how effective project management makes your life easier

happier clients and happier staff are just the start.

by frank stitely
the relentless cpa

i have some excellent news. effective project management can make owning a firm fun and profitable again. if not fun, it will be at least more tolerable than a lifetime of root canals.

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i have worked two aprils from the ncaa final four basketball tournament. this past september 15^th, i worked from the beach. no one at the office seemed to miss me.

what are we trying to accomplish with effective project management? first and foremost, we aim to create happier firm owners. i could tell you that we’ll be creating happier clients and staff, and i will tell you that later, but our first priority is you, the owner. you can have ecstatic clients and staff by charging nothing and paying top salaries, but you’ll be miserable living in a refrigerator box under a bridge.

how will effective project management make your life happier? first, your office life will become sane again. your daily schedule will no longer be determined by which client is on the phone complaining that he brought in his information a month ago and still has heard nothing from his preparer. without effective project management, this probably steals an hour per day. if there are 11 weeks in the heat of tax season, you lose 11 weeks times 5 days times 1 hour = 55 hours. i did the math without consulting staff, so you may want to double-check it.

what is 55 hours during tax season? it’s the difference between having dinner with your family and your kids asking, “who is that strange person who wanders in every night at midnight?” your spouse probably responds, “nobody. say hello to your new daddy, the mailman.”

second, you’ll be able to make money again on tax returns. you’ll do this by monitoring staff workloads and spotting bottlenecks before you end up with big write-downs or hours of wasted staff time. there will be no new work drawer with staff competing to see who can avoid that nasty schedule c return from that serial complainer client. you’ll assign returns based on workload and skill level. you’ll even be able to assign the same preparer to a client year after year, because you’ll know at a glance who prepared the return last year.

the second year, you’ll adjust staff levels to meet your anticipated demand because you know just what each preparer accomplished the prior year. you won’t over- or underhire.

when you get really good at project management, you’ll know what skill levels you need from staff to complete returns at the lowest costs possible. we’ll discuss assigning appropriate staff to projects later. i’ll preface it by stating that most firms hire too many expensive preparers to do work that could be accomplished by lower-paid admin staff. if you personally e-file all of your returns, raise your right hand and make a fist. then punch yourself in the face for the money you’re wasting.

third, your staff will all follow one process to complete projects. you will standardize both the procedures and documentation for tax returns. cindy won’t be using one set of excel schedules while tom uses another. standardization drives down costs and makes training new staff quicker, cheaper, and less painful.

fourth, your role in the firm will change. for me, the heart-palpitating thrill of entering a w-2 into tax software passed a while back. way back. you’ll become a traffic cop and reviewer. think of yourself as the guy at the front of the boat yelling, “stroke!” that’s way less work than being a grunt with an oar. you’ll also see the tax season iceberg before anyone else, and have the chance to correct course. or, you can take the life raft, and let everyone else in the firm drown. knowledge is power.

i’m not even a primary reviewer anymore. i’m the final reviewer, who bows in front of clients taking credit for their tax savings. and i produce more tax savings now that i get to think conceptually about returns rather than just plugging along entering w-2s and 1099s as fast as i can. i have the time to be a trusted advisor and not just a data entry clerk. you can make the proactive calls you want to make instead of the reactive calls you’re forced to make now. i also have time for a daily workout at the gym. note that i have the time. i don’t necessarily do it. it’s a good theory, but unproven in practice.

effective project management builds salable value in your firm. what firm would you rather buy: one where the owner is a one-man show and never gets a vacation, or one where the owner is a ceo and his staff functions independently? a firm where the old owner just turns over the office key to the new owner and the firm functions without interruption is far more valuable than a firm entirely dependent on the old owner to function. a well-organized firm with solid operating procedures will get you a higher sales multiple.

effective project management creates happier clients. long gone are the days when you could extend filing dates for half of your practice. the technical term for a client who brings in her information in february and gets a completed return in june is ex-client. did you ever wonder why mail order used to take six to eight weeks? clients wonder this about tax returns.

in the era of commodity 1040s, clients expect you to be able to manage your workload. they have to manage theirs. effective project management alerts you to projects that are late and in trouble. you can help staff remove bottlenecks before clients become ex-clients. returns will no longer fall through the cracks until april 14^th.

effective project management commutes your sentence in “what’s the status of” hell. you know that place. it’s where you get nothing done but respond to calls and emails about the status of returns that are getting ever later because of the calls and emails. you get to play endless games of scavenger hunt to see who has the file and when the return will be done. this is the “piles of files” method of project management. i’ll have more on the consequences of this method later. meanwhile, you can add yet another hour back into your tax season work day by stopping these scavenger hunt games through better project management.

did i mention that you’ll no longer have to discount your fees to keep dissatisfied clients from leaving? you know the game. “you extended my return. now i owe penalties, and i hold you responsible.” the fun never ends for us. we certainly didn’t get into the business for clients to chastise us 10 times per day. effective project management can cut that down to five times a day.

effective project management creates happier staff. note that i listed this third after a happier you and happier clients. i know the latest management fad is that happy staff create happy clients. that’s true to a point. a wise production management professor once told me, “happy employees aren’t necessarily productive employees. many employees are perfectly happy doing nothing.” i’ve lived that point a few times over 27 years in practice. that doesn’t mean i’m completely in favor of daily beatings.

would you rather work for a well-organized firm or one that staggers from crisis to crisis? we have a current staff member who worked for a couple of train-wreck firms before joining us. she experienced 10 years of not knowing if paychecks would clear or if any new work would be available the first week in april. that part about no work in early april floored me. i’ve never experienced that even in a nightmare.

employees who work in well-organized firms are more productive as they work based on priorities you set. they don’t just pick up the file on the floor that happens to be closest. you can give them work completion deadlines and know if the deadlines aren’t being met. an unmonitored deadline is no deadline at all.

employees who work in well-organized firms stay. if you’ve hired that dream employee with 12 years of experience, she’ll stay if she knows life at your firm makes sense and is predictable. someone who has worked for a few train-wreck firms won’t leave you for an extra thousand bucks a year. i’d like to tell you that you’ll be able to hire employees on the cheap, but you won’t. you’ll still pay market rate, but you won’t have to replace your staff every two years.

posted on march 13, 2019