When you’re growing your firm, the last thing you want to be as the owner of the firm is a bottleneck in your firm.

So, today’s about how to stop being a bottleneck in your firm.

And if you want to grow, you’ve got to really get over this point. It’s something that I’ve had to do as the owner of the accountants Millionaire’s club.

I’ve learned to stop being a bottleneck in my own business.

So, the first thing you’ve got to do is identify where there is a problem.

For example, you know, where’s there’s a backlog, what’s running late?

So do a time audit of what you’re spending your time on.

Ask your team, you know, where is it going? And, within a team meeting, the team will know where you’re being a bottleneck. And what you’re working on, where there’s a backlog will show you where there’s a bottleneck.

If that’s not showing, look at where you’ve maybe had some client crises or maybe where you’ve nearly missed a deadline for a client.

What were the reasons for that?

Root Cause Analysis

And the next stage is, once you’ve understood where the areas are, there’s a bottleneck, you’ve got to do a root cause analysis. So, something we like doing in the club is a fishbone analysis.

We teach our members how to do that, where you actually look at what are the key causes? And then what are the sub-causes of that happening?

Is it because you struggle to delegate?

And then if you struggle to delegate, why is that?

Do you trust your team? Are you actually managing them well enough?

Maybe, it’s because you believe you have a lack of capacity? Is there a real lack of capacity?

Is that because you’re not managing your team well enough? Or, you just need

more people on the ground? Maybe you don’t trust your team to deliver.

Now, is that because they’re not? Don’t they have the skill set. Or, do you have a performance issue with one of your team?

And maybe you need to deal with that first.

Think about solutions

Now, let’s look at where you can’t delegate because you think the team not capable.

So, in that scenario, what can be automated.

You may find that you can actually take some of the stuff you need to do by automating some of it.

But also put it into a process what the team can’t do at the moment and split it up.

What elements could they so you can transfer down to them? But also, what could be delegated?

What maybe could they do with some extra training? What could they do with a process, a checklist? Or maybe what you may need to do is think about a freelancer or outsourcing some work in order to free them up to have time to do your stuff.

Let me go through the steps, in order for you to stop being a bottleneck in your accountancy firm.

Step one, is identify where the issues are and prioritizing. Step two, is there any root cause why you are the bottleneck there, what’s going on for you, maybe what’s going on for the team?

And then step three, think about the solutions. Is it more delegation, is it training, is it automation? Could it be about shifting tasks around, so they have time.

It’s important when you’re growing your firm, that you need to stop being a bottleneck.