Control. It is the single thing that will help separate tax and accounting professionals from the dread, stress, and very concept of “busy season,” and it all starts with establishing and committing to your own rules.
Your clients react to deadlines and other rules set outside of working with you, but until you step in and take control by setting your rules for everything from what is needed and when to the very hours you and your staff will “work,” the work will always control you.
Yes, this all sounds like rhetoric, especially coming from a former journalist-cum-marketing consultant and advocate who never ran a firm in his life. But I’ve listened to you all for decades and continue to and know that even simple changes can have a big impact. I have also seen an increasing number of you set boundaries, work hours, and rules that staff and clients can abide by that actually work to relieve stress and still get everything done.
On the surface, taking any kind of control over your firm, changing from how you are doing things and have been possibly for quite a while, is not the most welcome of things. Thoughts of pain and discomfort come to mind until you think about it another way. What is the pain and discomfort of doing things the same way, “allowing” work and current workflows (such as they are) to remain as they are, and ultimately having work “happen” to you versus you saying what it is and will be?
There are already a growing number of examples out in the market of practitioners taking this level of control and actually having success with it. Reducing the number of clients they work with so it doesn’t feel like such a crush, and charging more for valuable conversations, planning, forecasting, and the like so that you have more quality time with clients and less “churning out” work or feeling trapped under it.
In other cases, firm leaders have strictly structured their “work hours” so they do not at any time exceed a set amount, thereby allowing more personal time and control over how work is actually done. And yes, I get it; major changes like this can’t happen when the “busy season” train has already left the station.
Even so, there are comparatively smaller things you can do to just have some semblance of control over how you and your team work. Maybe it’s as simple as “We are not taking documents past X date; anything submitted after goes on extension.” Or maybe it’s you deciding to take some time off in March, a long weekend, or maybe you have a staffer who could use it, even a few days where they unplug and do not even check email.
The point is, if you just take the time to look at what causes the most pain or what could even relieve some of the sense of things being out of your control, it will make all the difference until bigger changes can be made. It’s fine to start comparatively small; who knows? Maybe that will be all it takes for you to feel like it’s your firm, it’s your life, and you actually have a say.
This is my wish, my hope for all of you this season, this year, and onward.