From Cop to Accountant and Advisor
Leaders aren’t born, they’re made.
—Ryan Conn
As a former police supervisor, Detective Sergeant over Undercover Vice, and SWAT Team Leader, I was trained intensively for 12 years to lead others and build teams of high performing people.
In my world, leadership wasn’t just a promotion. It was the responsibility for someone’s life. Every ‘someone’ was someone else’s mother, father, sister, brother, child, spouse, or loved one. And, table stakes were keeping them alive. The enjoyment came in learning how to leverage every person’s motivation, skill, experience, and expertise to work collaboratively to achieve a goal. The goal often being to bring down bad guys. Very dangerous bad guys who would evade the law as a habit and take out everyone and everything that got in their way without thinking twice.
Enter stage left- my father-in-law.
Wayne Shelton is the man to whom my beautiful wife was born. Forty-four years into being a practicing CPA, Wayne was tired of the tax season grind. Burnout, turnover, and highly compressed tax seasons cause a lot of CPAs to sell or get out of the business altogether.
Instead, Wayne approached me with an idea. He wanted to make some big changes in the firm because he could see that business clients could be served far better if they had someone walking alongside them proactively and advising them on daily financial decisions vs. just being the guy who does their tax return.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave law enforcement, frankly. I loved what I was doing, and I was good at it. I was honing my skills and pursuing my passion for developing top notch leaders and high performing teams.
Turns out, that’s exactly what Wayne needed to transform his CPA firm. We had a vision for where we wanted to be in 12 months and 24 months, and it was going to involve significant change.
Where I started when I took a walk on the business side of things
After joining Wayne as a partner in his business, I started by following one of my own rules: “You have to be a good follower before you can ever be a good leader.”
Talk about a tough pill to swallow after leading high performance teams through life or death situations. I found myself learning how to do tax returns. To make matters more humbling, Wayne assured me that, “I can teach a monkey to do a tax return.” Great. Now I’m a monkey.
After taking some time to learn every person’s role in the firm as well as the business of public accounting, it was time for action.
The foundation- building teams
Once I learned the lay of the land, I understood the changes we needed to make. I went to work doing what I had been trained to do: building teams.
In accounting firms, this wasn’t a very common model. Most accountants do tax returns, bookkeeping, and financials. Each person is often a silo. And then, you have administrative support. But, we weren’t building an accounting firm. We wanted to build a CPA advisory firm that was laser focused on business advisory and consulting work. Our success would depend on our ability to help small businesses achieve their growth goals. The only way we were going to be able to build a business around regular advisory work that involved monthly retainers was to build a team of high performing professionals.
No longer was it going to be every man for himself. I started by surveying the work. What services do we need to provide to our business clients? What does that involve in terms of expertise and deliverables? What roles are needed to be on a team to serve these clients?
I established 3 priorities for building teams in our business:
Understanding where it makes sense to hire someone without an accounting background.
How to shift staff roles and workload to make it manageable and exciting based on expertise, strengths, and enjoyment.
How to build a better culture with trust.
What’s the purpose of teams in an advisory firm?
For your team members, there are enormous benefits to working on a team:
Spreading out the workload.
Developing camaraderie, positive energy, and workplace culture.
Empowering every role with built in accountability. No one wants to fail their team when they feel empowered to do their part, and when they are motivated to get the job done.
Increased communication…which leads to productivity, energy, and positive culture.
For clients, the benefit is magnified:
There is more value and satisfaction when you have a TEAM of people dedicated to your success. You aren’t relying on one person, and you are always going to be able to get help when you need it.
Increased communication which leads to strong relationships and better decisions.
Breaking it down.
I started by defining the exact roles and responsibilities for each person on the team. We knew what we needed, now we had to find the right people. Some we had. Some self-selected who weren’t aligned with our new vision to build an advisory firm. We were moving from the traditional tax factory to expanding the consulting and advisory work for the businesses that needed expert proactive consultants and advisors.
The smartest thing we did that drove massive results long term was to open our minds to hiring from outside the industry. If you look at your business from the angle of having the BEST resources in place to help your business clients achieve their growth goals, you don’t need or want to have a team of 100% accountants. You need people who have a diverse set of skills and talent that come together to provide the multi-disciplinary partnership small businesses need. It’s not always about pedigree and credentials.
How do I know this works?
My SWAT team was made up of a jeweler, a rodeo cowboy, an insurance salesman, a gym owner, a rental car rep, a copy machine repairman, 3 college grads, a body builder, a vet tech, and me. Our success rate for our missions was 100%.
Once we defined exactly what we needed in every role in the firm, we went to work filling those roles. Here’s what some of our team’s prior experience looks like today:
Stay at home mom with an Associates degree
Farm services rep
HVAC sales office manager and bookkeeper
Dental practice office manager
2 retired law enforcement officers
College grads - some with an accounting degree, some without
Credit card collections
Furniture sales bookkeeper
Harley Davidson office manager
CPAs
Results.
With this team and a completely re-designed culture and re-defined vision for how we could help our clients grow their businesses, we doubled the staff, quadrupled our revenue and profit, and reduced our client base by 23%.
Most people don’t realize there are actual leadership tools available that work to develop influential leaders. CS Business Consulting gives you the roadmap, tools, and training to experience the power of influence and the reshaping of your culture. Building high performing teams is essential to becoming an influential leader.
