Imagine asking a chef to cook a meal without knives. In professional services such as accounting, time is your knife. So, how do you use time in the same way as a valuable tool like a chef's knife, especially when offering client advisory services?
Breaking it all down, success in a CAS practice is 100% based on how you invest your time. Moreover, as someone running a CAS business, you have to look at time and time tracking in a completely different light.
Let me make it clear that when we talk about time in the context of your practice, it is not about time tracking for revenue or for pricing. This is about being 100% honest with yourself about how to best use and even buy back your time.
As the owner or CEO of a CAS-focused firm, you have to first look at where you are spending the most time. Is it on building the practice or on building your client's business? Both are fine, but you have to be able to make the distinction. This is where the concept of "Measure and Hack" comes in.
Track to hack: The time journal
You measure to establish a baseline (a recurring thing in our
If this seems too abstract, I will challenge you to start time tracking in a different way than you were taught. Track every 30 minutes, either through an online application or simply through Apple Notes or Google Sheets, and at the end of every 30 minutes write down the task you were working on. This is the beginning of your time journal.
To keep it even simpler, don't try to account for every single minute; simply write down the primary task during that half hour — even if it's "messing around on Instagram" or "checking and responding to emails." At the end of the week, look back on all the tasks you've completed or noted. You'll most likely be able to identify areas where you can improve, things that you can eliminate, or at the very least, realize that you are not as busy as you thought. The result will be recognizing the things you are and are not doing to move your CAS practice forward.
The goal of this process is, and will result in, actually finding the "time" to do the things you didn't think you had time to do. Once you truly understand where you deploy your time, you can start to identify the areas where you can get better. And when building a CAS practice (or any area of business, to be honest), this process becomes essential. You are the firm owner; your time is the most valuable. Control your time, deploy it on the tasks that will yield the highest impact, and you are guaranteed a positive return on your investment.
My personal recommendation on the time journal approach is to try it for a week and see what the outcome is. If you are consistent with the journaling, look at what you recorded and the adjustments you made. You'll not only start to become better at deploying time, but you will also become more intentional in your work.
The next step in this process is key. Once you've identified tasks that you don't enjoy, that can be outsourced for less, or that perhaps you are simply not great at, consider hiring for those tasks. You can also consider outsourcing some of those tasks to your own team or outside services versus having to hire for all of them. This helps to free up your time to exclusively focus on the things that have the highest impact. It's not that you can't afford to — it's that you cannot afford not to.
If you think you don't have time to run a CAS practice and help your clients out, you actually do! You just have to find it, and this time journal process is a good way to start. The end goal here is to ensure the best and first use of your most limited resource — time.
You are often in your practice spending time on the wrong things. Audit your time and establish a baseline. Look at what you are spending time on and, more important, focus that time on what you know you are good at.
At the end of the day, you owe it to your business, your clients and your own sanity to manage and use your time better. Try it out for yourself by downloading this
