What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #110

Author

Jason Staats
November 22, 2023

💡Making Hard Decisions

As we’re staring down renewal season we’re faced with hard decisions:

  • Do I cut clients?

  • How much do I increase prices?

  • Do I reposition my services?

  • Should we make that hard tech change?

And while goals shape our ambitions, it’s actual fears that keep us from making the hard decisions necessary to reach those goals.

Easy decisions, hard life.
Hard decisions, easy life.
~Jerzy Gregorek

Tim Ferriss uses a framework called Fear Setting to put hard decisions under a microscope and de-risk those hard decisions. It’s a fantastic resource if you’re struggling with a hard decision, or struggling to find alignment with a business partner. We ran through the framework in depth on the podcast this week with examples.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Define - List fears in a “What if I…” format. Don’t limit this to a specific decision, list all fears on your mind

  2. Prevent - For each fear write out how it could be prevented. For example, for the fear We’ll upset clients and they’ll leave bad Google reviews

    1. Communicate the necessity of the hard decision

    2. De-personalize the decision

    3. Maintain a positive relationship with the clients post-exit

    4. Develop a resource you can provide to clients on exit

    5. Ensure a seamless transition to another great pro

    6. Communicate the decision in a high-touch way, like a phone call

  3. Repair - If the fear happens, how could it be remediated?

    1. More aggressively ask happy clients for positive reviews

    2. Develop a plan for how to reply to negative reviews, including the specific wording

  4. Benefits - Make a list of the benefits of an attempt or partial success

  5. Inaction - Make a list of the costs of inaction on a 6 month, 1 year, and 3 year time horizon

While it’s helpful for me personally, and even something I could use with my spouse, it would have been a great to go through with my business partner to find alignment.

💎This Week's Sponsor

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📅 This Week

  • After an incredible week of drama at OpenAI their #1 and #2 have now returned to OpenAI with a new board

  • To celebrate hitting 10k subscribers on the YouTube channel we did a big accounting AI Q&A roundup

  • If you’re an accountant who has ever considered selling stuff to accountants, I chatted with Ashley Francis about this transition from practitioner to solution-builder

  • Microsoft announced their own version of GPTs, which may work better with your MS data but aren’t quite as easy for normies to build

  • Last month I was part of an AI roundtable the AICPA put together with a bunch of software co’s, here were the takeaways

  • Anthropic announced a new version of Claude, Claude 2.1 with a massive 200k context window, or around 500 pages of text

    • Context limits & retrieval accuracy are important areas of study for our profession. This testing gives some interesting insights on how the accuracy of retrievals degrade with large context limits, and this test shows the new 128k GPT-4 still greatly outperforms the new Claude

    • The new version of Claude also supports function calling for the first time

  • Anthropic released a Claude extension for Google Sheets

  • Every is a single platform to manage your banking, books, payroll, and taxes

  • If you want to make some wicked smart friends who run accounting firms my community is kicking off a new round of mastermind groups beginning 12/01

  • InventBot is a GPT for creating unnecessary inventions, like this robot I made that will turn the pages of my paper files for me. Notice that instead of licking a finger before each page turn we’re cutting out the middle man and just turning pages with the tongue

😍From The Community

My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, now capped at 500 members.

▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯ 379/500 members