I propose ideas to improve the experience of accounting.

Leverage has always been central to the public accounting business model. Traditionally, firms create leverage by organizing work so that more junior professionals perform much of the work while managers and partners review, coach, manage relationships, and make higher-level decisions.

David Maister described professional service firms through this kind of leverage model decades ago. The basic idea still makes sense. The problem is that the environment around it has changed.

COVID, turnover, retirements, recruiting challenges, changing employee expectations, and technology have all strained the traditional pyramid. In many firms, the ratio no longer works the way it once did.

The culture and operating model still assume leverage exists, even when the people underneath the model do not.

That creates a leverage problem.

1. Be Like Dave. Revisit the assumptions behind your leverage model. Know which work actually requires a CPA, which requires experience, which requires judgment, and which simply requires completion.
2. Stop Borrowing Leverage. Do not solve every staffing shortage by shifting more work upward. When managers and partners repeatedly absorb work that belongs elsewhere, the firm is borrowing capacity from its future.
3. Hire Outside the Leverage Model. Project managers, technologists, workflow specialists, contractors, offshore resources, and other professionals can create leverage without fitting the traditional staff-manager-partner pyramid.
4. No Eating Time. If hours disappear because people believe the work “should” have taken less time, leaders lose the information needed to understand where the model is breaking.
5. Buy a Ski Pass. Create enough capacity that people can occasionally use it for something other than work. Leverage should improve the experience of the people in the firm, not simply increase the amount of work the firm can accept.

HOMEWORK (that you didn’t ask for):

• Draw your current leverage model.
• Identify where work is consistently moving upward instead of downward or outward.
• Ask what kind of capacity your firm needs that does not require another CPA.

The leverage problem is not simply a staffing problem. It is a design problem. And design can change.

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