How to Delegate – for Partners Who Struggle

At many CPA firms, the definition of partner requires you to be proficient at delegating. But at some smaller firms, partners struggle significantly with letting go of their client work.

They have often been given their  title for retention or marketing needs, but serve the firm more like a blend of the following:

• Highly qualified senior associate (based on the quality of client work they do)
• Manager of clients/engagements (based on their ability to communicate with clients and see to it that the work gets done accurately and timely…by their own doing)
• Partner (based on their technical expertise and efficiency)

The problem

While this can work for a while, firms typically need partners to do more and more partner-level work (leadership, business development, and training staff) over time, which is hard to fit in without transferring chargeable work responsibilities to other team members.

In addition, it’s a challenge to retire, take on new clients, or reduce work hours for personal reasons without being able to delegate well.

Why delegate? Here are four benefits:

1. Profitability. Delegation is required for a properly leveraged firm and leveraged firms are more profitable. In the 2020 Rosenberg Survey, firms with $5-$10 million in revenue, with a staff-to-partner ratio of 8:1, reported an average income per partner of $738,000. Change the staff-to-partner ratio to 3 or 4:1 and the average IPP dropped to $383,000.
2. Team development. By giving work to your team, you build trust (“I believe you can do this work for us.”) and you build skills. Our profession is built on the foundation of doing progressively harder work. Great teams help us do better work – and retire.
3. Personal development. Mastering delegation frees up your time to focus on higher-level or more interesting work. Excellent rainmaking, influential firm leadership and having time to take a vacation all depend on being able to hand off client work.
4. Retirement transitions. Effective delegation paves the road for succession planning. By the time you’re ready to officially pass the torch, you’ll already have people trained to perform client work, manage client relationships, and…wait for it…delegate to their team members.

Our book CPA Firm Staff: Managing Your #1 Asset offers practical advice on ► training and delegation ► recruitment & retention ► flexibility ► importance of the boss ► mentoring ► leadership development ► performance feedback. 

Get your copy today!

How to Delegate More

Step 1: Identify people to delegate to.

Assuming you have one or more B-players and above available, read on. If you don’t have any team members, or none with capacity, recruiting is job #1.

If you have staff and they’re “not qualified” but you don’t plan to fire them, then you likely need to train them and delegation is one of the best ways to do this. It’s ok if they’re green, you can give them right-level tasks or engagements to get started and grow them into the professional you’ve been hoping for.

To identify someone to delegate to, check the following:

• Do they have availability in a timeline that works for the project/client work you want to delegate?
• Do they have the foundational skills to do the work? This isn’t the same as knowing how to do it, that’s what they’ll learn by working with you.

Step 2: Shift your mindset from “It’s faster to do it myself.”

If I had a dollar for every time a CPA doesn’t delegate because they say to themselves “it’s faster to it myself” I could retire on my own private tropical island tomorrow. We surveyed 65 CPAs about their biggest obstacles to delegation and the top two responses were quality concerns and “it’s faster to do it myself” or “requires too much time.”

Let’s look at the truth and the folly of these perspectives because they are interrelated.

First of all, it’s 100% true that it IS faster to do it yourself. You’re right! That’s why you’re the boss because you’ve been working on this client or type of engagement or in the profession FOREVER* and that makes you efficient at what you do, and very high quality.  (*Or at least a decade, but to a new college grad, that is pretty much forever.)

The mindset shift starts here – you’re faster and better because you’ve had practice and experience. The only way to create that for others is to give them a chance to get faster and better by first going slowly and making mistakes. And having you oversee them. Yes, it will take more time. Your time, and theirs. It will not be fun, or easy and it won’t feel efficient. And it won’t be profitable at first, but it will in the end. Without it, you’ll be stuck on a hamster wheel instead of building an empire.

Step 3: Come up with a plan.

Perhaps you want to delegate more, but you’re not sure where to start. The whole scope and process can feel very daunting. Starting small can give you a taste of what it’s like and help you develop some skills (and recover from mistakes) before you delegate more broadly. Here are some steps to get you going:

1. Pick one client or project. Go for something simple and easy if you’re just getting started or step up to a more complex project if that’s where you need to expand your leverage skills.
2. Pick one team member. They should have availability and some amount of willingness to work with you. Eventually, you can tackle delegating to difficult people, for now let’s not make the situation harder than it needs to be.
3. Pick a timeline. Make sure you have enough time to give them instructions, check-in on their work, review and talk with them about any mistakes or omissions and have them do the correcting BEFORE this project is due to the client.
4. Put it on your calendar or to-do list and walk them through what needs to be done and when. Monitor their work and provide feedback as you review, then reward yourself for trying hard things.

Giving up control of client work is difficult for many professionals. In many ways that’s what makes us great, we want our clients to receive the best possible service. But this seems at odds with having someone else do the work. The development of CPA professionals, who will serve the next generation of CPA firm clients, and pay your retirement benefits, depends on your efforts in showing them the ropes and giving them responsibility and training.