When Disaster Strikes

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When Disaster Strikes

To Our Clients and Friends:

Business Disaster & Recovery
Our year started with a disaster!  We’re going to be ok; in fact, I believe, before the year is over, we will be back to “good”. There is a fair probability that we will be back better, but for right now, better is a work-in-progress.

This will be very hard to write.  Thinking back over these past few months is painful.

Disasters are Catastrophic. 
This newsletter is not about “problems”. Disasters are matters of life and death.

Disasters affect every aspect of your business and personal life. They are big, frightening, and dangerous, threatening many lives and livelihoods.

Planning to manage a disaster requires both personal and professional plans.

Disasters Happen to Everyone
Disasters happen. You have already experienced a disaster or will experience one in the future; they are, to some degree, unavoidable. The main lesson for managing these disasters is one I have often taught: learn from failure, overcome it, and come back better.

It is the speed and quality of your recovery that matters most.

Is it a Business or Personal Disaster? Does it matter?
You will have your own disaster at some point.  I hope your disaster looks very different from ours. Be as prepared as possible.

Our Disaster
Just prior to Christmas 2021, David, my son, and a key workhorse in our CPA firm was diagnosed with cancer.

Everything froze.

Time slowed to a crawl and every other important thing became a secondary issue.  This diagnosis began an ordeal that is, hopefully, over.  David recently finished his chemo and is regaining his strength.

Cancer is a horrifying disease.

In March, we thought we might lose him; not to cancer, but to complications related to chemo.  Even a month removed from chemo, these powerful lifesaving drugs still have brutal lingering side effects.  We believe that David will recover from these and return to his hobbies of running marathons and hitting the gym hard and heavy, but not today.

The Personal Costs of Disaster
You can imagine the personal and emotional battles we have had to fight, together as a family and in my own life as a dad.  David truly was in a fight for his life.

It was not all bad. There were good things that happened directly related to David’s illness.  Our family grew closer.  We were amazed to see David’s core group of friends rally around his family in love and support.  This was a long-term commitment by David’s cohorts; I am deeply humbled by the commitment and quality of David’s friends.

There seemed to be nothing these dear people would not do to support David, Nikki, and the four “Rowdy Richardson” children.  Including providing childcare, food, transportation, supervision of sporting events and complex schedules, and even grabbing a kid or two for short vacation trips.

The larger cancer community also stepped up.  I have often heard about how cancer professionals and survivors rally around cancer victims, but now I know for myself how remarkable this community truly is! These people are amazing, providing literally lifesaving advice.

Unanticipated Friendships
During our disaster, a person that I, for good reason, sincerely do not like [the feeling is mutual (for equally good reasons)] hugged me; he cried with me and told me that we would be ok.  He did this because he went through the same thing. Disasters bring people together and forge unanticipated friendships.

The Business Costs of Disaster
Production
Any personal disaster will have professional consequences.  In our CPA firm, David is a major workhorse. With David’s illness, we lost a significant portion of our firm’s production capacity.

Internal Controls
I’m a dad first.  When David got sick, my ability to produce work was significantly impaired.  Overall production suffered and internal procedures (i.e., the To-Do lists) were not followed.  Because David is a significant cog in our internal control (I/C) structure, his illness also caused operations of that I/C structure to fall to subordinates.

Staffing
Because of David’s illness and my impairment, everyone on our staff needed to step up but not everyone did.

One of our junior staff members stepped up in a big way and got a post-tax season promotion.  Another Junior staff member was invited to seek employment elsewhere. A disaster will showcase strengths and weaknesses in your personnel.

Efficiency
Our CPA firm is efficient.  Perhaps I should say, has always been efficient. While in the past, we have always been able to turn work around quickly and accurately, our turnaround time has stretched out much longer than I find acceptable. Most of our clients have been understanding. Not all.

Workplace Environment
David’s illness was unfair to our staff and to our clients.  Cancer is unfair.

We have always enjoyed a low stress, pleasant work environment. Structural inequities built into our environment never became issues until the disaster. Disasters introduce stress into a workplace not accustomed to managing stress. Fractures occurred!

The costs of workplace stress are high. We lost a junior staff member we did not want to lose, I think, in part, because of the increased stress levels in our work environment.  That was unfair to our CPA firm and to that young person.

We are going to reestablish that low stress environment – soon.  Our internal work environment is already much improved.  More importantly, we are addressing strategic inequities that fractured under stress. This next year will be important.

The Real Issue: Disaster Recovery
Disaster Shows Your Weaknesses
Recovering from disaster is more than getting back to normal.  Disaster showcases your internal weaknesses. Disaster recovery for us is, and will be, a deliberate process of addressing these weaknesses.  We expect to be, for the most part, finished this year.  The full recovery will take a year or even two. In this reorganization process of the operations of our firm, Todd is taking a lead role, but the process will be collaborative.  Already, the communication between our senior staff is much improved.

Todd
I mention Todd often in my newsletters assuming everyone knows him. Todd is one of our most senior staff members and he is the CEO of our firm.  That is correct: Todd oversees firm operations, i.e., he’s the boss!

His opinion carries a lot of authority in our firm, and he rarely receives any push back from me.

These anomalies occur when I think Todd is trying to change the firm’s unique culture.  Our culture evolved in a small firm environment, but we are not a small firm anymore.

Our Firm is Very Personal
This is a strength and an important part of our firm’s culture.  Our clients like knowing who to call and what to expect. We want to keep this same level of personal care and attention at the forefront throughout the reorganization process.

The issue for us is how to keep a high level of personal care when faced with the inevitability of disease, disability, and death.  These three “d’s” often equal disaster.

Reviewing Work
Our senior staff will do more quality review work over a broader range of client work.  The quality review will not be so niche oriented.

We are already seeing the benefits of having accounts evaluated from multiple perspectives. As a result of this change, our staff can discuss various tax and other preparation ideas and techniques that improve the quality of work produced for more of our clients. This is becoming a tax and financial planning incubator.

We are learning.  This week, Amy has taught me a few things about S-Corp returns that I needed to know.

This level of intellectual cross breeding will keep us sharp. (As iron sharpens iron.)

Internal Controls
Todd is keen to push the demands of our internal control management structure to the clerical level and to make it more dependent on systems and less dependent on personnel.  When your staff is sick or unable to work, the controls may fail unless your I/C structure is system driven. Todd is 100% right; this is a necessary change. Systems can operate independent of key people.

But he is getting push back from me of all people.  “My problems” are that I like to:

  • Do my own filing
  • Sort my own papers
  • Write my own letters
  • Keep my own work-in-process logs and to-do lists
  • Do a dozen other things that are obviously clerical

Even I see that this is ‘bad behavior’. The two most obvious problems are:

  • These are time stealers. If I’m wasting time on clerical issues, I’m not doing the tax and financial planning that I am so very good at doing.
  • To quote Todd, by allowing these time stealers, “I am being unfair to my clients”.
  • If I’m incapacitated by worry, fear, and grief, my failure to do my “clerical” job leaves a serious hole in the firm’s structure and management.
  • If I’m incapacitated, client service suffers.

Increasing Capacity and Staff Training
We are going to slowly, in a deliberate manner, add staff.  We pay well and do have a great work environment. We intend to hire quality people.

If you look at that short list of “my problems” above and based on our review of other internal control structures, you can easily see how bringing new staff up to operating speed could be hard.  If new staff must adopt “my work procedures”, I can see that as being a bit daunting.  We have a long history of doing exactly this.

We make jokes about it: “Steve will just toss you in the deep end and tell you to get it done!”  Todd, Amy, Rachel, Liz, David, etc., were all trained this way.  It works when you are a really small firm and when the boss (that would be me) is really patient and can work one-on-one with the staff.  But we’re not a small firm anymore and we have more than one boss.

Looking at it now, this is unfair to our junior staff people.  We need to change how we train our staff. We cannot burden our junior staff with all the junk that I do (administrative overhead) when they really need to learn how to service clients.

Newsletters Should be About Helping You
There is a point to this. My newsletters are about helping you.

I do not want you to read this newsletter and hear:

  • Disasters happen
  • There is nothing you can do to prepare
  • The only thing that matters is how you recover

There is a lot you can do to prepare for a disaster.

Todd Again!
We knew about the strategic flaws in our management and internal control structures. Todd, our CEO, has been telling us, in detail, about these flaws for 15 years.  Todd has also been telling us that when we have a disaster, these are the things that would happen.  1-2-3, by the numbers, he nailed it.

Todd has a strategic picture for our firm that I did not allow him to implement.  I was wrong.  I was afraid of losing our small-firm culture.

Disaster Plan Step One: Draw a Strategic Picture
Anticipate your disaster by drawing a strategic picture of your business.  It’s not hard.  Here’s the recipe:

  • List your key people.
  • What happens to your business if they die?
  • How can you mitigate the fallout of that death?

You have completed step one of your disaster plan.

Disaster Plan Step Two: Get Professional Help
Step two of the disaster plan will likely require professional help.

Call us. We can help or, in your unique case, we know who can. We have recent experience.

Is Your Business Too Small to Have a Disaster Plan?
No.

Sincerely,

Steve Richardson, CPA

 

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