The job post has been open in a tab since Tuesday.
You started it at ten at night, right after a client emailed to ask what a transfer from March was for. You knew. You were also the only person alive who knew, and answering took eleven minutes you didn't have, and it was the second time that week something ordinary came to you because there was nowhere else for it to go. So you're hiring.
The instinct is aimed at the wrong thing. The week that feels full is four different kinds of hours, and a new person takes one of the four off you.
How to grow an accounting firm when you're already full?
You count the week before you write the job post. The hours that feel like they need a person sort into four piles. Work only you can do. Work that shouldn't exist at all. Work anybody could do once the rule for it is written down. Work that belongs to the client and got absorbed. A hire takes the third pile off you. The other three move by writing something down, deleting a step, or handing a job back where it came from. So count for a month, total the third pile, and hold it next to the hours you'd be paying for. If the third pile doesn't fill the job you're about to post, the person who takes it spends month one asking you questions nobody ever wrote answers to.
Key Takeaways
A full week is four kinds of hours - work only you can do, work that shouldn't exist, work anybody could do from a written rule, and work that's the client's.
A hire takes one of the four off you - the written-down kind, and only the part that's already written.
Unwritten work isn't handoverable yet - the rule for it lives in your head, which is where a new person has to go to get it.
A new person costs you answering time before they return any - count last month's questions and the minutes each one took you, because that's what their first month looks like from your side.
The trigger is a count - transferable hours in a week, held next to the hours you'd pay for, with no percentage anywhere in it.
It has to read the same twice - one month can be a single bad close, and a rule that fires on one reading fires on noise.
The four kinds of full
Take last week and put every hour in one of four piles. Sort by who the hour belongs to, rather than by what kind of work it is.
Start with the pile you'll get wrong, because everything turns on it. It's the recurring work a competent person could do on a Tuesday from a document, without asking you anything, and it's the only pile a hire takes off you. The trouble is that almost everything feels like it belongs there while you're doing it, because you're carrying the rule around in your head and can't see it from in there. The test is whether the rule exists on paper. If it doesn't, the task isn't ready to hand to anyone, however obvious it feels at your desk.
Then the pile that's yours and nobody else's. The judgment calls. The conversation where a client is embarrassed about something and needs a person. Anything that has to be signed by somebody qualified to sign it. Smaller than it feels, and it never gets to zero.
A third pile belongs to nobody at all. Hours that exist because something upstream is broken: re-deriving a decision you already made in April, chasing a document for the fourth month running, reopening a file you'd finished twice. The rebuild at the front of every month is the first place I'd look for it. What that pile wants is a route and a written decision, and a second person just does the rebuild alongside you.
And the last one is the client's. The statements you assemble because they never send them. The receipt you rebuild from a bank line. The four follow-ups. Somebody absorbed that job and it wasn't the client.
Count all four and the transferable pile comes in smaller than it felt. That's the number the rest of this runs on.
What a hire costs before it gives anything back
Open last month's sent folder and count the questions you personally answered that only you could answer. Multiply by [10] minutes each, which is a floor rather than an average. That's what somebody's first month costs you, except it arrives as every question, all day, with no written answers waiting.
That isn't a knock on whoever you'd hire. When a job has never been written down, the only copy is in your head, so the new person's real first job is extracting it one question at a time from the one person in the building with no spare minutes.
It's easy to read that first month as a bad hire. What's missing is a document.
How to grow an accounting firm without adding a person
Almost every article on growing an accounting firm opens with getting more clients. Your problem is thirty days of small unrecorded decisions arriving at the front of the month, and a job post doesn't touch one of them.
Intake is the other side of it. A written floor stops work you shouldn't have taken from becoming work you have to staff. Everything here sits behind that gate, on the delivery side.
The waitlist at SDO CPA has been open since June. I'm a partner in that firm. Room comes off that list when a client relationship ends, never from adding a person.
The rule that decides it
Two numbers, both of them yours.
Your transferable hours in a normal week: the pile a competent person could take from a document, counted, with every unwritten task thrown out of it.
The hours you'd buy: not a full-time job as an idea, but the offer you'd really make, at the hours you'd pay for. Twenty a week, or fifteen, or whatever your number is.
The rule fires when your transferable hours cover the hours you'd buy, and it has to do that twice, on counts taken a month apart. One month can be a single bad close, a quarter end, or one client who blew up in March. If your work has a heavy season, keep counting past two and hold the extra counts on the sheet, because a February count says nothing about July.
There's no percentage in that and there shouldn't be. Nobody hires a fraction of a person, and a ratio is good at making one bad month look like a trend.
What to fix before you hire
The pile that transfers is the pile that's written down, so most of the pre-hire work is writing. Four of the seven lines on the gate in the annex are documents that don't exist yet: standing rules for your two hardest clients, a definition of done for whatever you deliver every month, a one-page description of the job in tasks, and the list of decisions that still have to come back to you. The other three are checks: that the work has held still for a few months, that the transferable pile was counted rather than estimated, and that you start this person on your best-documented client instead of your worst.
Every unticked line costs the same thing. It becomes a question, the question comes to you, you answer it slightly differently than last time, and now two versions of the rule exist and neither is on paper.
The gate covers none of the employment side. Classification, wage and hour, offer letters, probation, termination. Those go to an employment lawyer in your state, and this letter has nothing useful to say about them.
Do this before Friday: count last week into the four piles, on your two hardest clients only, in whatever you already keep lists in. Total the transferable pile, turn it into hours, and write the number down with the date beside it. It decides nothing until you have a second one a month from now. The annex has the sheet, the gate and the trigger sentence, but the count is the part that can't be skipped.
If you've made a hire already, which was it: work that was written down before they arrived, or work you spent a month describing one question at a time?
House ad. My own product, so weigh it accordingly.
Growthy is bookkeeping software I build. Point it at QuickBooks Online, or import bank statements or a CSV. It sorts the routine transactions and tells you which ones it isn't sure about, and those are the ones you approve. On a first import it's right about 85 percent of the time, so you check the rest. What it can't do is fill in the inventory below, because it has never watched how you spend a Tuesday. Try Growthy
Operator annex
Your email client is already open, which is why the hire file works and a planning session doesn't.
The hire file
It's an email address, and it's the same trick issue eight used for client receipts, running the opposite direction. That one collects the client's paperwork. This one collects your own irritation.
Set up an address that lands somewhere you'll look later. Then one rule: the moment something makes you think somebody else should be doing this, forward the thing itself. The email, the task, the message that started it. Don't write it up and don't explain it. The forward is the entry.
Save this where you keep short notes:
Address: hire@[yourfirm].com
When something makes you think "somebody else should be doing this",
forward that exact item to the address. No subject rewrite, no explanation.
Read the folder in one pass, subject lines only, whenever you take an
inventory count. Anything that shows up three times is a job.Put that note on your phone rather than in a folder on your desktop, because the annoyance almost never happens at your desk.
Reading it on the same sitting as a count does a second job: the folder tells you what the sheet missed.
The inventory
One row per recurring task, not one row per client. A task you do for eleven clients is a single row with a count, unless it's genuinely eleven different tasks.
The columns, and what goes in each:
Task - what you do, in plain words
Client or All - a name, or All
Times per month - a number, not "weekly"
Minutes each - an honest guess is fine on the first pass
Total minutes - times per month multiplied by minutes each
Who could do this today - a name, or nobody
What's missing - what a person would need in front of them; blank if nothing
Pile - 1, 2, 3 or 4
Header row, tab separated, ready to paste into the first row of a sheet:
Task Client or All Times per month Minutes each Total minutes Who could do this today What's missing PilePile is the column the roll-up reads, so the rule for filling it goes next to the sheet:
Pile 1, only me: needs judgment, a licence, or the relationship.
Pile 2, nobody's: it only exists because something upstream is broken.
Pile 3, anybody's: a competent person could do it from a written document.
Pile 4, the client's: it's their job and I absorbed it.
No written rule anywhere, no Pile 3. It sits in Pile 1 until the day
you write the rule, and the What's missing column says what to write.Fill it for a week rather than a month on the first pass, on your two hardest clients only.
Then the roll-up. Four totals and one division, at the bottom of the sheet:
Pile 1 total minutes: ______
Pile 2 total minutes: ______
Pile 3 total minutes: ______
Pile 4 total minutes: ______
Weeks counted: ______
Transferable hours per week = Pile 3 total minutes / weeks counted / 60Don't turn that into a share of anything, and don't hold it against your total hours. It gets compared to one number, and that's the offer you'd make.
The pre-hire gate
Seven lines. The first two are built in issue eight's annex, if you don't have them yet.
Tick only what's true today. Every untrue line is the next thing to write.
[ ] Standing rules exist in writing for the two clients whose work is hardest
Skipped: every rule gets re-answered by you, differently each time.
[ ] A written definition of done exists for what you deliver every month
Skipped: nobody but you can tell whether a month is finished.
[ ] The job you'd hand over is described on one page, in tasks, not adjectives
Skipped: you hire a personality and meet the tasks one at a time afterwards.
[ ] The decisions that still have to come back to you are listed by name
Skipped: everything comes back to you, including what shouldn't.
[ ] The work you'd hand over has run the same way for three months
Skipped: you're teaching a moving target, and the teaching never ends.
[ ] Pile 3 has been counted, not estimated, within the last two months
Skipped: you're buying hours you never proved you had.
[ ] The client this person starts on is the one whose rules are best written
Skipped: month one gets spent on your least documented account.
Not a checklist item, and not covered anywhere in this issue: classification,
employee versus contractor, wage and hour, offer letters, probation, and
termination. Those decide what this person legally is, they vary by state, and
they go to an employment lawyer before the job post goes anywhere.Untick the whole thing and run it again the day before you post.
The trigger you sign
Fill in your numbers, sign it, and keep it in the same place as the half-written job post:
I'm not posting the job until the transferable pile reaches [20] hours
in a normal week.
Count taken: ______________ Hours: ______
Count taken: ______________ Hours: ______
Count taken: ______________ Hours: ______ (seasonal work only)
The last two counts above the line, and at least [four] weeks between
them. Then I hire.
Either count below the line, and I go back to the gate and write
whatever's missing.
________________________ ______________
signature dateWrite the date of the second count on your calendar the day you take the first one.
The prompt
The gate's one-page job description is the line worth handing to a model. It's the one owners rewrite and rewrite and still end up with a paragraph of adjectives about a person who doesn't exist yet.
Two things before you paste. Your inventory has a client column, so open a copy and swap every business name for a letter before any of it leaves your machine. And whatever comes back, rewrite the verbs in your own words: it has never met your clients and it has never watched you work.
I own a small bookkeeping firm and I'm about to hand part of my week to a new
person. Below is a list of recurring tasks with how often each happens, how many
minutes each takes, and a note on what somebody would need in order to do it.
Before you read the list: I've replaced every client name with a letter. If I've
missed one, ignore it and don't repeat it back to me.
[paste your Pile 3 rows here]
Write two things.
One: a one-page description of this job, in tasks. Every line starts with a verb
and names something that either got done or didn't. No adjectives about the
person, no "detail-oriented", no "self-starter".
Two: a two-week handover plan. For each task, say what this person needs in front
of them on day one to do it without asking me, and where my list is missing that
thing.
Then tell me which of these tasks you don't think are handoverable yet, and why.
Do not write a job advertisement. Do not name a salary, a title, or an employment
type. Do not connect to anything, do not open anything, and do not send anything
anywhere.Take the first count this week, even if the sheet is half empty. In month two you'll want something to compare it against.