Build to Enough

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Keila Hill-Trawick: Hello. You're listening to Build to Enough, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to scale at their own pace. I'm your host, Keyla Hill Traywick, and I'll be your chief storyteller and cheerleader in a world that glorifies endless expansion, we're tuning out the noise and discussing the beauty of enough. Each episode will dive into inspiring stories, practical insights, and strategies to cultivate sustainable success on your [00:00:30] own terms. So whether you're a solopreneur, small business owner, or aspiring entrepreneur, get ready for a refreshing take on the entrepreneurial journey. This is build to enough. Hello and welcome back to Build to Enough. Here we share actionable insights and advice on how to build a firm at a sustainable pace. Now, this is the fourth in a series on how to make your firm more successful in the second half of the year, so if you haven't listened to the first three episodes, I [00:01:00] definitely recommend that you go and check those out. So far we've talked about financial health, client review and tech, and today it's time to talk about our teams. I mean, they are what power our firms overall, and we really need to focus on staff performance and review in the middle of the year in order to make it more of a success for everyone who works with and for us through the end of it. Now, managing your staff is crucial because you're only as good as the people that [00:01:30] you hire.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Some of you have heard about my ups and downs, about bringing people in and out of little fish, and well managed teams overall are just more productive, engaged and satisfied, which are qualities that we all want as part of our firms. We also want to reduce the turnover, right? Like once we get good people who like what they do at our companies, we want to make sure that we keep them. And that starts with us making sure that what is important to the people that work for us is important to us as well. There's obviously an impact [00:02:00] on productivity and efficiency, because when you have good people doing good work, when you have the right people in the right seats, they can perform their task more efficiently, right? Because this is what they're focused on. The whole point of expanding your team is that we are not the people that are doing all of the task ourselves anymore. And so the team members that we bring on, really to support the firm, end up being an important part of the firm's overall success. Now, when we talk [00:02:30] about, uh, staff management, we've also got to talk about staff development. And that starts with continuous learning and growth. Some of you might know that my team is doing a book club right now. We're reading, uh, The Making of a manager, which, by the way, very good.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Uh, especially for first time managers or people who are getting a new role within their firms. But it means that we always have to be on a quest to learn more, to get better, to take advantage of resources that really [00:03:00] help us to become more skilled at the thing that we do when we invest in our employees professional development. It also helps them stay current with industry trends and laws, so that they can be more effective in responding to client requests and client deliverables, not to mention that professional development helps to boost employee satisfaction and retention. When team members know that we are investing in them both with money, resources, and time to be able to take advantage of those, [00:03:30] we know that those employees are more likely to stay like they know that there are more opportunities for career advancement, but they also know that we care about pouring into them that it is more than just the work that they do. Also, a really tangible example of us saying that you're important to us, your career advancement, your development matters to us. And so we are going to make sure that we make those investments and commitments to making that work for you. So first [00:04:00] let's dig in and talk about team productivity. Now the first thing that we're always looking at is measurement, right? We want to be able to measure staff productivity like performance metrics, output tracking and project milestones.

Keila Hill-Trawick: One of my pet peeves is things being late. So you know that I am always tracking. How often are we responding to clients within a timely fashion? How often are you meeting the deadlines that are set? And that means that we have to set really clear goals and expectations. [00:04:30] So at little fish, redundancy and continuing education are two really important pillars at the company. Redundancy means that there is more than one person that can do the job. If you are like me, you were the redundancy person, right? You were the one that was the Swiss Army knife. If anything has to be done and somebody that was hired to do it is not doing it, it becomes your job again. And so what you want to make sure is that there is somebody else on the team that knows how to do a part of it. They don't have to be [00:05:00] able to replace that person. We just want to make sure that those core items that need to get done are always getting done. Even when somebody gets sick or has a prior engagement or something else is coming up, that's preventing the main person from being able to take care of it. And then continuing education like we talked about with professional development, is really the ability for us to say, hey, the things that we have learned don't stop there.

Keila Hill-Trawick: There are going to be changes in laws and best practices in tools and tech that's available [00:05:30] to us. Are we staying on top of those so that we are providing the best service to our clients, and creating the best employee experience for the people that work with us? We need to make sure that the redundancy and continuing education ensures smooth operations when there is discomfort or turnover, whether that's because of team changes or because of client changes, it's always going to happen. We are not going to be able to avoid that. And so how can we make sure that the team is prepared to weather [00:06:00] those ebbs and flows as they change in the firm? And then you also want to just make sure that we have a skilled and adaptable workforce. For those of us that are keeping small firms, we know that the key to that is being flexible. Things change all the time, or sometimes they stay the same for a while and you think that that's a plateau and then they move again. And so how can we make sure that our team is constantly up to speed on what is going on internally with the firm and externally, just in our industry, [00:06:30] so that they're prepared to have that flexibility that we need within the company. All right. So the second thing that I would say is setting expectations and employee feedback.

Keila Hill-Trawick: One of the things that we implemented at Little Fish is success measure tracking. So we have a list of all of the things that need to be done in a department, kind of on a higher level. Like we didn't want to get too far into the weeds, but somebody has to be responsible for each of those lines, right? The account manager is responsible for some. The senior accountant is responsible [00:07:00] for some. Our ops manager or sales and marketing team are responsible for specific tasks. And what we want to do is start by when we're onboarding people, showing them what the success measures for their role are. What are they responsible for? What do we want to make sure that they are learning, taking over and being empowered to manage going forward. We also want to make sure that we are checking in throughout the year, throughout their tenure here. Right. You [00:07:30] don't just want to transition a task or a responsibility to somebody and then leave it. You want to check back in and say, are you still doing this? Well, when you, um, finished your first 90 days, you were doing excellent at this. Are you still doing excellent at this? Do we need to look again at what you should be responsible for? I think setting those expectations also helps when there is something wrong on the team.

Keila Hill-Trawick: When someone isn't meeting expectations, you both know what the expectation was to begin with, right? When you're regularly [00:08:00] checking in with employees on how they're doing at their work, this is also a good time to collect feedback about how they like working. There are people happy. Are they a flight risk? Now? The reality is, we all know that it's really hard to tell your boss that you don't like what you're doing for fear of losing your job, but we can all hope that we're creating an environment and a culture that allows people to feel comfortable saying, hey, there are some things that I see could be done better here. [00:08:30] You want to gather feedback through anonymous surveys, through one on one meetings, and even suggestion boxes. Just something that gives employees the opportunity to say, I have a voice that I'd like to be heard about how things move around here. Everybody, again, is contributing to the success. And so they have a right to have the opportunity to be clear about the things that could both improve their experience and the firm overall. Time tracking is a hot topic all [00:09:00] the time, and I'm not going to tell you whether you should or shouldn't do it. What I will say is that we went a very long time without doing time tracking, and ultimately decided to add it back because it was the only way that I could measure capacity for the team.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Sure, we had the anecdotal way of saying, oh yeah, well, I'm full, I'm busy. But like that is very subjective. It depends on what is going on in your life. It depends on what is being asked from you at the time. And so time tracking helps to give me a sense of, are we getting any [00:09:30] closer to our goal of everybody on the team working part time hours for full time pay? And for me, that means less than 35 hours. So if you are consistently approaching 40 hours, we're probably only going to get more clients right? Or we're only going to give more service offerings, even if we limit how many people come in. And if you're already reaching your max, it's going to be really difficult for us to be able to onboard new clients or onboard new team members without you going over that line. Now, when [00:10:00] I think about how we can implement these tools and how we can use this data to really make our team stronger. I'm also thinking about how we can be more efficient with our time, so that we have space to be able to do that, right? Like if you're always in the weeds of doing everything, it's going to be really difficult for you to take some time to say, hey, how are you feeling? What do you like? What do you not like? And so when we have the opportunity to make the team stronger by reducing administrative [00:10:30] tasks, you allow staff not only to focus on each other within the team, but also give them space to focus on their passions.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Like everyone is a human being, they're not just workers. And so they have other things that they're interested in too. And you want to be able to give them space to do that. One of the ways that you can do that is to reduce the administrative burden. By using a tool like ignition, you are able to have less admin, more passion, and you can automate a lot of these administrative tasks like proposal generation, [00:11:00] billing and payment collection. When it comes down to making sure that we can bring on clients who are already ready to work with us with ease so that we can focus on giving them a solid onboarding experience and making it easy for the team members that are bringing them on to do so. Ignition is top notch in my book, and we've dropped a couple links in the show notes for you to be able to start a free 14 day trial. You don't even have to give them a credit card. So I would say definitely sign up. Um, [00:11:30] I use it have been using it for my firm for a while now, and we love what it's been able to do for our team and our clients.

Keila Hill-Trawick: All right, so to recap, what am I saying that we do here? The first thing is make sure that you're creating a positive work environment. None of this is going to matter if people hate working there. It doesn't matter what metrics you put in place or how many suggestion boxes you put around the office if people are miserable. So make sure that you're creating a work environment and a company culture that really allows people to feel [00:12:00] supported, increases employee morale, and overall leads to better client interactions. And then make sure that your team's goals are aligned with the company goals. Um, again, all of the metrics in the world will not make up for a misalignment between what you think is important and what the employee thinks is important. Make sure that those check ins are taking some time to say, hey, is what you want aligned with what we're doing? And if not, ah, is there anything that we can do to make sure [00:12:30] that that, um, joins up better when you focus on these? The firm owners can ensure that we're managing and developing our staff effectively. And overall, as we know, that leads to a more productive, satisfied and successful team. And I say that not just from a productivity get as much done as possible in the short amount of time, but productive in the like if you can get your work done faster, maybe you can spend some time doing the things that you really love, whether that's fun [00:13:00] stuff within the company or just spending more time outside of work, the faster and more efficient that we can get things done, the more space that we have to do the things that are really important to us.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. Like I said, this is the fourth in a series, so if you haven't listened to the first three episodes, go back and grab those and give me your thoughts. Drop us a line at podcast at Little Fish Accounting Comm with your thoughts, and if you have any episode suggestions or recommendations, we'd love to hear from you. We want [00:13:30] to make sure that this is valuable. So if there's something that you want to hear that we're not talking about, let us know. Otherwise, we'll see you next time. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Build to Enough. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate and share the love with your fellow entrepreneur friends, and make sure to sign up for the Build to Enough newsletter. The link is in the show notes. Stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to redefine success one intentional step at a time.