What difference can 10 minutes make when your accountancy practice needs a complete overhaul?
Actually, the difference can be huge.
Listening to accountant Kathryn Webb talking on our webinar last week, this really struck me.
A few years ago, Kathryn was right at rock bottom, stressed, tired, constantly in fear of something going wrong. She was spending too much time on the wrong things and she knew she was the bottleneck holding her business back.
“I worried that things were going to get missed. I worried that there were going to be quality issues. I worried about cash flow constantly, and I felt really vulnerable as a business owner. I just felt the business wasn’t robust enough so if we had some kind of outage of a system, or if we had a key team member leave, we would have been in a lot of difficulty. And that was at the forefront of my mind an awful lot of the time. The knock-on impact of that was I just felt pretty miserable. I was really struggling with that mental load and with my motivation.”
In fact, she was seriously thinking about just walking away.
But having got to that very low point, she realised something else.
“That makes you really brave about the decisions you make in your business. Because you were already at your walk away point so you’ve got nothing to lose. And that was where I was. So I thought, what the hell, I’m going to really go hard at this and if I can’t do it, then that’s it. I’m done.”
The difference 10 minutes made
But where to start?
When you’re drowning, as Kathryn was, making changes can seem insurmountable. There’s simply no slack in the system.
So Kathryn started with a time audit.
For two weeks she recorded every five minute block in her diary, detailing what she’d done, how long it took and also whether it brought any value to the business.
And by day three she was already making changes.
“Quite quickly, I could see, oh, my God, why am I doing this task? This is ridiculous. We can have a process for that that I could do in 10 minutes, and that’s going to save me an hour over a week, for example. So straight away, using that time audit gave me that clarity, and that really gave me direction to where I went from there.”
Seeing where she was spending her time helped her to pinpoint where to prioritise improvements.
“I could start ranking things to understand, okay, this is a big issue in the business, we need to prioritise it. Or this maybe isn’t a massive issue in the business, but there’s a quick fix, so we’ll prioritise that as well, because it was important for me. I was stretched so thin. I needed to try and get that low hanging fruit.”
Those tiny amounts of time she saved began to add up. And once she’d saved 20 or 30 minutes a day, she could start putting an action plan together to tackle the most pressing issues.
It was a revelation to Kathryn.
“I didn’t realise this. I thought when you had a vision for changes that you wanted to make, you had to have that space straight away, and you have to have enough time for it. But actually, just those small steps really started that journey, and then it picked up pace from there, slowly at the start, but it picked up pace.”
Why this matters
Kathryn’s situation at the start was far from unique. Every week we talk to accountants with exactly the same issues, exactly the same worries.
And many of them think exactly as Kathryn did – that they can’t make any changes because they don’t have time.
But all you need is 10 minutes – even five – to start.
You probably already know where you could save 10 minutes in your day – so why not do it now?
Struggling to find even those few minutes in your day?
I challenge you to put aside 20!
Yes, 20 minutes for a quick discovery call with my team here at AVN. Share your challenges and get help to start whittling them down – you’ll be glad you did.
Book here – https://avn.co.uk/bookacall/