The Real Reason Your Firm Feels Broken (And Why More Clients Make It Worse) With Jamie Gruol

The Abundant Accountant Podcast: Sales & Business Growth for Accounting, Tax, and Bookkeeping Firm Owners

In this episode of The Abundant Accountant Podcast, host Michelle Weinstein welcomes Jamie Gruol, co-founder and CEO of Workflows For Tax Pr

Key takeaways

Adding more clients without fixing underlying workflow issues only amplifies existing problems and leads to burnout.
Automation and technology like TaxDome are powerful tools, but their effectiveness depends on having well-designed systems in place.

Main topics

The myth that more clients solve business problems
Implementing automation in accounting practices

Notable quotes

"Bringing on more clients won't fix an overworked, disorganized firm—it will only multiply the chaos."

Conclusion

The real path to growth isn't adding more clients—it's fixing broken systems. By

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:10) Welcome to the Abundant Accountant Podcast, where accounting, tax, and bookkeeping firm owners learn to scale with confidence, charge premium fees, and reclaim their time. Hosted by yours truly, Michelle Weinstein, this podcast gives you the proven frameworks, the mindset shifts, and success stories you need to transform your firm from overworked and undervalued to confident and profitable. If you're ready to master the art of enrollment, and build a firm that supports your life instead of consuming it you're in the right place Speaker 2 (0:48) Welcome to the Abundant Accountant Podcast. Today, we have a very special guest. Our special guest helps tax and accounting professionals simplify their operations, increase profits, and build practices that actually support their lives. She is the co-founder of Workflows for Tax Pros, which helps over thousands of firm owners ditch admin chaos and implement automation that makes businesses and their firms feel a lot lighter using TaxDome. And with a background in accounting and an MBA and a decade in software implementation, she blends her tech and strategy in a way that actually makes sense for small teams. She is based in Vermont with her husband and her two kids and believes that freedom isn't just possible, it's actually necessary. So before we welcome our special guest to the show, If you are like many firm owners and you think of the thought of your upcoming sales calls makes your stomach drop, or you feel a little afraid that you're going to freeze up or sound pushy or even worse, get ghosted again by your next sales meeting, I get it. And that's why I created a step-by-step system that helps accounting, tax, and bookkeeping firm owners like you sell with confidence without ever having to feel salesy. You're going to learn how to lead every conversation, stand in your value, and walk away with a yes from those prospects who are actually excited to work with you and want to pay you a premium fee for the work that you would do. And at The Abundant Accountant, we help you turn every single sales call into a clear, easy win without any awkward sales scripts or guesswork. So if you're ready to shift the power dynamic and never dread another discovery, meeting again, go to theabundantcall.com and book your complimentary strategy session with me and my team today. And we will dive in to break down your current setup, find the gaps possibly that you have in the revenue of your firm, but really map out a clear path so you can have this peace and freedom when it comes to your sales meetings. So once again, go to theabundantcall.com and we look forward to talking to some of you soon. And now let's welcome our very special guest, Jamie, to the show. Welcome, Jamie, to the show. Speaker 1 (3:14) Hi, Michelle. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Speaker 2 (3:17) Yes. Thank you so much for being here with us today on the Abundant Accountant Podcast. I'm very excited for our conversation today. But before we dive into why more clients won't fix a broken practice and... how to resolve that. I'd love it if you can share who you are and what you do. I think it's always better to share from your voice versus me doing your intro, which I've done. But if you could take like 30 seconds or so to share with the listeners, you know, who you are and maybe why they should pay attention today. Because, you know, I think a lot of people think, oh, yeah, I just need more leads. I need more clients. You know, I hear the same thing on the sales side. But maybe you could share who you are, what you do, and then we'll dive in today. Speaker 1 (4:00) Yeah, well, thank you. So I'm Jamie Gruhl, and I am the co-founder and CEO of Workflows for Tax Pros, where we help small tax and accounting practices to implement automations so that they can start having a life-first business, meaning that they're allowing automation and technology to power their business and lighten the load. Because let's tell you, there's just so much going on in life today that by putting technology in place to act as a team member, essentially, we can lessen the demand on ourselves, on our brains, on the efforts that we're putting into our businesses and work smarter, not harder. So that's Speaker 2 (4:39) what Speaker 1 (4:39) we help people do. Speaker 2 (4:40) Awesome. I am very excited because, I mean, in Taxstone, it's confusing and it's complicated, at least from what I've heard from many of my clients. And I would say probably most people don't utilize all of the features that it has too, right? Speaker 1 (4:55) Well, exactly. And you mentioned, so we are experts in TaxDome. That is the platform that we help people implement the technology of. And you're right. Like I think the biggest, the biggest challenge people have is that when they purchase something like TaxDome or any practice management software for that matter, it's a big empty box and you need a system to make the tool do what you want it to do. And so what we have designed in workflows for TaxPros is that system. And it's based off of my co-founder, Jessica Smith, who's an enrolled agent. on the workflows that she has in her practice. So we use her as like the testing ground for all the new features and all the things and building out workflows. And then we teach them and provide them to our members in our community because it is that system and the way in which you think about how to use that tool that is the game changer. Because the tool is amazing, but just like a pen can write out a shopping list, it can also write a New York Times bestseller. And so we want to give you the New York Times bestseller version. Speaker 2 (5:54) Yeah. Yes. I love that. And so today we're going to talk about, you know, why more clients in a firm won't fix the broken practice. And I like to say, you know, more clients in your firm won't fix the sales problem either. You know, you're just going to keep underpricing. You're not going to convert high and you're going to continue out of all these problems. So I think. getting these issues resolved on the front end will not only save you time, headache and issues, but you won't have to redo as much. And I like to explain it. Jamie, I have a really expensive fixer upper house. And currently, as we speak, I'm getting a new roof. And it's not even like 10 years old, this roof. But because it was done so poorly in the beginning, we keep having leaks that I have like two leaks a year. I've only lived here three years. So I've had I've had six leaks and multiple repairs. And it's like, you know, more rain and or more sunshine is not just going to dry out my problems. Right. It's like you have to get to the root cause. And my root cause was like, all right, I'm just going to rip the bandaid off. And literally 7 a.m. It sounded like marbles were on top of my roof with the guys like demoing and taking off the whole roof right now. Yeah. Oh, Speaker 1 (7:12) man. I know. But I Speaker 2 (7:15) think it correlates to your practice. So you can try to get clients, you can try to grow, but it's not going to fix the broken pieces on your workflow side, which is what Jamie's talking about today, or like with me on your sales side. You're going to just compound those problems until it gets so big that you're going to have leaks in your firm. And so I know we're going to talk about some boundaries so you don't get burnt out. And share some real stories, too, of firm owners that you've taken through these processes. But what would you say is like the first thing a firm owner needs to do? I have a different question, Jamie. How does someone even think or know that they have a broken practice? What are like some of the things that a firm owner, you know, what's the symptoms that they feel or see? Uh, cause the, you know, I'm not the technical side of this business, but how would someone even know that they have a broken practice? Speaker 1 (8:17) Yeah, that's a great question. Um, you know, from the, the pain points that our clients come to us with and then resolve out of is one, they're working nights and weekends and that's when they're quote unquote catching up, right? Those are the hours of replying to emails and. where's my stuff at stuff. And so, you know, long hours. Um, and they're, they're really making the firm, the first priority where. And that's because it's just consuming so much time because they're trying to do everything manually. So that's like the first one. The next one is, is that their clients are not following their instructions. I hear often like my clients won't read anything and I send them this stuff and I tell them what to do and they don't do it. And I'm like, well, yes, but what does that look like? Like, what is your communication method model plan? look like? And do you have one? Because for a lot of people, it's I send them everything at the beginning of tax season, for example, and I expect for them to execute on the like 10 things I need them to do by March 15th and to deliver it to me by March 15th. And people are busy like that stuff. I don't know about you, but like when my old CPA used to mail me my packet with the engagement letter and the organizer in that paper packet that he probably today's dollars would have paid $10 to send. I would get it. It would go in the stack. And then about April 10th, when the newsman would say, taxes are due in five days, I'd be like, oh, crap. That's still in the stack. I better get busy. And I'd go and hustle and get my stuff to him on April 12th. And then he would stay up until 4 a.m. for multiple days to get everything done by April 15th. And he... to point fingers at him was allowing that to happen. Right. So I think that's like Speaker 2 (10:10) a boundary that we're going to discuss. That is Speaker 1 (10:13)