How To Hire a Director of Ops for Your Accounting Firm
Speaker 1: Steven, quick follow-up question is … the Director of Operations. Was that from day one more or less? I mean did you hire that person at a team of five? A team of ten? 20? When did you bring that role into the firm?
Steven: That role is a role that developed so it was … we elevated it over time. The booking business had a role that was that scheduling aspect. Making sure that people were doing what they were assigned. Making sure that the follow-up from the clients was done. As we developed, as we brought in more of our advisory business and rolled that into the same shop, that role was elevated over time.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Steven: One thing I did want to touch on, and tell me if you have other questions, but you know, we’re talking bout developing new profit centers. One thing that we identified was where we didn’t have the capabilities for and we ended up divesting the payroll business of the bookkeeping.
Speaker 1: Oh. I see what you’re saying. Okay.
Steven: It’s something that we looked into building, into growing, but in the end we decided we did not have the cope competencies and that it was not something that we wanted to put our efforts into continuously improving and hiring the capabilities to deliver that service to the degree that we … to the level of quality that we wanted to be able to deliver it. That’s one thing that we took off our table so that we could focus on other things. I know that’s not the focus of this session, but really, as I was thinking about this, “How do we add new profit centers?” Part of adding new profit centers is again, knowing where to fucus your time and if there’s an opportunity to divest a certain part, a piece of the business, or a lot of times, people talk about firing clients. If there’s a way to optimize where you’re spending your time and who you’re delivering your service to, that’ll deliver a lot of return.