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Jason
Pods, the team structure, not podcasts. Pods, how you organize your people together into teams inside of an accounting firm. Pods and firms, very, very common. But most people do them differently and it's dependent upon the services you deliver to your clients. Like what the, what the ongoing touch points are, how you craft that pod in a way that is in service of how you design your client engagements. Today I'm going to give you 10 different things to think about that are like, types of people, what those people need. Each of those 10 things at least needs to be considered in how you design those pods. Whether you're doing it for the first time or whether you were like an OG pod racer from way back in the day. I think even now you'll get a couple ideas to be like, oh, we could actually maybe add this or that to better support those pod people. That's it. That's what we're doing today. Join me, Jason, on firms. Okay, the first one, let's just get the obvious one right out of the way. Some sort of senior. Usually you're going to build a pod around some sort of outstanding individual who will serve as, as kind of the adult in the pod, but not always as we're going to, as we're going to dig into. But if you are a growing firm, that's usually where you start, is who's kind of going to be the backbone person in this pod. And so this is maybe the most obvious one. Let's get to the second one, which is maybe the second most obvious one, is who is going to be the junior to that senior. My approach is rather than having people in pods that are kind of like peer level, like a co pod leader or something like that, I want to have a progression. I want to have a clear command structure. Not even a command structure because this doesn't even necessarily dictate authority as much as technical capability. But I want a progression there so that my junior is getting senior. And part of the value of these pods is to, to have a clear path to who's going to spin up the next pod. So like for me and how I developed those pods, we always needed to have a plan for what the next pod would be, the pod after that, and who are the people in the pipeline most likely to take the helm in those future pods. And so in the way that I designed my pods, you would always have like the most senior person and then a less, a less senior person that you were developing to hopefully at some point have a pod of their own down the road. Third thought here Third, consideration for who you put into that POD technical domain. Because a POD doesn't necessarily need to be just like here's a tax pod or here's a bookkeeping pod or an advisory pod. Oftentimes the best pods are a mix of different domain expertises. And this is where we get into how you design a POD in a way that, that is more reflective of the things that clients are going to come at you with. They're going to come at you with tax questions and, and questions and questions about their month end close. Then the more embedded those folks are in, kind of feeling like they're in the same team, then the less it's going to be like, well, let me transfer you to the tax department because nobody likes that. So depending on the services that you provide your clients with, consider does, does a service rise to the level of needing someone to represent that service inside the context of a pod, whether that person actually does the work or not? And I should offer a point of clarification, people will have very different takes on this. I can tell you in the way I ran my firm, pods were not necessarily always the ones doing the work. And in the beginning in a smaller firm, like 20 people are under, I think almost certainly the pods, they are, they are the doers. But you can also have separate functional teams where they are just like the, the kind of manufacturing floor for doing a specific type of work. But they may be kind of the behind the scenes cast, whereas the POD is more the client facing folks. And this is the, this is the setup that I ultimately moved into was we had teams of folks whose sole responsibilities were just to machine the work out and get that work done. And pods evolved into a more client facing thing where they oversaw the work and they reviewed the work and they worked with the client and did all the back and forth there, but they were not necessarily the ones responsible for doing all the work. Your pods may work that way, but they don't necessarily have to in the beginning. They almost certainly do because the smaller your team is, the more those folks are going to be doing. Okay, number four, an admin. Hear me out. I think most of the people in your team would benefit from an admin for the same reason that you would, because everybody has a collection of tasks that run the gamut of things that are very technical and, and really push that person's noodle to the limit and stuff that just is not that. And unfortunately most of us, a huge percentage of our days are filled with very trivial administrative things. But I would argue that most firms are still blocked by usually leadership. That's like, well, I'm not the type of person that needs an assistant, okay? Like, I'm not. That's not me. And a good way to kind of take inventory of, of how you could benefit from this is literally just consider what are the things that take up your day. If you spend in a few hours a day on email, what are the quality of those emails that. That you're managing? The email is a great example of something where it's very rare that there's anything in that inbox that is actually like pushing you to the limit. You know, most of the questions that we get from clients are the same things that we've seen hundreds of times over. They're simple requests for information. And, you know, if I look back at, you know, my most senior tax staff, we were largely operating at, in an age before we had really good tax intake apps, like machines that could oversee the requesting of information from clients. And so it was a whole bunch of humans doing this back and forth with clients, tracking them down for documents. And then the client gives you 67 pages of PDFs. And my most senior technical people figure out how to get that back into the work paper file. And that's a big project. And, and it's just a big old headache, all of that stuff, man, if you can have somebody that that senior can hand off to, oftentimes even that the junior can hand off to, you're going to save them a pile of time. And in the process of doing the work, you're teaching them the skill of delegation, which is maybe the biggest blocker for a lot of us business owners that are listening to this is just a lack of comfort with being able to trust somebody else with a task. Not seeing the opportunities that are most ripe for delegation. And as people move up through your organization, they're gonna have all those same problems. Technical people, they don't just roll out of bed one day and know how to do delegation. This is an opportunity for them to learn that in the course of doing their work daytoday. And it's worth remembering that the sawdust, the leftovers, the stuff that you would just rather not do, that sounds awful. Somebody else. It's a great opportunity for them. It's actually like a, arguably the highest value thing they may do is that thing that you're just dreading that's like, this is such a waste of my time. And so by having a willingness to delegate that stuff out, you're actually raising everybody up. So the senior, the value of them having a junior partnered with them is they can work very closely with that junior and send that junior a whole bunch of work. And that junior as a result progresses much more quickly because they're working in tandem with that senior. The admin, you'll actually find that person progresses really quickly the more they become this sort of irreplaceable resource for the senior and the junior. So what could they be doing? Well, it could be like ad hoc, throwing them tasks day to day. It could be managing the inboxes of both of those people in the same way that they may manage the inbox for you. Like, let's think outside the box here. Like, you don't need to restrict this to. I had to hire an admin to sit at a desk and look at a phone. I made a ton of non accounting hires in my accounting firm and they were so freaking good. I mean I hired as many non accountants as accountants. I would look for people who just had a track record of like being absolute hustlers. Firefighters, like really good operators could create systems and that sort of thing. And augmenting a technical team where accountants are not always the best at that stuff with a really good operational person, that was magic. Many of those people would go on to even build the technical skills. And then they were just like these unicorns that could do both sides of that. Highly recommend pulling admins in to support your team earlier. To kind of strip back some of the blockers we have working with admins where we're like, I don't want to have an assistant. Like we just normalize that for everybody from the beginning. And it just creates a more collaborative workplace where everyone is working in service of everyone else and just kind of trying to help out rather than this weird sort of hierarchical. Well, the C suite, the executives, they have virtual assistants. It's like, no, like let's just kind of all help each other out. And the more fluid everybody can be, the more Teflon you are about which tasks stick to you and which don't, the faster it actually raises everybody else up. Number five, a client relationship manager. This person that might just be their job or it might be a responsibility that is stuck to one of the other. Like one of these people in within the pod. It's something you have to have a clear answer for. Who is, who is the person responsible for maybe everything that the client does with the firm? Or who's the person responsible for the tax stuff, for the bookkeeping stuff. I personally like unifying that Stuff behind a single person that has some domain expertise in one of those areas, be it tax or accounting. But within a pod, somebody has to wear that hat. And I should say, even going back to the previous point on admins, these people can be exclusive to a pod or they can be cross pod intra pod people or capacities. So an admin, for example, an admin could support 2 pods or 3 pods or 5 pods or whatever made the most sense. And when you're in your really, really early days and you don't have enough people to really fully build out pods, you may have a junior that straddles a couple of different pods. This is totally normal. And a nice aspect of organizing folks into pods is you have a structure you can kind of see longer term that you grow into. And in the short term it may mean making some compromises or if somebody leaves or, or you have a new person, you flex that structure just a bit in a way that makes sense. But it is like structure while maintaining some flexibility. Similarly here for client relationship managers, you, you could have someone that spanned multiple pods as well. So if the pods were still responsible for doing the work, for actually being the machine that produces tax returns and month end closes, then maybe you've got a rockstar like client facing person where that's all they want to do and you could have that person be the client relationship manager across a couple of different pods. You can totally do that. So people don't need to exclusively exist within a single pod necessarily. This episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing. Hey, scenario. What if, what if you had this buddy that was running another accounting firm and they stumbled into this thing and they like, they start hiring these really good offshore accountants in the Philippines and you're talking with them one day and your buddy's like, hey, I got some really good people here. You want me to hook you up? You want me to find you a few, find you a few accountants? What would you say? Would you be like, nah, I'm good, I can find accountants all day long. I don't need more accountants in my firm. Poppycock. You'd be like, tell me more. That's what working with cloud accountant staffing is. Because the team behind cloud account staffing, they were literally just an accounting firm that started hiring people in the Philippines, had really good luck like I did with the quality of who they picked up and then they just started doing it for other firms. It's not, it's kind of as simple as that. If you're looking for somebody who understands you just works with accounting firms, not some rando sending you cold dms on LinkedIn, a group that actually does this stuff just with accountants. Check out Cloud accountant staffing link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow. Do your clients just throw up in their mouths a little bit when you send them a PDF of their financials every month? I bet they do, because what is even that? What are you supposed to do with a set of financial statements? The okay, most people, they don't know how to make sense of this. What if you started delivering something, something better? Okay, think about it. Live Flow kind of the OG what they used to do. They let you connect your qbo, your Xero to Excel and Google Sheets so you can, you can make your wildest, wildest spreadsheet dreams come true. Now they have these simple little financial dashboards you can build, have all the same connection points to your accounting ledgers. But you can build like a more intelligent report that your client will actually understand. You give it to them on a monthly basis instead of financials give it to them on a weekly basis even because it can connect to the ledger in real time still means you got to do the bookkeeping every week. But if you look for something, your clients will actually engage with a little more and get more value out of that ongoing accounting that you're doing for them. Oftentimes the answer is to change the deliverable to something, something besides that stanky, stanky old PDF financial statement package. Okay, I'm not the boss of you. I'm not here to tell you what to do besides mosey on down to the Show Notes and learn more about Live Flow via the link down there. Number six, a team leader. That is somebody that has actual authority that gives feedback to people in the pod. This could be the senior technical person in a pod and could also be a quote unquote team leader. Somebody that is the more the leader of that team, which I think is sometimes more realistic because someone that has technical capabilities is not always necessarily going to be a leader. So it's worth considering who has the actual like hierarchical authority over the folks in that pod. This is a good thing that comes with like a specific set of responsibilities like designing KPIs that make sense. Having one on one meetings, maybe not designing the KPIs is actually happening in this role. Probably not. But checking in on those KPIs with folks and having those meetings, being the quote unquote leader. And what is, what is the life cycle of like what that entails every single month and every single quarter. That has to be somebody else's job or otherwise it's just something that doesn't happen. Just relying on the quote unquote open door policy or your senior technical person, like being the big boss, putting that stamp on them is, is not enough of a clear directive to actually be leading people effectively. So the team leader, whoever that is, that needs to clearly be a hat that goes on somebody inside the pod or someone that sits across the top of multiple pods, potentially. Number seven, consider which of these roles ought to be onshore or offshore. Uh, and this is where people get their hackles up over whether they're comfortable with that or not. We don't need to be belabor this point too much, but the reality is you're, you're in a tough spot if there is work that can effectively be done offshore, but you are choosing to do it onshore. That's a kind of fighting with one arm behind your back there. My firm went through the entire progression of being terrified of being offshore at all to you need to have a very good reason why something shouldn't be offshore. And we weren't sneaky about this with clients. We talked to clients about this. I mean, virtually all their other vendors were working with offshore staff. It was a factor in how much our services would cost and the ability to like keep doing the work. Because hiring onshore talent, obviously there's not a, an endless supply of those folks. But inside of our pods we had roles that were definitely onshore roles versus offshore roles. And so all the client facing stuff was onshore. Increasingly, the more production kind of manufacturing aspect of things went offshore. But you know, the, the different capacities that folks hold within a pod, sometimes those can always be onshore offshore. Other times those would be fluid. Like we would actually say, like, oh no, we're pretty sure that this role needs to be onshore. And then we have an offshore person that was developing and we would realize like, they're going to be better at this than any of our onshore people are. And so it even kind of challenged that assumption. There's an argument that like, do you really need to make that delineation or is, is that counter to this new age notion that like, everybody's the same, it doesn't matter, we're in a borderless world. The reality is, and there's definitely scenarios where like interacting with clients and stuff like that where it does matter. In a perfect world, I would want it not to. But for us, in some cases it still did number eight. How about a project coordinator? So again, this is like a responsibility and not necessarily a person, but it's a responsibility that has to fall on somebody's shoulders to ensure that priorities are still kind of being overseen. If there's any important deadlines that we are on track for those kind of working backwards from them. And the person that is just kind of like thinking about the 10,000 foot view of how work's getting out the door. Another example of something like, like being a team leader where until you make it somebody's job and get explicit about what the responsibilities are for the person with that role, it just won't happen. And before you know it, like the train will just run straight off the end of the tracks because everybody's just head down doing the work and nobody's actually heads up enough to be like, hey gang, like this isn't going to work. We got to make some sort of change here. Or saying more systemic things that are like, well, this project always needs to get done before this other project if we're going to be realistic about meeting that deadline. Or this set of requests needs to go out immediately at the first of the month. Like who is kind of the project manager thinking backwards through what's the most efficient way for the team to tackle this work. Something that's probably most common in tax firms where you've got a large volume of tax returns and somebody's kind of doing the walk around to talk with everybody and review their projects, make sure they're on track. This has in some ways been managed by software now, but that's still not 100% of a solution. Like there's still like actual upside to somebody putting some like brain cycles into to Is there a better sequencing of how we approach this work or is what we're doing still makes sense? This could also be one of those things that is shared across multiple pods, but somebody, it has to be part of somebody's job also something that's pretty ripe for pulling in a good admin person to help with. Two more to go. Number nine, mentorship. I picked this one up from Chad Davis where it is like people's actual jobs to be mentors inside an accounting firm. I'm like, what you mean like trainers? And he's like, no, like more open ended mentors. And I was like, I thought that's something that just has to happen. Like you either vibe with that person or not. But they had a much more intentional approach to this where if you think about the design of your pods, like how do all the junior accountants get energized? Or where do they learn all the admins, how do they share stuff? And this is where you have an opportunity to do like really cool kind of cross pod sort of things and pull in folks that are genuinely like there for support, whatever that person needs. And oftentimes there's, there's types of support that is hard to ask for from your senior, from the more authoritative person. In perfect world, maybe that stuff comes up with the boss in a one on one but, but sometimes it won't and sometimes the, the boss won't necessarily have the time or the resources to execute on exactly what that person needs. And that's where someone that is more of a mentor can come through and, and offer support in a, in a, in a different way, in a way that's not quite as tied to authority. Also, if they are the mentor across a different type of, across the same type of person in different pods, they can see the common trends of what those people need and that can go back to inform, you know, the training that those people get. Maybe an adjustment to the KPIs for that type of person in a pod. But mentorship, man, it's like, I mean it's like date night. Like unless you create space for it and it's actually a thing, then I think it just doesn't happen. Last one, number 10. Oh, speaking of date night, number 10, team building. You must create a task for having fun and enjoying each other. Maybe that's, maybe that's, that's too specific. You need to create a task for creating space for those things to happen. So what's the fun thing you do every week, the fun thing you do every month? The, the opportunity to create connections between people that are not necessarily work related and are a space for a more interesting conversation than just talking about clients and complaining about. It's one of those things where the bums me out about distributed work is that's that it's just kind of a different vibe as opposed to like having the physical spaces where you would literally go and eat lunch together. And that was pretty fun. And you would learn about people and you would see the stupid sweater they were wearing and the decorations and tchotchkes in their office. I guess we get a degree of that and distributed remote work. But it is like date night or unless you put it on the calendar, it's not just going to happen. And unfortunately this oftentimes like there's a great plan that goes into place and it starts with excitement and then attendance peters out and you always have these hard issues around, like, do we make this stuff mandatory for people? Are we paying people to do this thing? There is like a real gift that some people have to deliver this stuff consistently and get people excited about that. And that is hard. And that is not something that most accountants are wired to do very well. But I think it just comes down to like probably changing it up. There probably isn't a way to do a turnkey, quote unquote team building thing every single month. Like somebody has to be thinking like what is an off the wall experience that will get people out of their comfort zone, require us to work together in a different sort of way. It's a really squishy aspect of employing people that has very real monetary like implications. Are you creating a, a safe, like fun place for people to work where they feel like they can connect with their colleagues? I think more than ever before, people are disconnected. Unfortunately, as a product of, I mean, I think remote work is a factor. It's not to say that there aren't strategies specific to remote work that can make this better, but if you're not doing it, not putting thought into it, it kind of just becomes a bummer. It kind of just becomes a bummer. Like soulless place to work, right? And nobody, none of us want to, none of us want to pay people to sit in a chair to come to a soulless place to work. So there you go. 10 considerations for building out your accounting pods. Whether you need a senior, a junior, what their technical expertise is, AKA like what area of service delivery they're involved in. An admin, a client relationship manager, who's the team leader, should they be onshore or offshore, a project coordinator, mentorship and team building. If you got a pod structure that you really like, actually drop it down in the comments. That'd be great to see. I'm always fascinated what combination of things people stumble into on their own context. Is everything there? It's not going to be the same for every firm by any means, but there's certainly things that we can ensure that we are building around these pods so that people have everything that they need. Stuff like admin support, junior support. To ensure that your people are growing and being challenged over time. And the clients getting everything they need out of that pot. Right? You got any genius advice, man? Drop that stuff down below. It'd be great to see. Thanks for coming and hanging.