Earmark Podcast | Earn Free Accounting CPE | Stop Being the Bottleneck: The Six-Part Delegation Playbook for Accounting Firms

Still running every meeting and answering every Slack ping? Blake Oliver talks with Chase Damiano of Human at Scale about escaping founder bottlenecks. Learn a six-part delegation framework (responsibility, purpose, success, process, resources, decisions), turn 1:1s into leadership labs, build a team responsibility inventory and a delegation roadmap, and see why great prompts mirror great delegation. Leave with practical steps to hand off meetings, elevate decision-making, and reclaim time for strategy and growth.

Chapters

(01:17) - Chase's Sabbatical and Transformation
(02:36) - Challenges of Rapid Growth and Burnout
(03:28) - Finding Purpose and Slowing Down
(13:59) - Effective Delegation Strategies
(19:11) - Delegation Example: Managing Team Meetings
(25:16) - Approval for Meeting Cancellations
(25:37) - Delegation Framework Explained
(26:02) - Addressing Delegation Failures
(30:48) - Team Responsibility Inventory
(32:56) - Delegation Roadmap
(36:28) - Defining Success in Delegation
(42:11) - Encouraging Decision-Making Autonomy
(49:21) - Human at Scale: Transforming Operations
(51:51) - Conclusion and Next Steps

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Connect with Our Guest, Chase Damiano

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chasedamiano/

Learn more about Human at Scale

https://humanatscale.com/

https://humanatscale.com/assessment

Connect with Blake Oliver, CPA

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blaketoliver
Twitter: https://twitter.com/blaketoliver/

Creators and Guests

Host

Blake Oliver, CPA

Founder and CEO of Earmark CPE

Guest

Chase Damiano

Chase Damiano is the founder and CEO of Human at Scale, an operations agency helping outsourced accounting and CAS firms run without constant oversight. With a background in Accenture’s tech innovation group and startup leadership, he’s helped 40+ firms reclaim time, boost profit, and scale with intention.

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This show is brought to you by Earmark, your source for podcast-based continuing education for accounting and tax professionals. You can earn CPE by listening to the episodes on this podcast and more! Sign up for our mobile app to earn free CPE whenever you want, wherever you go. Learn more at https://earmarkcpe.com.

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

Chase Damiano: [00:00:00] I'm a big believer that your one on ones with your team should not be about, hey, did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? More of an accountability structure. It's more of an opportunity to develop them as leaders. Leaders in every role, in every position. Um, they should do 80 plus percent of the talking in the room, talking to you about. Hey, this is what I'm thinking. Here are my challenges in their own responsibility. And you're there to offer strategic guidance. And great question asking to help them think.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:30] Are you an accountant with a continuing education requirement? You can earn free Nasba approved CPE for listening to this episode. Just visit earmarked app in your web browser, take a short quiz and get your certificate. Hey everyone, and welcome back to earmark. I'm Blake Oliver. Today I'm joined by Chase Damiano, founder and CEO of Human at Scale, an operations agency that exclusively serves accounting firms. Chase brings a fascinating background to our industry. He's a Virginia Tech graduate with degrees in both chemical engineering and economics. A former eccentric consultant and the former CEO who scaled Commonwealth Joe Coffee Roasters from 0 to $5 million in revenue. That success earned him a spot on Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2018. But what happened next is even more interesting. After experiencing the operational chaos that comes with rapid growth, Chase took a transformative 12 week sabbatical that included two weeks of silent meditation. I don't know if I could ever be silent for two weeks. Chase. This experience completely shifted his leadership philosophy and led him to found Human at Scale in 2019. His mission is simple but powerful free accounting firm owners from being trapped in daily operations so they can focus on what they do best. Chase, welcome to the show.

Chase Damiano: [00:01:49] Thanks, Blake, for having me. What a great intro.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:52] So I I'm kind of my mind is kind of blown. Like two weeks of silence. Like how? Why?

Chase Damiano: [00:01:59] Uh, I think after after stepping out of the coffee business at that time, my, my mental health was in shambles. I, uh, I almost lost myself. Like, who am I as a person? Uh, without that, without that company. So I ended up taking this sabbatical. And then the two weeks of silence, specifically, uh, started difficult, but then became very easy, uh, as I just was more sitting and just spending time with myself, which I hadn't done in quite some time before that. Uh, because startup, startup life, etc..

Blake Oliver: [00:02:37] So you, you scaled up the coffee company and you, you exited out of that, and you, you didn't know what to do next. Like, were you burned out? Like what? What happened?

Chase Damiano: [00:02:48] Yeah. More. More or less. I was burned out at the time. And, um, other entrepreneurs who have left their baby, maybe experience something similar where it's like, I don't know who I am without this company. Everyone's asking me, hey, what are you going to get into next? Because you've done something really cool. People assume you're going to go on to an even greater thing, but you might not have that clear internally within yourself, and that's okay. And some of us will fill that void by trying to make ourselves really busy in the in between time. Let me do some consulting, let me do some projects, let me help out another entrepreneur. And the idea here being to slow down, spend time with yourself and really ask yourself the question is like what? What do I feel I'm being called towards? Like, where is the energy instead of it being a push, push push grind grind grind, where are you experiencing more of a pull? And that's when I sought to. That's why I sought to experience. And it took about three weeks of just putting down the phone, putting down email. Stop taking meetings. Took about three weeks to just get out of this productivity habit where we're so used to just like, okay, waking up now, I'm gonna have breakfast, then I'm going to go to, uh, you know, a coffee shop and quote unquote figure things out. Oops. Then it's time for lunch. I'm going to figure out some more things, and then, sure enough, time for dinner. Time to come home. Hey, honey. How was your day? And even the act of, quote unquote, figuring out your life can now look more like a job. And so it took about three weeks to really smooth that out and stop the productivity habit where I can really listen to myself internally. What is it that I do feel called? Where where I feel called to serve.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:36] So you were so busy all the time when you were growing this company that you just got. I feel like it gets kind of addicting. If you're a firm owner or a startup founder or you're just building something like that becomes your life. And like, I've definitely felt that. I feel like a lot of accounting firm owners are there too, where that's everything. And if that stops, then you don't really know what to do next. You don't really know where you're at, who you are. And so much of of who we are gets, um, gets wrapped up in the job and we're busy all the time.

Chase Damiano: [00:05:15] That's right. That's how I see it as well, especially in what I see with accounting, which everyone I've met in this space is, uh, an incredibly authentic person. Um, some of the kindest, most well-meaning people that I've met. And I also see similar to myself. I also see where there's an energy of by me serving someone. I feel good about myself, my role, my purpose within the world. And sometimes that can be really powerful. Um, especially if we're coming in a sense of equal business stature with our clients. Um, but it can be very detrimental if we bring in this people pleaser energy. It's like, well, I have to serve? Because they're my clients and I put them first before myself.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:56] Well, and that desire to serve is what ends up getting us so busy because we want to help everybody. We want to take on all the clients who come to us, all of their friends and colleagues, that they refer to us. We want to help them and we ultimately say yes. And when I say we, I'm pretty much talking about myself. I'm thinking about myself. When I had my firm, I say yes to everything, and then I've got like too much to do and I'm like full up, busy all the time, 60 hour weeks. And so I guess my question is, how do we get out of that? How do we escape from that? Like busyness? We want to help. That's a good thing. But how do we also, like, not overload ourselves?

Chase Damiano: [00:06:44] The quick and easy answer is always that you know that word that we never like using, which is no. And even even in building the first company. I wrestled with this a lot because, you know, we're doing a lot, a lot of initiatives. We're growing different business units at the same time within the coffee company. It's very hard to say no because everything looks attractive. Everything is like, oh, there's some extra revenue that we can get here or a vision pops into our head. Yes, we can absolutely execute on that. And there's there's definitely a piece of figuring things out. There's a piece of needing to go through those motions in order to learn and understand. What do I really want to be in the business of doing? Even when I started my consulting practice at human at Scale, I to took on took on different projects, uh, that I didn't have the polished ideal customer profile. I didn't have the clear business, you know, the service lines that I was offering right on day one is through the act of making an attempt and taking on things and living through, um, Even not so great client experiences that it actually creates the internal learning. It creates the inner learning. Who do I really want to be? What do I actually want to do? And in my in my experience, for me and some of the experience my clients, they become more clear when that data is presented to them. But it's not just financial data or qualitative data from the team, it's internal data. It's what our intuition or gut is telling us at the same time.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:16] What do you mean by that? Internal data. Tell me more internal data.

Chase Damiano: [00:08:21] There is. I like to think of our own sense of intuition, our own alignment towards energy as a data set. And every individual has that across across your entire team as well. If we can take a look at that data, extract that data, take a look at it, and then make a collective decision, both as a CEO of an accounting firm as well as across the team, it can lead to some really rich insights. So to give you an example for that bottlenecked CEO where they are working 50 plus hours a week, they are most of their time is spent reactively and firefighting. They're looking at quality of of the accountants on the team. They're not very satisfied with it. So they're having to go in and redo a lot of the work themselves, ship it off to the client. They're still managing a lot of the client relationships and clients are still coming to them. Do the first question becomes, how do how do you feel on a day to day basis? It's like, where's your actual energy? Because you're in this pattern, this perpetual pattern of doing these things because perhaps you feel like you have to or perhaps you feel like you're stuck, but where's your actual energy around it? And every time I ask that question, it's like, oh, it's incredibly draining. It's incredibly I don't want to do this. And so they're able to vocalize and say, I don't actually want to do this thing. I feel drained by it. I'm very, very stressed out. Yet the pattern continues, and part of our work at Human at Scale is helping firm owners and teams to just study and reflect that very data, because there's something around our consciousness where we're able to say these things, it's just the feeling of being stuck. We're able to say these things, but yet take no action to change it. So that's what I mean, that inner, that inner gut and intuitive data that we have on, like, how do we how do we feel about things.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:13] We know objectively, we know what we should do, which is pull ourselves out of all this work. But doing it is another thing. I want to do it, but I keep getting involved in the client work. So is perfectionism to blame here? Is this feeling like it's got to be like as good as it can be? The reason that we struggle. I mean that that was something that I, I had to deal with, where it took me a long time to get over it. The idea that it's okay for somebody else in my firm to do this thing I've been doing. If they can do it, like 90% is good.

Chase Damiano: [00:10:53] That's right. And it's hard because I'm even. Even what's happening in the age of AI now. It is causing all of us to question, hey, this thing that I'm really good at doing all of a sudden can be done for me. So I had my own reckoning with I love spreadsheets, I'm really great in Excel and Google Sheets, and then all of a sudden I'm able to see this tool that can do this at a much, much better capacity than I have. Instead of me spending hours on something, now, something can be done for me. And I had a little bit of a reckoning. Whereas like, okay, well what is my value. What do I then do? And I think that happens. That happens with accounting firm owners as well. It's like, okay, I'm really, really good. Perhaps in your firm you sit as the seat of the, of the CFO for your clients. You know, you have your senior accounting team. Um, they're the ones closing the books, but you're the ones that help with the. You know, 13 week cash flows and etc. on that level. And maybe you've started to identify that that is the value as a CEO of my firm. That's the value that I provide. But if you're trying to grow, you also know that if you doubled the amount of clients that you had sitting in that CFO seat, you wouldn't be able to do it as good.

Chase Damiano: [00:12:12] And so you have to go through this reckoning and be like, okay, I either need to hire or delegate or train someone else to do it. Maybe some software can help, maybe some automations, um, to help serve my clients. But you have to go on this journey of knowing that it's like, hey, this is not meant for me. Despite the fact that I'm really good at it. And you're right, some perfectionism, I believe, is to blame. We tell ourselves this story that, oh my, you know, I could do this in five minutes. Why would I delegate something that's going to take them two hours to do? I would just get it done really quick. And I see that story time and time again where the our days as CEOs start looking up, doing a lot of these little things that we know in our gut were not supposed to be doing. We think that we're being efficient that way, but it's not true. If you're really trying to grow or scale your practice, you know you have to identify those little things to not only delegate, but permanently delegate and hopefully get to the point where you're not even approving and reviewing that work anymore. It's completely out of your your cognitive load. This, you know, your it's completely out of your mind because you've adequately built a system for someone else to handle that.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:20] You've extracted yourself from the workflow. That's that's how I like to think of it. Right? I'm no longer the bottleneck in there. It's not going through me. It's going around me. And I'm I'm just overseeing that workflow. But it's really hard to get there. What are some of the other, like, psychological barriers that prevent us from doing that.

Chase Damiano: [00:13:43] The other, other things I see in the prevention of delegation is trust because or as accounting firm CEOs or any any team leader learns how to delegate, there are going to be missteps. I've seen in one experience, I saw a chief operating officer attempt to delegate a billing process to someone else on their team, and I asked her to write down, um, and she she reported back to me that the delegation did not work. So I asked her to write down, okay, show me exactly what you said to the team member on what you delegated. And all that was said was on a sheet of paper. Just said manage billing process while I'm out on vacation. And of course, a delegation like that is going to fail because all the context that's required for the individual that's going to do that task for you while you're out, um, isn't there. And so when I like to think about delegation, I think about it in six parts. One is okay, what are we delegating? Two, what's the purpose? Why is doing this important at all? People need to feel that their responsibilities matter. Number three, what does success look like? We can see that we can do this with metrics. We can do this with a vision. Paint what done looks like for me. Number four is a process.

Chase Damiano: [00:15:08] If there's a process to complete it. And this is specifically good for more junior team members that need a little bit of extra hand-holding on like how to do the thing you're more senior leaders might not need a clear process. Uh, number five are the resources. What resources can I, as a senior leader, give you in order to do the job? And then, number six, the decisions. And this one is one of the most important ones. What decisions can you make autonomously? And then what decisions require my approval and then what decisions do I actually need to make to continue this process that has been outlined? And I find that when leaders define this a little bit more clearly, that delegation sticks a lot better, because suddenly you're giving all that context to actually empower an individual to make an attempt and do the job. Now, not everything goes perfect right away. So we need to measure the results as well as coach them up to success. And you can build this into a system where every team leader has a series of one on ones and team meetings that are doing this playbook over and over again to to consistently and effectively delegate increasingly, increasingly higher amounts of responsibility off their plate so they can focus more on strategic vision.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:26] So as you were outlining that delegation system or the criteria or whatever you call it, um, a thought occurred to me because I'm obsessed with AI and prompting and AI prompt engineering what you what you just described is a well written prompt. It's the same thing.

Chase Damiano: [00:16:48] That's right. It is.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:49] So delegating to a human and crafting a prompt that's going to get you the desired result from like a artificial intelligence system. It's like the same thing.

Chase Damiano: [00:16:59] It is. And it's uh, I've also found that funny because when I created this system back in 2020 or 2021, and then when all of the prompt engineering stuff started coming out with ChatGPT, etc., it ended up being the same thing. And I think what's interesting there is, again, we are communicating context. It's all of the traditionally hidden or invisible flavor around the intent that we're trying to communicate. And we as leaders, no matter if it's delegation to a human or AI, we have to get that context and intent out of our heads and onto digital paper or into someone else's heart or mind.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:40] Well, and the reason that it is similar is because artificial intelligence systems, generative AI systems that are built on large language models, those mimic human intelligence. They work the same way. They're not the same, but they have similar operating principles or architecture. And that's so amazing. Okay. Can we can we actually, like, do one of these like an example. Can we go through those that list? Was it six items you had items. Okay. Can we do that I think that would be really helpful for me. Sure. And I hope our listeners too. So this is this is basically the structure for delegating anything to a human or an AI agent. If it's a simple enough thing, I suppose. Okay, let's do it. Number one.

Chase Damiano: [00:18:29] First one is just name, name the responsibility. I like to do this in about 2 to 3 three sentences that are also leading with an action verb. So it's do this, manage this, or could be oversee this. You want to pick up some responsibility.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:46] Okay. Um, let's say it's like, uh oh. What would be a good example for our accounting crowd? What's the chase? You tell me. Like with all the firms you work with, like, what's the what's the number one thing that owners are doing that they should be delegating? Like what's the most, you know, delegation worthy task that they just hold on to?

Chase Damiano: [00:19:11] I think one of them is leading internal meetings. Whether you adopt the EOS framework or you do like a level ten or a weekly team, sync is, um, especially at the earlier and mid stages, uh, CEOs might still run those meetings.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:29] So that's a great example because that's very time consuming to prepare for those meetings.

Chase Damiano: [00:19:33] That's right. And my belief is that CEOs should just walk into the meeting with no prep, and it's actually the company that's prepping them, not the other way around.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:41] Okay, I love that. That's a great time saver. So let's okay. So let's name that responsibility. Um, I guess I'll.

Chase Damiano: [00:19:49] Manage and coordinate weekly team sync.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:53] Okay. Perfect. What's next?

Chase Damiano: [00:19:56] Okay, so we need a purpose. Why is this responsibility important?

Blake Oliver: [00:20:00] Uh, well, because our weekly team sync is what keeps everyone organized and makes sure nothing falls through the cracks. And that we're delivering everything that has a due date on time. Am I missing anything? Yeah.

Chase Damiano: [00:20:14] Team. Team connection and unity is like, this is our command center for what is happening for the week. Um, but also a place for us to come together, uh, as a culture and express our culture. Um, I think it's important. Oh.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:28] That's good. Yeah. Helps us prioritize.

Chase Damiano: [00:20:30] Okay, let's just prioritize. Yep.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:33] So we got purpose. We've named it.

Chase Damiano: [00:20:36] So next will be the, uh. What does success look like? So again this quantitative or qualitative.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:43] So I guess in this case for me if it's my weekly team sync success means that everybody leaves the meeting with their priorities for the week, their top 3 to 5 priorities clearly defined. So they know what to work on, that we've addressed any blockers, anything that's stopping them from achieving those goals for the week.

Chase Damiano: [00:21:05] Mhm. Yep.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:06] And like you said culture right. Everyone feels good leaving the meeting to like.

Chase Damiano: [00:21:12] Yep that's right.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:13] Okay.

Chase Damiano: [00:21:14] And then there's I think there can be a binary here. Did the meeting happen or not.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:18] Yeah that's success for sure. Right. If it didn't happen or not. Yeah. Did everyone who like, didn't have a valid, you know, did everyone who could attend? Yeah. Yep.

Chase Damiano: [00:21:31] Okay. So that's the success metrics. Um, and.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:34] That's that success metric is very much like in a prompt when you engineer a prompt that's like the, uh, the expected outcome is often how we define that. Yeah.

Chase Damiano: [00:21:42] Yep. And I've had this be again, this could be quantitative where it looks more like a KPI. Um, it could be qualitative, where hey, here's an example of something. And so you can give either AI or person, um, here's what success literally looks like. It could be, um, you know, in the case of branding can be like, here's a design template that you can follow.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:05] Okay. So we've got we've named the responsibility. We've defined the purpose. And we've uh, we've identified what success looks like. Um, what's number four?

Chase Damiano: [00:22:15] So then this is process.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:17] Process. Yep.

Chase Damiano: [00:22:20] And so we might define a process. It can look like, you know, meeting invite sent, uh, a, uh, prep email sent to the group.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:29] Uh, agenda needs to be created in advance.

Chase Damiano: [00:22:31] Agenda created in advance. Any. Collect any key topics from any individuals. That's all the meeting prep. You have the meeting itself which is okay. Facilitate and walk through every agenda item. Uh, collect any outstanding questions? Uh, if there if there are any deep conversations, ask people to take that offline, follow up with action items and summary. And then you have all your post meeting items which you know, you can send the recording to everyone, maybe an email with all the action items, make sure your practice management tool is updated with everything, etc. there's your process.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:08] Yeah, all the all the tasks that are related to clients have to be in the in the PM system, right?

Chase Damiano: [00:23:15] Yep. That's it.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:16] Okay.

Chase Damiano: [00:23:17] Then we have resources which are what what are we giving? Um, as leaders, what are we giving to this person who's holding this responsibility extra to help them be successful at this? Well, they need access to everyone's calendar to schedule it. They need access to the practice management tool to gather everyone's work. Uh.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:39] They might be able to, like, run a report of any tasks that are, like, due this week. Critical deadlines.

Chase Damiano: [00:23:45] That's right. Need to run report and whatever data you're presenting they need access to. Um, it could be they need time. They need time a few hours every week to prepare, facilitate and then do the action items at the end. Those are examples of resources.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:01] And in a prompt that would be the tools. If it's an AI agent you give them access to tools like here access to my calendar to search. That's it. Okay. All right. And now we've got the last one. Number six. It was six, right?

Chase Damiano: [00:24:13] Six. Last one is decisions. So what decisions can this person make or someone else? What decisions require my approval as someone delegating this work? Um. And then what decisions do I actually want to hold? So you might say something is like okay for the person facilitating. Let's say it's an operations manager. Operations manager can make the decision on, uh, the time of day of the meeting, as long as it's with at the right time for everyone else can make the decision on the agenda in with full autonomy. Provided that my special CEO two agenda items are always on there. Therefore, I don't need to approve it. Operations manager can choose the recording tool to send it out, and Operations Manager can take up to two days to put the put, you know, get the task all correct. Maybe two days is too long. Let's say it's one day to get the tasks in the practice management. I want to be, um I want to approve it. If you decide to cancel this meeting for two weeks in a row, I need to approve that. Um.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:24] That's.

Chase Damiano: [00:25:24] Yeah. That's good.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:25] This is. This is like a great example, right? I'm sure there's plenty more we could add, right? Go into way more detail on the process or the decisions or the resources. But like that's the framework. I get it now.

Chase Damiano: [00:25:36] That's it.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:37] Yeah.

Chase Damiano: [00:25:37] So whether it's a person or AI, this can be um, as a CEO, you can fill out this map yourself, or you can ask your team to ask you questions to extract that vision, that information, the context and intent so that they have it and then they can do the work.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:53] And then basically this gives you the confidence to actually delegate that thing and have faith that it's going to get done.

Chase Damiano: [00:26:00] Yep. That's it.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:01] Yeah.

Chase Damiano: [00:26:02] I see I see with miss delegations that because we don't give the context when the delegation doesn't work. Um, now we're trying to figure out, well, what happened. How much of it was me versus how much was it them versus the context, the environment that that we're in. I'm a believer that we as CEOs need to absolve ourselves like our behaviors should not be the influence for why this delegation didn't work. Absolve ourselves of that responsibility so that we can clearly see, okay, what about the individual skill set or the conditions or environment or the resources that didn't work that made this not successful? That also helps focus less on the person and more on the process and everything around it. So it puts you both on the same side of the table. You can look at this sheet. Hey, what about this? Wasn't clear. Didn't work for you. Now you can literally look at it and pinpoint exactly where. And that is what makes the delegation stick, because you can just fix that one issue instead of being like, oh man, you know, you know, I tried to delegate the, the, the weekly team meeting and it just didn't work. I'm getting frustrated about it. You don't need to get frustrated because you actually have the breadcrumbs to understand what happened.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:13] And what's beautiful about this system is that it allows you to delegate work and get better results, and delegate it to people who like you don't have to rely on people being just brilliant and figuring it out, which was always my experience in public accounting. At a big firm, there was delegation and it was not like this. It was go do this thing, go figure it out, and then it's up to me to ask all the questions. And thankfully, I'm a really curious person and I, I don't know, I benefited from my education and my family. That made me curious. And so I could ask the questions that would get me to, you know, this checklist really, or this, you know, the set of criteria. But like, not everybody can do that. So if you actually want to be able to delegate to like everyone in your firm and not just your, you know, like top performers, then you have to give them the framework.

Chase Damiano: [00:28:09] That's right. And again, those first three, the the responsibility itself, the purpose and the success criteria. If you have a more senior individual, that's the type of delegation okay. Go figure it out. I'm not even I'm not going to tell you how. Like you're smart enough to go. You know what the vision is? Just go do it. If you have more junior folks, those those last three, the process, the resources and decisions, they act like guardrails to help educate that junior person on like what your what your intent is. And so you get to play with for different types of delegation. You get to play with. Which ones do you want to choose?

Blake Oliver: [00:28:42] Yeah I love that. So basically you don't have to do this whole thing every time, depending on the seniority of the person you're delegating to. You can just give them this framework and then say, ask me questions until you have this filled out. Yes.

Chase Damiano: [00:28:55] I think that's a great way to do this, because also like what we're trying to teach our people, we're developing them as leaders as they ascend through the organization. I see a big opportunity and okay, career development pathways. How do I move from someone in a junior role into something much more senior? And part of that is that ability to it's all the soft skills, right? It's the ability to ask questions and it's to Empathize with other people and to solve problems, bring solutions, not necessarily problems. And we can teach our teach our team to do that through this way. Get them to ask you the questions, not the other way around.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:34] So I love this framework for delegating. You identified as our example one really common situation, like a great example of like something to delegate, which is preparing for the team meetings. I, as the CEO or the firm owner should not be running the meetings. I should be attending the meetings and offering my, you know, expertise input, helping to guide it. But it's the team that's running the meeting. Mhm. Um, where else like how else do we identify what to delegate. You talk about building a roadmap for delegation. What is that. What does that roadmap look like.

Chase Damiano: [00:30:16] So at at some point um And there's the adage of, okay, what got us here doesn't get you there. And at some point, complexity of responsibilities within firms gets needs a new way of looking, a new way of organizing it. I usually see this, you know, some some time between like hitting 10 to 30 people. And, you know, we've hired all these people. We might have someone in operations, but it still feels like a mess, still feels disorganized information in people's heads. So one of the one of the techniques is to build a what's called a team responsibility inventory. One of the things that I have seen not work is okay, well, to help organize, I'm just going to write job descriptions for every person. Here's your job description, here's yours, and here's yours. Good luck. The issue is that these individuals, they're just focused on their own role. They're not looking at anyone else's. The technique on building this team responsibility Inventory is not just to have documentation on everyone's responsibilities, but for the team to have a collective awareness and experience of everyone else's. And so the way that you do this is you ask everyone to do a little bit of a time audit where for hey, for the past seven days, write down in a spreadsheet or on a piece of paper. Just brain dump all of the tasks and responsibilities that you did. And it can be as disorganized as you want. It really doesn't matter. Then, in preparation for what looks like a facilitated session, which an operations person can do is taking all of the responsibilities from every team member, putting in a single sheet.

Chase Damiano: [00:31:58] And then we're going to go line by line as a company and review all of them. Maybe there's some light organization. Maybe, you know, we're organizing certain types of clients or organizing certain types of functions marketing, sales, operations, etc.. So then as a company, we can make a collective Decision on okay. Is this the right configuration? Is this should everyone that currently has these tasks continue to do these tasks? And often the answer is no. And especially that is from the CEO. So it's possible that the team will have the experience for the first time of seeing exactly how much is on the CEO's plate and exactly what. So imagine you're going line by line through these responsibilities and as a team making a decision. Okay, should the CEO still have this responsibility? Answer. In some cases, yes. He's the best person. She's the best person. They're the best person in order to do this thing. But in some cases the answer is no. So we start building what's called a delegation roadmap. Every responsibility. If we want to move a responsibility, it only has six possible destinies. You can hire someone to do it part time or full time. You can delegate and train someone, which is someone inside the firm that you have to teach. You can outsource it to a service provider, You know, our clients do it with us. Why can't we do it? We can automate it. Essentially make the labor effort go to zero through software. Um, we can consciously eliminate it. This is a underused one where. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:29] If I was going to ask you about that because like, you can't if I'm going to delegate a bunch of my tasks to CEO, to my team, and my team feels like they're already too busy to do anything, like that's just going to be a disaster, right? That's right. That.

Chase Damiano: [00:33:42] Yeah, we have to we have to balance it over the whole company. We can't exactly. You said you can't have a CEO be like, well, I'm just delegating everything and walking away. You might not have the capacity for that. And the training effort might be high. But eliminating work is big as we're running our businesses. If we get to that 10 to 30 person, you never know with one thing that you said to someone one time. There have now been doing that for weeks on end going and going, oh yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:07] This is not a public accounting example. But my favorite in corporate accounting and finance is there's all these people running like weekly, monthly, quarterly reports that were like, defined and asked for like five years ago that they've been sending out constantly and nobody's actually reading them. Right, right. They're no longer needed or they were never really needed in the first place. Just somebody requested it. Yeah. So those would be examples of like tasks that would be on the list that we might say, well, let's go find out if anybody's actually using these.

Chase Damiano: [00:34:40] Bingo. And then the last piece, the sixth one is to keep it. It's the best interest for that responsibility to be kept. So imagine going through hundreds possibly of responsibilities as a company in a single workshop, going through these and then reallocating. When you see how these how these responsibilities move to others over time. That's the delegation roadmap. So you understand how a company as a whole can better use its resources and be more strategic about where these responsibilities go. And it tends to liberate a lot of energy and excitement, Statement, because I see time and time again that the accountants within a firm, they see that the they see the pain that the CEO is in by being too busy. And what's even more painful is when the CEO starts interjecting themselves in different parts of the process and sort of mucking things up. And they would love nothing more to have more autonomy over their role. And so they, they they're hungry for this.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:38] I'm smiling right now because that's the situation I'm in with my team. We're at about 16 people, and my business partner and I are the problem because there's all this stuff from when we were half the size where we were like functionally critical participants in the workflow. We had to do the work, but and we're still doing that. But now we've got the team and we're in the way, right? We're the bottleneck.

Chase Damiano: [00:36:02] That's right. And you, you've you've you've bet your career on getting to this where it's like, okay, you you had to in those early days, do all of these things and I guarantee you've gotten really good at them. So that perspective makes it really challenging to delegate this to someone else who's not going to be as good. And that's what creates this, like, well, I can just do it because I've seen this a hundred times before, but you know that the future needs to be I need to build this in a way so I never have to do it again.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:29] The thing that really helps me as somebody who has perfectionist tendencies is step three in that process, or that delegation is the success. Defining what success actually looks like, I think is really helpful because it's not 100%. It's not necessarily 100% like the client probably would be happy and fine with something less than what you're giving them or it's not. It's not necessarily that. It's just like defining. Maybe you were just going over over like you're you're doing more than what was agreed on in the scope with the client. Right? I don't know, it's sort of I think of it because I come from the bookkeeping background. I always think of it as like insistence that we tie everything to the penny. I see the value in that. But also nobody cares because it's immaterial.

Chase Damiano: [00:37:22] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:23] So defining whether or not you need to tie to the penny or if it's okay just to like, plug the plug the reconciliation if it's within X dollars like that could save you a lot of trouble. I saw one example.

Chase Damiano: [00:37:38] I saw this for the first time in engineering school when, um, a lot of the calculations at the very end, I mean, we're, we're talking we can have calculations to like two, three, four, five decimal points. And then professors will just be like, well, that's about 1500. That's the right answer. And it blew my mind because it's like, wait a second. This is engineering. It's like precision matters. And then there's the whole thing about significant figures. And it's like actually the calculation, you know, has tolerances built in. And in engineering, some answers are just good enough because you have to communicate that to people. You have to be like, okay, this, this makes sense. No one cares about the fourth decimal point on things.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:18] Yeah. It's like in, um, the related in manufacturing. If, if you want to be really, really precise, it's very expensive. Right. The, the additional precision like makes a, like an aircraft part that has to be really precise. Might make that thing cost $1,000 versus $10 or, you know, it's like you got to account for that. And so I always say if think about it from your client's perspective, what is the minimum they need to accomplish their goal that they hired you for. It's almost like you could turn this framework around and like, think about what your client has outsourced to you as like a delegation.

Chase Damiano: [00:39:05] Mhm.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:06] And and like what does success look like for them? I don't know if we ever think about that enough as like, firm owners, right?

Chase Damiano: [00:39:13] Yeah, maybe we should. I love, uh, I think I see a lot of promise in, um, more and more accountants and firm owners, like, really understand what their clients are trying to do. We see this in the in the product world. So, um, you know, in building a tech product, there's a framework called Jobs to Be Done, which is what what job is your customer trying to do where they're hiring your solution. So for instance, if I'm, if I'm hungry, um, the job I need to be done is like, oh, I need to eat. But there are various solutions to that. I can hire a banana for that solution. I can hire a Snickers bar, I can hire a, um, bottle of water, or I can even hire a jog and I won't be hungry at the end of that. There are different solutions to the same problem. And so when we think about what are our clients actually trying to achieve, in the further and deeper we understand their business goals, we can put ourselves into a position of being of the utmost highest service. So less worrying about if pennies are tying out, but more about okay, how are we creating strategic business value? And it's our duty to ask because they're not necessarily going to tell us.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:27] I thought of another example from my time in public at the big firm that I was at. We had a nonprofit team that did client accounting work for nonprofits. It was the biggest part of that consulting practice that did outsourced accounting services. And I was shocked to realize that we were doing full on compilation engagements for a lot of these nonprofits. And I don't think they needed them. Like most of these nonprofits did not need compilations, but we were doing it anyway with a huge added cost. And I guess maybe it was because we were on an hourly model. It was, you know, fixed pricing but built up hourly. So there's an incentive to like, do more work than is necessary. But also like we could have delivered a non-compilation type service at a fixed fee and just not done all that work and probably made a better margin. Like the client, the client didn't care about, right? So I always feel like there must be so many examples of ways in which firms are like, you know, doing that. They're not really thinking about what success means for the client and for the team. That's just a tangential thought there. Um, okay. So. We've talked about like the framework for delegation. You mentioned like KPIs for measuring this stuff. So how do you like I think the decision part is the hardest for me right now. Getting my team to like make decisions without me, not come to me for everything. But then also limit the scope of those decisions because they can't all be the CEO. So how do you how do you encourage the decision making autonomy? How do you get them doing that?

Chase Damiano: [00:42:38] I like to I like to ask, ask a series of questions that help them do the thinking and to propose an option. And then as I am stepping away from these responsibilities, I might start reviewing them to just make sure, um, you know, they're not missing something. So one way, one way to do this is I call this a proposing solutions framework. It's essentially trying to frame any change effort, any decision as okay, what's the problem? What's the outcome that you're trying to achieve. And then what is the solution? The solution essentially is the bridge between the problem and the outcome. And helping helping individuals define each of those pieces. And it's really in that order. It's problem outcome and then solution. And each one might have a handful of questions. Describe the problem. What's the cost of the problem. Describe the solution. What's the benefit we gain from the solution. And then what are three recommended solutions and which one are you advocating for. What resources do you need to make it happen? Similarly to the delegation, you can put all these questions on a sheet of digital paper and they can present to you, hey, I this this was my thought process on solving this problem and creating this outcome.

Chase Damiano: [00:44:03] Here's the solution I recommend and then give you the whole sheet. And similarly from your standpoint, you start looking with surgical precision on exactly what their thought pattern is as well as like, oh, this was this piece of information that you had. That's not exactly correct. If I update this, how might that change your thinking? And you do all this in conversation which looks more like a coaching conversation? I'm a big believer that your one on ones with your team should not be about, hey, did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? More of an accountability structure? It's more of an opportunity to develop them as leaders, leaders in every role and every position. Um, they should do 80 plus percent of the talking in the room. Um, talking to you about, hey, this is what I'm thinking. Here are my challenges in their own responsibility. And you're there to offer strategic guidance and great question asking to help them think so. And that's no different from making a decision. So that's something you can do. Problem, outcome and solution. Ask someone to fill all that out and then just sit down and review it with them together.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:08] I like that problem outcome solution. I think a lot of times we jump to the solution without really thinking about what outcome we're looking for.

Chase Damiano: [00:45:17] Right, right. And the outcome is just a testament if the solution was implemented. What are the benefits of that. And there could be risks to there and trade offs.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:29] Right.

Chase Damiano: [00:45:29] And but that vision again we're we're also helping to teach people to think strategically, to create a vision of the outcome that they want to see where a solution will help them get there.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:41] Yeah. Because currently my the the situation I'm in is not scalable. Where it's my team comes to me with a problem and then I have to use my, my brain space to like, think about the solution to that problem and give them the solution. But it'd be much better if I went back to them and said, here, define the problem, define the outcome you want and then give me a proposed solution. That's it. First and come to me with that.

Chase Damiano: [00:46:07] I see this with firm owners a lot, where so much of their day is just spent in slack or the practice management platform, just answering a bunch of questions. Hey, can you take a look at this? Hey, can I have a quick call? Hey, can I run something by you? And just like you're saying is like, essentially the company is using your brain as the internal Wikipedia for how this company should operate, and that makes you a bottleneck, just like you said. And so the better that we can either extract that knowledge, you might have proprietary, proprietary knowledge. And truly you only knew that. No. The solution we have to get that out of your head.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:42] Unlikely.

Chase Damiano: [00:46:43] It's unlikely we have to get that into a knowledge base somewhere. But in the case that the path. If I'm an accountant, the path of least resistance for me might be to go to you in order to have my pain point solved. And it's not. I'm not. It's not a nefarious thing. Um, it's just how the water flows. And so, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:03] It makes sense.

Chase Damiano: [00:47:04] You have to make a barrier. That's right.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:07] Yeah. I'm a team member. I've got a problem. I need a solution. So I've been trained to just go to Chase and tell them my problem, and he gives me the solution. I go home or go back to my desk and work. But like, I haven't really thought about it. And if we want to develop, if we want to develop me into a leader who can come up with solutions, I need to actually go through this exercise myself. That's it's great for it's great for you, Chase, because then you just get to say you get to look at it and if it's good, you just say, yeah, go for it. Which is so much easier than having to like, come up with a solution.

Chase Damiano: [00:47:44] And it's a win win because it develops their skills to solve their own problems in the future. And yeah, they're going to have to go through a little bit of discomfort in, hey, I don't I don't know what the solution should be. I don't know what Blake is going to think about my solution. They have to go through that. And that's where we as the leaders are the ones that are encouraging. And we're we're not here to say right or wrong or say, hey, tell me your thought process and let me help edit that with you. Um, so that they can get a positive experience in doing something new. And you just do that continuously on repeat and you start removing yourself as the bottleneck. The firm starts operating more autonomously.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:24] And the dream is which is which ultimately happened with my firm, uh, was and I kind of got lucky in a way, because I didn't have this framework, like, I didn't know what I was doing. I got, well, I did certain things right. Um, without like, just just intuitively, I got and I got lucky. And at the end, after five years, I was doing no sales, I was doing no client work. We were getting customers. They were getting served. They were happy, they were paying money was coming into the bank and I was like, not involved. And that for anyone listening who is like, not in that situation and wants to be, I will tell you that it is the greatest thing in the world to get into that position, because then you're really just a owner of a business and chase, you can help them get there. So tell us about human at scale.

Chase Damiano: [00:49:23] Sure. So what human scale is we're we're an operations transformation firm or an operations agency specifically for accounting firms. And what we do is we help build the infrastructure that sits at the intersection of people, process, technology and culture in a way that comes together, that helps businesses run. And every business is a little bit unique. But what we specialize in working with accounting firms in this way, especially due to the intensity of the labor that. That we put in. So typically we'll go in with an audit and understand where exactly are you experiencing operational challenges. And we're also looking for where might the CEO or another key leadership team member might be a bottleneck and doing behaviors that are actually not helping the success of the firm. We end up we do a process review, tech stack review, practice management review. We interview all of the meaningful key team members on the team, and we bring this together in an assessment. And sometimes we'll find somewhere between 4 to 8 big operational problems that need to be solved in order for the accounting firm CEO to get to their goals, which could be double or triple the size of the firm. It could be time, freedom or financial freedom. It could be creating an ESOP for their employees. Um, there are lots of different outcomes for these leaders. And then, uh, and then we help them, uh, we as a team go in and then help them initiate as well as execute that change. So we don't we don't just come in as a consultant or advisor or coach. This isn't hey, we're going to have a bunch of coaching calls and and the accounting firm CEO and the team does all the work. We actually come in and join your team. Um, we are in there actually running these systems and building that with you live. Uh, as we know, we build the plane as we fly it, and we're literally there hammering out the different pieces of this plane so that it flies better. Uh, and that's that's what makes it different.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:28] Oh. That's amazing. Yeah, because I figured you were going to tell me what all the consultants say, which is like they give you the strategy, but then it's up to you to implement it.

Chase Damiano: [00:51:37] Well, that's not very much fun, is it?

Blake Oliver: [00:51:39] No. Well, it doesn't usually work, right. It's like that's. Yeah. You need that's that's really great. I love that. I've never heard that before. Um, well, how can how can our listeners learn more about human at scale? Chase.

Chase Damiano: [00:51:51] Yeah. So come, come check us out at our website. We're at human at scale. Com and we have an operational leadership assessment, uh, that folks can take. It's a diagnostic to help you pinpoint different operational issues in your firm and what to do about them.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:08] Check it out. Thanks, everyone for listening. I'm Blake Oliver. I've been speaking with Chase Damiano. Chase, thanks so much for sharing with me this this framework. And like I'm going to start using this. I'm going to I'm going to be doing this like tomorrow with my team. So like you've helped me out a lot and I thank you.

Chase Damiano: [00:52:31] Yeah you're welcome. I'd love to learn how it goes.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:34] I'll keep you posted. Maybe we'll do a follow up sometime.

Chase Damiano: [00:52:37] Yeah, I'd love that. Thank you.