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John Briggs: [00:00:00] It comes down to there's a certain amount of work that needs to get done, and there's only so many hours labor hours we have as a service based company. And so I don't want to push my person to 150 200% capacity before I decide to hire. I actually want to have them at 80% capacity almost all the time. If you'd like to earn CPE credit for listening to this episode, visit earmark Cpcomm. Download the app, take a short quiz, and get your CPE certificate. Continuing education has never been so easy. And now on to the episode. Hey everyone, and welcome back to earmark. I'm Blake Oliver, and today I'm joined by John Briggs. John Briggs is on a mission to revolutionize the accounting profession as a CPA and the founder of Insight Tax, he's rejected 70 hour workweeks in favor of a radically productive approach called the 3.3 rule. His new book by the same name equips firm leaders to end the burnout epidemic while growing a thriving practice. John, welcome to earmark, man. Thanks for having me, Blake. So is it 3.33.333. What do you call it? The 3.3 rule. Okay, so that's the name of your book. Tell me, what is the 3.3 rule? Um, I can give you the rundown, but obviously all the context matters. But the rule, simply stated, is the most efficient workday consists of working up to three hours at a time, followed by a 30% recovery period.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:33] Three hours at a time, three hours at a time at a time, followed by a 30% recovery period. So does that mean like an hour off?
John Briggs: [00:01:42] It can. So it's up to three hours. So okay. One of the thing that's important. I looked at a lot of data and science for this, uh, because there's no studies that support the way we currently work. Um, just 12 hours straight. Yeah, just 12 hours straight or 70 hours a week. Yay. Um, it's interesting that we're all different. And so even the concept of a straight 9 to 5 doesn't actually work for all of us with our the different makeups. And so a lot of the rule is about having awareness of yourself. And if I feel like I'm losing focus after an hour, that's totally fine. However long I work. So if I worked an hour, 30% of that, I'm going to take 20 minutes off. But if, like for me, uh, all of the audience could probably get this, uh, usually I'm not talking specifically to accountants, so I'm really glad to be here. Um, if you give me financials and, like, hey, can you forecast some stuff? Uh, man, I geek out on that stuff. I love it. So I could go full three hours without any issue. So then I. Yeah, I would take a full hour off after that.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:50] Got it. See, I, I love this idea. And I loved when you sent me your book. And I learned about this because I was a musician in my prior career. And all of us. I mean, nobody can practice an instrument straight all day long for eight hours. You will you will harm yourself physically, right? It's a it's an athletic thing. Um, and I suppose you could say this about sports too. They don't they don't practice that way. Right. Um, and so I got in the habit in college when I was practicing really hard of doing, like, two hour practice sessions, you know, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. If I could do three in a day. That was incredible. Most of the time I would only ever do two right. But like, it gets to your point that, um, it's really hard to be focused and productive for more than actually a few hours a day.
John Briggs: [00:03:50] Yeah. And it's interesting you bring up sports, something that didn't make it into the book. I did try to look at articles and studies and reports that people had with professional athletes like LeBron James regime, like his regimen and all that kind of came up. And it is interesting how there are breaks that they take. Yeah, he's not sitting at the gym shooting shots or lifting weights eight straight hours. Like there's there's got to be recovery in between. I mean literally for our muscles to actually grow, we have to have recovery. Why? We haven't applied the same science to our mental capabilities. Crazy to me, but there's enough data that supports this. Uh, so it's just yeah, it makes sense to me.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:32] So I want to dig into how we actually apply this in accounting. How do we get away from the work and straight 8 to 12 hours a day and do this method? But before that, I'm curious to know what led you down this path. Were you working 70 hours a week? Uh, I know you're in tax, and that's a very common experience.
John Briggs: [00:04:55] So, um, early in my career, I worked at Deloitte and, uh, you know, I noticed, interestingly enough, that I was going to get rewarded. I was going to get bonuses, promotions based on how many billable hours I had, and if I wanted to keep my job, I had to work at least 55 billable hours. Uh, and I was young at the time, so it's like, okay, cool. Not to mention my entire university experience was conditioned, was conditioning me to, hey, accept this idea. Oh, don't worry about it. You'll work 70 hours a week. But that's okay, because that's how we do it. Um, so I kind of noticed this issue then, and talking to some of the accountants who have been around for a while, like they just weren't very happy and, you know, oh, suck it up. I'm young. Like, you guys just need to work harder. Then I, uh, fast forward a little bit. After a little stint as a controller for door to door sales company, became a partner in another accounting firm.
John Briggs: [00:05:55] And yeah, that's when it kind of started to hit me that this is not a good lifestyle. I mean, I mean, my wife sometimes at that stage in our life would comment you. She's like, you know, I'm a single mother. I had broke my heart because it's like, but we're in this together. And so I luckily had identified that this idea of ours is broken and a lot of accounting firms don't have good systems, like, they just don't do things that help them out to be more efficient. And so when I started my firm, I said, I refuse to put my team through the same crap that I had dealt with. And so luckily, we've been able to do this in our firm for quite a few years. The last three years, we've averaged about 42 hours a week during tax season.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:39] 42 hours a week in, busy in busy season.
John Briggs: [00:06:43] Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:43] That's fantastic. Okay. Wow. So what are you doing that's different than a traditional firm to make that possible?
John Briggs: [00:06:51] Um, probably the obvious one is I hire more people. Um, it is, it is a numbers game. We're accountants, but somehow we don't translate the numbers game to the way we run our business. Like, one accountant can really handle X amount of clients. Um, and it's not like a fixed formula because some clients have bigger needs. So you do have to look at those things. But there's only so much time in a day. So one accountant can only handle so many people. And when they're full, we need to stop filling them up. And we just need to hire more people. So theoretically, we operate about a 20% margin that's lower than a lot of the other firms. Uh, because, you know, I'm I'm paying higher labor costs to have the people around. For me, it's more of a long game, though.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:38] You say it's lower, but I thought, what margin are you talking about? Because is that like a gross margin. Is that a net net.
John Briggs: [00:07:45] Net net.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:46] Yeah. Because 20% profitability is is is not bad.
John Briggs: [00:07:50] I think it's awesome. Yeah. I just I feel like other accounting firms are potentially in the 30s.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:55] But that's misleading because often the owners are working crazy hours for sure 55 plus. Right. And if you actually back out the time they're spending that they're not billing then and they actually got paid for that. Then out of the profit, right?
John Briggs: [00:08:12] Very misleading. In fact, it's funny, when I was interviewing accountants for this book, it took me two years to write, so there was a lot of development time in between. And I share the concept of their very proudly like, oh, I'm doing that for my team. For your. That's interesting. You're doing that for your team. How many hours are you working? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I work 70 hours as the owner like you do. No, that's not sustainable. And I mean, even if you look at your work product, what is your work product like after working ten hours straight? I mean, are you kidding me? Like, come on guys.
Blake Oliver: [00:08:45] It's. Yeah, it's it's. It's funny because I've interviewed a good number of senior folks on this show, people who made partner at the Big Four and lived their entire lives pretty much in public accounting, and it's so hard for them to understand the idea that you can. Be successful in not work more than 50 hours a week and not dedicate your entire life. You know more than what is normal. It has become normalized in this culture. To work that hard. And if you don't, it's somehow like like it's a badge of honor to work that many hours. Yeah, the converse is true as well, right? If you don't, you're seen as a slacker. And I tell them, like, I don't want to work that much. My goal is to work fewer than 30 hours a week. And I kind of like I when I say that they're like, judging me for it.
John Briggs: [00:09:47] 100%. But we have to get past that badge of honor, right? That that's a problem that they've accepted because we're talking I mean, if you look at the development of the tax code and government agency and like how accounting firms came about, we're talking 100 years at least of this kind of like, oh, yeah, we just we have to work a lot of hours. That was one of the main motivations. I want to change that badge of honor that people feel like, and then judge others because they're not working 80 hours. Like, I mean, I have a such a great life, I could do this running my firm the way I do it until I don't need to retire. I don't need to even need to look forward to it. Right. Because I can build those things in. And so I'm hoping with the book that the accounting industry can maybe look at it and say, yeah, let me try this out and I wonder if it'll work for me.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:41] I, I'm guessing you don't bill by the hour in your firm, or are you able to do that and use this method?
John Briggs: [00:10:48] No, I mean, you could, uh, I don't necessarily think billable hours is actually a great way to bill in general, I'm. I like value pricing or fixed pricing. Obviously, there's some things, like when we're doing bookkeeping cleanup work that we do bill hourly for that-
Blake Oliver: [00:11:05] tough to scope. Right. So-
John Briggs: [00:11:07] yeah, exactly.
Blake Oliver: [00:11:08] Say we'll do it hourly. But the ongoing stuff. Right.
John Briggs: [00:11:10] But the ongoing the most of the stuff we know what the work looks like. Yeah. We know what the value is to the client. And so we'd rather incentivize ourselves to learn how to be more efficient instead of rewarding butts in the seat and wasting time on something.
Blake Oliver: [00:11:24] I feel like this issue with the overwork is is very much tied to the billable hours and the time sheets, because the firm's financial results, they're the revenue, the profit to the partners is all linked to how many hours people bill. And um, so that's the incentive, right? All the incentives are designed so that people overwork. And the thing that the thing that's really shocking to me is that these days, as you move up the ladder of the firm, because the firms have realized they can't recruit people if they bring them in and start working them 55 hours a week, right away, the interns work the least. The the the junior staff work a little bit more. The seniors work a lot more, the managers and directors work more, and the partners are actually billing the most hours 50 plus on average, according to some crowdsourced data that I've seen.
John Briggs: [00:12:21] Yeah. Which is ironic, right? Because you're kind of sold as the entry level or intern that. Hey, you want to go make partner? Right. Partner. Partner is perfect. Right? And because they're thinking, oh yeah, I oh, I'd love to not work this many hours. I could be a partner. Partners don't work that much. And yeah, the data doesn't support that. The data support partners work at least as much as they were working prior to becoming a partner. And most, most end up working more.
Blake Oliver: [00:12:48] Yeah. I wonder, I wonder about the managing partners. You know, like once you get out of client service, do you actually get to have a balanced life? But I don't know, maybe by that time you're so enmeshed and working all the time.
John Briggs: [00:13:01] I mean, it's you're talking about 30, 40 years of, uh, behavioral-
Blake Oliver: [00:13:05] conditioning.
John Briggs: [00:13:06] Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:06] I mean, so my dad was, uh, you know, he was he was a corporate guy, right? He he worked at a at a company, uh, you know, professional job. And, you know, it was very much if you wanted to succeed, you were in the office from 8 to 8 kind of situation. So, you know, we didn't see him a lot on the weekdays. And it's funny because when he finally went to work for himself, he still kept that routine, even though he didn't have to. Right? He like, couldn't not have his laptop around.
John Briggs: [00:13:37] Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:38] So. Let's. So let's, let's, um, I want to dive into the 3.3 method more so you said. At most three hours of work, and then you take 30% for rest. Um, like, take me through it. Take me through, like your day. How does that how does that work? In, in a in a in a day of your life?
John Briggs: [00:14:03] Yeah. So I think it's important. So there's three generic approaches first. And then I'll kind of get into how you apply it. Uh, some people might be more like a sprinter. So when I was doing this, uh, one of my good friends is Mike Michalowicz, who wrote Profit First. And, um, as a much a very accomplished author, I obviously picked his brain a lot. And he said, it's interesting, as he's reading my stuff, he's like, when he's in his writing seasons, he's like, I write for about 55 minutes and I take about 20 minutes off, which happens to be this 3.3 rule. He just naturally figured out that he's focused that way. So Mike's a sprinter, uh, because he could probably handle up to an hour. And then he admitted, you know, with his, uh, his admitted stuff of, uh, I can't remember what he called it, but not necessarily-
Blake Oliver: [00:14:54] i'm impressed that he makes it an hour knowing him. That's that's good. Yeah. Yeah.
John Briggs: [00:14:54] I mean, he he he's kind of all over the place with how fast he moves on things. I say that with love, Mike. And so then the next person is someone who probably can last a little bit longer. So we call them a jogger. Maybe that's an hour and a half to two hours. And then someone who maybe is like, dude, I have a problem sitting down and focusing. I'm a Zen master. So I go full three hours. So we just kind of lay out as a general way to explain and help illustrate this is how many hours that person would work and they'd take this much time off. But the reality is we don't all get the tasks that we have to do that are the ones that we enjoy the most. There's elements of running your firm or being a team member that you got some things you don't like to do. Uh, and those cases, a lot of times they're sitting at the bottom of my list right now. Yeah, yeah. A lot of those times, the better approach is a kind of a sprinter approach. So yeah, again, you asked me to do some forecasting. I love that stuff. I could do three straight hours. You want me to get on the phone, um, and talk to people? I'm going to be more of a, like, I'm going to need a break every 45 minutes or so. Um, um, and so it does depend on the task. You know, I, I don't know if you're familiar with, uh, the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, but I kind of feel like my book just picks up where his left off. He talks about there's deep work and there's frenetic work, and I feel like his argument with his background is kind of like, let's make sure we always find the deep work and running a practice.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:31] Yeah, it's not always-
John Briggs: [00:16:32] you cannot get rid of the frenetic work. Yeah. Uh, it just it happens. And so some of your team members have 90% of responsibilities on their plate. That's frenetic and shallow. So we have to adjust. So for me, I either like to take time at the end of the day to look at tomorrow or first thing when I sit down for the day, like, how is my day flowing? What do I have based on okay, these things that I need to happen, I know I'm probably going to likely need a break here, and so I give myself kind of a format for each day. Just okay, I'm gonna I have two back to back meetings. I know I'm going to need a break after that. I need to write a blog post. Okay, I know I'm going to need a break after that, and I know that more than an hour and a half is not good for me. So if I don't finish it in an hour and a half, then I'm not going to. I'm probably going to need to move it to a different day. Um,
Blake Oliver: [00:17:26] so are you putting this on your calendar like the breaks?
John Briggs: [00:17:29] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think it's important. Um, so that way you it's it's fluid. It's a very principle based science as opposed to, like, um, people are familiar with the Pomodoro technique.
Blake Oliver: [00:17:43] Yes, that's the one I'm- that I like to use that one because it's so short.
John Briggs: [00:17:47] Yeah. It's like 20 minutes on, five minutes off. And you do that three times, and then the fourth time you take a full 30 minute break. Yeah. Um, the challenge with that, though, is if you find yourself in a zone when that tomato timer goes off or whatever, I just.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:04] Yeah. Then I ignore it. Right. And it breaks my method-
John Briggs: [00:18:07] but it could break your concentration anyways. And so it is a little bit too rigid. And that's why I wanted to take the science and just say, look, it's up to three hours more than that. Even if you're in the zone, studies would show that your productivity is going to drop off anyways, so you might as well take the break and come back a more efficient.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:28] You mentioned, um, the science, and you've got a stat in your book that is sticking in my brain, which is. Something about how, like an office worker and a typical eight hour a day kind of job really is only productive for about three hours-
John Briggs: [00:18:45] two hours and 53 minutes-
Blake Oliver: [00:18:47] two hours and 53 minutes. Where did that come from?
John Briggs: [00:18:50] Uh, a study done in the UK. Yeah, they looked at 2000 workers, um, and two hours and 53 minutes of productivity.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:00] And so what are they doing the rest of the time?
John Briggs: [00:19:03] I mean, think about it psychology wise. Like we sit down, your team member sits down and like, oh, I got eight hours to do like, I, I'm, I'm going to here be for eight hours. Oh, this task is kind of good. Like, you just you're kind of meandering. There's no right. It's just I'm trying to suffer through the day is a lot of our team members attitudes-
Blake Oliver: [00:19:23] And meetings would be in there too, right?
John Briggs: [00:19:26] Yeah. And. Oh, distraction. Oh. Let me. Oh, yeah. Oh, oh, that's a good distraction, you know, versus the if you start giving people permission to take a break and during that break you do absolutely nothing work related. Now all of a sudden it's like, oh, I know I'm going to get a break. I'm going to stay focused on this task right now. Even like with the blog post thing, um, I don't consider myself an author. It's hard for me. I do a lot of editing, um, a lot of great people in my life who taught me some things, but like, it's about getting stuff on paper and editing. It's hard. And so having if I know that I only have an hour and a half to get it done, I actually am more productive than saying this is the only thing I have to accomplish today, because that means I'm going to take all day and let any distraction get in my way until 450 when it's like, oh crap, I have ten minutes before I'm going to leave and go home for dinner. Oh no, now I can't fit it in.
Blake Oliver: [00:20:23] So the average worker is productive less than three hours a day. What's the benefit of this? Method,
John Briggs: [00:20:35] so you double their productivity when you give them a structure that says, I want you focused for this time. Or really you say, here's the principle based on your task you're doing. How long do you want to do that? And then take your breaks like. Then the psychological relief of that which normally they feel guilty, they no longer have guilt anymore because there's permission to not work even while they're at work. Uh, so they come back, their brain resets, and now they actually come back to another productive work block. It's that reset that's the most important element of of the rule.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:16] For me. My reset is exercise. If I reset, my rule is if I if I start in the morning and I start at 830 and I get a solid couple hours of work in three hours, I give myself permission to take an early lunch and go and swim, you know? And when I come back after an hour or two, I'm. It's like a new day.
John Briggs: [00:21:40] Totally. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:41] So you're aiming for your people to work a productive six hours versus a very unproductive eight or more hours. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's the thing the time sheets like don't show us is how productive are those hours actually.
John Briggs: [00:21:56] Right. And I mean, I one of the things that I just disliked about the Deloitte billable model. So I'm not trying to be offensive to anyone who's doing the billable model.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:06] But that's okay. You can offend them, I don't mind. They can write to me, send your emails to Blake at earmark dot me as the host.
John Briggs: [00:22:15] I noticed even as a young accountant like, my goodness, I'm going to get rewarded based on billable hours, but I don't control my workflow. Right? There was like 1 to 2 people in the entire office who controlled the workflow. So if they handed me one thing. And I got through it efficiently. Now I have to be inefficient walking around begging for work from other partners versus, oh, you give me six things to do. Like, yeah, I'm going to crank through it. So and you know, who eats that inefficiency in the billing is the client. How is that fair to the client? They're not getting a better work product because someone spent more billable hours on it.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:52] No. Arguably worse.
John Briggs: [00:22:54] And you know, if you look at why we exist, clients pay our bills. They are the reason we can stay in business. Kind of feel like we should be customer centric on that. And I just don't think the billable hour does that for us.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:10] I agree. So you tell a story in your book about when you were a controller at, uh, was it Atlas? Atlas. Yeah, yeah. So what happened there with the hustle culture?
John Briggs: [00:23:23] Oh, man. Um, they're so a little background door to door sales company. And if anyone isn't familiar, uh, I'm here in Utah. And Utah County is kind of the Mecca for door sales companies. Uh, they're just all over the place. You probably seen Vivint as a sponsor. They started as a company called apex, got investing, but they were our competitor at the time. Um, and so I was the first I'm sorry. When you like people going door to door ringing doorbells, summer sales. Yeah. Hey. Buy DirecTV. Hey, buy dish. Hey, buy pest control.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:57] Do people still, like, answer the door for that sort of thing? Because now, like, we have a ring doorbell, so I don't I don't get surprised by door to door salesmen anymore.
John Briggs: [00:24:06] Uh, yeah, I certain areas apparently, I don't know how those people are adjusting. Um, but at the time it was ring didn't exist. Uh, so.
Blake Oliver: [00:24:15] Yeah. Yeah, maybe they're maybe they're struggling now. Yeah. Okay. Um, I got it.
John Briggs: [00:24:18] So I was the first controller and there I was. I joined them in their fifth year of existence. I was the first controller who actually had an accounting degree. And so I looked at everything and I suggested this crazy idea to them. They're like, wait, what's going on? I go, yeah, yeah, it's really catching on in the business world. They're calling it a budget. And they're like, oh, we don't need a budget, we'll just sell more. So there was this idea of like, I can just hustle and sell more, right? I'm just going to keep selling. Uh, and you know what? It didn't work. The company actually went belly up, declared bankruptcy.
Blake Oliver: [00:24:56] Focusing on top line revenue. Sounds kind of like accounting firms in a lot of cases, right? It's all about top line revenue. It's funny that we do that right, considering that we are the experts at calculating profit. Yeah, but in our own firms we don't focus on the profit as much as on the top line revenue and all the metrics that we like analyze firms by. It's like headcount and revenue. That's how they come up with the list of the top 100 firms. And I'm thinking like, I mean, you could be a huge firm and have a lot of people and a lot of revenue, but you might not be that profitable.
John Briggs: [00:25:32] Yeah. You know, I it's funny, you bring up the top 100 firms. We really ought to look at the criteria for some of these things. A lot of them are just popularity contests. I mean, I remember in my, um, writing the book, I studied, like, great places to work. There's even an organization I pretty confident there are nonprofit, great places to work. Org or something like that. And so then they rake all these companies and. Sure enough, the big four fall into like, the top 50 of greatest places to work. And you look at the reasons why. And it's like. I guess it's a great place to work because I like the people I work with. Like no one is looking at the factor of what's work life, harmony look like to these people. Now, that's not that's not a factor. And if it's a great place to work based on their criteria, I feel like it should be.
Blake Oliver: [00:26:25] Yeah. I always I've always wondered about that. How do the big four firms always get on the top of these, like great places to work lists? You know, they may have all this PTO, but people don't take it, right?
John Briggs: [00:26:37] Right. Because you get fired if you do.
Blake Oliver: [00:26:39] Right? So, you know, yeah, I just it's it's it's interesting to me. But then also like we have to remember these firms are massive. And so like the audit and the tax team are very different than the consulting team. And and the consulting is actually bigger now.
John Briggs: [00:26:56] So and they keep creating new things and they buy other companies. And so yeah, maybe some of those departments which to us is small business owners is a completely different company. Yeah. Some of those, some of those, they're really a conglomerate at this point with the variety of things. Yeah. Maybe they're only talking to the consultants who work 30 hours a week and get to get drunk on the company's dime. Like, this place is great to work.
Blake Oliver: [00:27:20] You know, with I, it's a great time to be a consultant. It can make your PowerPoints for you. It can make up your talking points for you. It can basically. I mean, we're going to we're going to automate consultants out of a job pretty soon. I feel like-
John Briggs: [00:27:32] I agree with you. I actually did a see that a guy did some AI stuff for and he's like, watch this. And he typed in some things. He's like look what it produced. We would spend. Two weeks producing this report, and we build the client for $200,000. And I showed you how to do it with a 32nd prompt. Yeah. It's like-
Blake Oliver: [00:27:55] so it could also be our savior. Right. That could be the end of the billable hour because, you know, could be could maybe like once. I mean for me it was anyway like in, in bookkeeping, you know, I had a bookkeeping practice basically. Uh, we didn't call it that because we wanted respect, but essentially we were putting together the books for our clients, some virtual controller stuff, too. And when cloud based accounting came along, it cut the workload by 80%. So what what did we do? Well, we're not going to bill 80% less. We fixed the fees and we shared the benefit with the clients. Maybe that'll happen with audit and tax is my hope. And that can-
John Briggs: [00:28:35] maybe, you know, um, John Maynard Keynes, I quote him in the book. He actually. Uh, I wish I could remember the exact date, but early 1900s, I think maybe 1940 ish. He's, like, based on the evolution of technology. His prediction was we would be working at the turn of the century, 14 hour days or 15 hour days or something like that. Um, wait, [CROSSTALK] 15 hours per week. Okay. Yeah, 15 hours per week. And, uh, I think he underestimated. And I we're probably going to underestimate the human's ability to fill space, to fill the time with more stuff. Uh, because we don't set up boundaries. We've been trained, and people are like, this is how it is. And if they do it for so long, they have to give themselves a pattern interrupt. And I'm hoping the 3.3 rule can be that pattern interrupt for them.
Blake Oliver: [00:29:28] Well, and maybe maybe he wasn't wrong in that if somebody was willing to live to the same standard of living that Keynes had, you could do that working very little these days. It doesn't cost that much to have that standard of living now. But if you want all the things. If you want the massive house, you know, I know people with, you know, for a family of four living in a 4000 5000 square foot home. Some people think that's, you know, that's what I got to have now. And it's absurd. If you compare how people were living just a few decades ago or in other parts of the world. Right. You don't need that. It's not necessary. But for some reason, the more money you make, the more you have, the more you want.
John Briggs: [00:30:20] Right, right. Cause we. Yeah, we we let our personal living expenses increase at the same pace, not faster than our income.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:26] And that's what's so fascinating to me about the whole partner mentality in these bigger accounting firms is that, you know, the partners at a big firm, they're making, on average, uh, at the biggest $800,000 a year. Now they could work half as much and earn $400,000 a year.
John Briggs: [00:30:48] It still seems pretty nice for most people-
Blake Oliver: [00:30:50] if they let themselves, and I think most people would agree that you could live very comfortably on that amount. And I'm willing to bet-
John Briggs: [00:30:58] they would agree. Yeah,
Blake Oliver: [00:30:59] I'm willing to bet those partners would not, because they're whatever they're spending their money on has become a necessity. Right. So I think there's also that sort of like broader social mindset shift. I feel like Gen Z is starting to embrace that.
John Briggs: [00:31:15] Yeah,
Blake Oliver: [00:31:16] maybe that's because they realize they'll never be able to afford a house, or they think that they will never be able to afford a house.
John Briggs: [00:31:22] But at the same time, to a point you made earlier. Gen Z might be embodying that now. But then what do all the other generations classify them as? They've labeled them as lazy.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:31] Lazy? Yeah, I like to think of myself as a lazy CPA because I don't want to work a lot. I want to work as little as possible. Yeah. And that that pisses some people off. I don't know why, you know, like, why does that bother you if I don't work as much? But I think it is sort of like goes against the grain.
John Briggs: [00:31:53] Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:55] So what's your personal goal, John? Like, how much do you aim to do every day?
John Briggs: [00:32:01] Um, you know, I get into the office about 10:10 a.m. ish. My, my morning routine. I do exercise in the morning, and then I leave by five. I'm home for dinner most nights. I don't travel a ton. And, uh, you know, my goal is still to figure out how to cut back even what I am doing right now.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:21] How much exercise do you get?
John Briggs: [00:32:23] Uh, workout five times a week.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:24] Yeah. How how long?
John Briggs: [00:32:26] Uh, so Monday, Wednesday, Friday, our strength training and those are about hours long sessions. And then Tuesday, Thursday. And, uh, occasionally a Saturday is cardio, and I try to go for about 45, 50 minutes.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:39] That's great.
John Briggs: [00:32:41] Um, my problem is my eating habits. I like sugar a little bit too much, so trying to figure that out, most of us doesn't help that they put it in all the food, all the food, even in like, sauces.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:53] Yeah. It's everywhere. You know, my wife and I just went to Disney World, um, with our son for a week. And, you know, we've cut back. And the hardest part about it was that everything was so sugary, you know, at, at that park. And it's just almost shocking, actually, if you kind of take a break from eating a lot of sugar and then you, you go to a place like that,
John Briggs: [00:33:16] I wish that were true for me. There was a time period, uh, I went from January 1st to September 28th. I didn't eat sugar at all. Now, I didn't stop from eating other foods. It probably had sugar in it. I just didn't eat obvious sugar. Uh, September 29th. I had no problem just popping in. The sugar felt great. Uh, I have a real problem. Well, it's.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:40] You know, the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem. Yeah. Uh, for me, it was like the. It's great to hear that you're exercising a lot. And I feel like that's one of the biggest benefits of adopting this kind of methodology or mindset about work is that it gives you time for exercise, and you don't have to feel guilty about that either. Uh, and I, I started back in September, and it's what, uh, we are recording in May. I started just like swimming every day I can, which I can do because I live in Arizona. So even in the winter, right, I can go and it's been life changing for me to be exercising like an hour and a half on average every day. Nice. I feel so, uh, more, much more productive when I do work. And so, like, that's why I love your your your theory.
John Briggs: [00:34:29] Yeah, the science also supports that. And it's interesting, even in my own firm where, you know, we were arguably the first firm that started doing this. I'm the one pushing it. And I still get team members during tax season. I'm like because we try to work out together. In fact, I incentivize them. If you come and work out three times a week with the group, I'll pay for your gym membership and I'll give you the hour credit of work. And it's amazing how the group gets really small during tax season. I'm like, where are you guys? Well, I just got so much work to do. I'm like, you do know you'll be more productive?
Blake Oliver: [00:35:03] You've actually made exercise part of the job. Like if they want it to be. Yes. Yeah. That's amazing. Well, it's really hard when you have all that. I mean, I guess for me, I've sort of just embraced this mindset that as a startup founder, as a small business owner, there's always work. You will never get through the list. It's infinite.
John Briggs: [00:35:27] You'll never it's never ending.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:28] So for me, the big mindset shift was reprioritizing. So that exercise taking care of my my health is at the top. And then I've got my family and my friends because that's important too, you know? And then there's work. And that doesn't mean that work is not a priority. But I have to take care of my health every day, and I have to spend time with the people that I care about every day.
John Briggs: [00:35:59] Yeah, but it's interesting though, when you're doing that. My guess is when you work, you work. Yes. Right. That people are like, well, you're just you're gonna breed entitlement. And people are like, everyone's lazy, they're gonna take advantage of you. It's like there's still a pace that my team members need to work at, and if they don't, they're not fit for this culture. And frankly, they're not fit for public accounting. When you work, you gotta work. And so you have a scoreboard and you track that. But because you work, when you work, you also now can take the time to be healthy. But the reverse is true. If I take the time to be healthy, I now know when I work I can work instead of just, oh, I got eight hours in front of me. I got 12 hours in front of me.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:40] So that's, I think one of the biggest barriers to changing this in a firm is. Firm owners will say, well, if I'm not tracking the the time that people are working, how do I motivate them to like, be productive? Especially if I'm saying it's okay to only work six hours a day? Do you have like how do you measure the productivity of your people if it's not hours that they're sitting at their desk?
John Briggs: [00:37:09] Yeah, super important that we actually utilize job descriptions. Uh, job descriptions should lay out what are the tasks the person is responsible for, and how does your team member know that they're doing a good job? Because our no one wants to suck. No one comes into work on purpose saying, I'm going to blow it today. I'm going to be terrible. They want approval even if they don't physically act like it. I have a daughter, my middle daughter. She is that person. It's like, I know you care. I know you care you. And sometimes you have team members like that. And so as part of that, okay, here's your job description, whatever that is. Let's come up with metrics so that, you know, and so a tax person who's brand new is going to have less tax returns. I need them to prep every day compared to an experienced accountant who's going to have more returns. I need them to review every day. Same with bookkeepers. Right. And so it's really important, as the owner, that you look at what is the thing they're doing. And based on my estimation what would they do that I say, man good job. So you're getting metric.
Blake Oliver: [00:38:18] So it's not you're taking you're not taking away the metric. You're just changing it from here's the hours that I put in to here's the tax returns that I completed.
John Briggs: [00:38:29] Yeah. And we're trying to focus on result based metrics as opposed to input based metrics.
Blake Oliver: [00:38:36] I love that so much. And it's great too, because it's if you set it up right, certain things are easier than others, right? Yeah, but if you set it up right, then it's pretty easy to see who's productive, right? And who's not. But if you just have a bunch of hours, right, you have no real idea.
John Briggs: [00:38:54] Yeah. And if anyone's like, oh, it's just going to be hard to track. There are so many inexpensive solutions out there. Almost every CRM these days. You know, you track, you need to track your clients. You should be able to produce a list of that. Most of them also will have some sort of project management function of it, and you can run reports on that project management start date, end date. Yeah. I mean it's just don't don't let what feels like an elephant if you haven't done any of this yet to get in the way of like implementing this because it's game changer. It really is.
Blake Oliver: [00:39:25] It's great. Um, I can see it with my team when I set it up, right that the productivity goes up. And I know personally it works because. If I start work, and I know that I have these four CPE courses to review. I'm done right after I get those four done. So I'm going to work quickly to get them done and efficiently. Whereas if I have the whole day to do it, I'll take the whole day, right? So. So with tax you're doing tax. What other kinds of work are you doing on an ongoing basis?
John Briggs: [00:40:00] Tax bookkeeping. We do cash flow management the profit first methodology. Cool. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:05] So with bookkeeping in my firm we the way I measured capacity was with just basically how many clients are you managing? How many, you know, monthly reconciliations do you have to do? And we kind of got a rough idea after a certain amount of time a bookkeeper could handle based on our size client 20, 30 clients.
John Briggs: [00:40:29] Yeah. So we very similar. Um, we have three ratings for clients, though, based on complexity to simplicity. And so someone, if they have all simple clients, could technically manage more simple clients, but they have complex clients in there. It's kind of like, you know, every complex client is worth three simple clients, but the exact same concept.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:50] Now that makes sense, right? You've got weighting there.
John Briggs: [00:40:53] Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:53] That's good. That's even more sophisticated. But it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to know.
John Briggs: [00:40:58] It's pretty easy. But again, it comes down to there's a certain amount of work that needs to get done, and there's only so many hours labor hours we have as a service based company. And so I don't want to push my person to 150, 200% capacity before I decide to hire. I actually want to have them at 80% capacity almost all the time. Oh yeah, because we need that 20% break, that flexibility, that one. It allows us to give them the 30% recovery period. But then sometimes emergencies happen. We've had I've had team members like he just woke up one day and the base of his spine, uh, pinched the base of his nerves and he lost complete sensation in his legs. And it took him four months to recover. So, man, our bookkeeping team had to step up and take up, take on his work. And, you know, the 3.3 rule is not saying none of that's going to ever happen again, but it gives us that space that allows us to adjust without. Right. Really freaking out.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:59] Yeah, yeah. Because if you're at 110% all the time, then if if somebody quits, the team is really screwed, right, you know, where it gets hurt or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Building capacity and that's so important. Any other like nitty gritty details in like how to make this effective in implementing into a firm, you know, like I love that that kind of like practical advice,
John Briggs: [00:42:24] you know, um, if someone's listening to this one, obviously, selfishly, the book has a lot of details on it. Yes.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:33] Do you have a copy you can hold up?
John Briggs: [00:42:35] Uh, I actually, I'm not accessible.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:37] Where can people where can people get
John Briggs: [00:42:40] Amazon's the easiest place the, the 3.3 rule I think if you Google it, it should even be one of the top searches. But um, man, if you're like this sounds good, I hope you guys try it out. And when you introduce it to your team, they're going to be weirded out. My team was I'm like, okay, here's here's what we're going to try now. And they're like, is this like a trick to get like, so you can fire me because you're going to catch me not working. And that's hard to get by. Like even me, I did the science. I looked at it, I was living it myself. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna let these guys work basically six hours, but I won't pay them for eight. You know, as an accountant, as from an efficiency standpoint, it's hard, but at least I had the data to back it up. Like they're only giving me two hours of 53 minutes on average.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:30] Yeah. Your time sheets are not real. You're only getting three hours of productive.
John Briggs: [00:43:35] I'm actually gonna double the six hours is double the productivity for the same cost.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:39] That's that's that's what people have to get over.
John Briggs: [00:43:41] Yeah. So that helped me get over that hump. But then it was like, you have to then be the visionary and leader for that team and encourage them. It's like, hey, oh, I see you're on a break. What are you doing? Uh, cool. Good job. You cannot give any sort of hint like, what are you doing? I'm on break. Oh, you're on your break, are you? Do you think you earned your break? You know, like, you have to get them comfortable with the idea because they also are going to be a little. Everybody's in the entire industry has been trained. Yeah. That the way it is, is to just work until you die straight. Squeeze the soul out of people.
Blake Oliver: [00:44:20] And I'll admit, it's it's sometimes I feel guilty, you know, when I'm out there in the middle of the day doing my thing, enjoying Paradise.
John Briggs: [00:44:29] Yeah, I feel guilty
Blake Oliver: [00:44:30] in the desert here. I feel a little guilty. But then I just post on Instagram and make everybody else feel bad. And then I feel better. Yeah, great.
John Briggs: [00:44:40] Yeah. It's,
Blake Oliver: [00:44:41] uh. John, it has been so great talking to you. Uh, listeners, go find the 3.3 book on Amazon. We'll have the link in the show notes as well. And, John, uh, where do you like to hang out online?
John Briggs: [00:44:56] Uh, LinkedIn's. Great. That's probably the place I personally hang in the most. Cool. Yeah. But I mean, our firm, we have a team, and so we have stuff on Facebook and all that stuff. Are you hiring any. We are always hiring. I have like 20 open accounting positions right now. Okay.
Blake Oliver: [00:45:13] Where can our listeners, uh, find those. What's the website
John Briggs: [00:45:17] uh insights tax com backslash career. Cool. Uh, or you can just message me on LinkedIn.
Blake Oliver: [00:45:24] John Briggs with two G's. Two G's. Yep. Cool. John, great talking to you. And, uh, hope to see you around.
John Briggs: [00:45:32] Yeah. Thanks, Blake.
Blake Oliver: [00:45:34] Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you learned something new. And if you did, wouldn't it be nice to get some CPE credit for it? Well, I've got great news. My new app, earmark CPE, offers free Naspa approved CPE credits for listening to podcasts, including this one. Visit earmark Cpcomm to download the app, take a short quiz, and get your CPE certificate. That's earmark Cpcomm.
