned on that.