Nobody calls their accountant until the bomb is on fire

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I To be honest, I was offered an opportunity to go into the industry. The firm I was working was a public practice, so we were working with multiple clients and assisting them to prepare the VT returns, accounts, tax returns, etc. And the company from the industry approached me and advised to become their finance director. And this is how the whole story has started. It is common knowledge that industry pays higher salary than the public practice because you go in deeper into the client affairs and you specifically working with that. But the public practice provides you more different knowledge about different industries, about different clients, about different problems. whether when you're working with the individual company as a finance director, you only build up the certain knowledge of the industry and go in way deeper into that. So and yeah, that was a leap of faith to see and bigger money at the time.

It wasn't yeah, it wasn't that exactly. So I actually talk about it in my book. so I went to work in the industry and it was an oil trading company and I was working there as a finance director. And very quickly I have noticed how inefficient the processes were in the finance department. The work was duplicated. People were duplicating, they were rechecking the documents after one after another. So and I I could not tolerate those inefficiencies because it would be the workload for the sake of doing the work without having the end result at the end. So what I have started there is I streamlined the processes and make the work Very very effective. So, in effect, rather than doing my job as a full-time finance director, I was capable of doing that on a base of four or five hours a week rather than doing it in 40 hours. and hey, it was 16 years ago, the AI was not in the picture by that time. So it was it was a little bit different game, that's why I'm so proud of it. And then I approach the management saying that you no longer need me full-time. How about I will do exactly what we've been doing? And by streamlining the processes, the company has saved half a mil on the annual expenditure on the whole finance department. And I offered them. to run those processes externally rather than being the internal finance director. And they became my first client. So in effect I have founded my first and only public practice and engaged them as my first client.

Say the mistakes. what I see is that a lot of people they starting up the business because they motivated and they are inspired by the bigger idea. So they are creating the profession, whether it is marketing, whether it is architect, dentist, hairdresser, yoga teachers, you call what it is, and They will go into business because they would like to deliver the service, the process to make people's lives better in that particular niche they are working in in that particular industry. And it is the last bit on their list to think about how to structure the bank account, how to structure the invoice flow, how to build a client. They they don't have time thinking about it. It's not that. You know, glamorous to talk about it. It's not that glamorous, it's not the profession, how you put all these things together. And in England we have the tendency that you have quite a lot of time to prepare the account. So you can run your business for 12 months and then you have another nine months to actually prepare the account. Because this question keeps shifting to the bottom of the list, the business owners they would only handle that when it's absolutely urgently and the bomb is on fire. So when they have to put things together, when they have to rush to see the accountant, when they really have to go historically through these transactions. And I think this is this is the the problem what they they face. So eventually they they build up their attitude and the habit to the accountancy pract to the accountancy assistance as a burden. Like I'm creating something beautiful, useful, and so much in demand for the public. And this is the burden which I need to handle. So people hate it. And then they do it year to year, nothing is changing in the process, and their belief instilled in in that particular element. So I do have clients coming to us with the fear of the accountancy process. And they're like, not another year, and they don't like meeting an accountant, they have it like a problematic. conversation and they will avoid it and they will not reply to your email. So it's kind of it's it's the whole big attitude which I think I am making a change too because when we step in rather than being the person on the other side of the table whom you try to avoid and you Think about like another chore that you need to call your accountant. We try to position ourselves on the same time of the table with the client. When the client actually you would be the first person they will call if they need to make a decision, because first of all, they can see how the business improved. And this is the delivery, the delivering their promise. They trust you. They see that you're actually bringing the value to the table rather than the bad news, like, hey, you've got another tax investigation, let's fight with the bad guys. Not that sort of help. It's it's more of a we have resources, we have more time, we make time available, we make the processes visible to the client, to the business owner, so they're comfortable and they don't have that, you know. scary skeleton in a cupboard which they, you know, shake the dust off once a year.

Yeah, the book called Rewind Your Business for Success. And it's it's actually for the people who is in the business and for the business owners who would like to extract themselves from the business. it's also a good book to read for the people who is considering to set up the business. So they're not getting themselves in the trap when the accounting gets shifted to the bottom of the list. So if you get the book. And you start from those processes, you can have everything set up the right way. So, further down the line, when the business starts to grow, you're effectively already in control of what's happening. And it's called rewire your business for success exactly for the reason I've just explained that people building themselves the belief that the accountancy is a daunting, unnecessary chore which the business owner is afraid to carry on doing. So hopefully by implementing those six steps into your business, you effectively rewiring your neuro connections in your brain that the accountancy is something important and prioritize it for your business. Because as you said, working with an accountant is is way more beneficial than rather than meeting the deadlines. That's just the last element in the list. When you work with accountant, accountant actually can review the financials and ask you the right questions. is the bottom line what you would like to see? Is it profitable enough? Maybe it is time to review the prices and increase the price, adjusting the price, how much you spend, all that comes from the accountancy knowledge when you see the actual financial data. And like a lot now we talk about marketing with our clients as well, and they would be asking, like, we need more customers, but maybe. You don't need more customers. Maybe you need to make your processes, your operational processes within your business more efficient. Maybe you need spend less, I don't know, on the office or on the travel and increase your marketing budget. and different we will be able to because we work with multiple clients and we see the industry on actual, you know. Very tactile figure base. We know how another profession, another client in the same profession operate. Of course, it would be all confidential, but we are building the knowledge. We work a lot with the medical profession, so we know how much the profit margin should be on different elements. So by looking at another Dental practice, for example, we would obviously see that they spending too much on one area or another. So by by utilizing that skill and by keeping the conversation open and chat with the client about it, a lot of interesting ideas come, a lot of improvements to the business. And this is when the accountant changing the role from being just the person who is recording figures and presenting you with a tax liability into the person who actually give you the ideas, give you the advice on handling different aspects of your business in the operational sense.

It all depends what the client already have in place. The hardest, I would not say the the hardest. The hardest would be if they try to implement everything at the same time. So they might have the illusion that that's it, they just gonna turn it around in one day or one week and the rainbow gonna start on the on the next week. This is not gonna happen because they already got a certain set of habits which they need to rebuild. So for example, we encouraging the client to collect all the invoices, whatever they spend for the business. And they could not have they probably would not have the set of skills or The facilities, how they do that. So, what we help them, we would say, install this application. Anytime you see the invoice in the paper format, open the application, take the picture, and that's it, the job done. We will receive that on the other hand, and we know what we're gonna do with that. Whenever you have an email with the invoice, you're sending it to your let's say manager to make a payment, copy this dedicated email address. And we're gonna get it on the other side. So they need to build it into the habit. It's not like, I need to remember to send that email, I need to save that email, I need to remember to open the application. So it takes time. So at the beginning it feels like it's difficult, it's something else I need to remember. But then within a couple of weeks, you already have it as a habit and you don't even notice how you how you're activating it. And As a result, you don't have a pile of paperwork. You have your accountant, us, we already received all the paperwork and we're handling it. We can ask the follow-up question and it makes us in the game rather than looking at it 12 months down the line. So I think, yeah, step by step. By the way, it's not we just I've written the book, I also have created the scorecard. So developed the matrix of questions, which is on the website called rewire4 as a digitsuccess.com. And every owner of the business they can go on that link and complete the scorecard to see where their business and personal finances is. It's a very quick quiz. It's only about probably five, six minutes. And then at the end you're gonna get the report and also you will receive the step by step what the first action would be recommending depending on your answer. So it's a very useful tool. Maybe this is something the listeners would like to to follow and try for themselves.

AI is a tricky thing. we do use on very basic level to optimize the admin processes. I think AI does have pluses and minuses as anything in our life. And the bad side of it, what I see is when business owners Over reliant on the AI and think that AI can substitute the accountant. We saw a couple examples already in our practice when the client would come and they prepared the accounts with the help of an AI. And the interesting thing is we looked into the AI statistic and apparently. AI is programmed and created with certain percentage of errors which AI had to make. So AI is already built with the idea that it had to make the mistakes. Because in that case We as a users are not intimidated by AI to use, because if AI will be so smart, we it kind of it can create the dislike of human the AI. And that's why it is intended to make mistakes. So we saw the cases when the set of accounts would be prepared and the the suggestions