[James Flawith]

Update: It looks like Botkeeper isn’t ready to automate Canadian payroll (or businesses). There have been a number of drawbacks, particularly around payroll. And when payroll isn’t done right, ain’t nobody happy.

Revised plan: My wife has started taking a bookkeeping course at North Island College in Courtenay. She’ll be taking over our books in March. Initially, we resisted this course of action because we didn’t want “all our eggs in one basket” thinking she’d be better off getting another job in a different field, unrelated to Precision Tree. There are some reasons we decided to have her start helping:

1. As the bookkeeper, she’ll have a first-hand look at the flows in and out of the company and can weigh in on spending/decisions from an informed standpoint.

2. I won’t have to do all this alone and will have a partner to help me.

3. Precision gets a specialized, dedicated, bookkeeper capable of keeping our books up-to-date weekly – this is worth paying more for.

4. We can use this to income split legally so we earn more money personally.

I’m also getting my part-time admin assistant to help more on Precision Tree (instead of our other company Lil Worker Safety Gear). We revised our website so all residential contacts flow through her, she schedules my estimates and takes care of customer follow up. My aim is eventually to have my assistant scheduling estimates with an estimator who is NOT me, leaving me to schedule crews. Maybe we’ll even have enough work to justify a dedicated residential crew which she could then schedule for me, taking me right out of the system. I’m sure Beverlee loves hearing that.

The assistant also has payroll experience so we’re training her to take over payroll from Botkeeper using Quickbooks online and Wagepoint. She’ll be able to train my wife to cover for her so we make sure someone is always available to do payroll.

[James Flawith]

2nd update: I had to temporarily pause work on the Confluence project with VA Michael because I spent all our money. It’s a long story and to make it short, the contract is back on but I’m taking baby steps.

Short term goal: Reduce the feedback loop time on employee performance to as close to real time as possible. Achieve this by setting up an “Employee Hub” using Confluence and some integrations. Create a private page as a tool for each employee to house/access their certificates and licenses, current position agreement and skill development journal. Materials for discussion and review will be posted to an open/shared company-wide monthly meeting page. At our monthly meeting, we will review all posts/comments to the page from the previous month, review previous goals/set new goals, measure performance, etc.

Long Term Goal: Use Confluence to eliminate our stale, paper-based OHS Program. Convert to cloud, enable editing and commenting in real time. Create an entirely digital service-based company.

[James Flawith]

I wrote this in my Business Journal but thought it would be valuable here as a “how to” to follow after reading The Power of People Skills (POPS). And you should read POPS. After I did, something “clicked” for me with regard to employee hiring and management. I’ve been pounding on my company values hard since starting O&P in Feb/March 2018. If you asked me to recite the values I made up, I would get maybe 2 or 3. This is not good. Not if you want your employees to remember them and if you want to actually I use them for something.

Here’s what my values looked like prior to my POPS revision. Skip to the *** if you get bored:

Precision Core Values

“Performance. Professional. Precision.”
Success at Precision is being:

Love
We love our work because we prevent kids from getting electrocuted and we help people by keeping their power on.
We care because lives depend on the quality of our work.
We love challenging ourselves physically and mentally.
We always have fun and never get bored.

Effective
We are Industrial Athletes, true professionals.
We are dedicated to leveraging technology to do more work with less effort.
The best in the world push themselves to get better every day. We want to be the best, so we push ourselves to get better every single day.
We have nothing to prove, but everything to prove.

Dependent
I’m your left leg. You’re my right leg. We depend on each other to win.
The closer we work together, the more freedom we have to reach our true potential.
One team. One dream. Own the work where we live.

Responsible
We take ownership of everything that happens in our lives.
We own our reality. We control our destiny.
At Precision Tree, we are all self-employed. We all work for ourselves.

Disciplined
We do not need managers, we are all disciplined enough to manage ourselves.
We set the bar for professionalism in our industry, holding ourselves to the highest standards.
We will do the things others do not want to do.
Discipline = Freedom

Grateful
We appreciate the opportunities life provides us.
We are courteous and show respect for ourselves and our customers.
We are thankful for our work and always strive to do the best job possible.

***Looks great, right? Just like something you could print off and hang in your office with some nice graphics, eh? And how many people would ever actually read it? Did you even read it? Honest! Right, point proven. Now, our revised values post POPS:

Precision Core Values

GROw with Precision

G
Give a shit. About the company. About our team. About yourself. Do you give a shit?

R
Ready. Show up to work ready for work. Leave work ready for work. Are you ready?

O
w
Own it. Own up to mistakes and problems by taking responsibility for them. Do you own it?

Or GO from Precision

Sorry for the language, but daaaaaamn! Did that wake you up? How many ways can you measure that??? Can’t remember the values, I bet you’ll remember that you either GROw with Precision or you GO from Precision, right? What if you’re late for work? Well, I guess you don’t give a shit, do you? Forget your lunch? I guess you weren’t ready, eh? Did you go home without doing your Mandatory End of Day Checklist? GOD HELP YOU.

Right about now you’re probably thinking, “this is frigging amazeballs but what do you do with it?” Well, POPS tells you. You use your values to assess your employees and plot them on what’s called a STAR CHART. This chart uses 2 axes (“Right Attitudes” vertically, “Effectiveness” horizontally) to determine she is a “star” (or “potential star”) OR if she’s a “wrong fit”/”productive-but-difficult” giving you and your employee a super valuable REALITY CHECK on where she’s at. Hint: you want a company full of STARS. Here’s a GSheet link to a template I made for a Star Chart.

I found this axis thing a crazy coincidence since I was already graphing values vs technical skills when looking at new hires. If you get down to it “Values” and “Right Attitudes” as well as “Technicals Skills” and “Effectiveness” are really the same. Fascinating.

I’ve already shopped the Star Chart and Coach and Connect Session to my employees as a replacement to our monthly worker assessments and they were stoked. Here’s a link to a Google Doc to what the POPS calls a “Coach and Connect Session” that I made based on the POPS. It’s interesting to note that the Coach and Connect format also incorporates some The Coaching Habit-type open-ended questions and the Star Chart to give your employees a reality check (aside: The Coaching Habit is a super-wicked book and you should read it).

What does all this mean? Well, I think of the simplified values as a sounding board to measure decisions against. By continually reviewing and comparing decisions and actions from the field to the values the company is based on, you’ll be teaching and training your people to act in the best interests of the company without actually having to tell them what to do. Kind of like passing along your Commander’s Intent. You’ll also be able to detect when your new hire is turning out to be a “tree guy” before it bites you in the ass, and give you the tools to help them improve (GROW) or leave (GO) with plenty of fair warning and minimal cost to the company.

Ok, the short version of both of these posts is: you need to read The Power of People Skills. Just do it.

[James Flawith]

Update: after some research, I decided to post a job to Upwork to find some help. I didn’t want to ignore potential solutions so I didn’t ask for help with Confluence, but anything that could fit the bill. Here’s how I worded it:

I’m looking for someone who is an expert using Confluence/Basecamp/Sharepoint/etc to help me find a way improve our current system of sharing with Dropbox Word/Excel system. We would like an easy to use “thing” to manage all of our projects/contracts, policies, procedures, forms, etc. Something like a searchable, editable, “hub” of information for our company.

Here’s a link to my full post (which is now closed): https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~011dbc031e9e2bd4f3

I engaged with a VA named Michael from Texas who has a crazy amount of Confluence experience has an Upwork rating 100% (https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~01795f8003dc0ebd38). Prior learning experience has taught me to be wary of overseas help for “culture-based” jobs that require intuitive soft skills. I had a phone meeting with Michael and he backed up his experience with some awesome insights on how Confluence could be used (he kind of blew my mind) and told me he had set up the same thing I’m looking for recently for a large construction company in the US. I decided to look past the high hourly rate ($105/hr) and give Michael a chance.

It’s a lot of money. My thought is to use Michael to set up the architecture of the Confluence system, teach me more about it and then hire a lower cost VA to actually transfer the bulk of my OHS, policies, and procedures over into the Precision wiki. I *kind* of hope Michael has a rapid import trick or two up his sleeve to make this much more efficient than manually importing Word and Excel files into Confluence. This is one of those situations where it’s really easy to get tempted by that $16/hr VA that will take 100 hours to do something a $105/hr VA could do in 4 hours. I’ll keep my eyes on it and see what happens.

[James Flawith]

An update: after searching around locally and worldwide on Upwork I’ve decided to try something… different. I think the main choke point for information flow in any bookkeeping system is… the bookkeeper him/herself. They have different schedules and clients and data entry on a consistent basis seems to be a tough challenge. So, is bookkeeping without a bookkeeper possible?

Believe it or not, the answer might be “yes.” I’ve engaged a company out of Boston, MA, called “Botkeeper” (www.botkeeper.com) to help me out with my bookkeeping. They offer Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to facilitate quick data entry. They offer human support in the form of a team of accountants who are assigned to your company and get to know your work flows.

Botkeeper offers very competitive price points for various service levels, which are dependent on the number of transactions you run monthly. They actually offer FREE bookkeeping for the lowest transaction levels to help companies in the start-up phase. I dig that.

I’m in the process of onboarding right now. It looks like right off the bat I can stop using Hubdoc which is about $60US/month. I still take pictures of POS receipts but instead of using the Hubdoc app I send them to my “Bot” via attachment with e-mail. I actually like this system better because it gives me a paper trail to find anything I’ve sent in (searching my e-mail “sent” folder) – Hubdoc’s app doesn’t let me search anything. Also, I am now coding everything myself using our Chart of Accounts coding sheet so I enter the class and code in the subject line of the e-mail which is super easy. An additional plus is that all invoices I get via e-mail can be forwarded to my “Bot” as well, which is basically identical to how Hubdoc works.

I’ll keep you in the loop with how Botkeeper goes, we’ve got a progress update meeting next week. There have been some small growing pains – ie. pay stubs not getting sent to employees. I also had to keep my Canadian bookkeeper on for small Canadian-specific tasks such as tax remittance, ROEs, etc. The quoted cost for this services monthly (billed hourly) is about 1 hour which is about $50.

[James Flawith]

Hey Frieda,

Thank you for your feedback. My accountant brought in some extra help to get this all sorted and we’ve refined my original couple of sheets. Here’s the final version:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tW_yI1LYIvA1HMpeXup6lbsPsXs-NwZKtiohb3ydnMo/edit?usp=sharing

A note from my accountant:

Just enter the numbers in the cells that are highlighted blue. Everything else is formula driven. You would use one of these for each employee, or have separate tabs in the worksheet.

The cells that are highlighted yellow are ones that could be hidden if you want, they’re really just there to work things out in the background.

The employee in the example sheet qualifies for an additional 15% of annual income if we hit our high annual target. Pretty sweet!

~James

[James Flawith]

Hey Guys,

Ok, since I lack the ability to sleep until I figure out a problem (and this is a fun problem!) I took this a bit farther.

In order to determine if this is a good idea, I wanted to take a look at what the numbers would be like if we hit our high target (18% profit margin) and used Precision’s estimated revenue, expenses and anticipated payroll for a year. I’m pretty happy with the numbers but everybody thinks their baby is the cutest in the world so this is where I need some help.

Here’s a second Google Sheet which shows my estimates, including the actual cost of profit sharing using the Precision GGOB formulas in the post above. I enabled editing in the GSheet but it’d probably be better if you downloaded it in Excel to tweak the numbers for yourselves. Ya, go on, download it and plug in your own numbers to see what this would look like for your company. Sweet, eh?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YHlad4ml5Oufb5U-yT7BI–HjC7FKL6tiIL0Xri1DLk/edit?usp=sharing

Lemme know what you think. Don’t hold back!

~James

 

[James Flawith]

Hello Beverlee,

Thanks for your feedback. An update: after searching I decided to try to clarify my expectations with my current bookkeeper by creating a Bookkeeping Services Agreement. Here’s what it looks like:

Precision Tree Services Ltd

Accounting Department Task List

 

Current Challenges:

• Development and implementation of a per job/contract costing system
  • Jobber? No.
  • QBO? No.
  • Internal custom designed app
• Look to streamline the system, remove inefficiencies and redundancy
  • Can Jobber time tracking replace TSheets? No. Use TSheets API for time tracking in internal Precision App.
  • Is Hubdoc needed? Yes.
  • Does QBO work better for us than QB Desktop would? Yes. Remote access to financials. Current custom reporting.

Weekly Responsibilities

• Post payables to QBO from Hubdoc
• Create (raise) sales invoices to BC Hydro via Ariba Network as they occur
• Check that Jobber has synced with QBO successfully and make changes as necessary
• Generate and send AP, AR, and Credit Card Balances reports to James and PTS Executive Assistant (Lindsey) every Thursday
• Phone and email support as needed

Bi-Weekly Responsibilities

• Add new employees from completed TD1 forms and Direct Deposit authorization forms
• Run payroll
  • James to review and approve time in TSheets (or Jobber) every other Monday
  • Post time and run payroll
  • Forward manual cheques info to PTS Executive Assistant (Lindsey) for payment
  • Crate paystubs and upload to Dropbox (folder for each employee?)
• LifeBiz Customer Experience Manager Lindsey’s LBE hours (cost) moved to LBE – currently paid by Precision
• Prepare any ROE’s

Monthly

• Reconcile all bank and credit card accounts; to be completed by the 15th day of the following month
• Ensure the “Due To/From Life Biz” ledger is balanced with its counterpart in the Life Biz Books
• Transfer for “Precision Savings Plan” = 15% of all Revenues transferred from PTS chequing to PTS savings each month
• Remit and pay source deductions
• Remit corporate tax installment payments
• Post any accruals as required
• Review Loan balances and their terms
• Monthly meeting to review systems, policies, procedures and target improvements
  • Issues, improvements, performance

Quarterly

• WorkSafeBC reporting and remittance
• GST preparation and remittance

Annually

• T4 and T4A’s for all employees and contractors
• Year-end for the company completed by November 30th annually
• Respond to questions from the YE CPA

Notes

• Please ensure all correspondence addressed to precisiontreeservicesltd@gmail.com
• No payments or movement of monies in and out of any precision bank and credit card account will be performed without written permission from a signing authority on the account
• Monthly meeting, if necessary. An agenda will be created sent ahead of meeting for review. The Agenda will always start with a review of the Balance Sheet and P&L and bank reconciliation reports.

I have also been extremely diligent in limiting the communication with the bookkeeper. I had been engaging them for financial planning and strategy but have stopped using them for this service. I know consult my accountant on things like my “Precision Profit Sharing Plan.”

 

Hope this helps anyone else with bookkeeping issues.

~James

[James Flawith]

I think one of the biggest revelations I got from the E-Myth was the differentiation between “entrepreneur,” “technician” and “manager” roles in business. It may seem a bit strange, but I had never thought of anything other than the technical aspect of the work, the doing of the work as “work.” I still struggle with this… it seems when I let my guard down I slip into “doing everything” technician mode.

I also catch myself getting frustrated when an employee makes a mistake or screws something up. It’s hard not to blame them. Ultimately, I’m the one who is responsible for creating a system to instruct employees how to do tasks, for ensuring the systems function correctly and then also for putting the right people in the right positions. So… that mistake? Ya, it’s my fault.