Understanding Your Why in Your Accounting Firm

Read Time: 4:42 minutes

✋Welcome to The CAS Cache, a newsletter designed to help accounting firms grow their CAS offerings. Each issue will feature my insights on a topic.

In addition, perspectives from gurus on the topic that I am listening to 👂, reading 📚, or watching 👀 and one thing I am talking 🗣 to my clients about in my firm newsletter. Please feel free to R&D (rip off and duplicate) the Client Cache.

Disclaimer: Some links below support my writing of this newsletter, and some give you a deal.

Issue Sponsor 😎

One of the core values at my firm is family, friends, & health come first. I constantly remind myself to make time for important events in my life. Work will come and go, but family, friends, and your health will not.

Here is another good reminder of my core value that brought tears to my eyes.

Understanding your why and core values makes it easier to make decisions in your life and your accounting firm. And most accounting firms and I struggle with saying "NO."

Therefore, I look at my why and core values as a guiding light. When something doesn't get me closer to my why or fit with my core values, then saying no becomes easier.

My Why

My why, which I call my Big Hairy Audacious Goal ("BHAG"), is to contribute $500,000 back to the planet and community by 2026:

I am currently doing three things to work toward my BHAG:

1. Volunteering on a community board and coaching my kid's sports teams.

2. Contributing 1% of revenue from FinDaily toward carbon removal.

3. Setting aside 2% of revenue in my firm toward purchasing farm ground. The land will unite my passions: nature, food, and community. I want to restore farm ground to its natural state of prairie because the biodiversity of a prairie is on par with the Amazon Rainforest. The land will also have an Agriturismo for people to learn about the land and share food created locally.

I have this picture on my computer background to remind me of my BHAG every day.

Applying my BHAG in my Accounting Firm

My BHAG is my guiding light and motivator. For example, I am considering bringing another person to my accounting firm. So I ask myself, does this help me move toward my BHAG? The answer is absolutely.

However, the number one core value in my accounting firm is family, friends, and health come first. That makes me pause because I will lose some free time training this person and bringing on more clients.

That brings me to another core value of carry your own bag. If I do find someone, they need to be proactive and self-accountable by troubleshooting problems before asking for help and staying on top of work without reminders. This core value should mitigate some loss of free time. I must also motivate this person with a compensation structure that incentivizes executing the core value.

Now, I know that if I bring on a consultant, I need to do three things:

1. Structure the relationship as an independent contractor that I am helping build their own business. This also checks off another core value of paying it forward.

2. Start building a funnel of potential clients for this new person.

3. Find a core value fit by asking questions developed around my core values and doing a trial project with the person. Similar to what I did with my Filipino contractor. You can download these questions and a list of tasks for a trial day by clicking here.

Using a Guiding Light in Your Accounting Firm

Here are two ways to apply this in your accounting firm:

1. Develop your why and core values to get your team rowing in the right direction. I would recommend using either EOS discussed in Traction or Scaling Up.

2. Start hiring and firing around your core values. EOS has a simple tool called The People Analyzer for doing this.

Feel free to book a call below if you are stuck. If you are already doing this, then drop a comment in the Tweet below to inspire others 👇

QuickBooks Connect

I hope to see all of you going to QuickBooks Connect. I will be speaking on Monday from 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM PST in Breakout Room 3 (Level 3), so come by to say hi.

Megan Tarnow and I plan to do an #accountingsaloon meet-up, so make sure you follow CAS_chat on X and enable notifications to find out where we will be bellying up to the bar.

Thank you, John Sanchez, for sharing the last issue! 🙏

Guru Cache 👂📚👀

👀 Simon Sinek’s Start with Why Ted Talk

📚 Becoming the One has a great personal core values exercise that I have found helpful in bettering myself.

Client Cache 🗣

📚📈 How to make millions presenting the McKinsey way 👇

Thanks for reading, Luke Templin!

P.S. There are four ways I can help you grow your CAS offerings when you are ready:

1. Automate your CAS offering with daily financial digest on autopilot

2. Mini-courses on CAS

3. Book a 1-hour CAS consulting call

4. Join Megan Tarnow and me at the #CASsaloon every fourth Thursday at 2 PM CST on “X” to talk all things CAS.