CPA Chat: Extinguish Burnout & Spark Success with Michelle Tracz, CPA

Are you feeling the heat of small business burnout? Fear not, because Michelle Tracz, our go-to CPA, joins me to reveal tips that are nothing short of a springtime revival for your entrepreneurial spirit. We're blowing out the candles on burnout by celebrating our CPA Chat success and sharing ways to keep your business passion burning bright. From the art of delegation to the strategic sorcery of outsourcing, we delve into how leaning on external talents for tasks such as accounting and marketing can arm your business against fatigue. Listen in, as we discuss honing in on your strengths and smartly managing resources to ensure your business doesn't just survive but thrives.

Wave goodbye to the weariness of workloads with my arsenal against fatigue, where to-do lists reign supreme and achievable goals are the stars of the show. We toast to the small victories that keep us charged up and explore how cloud technology can be our knight in shining armor, smoothing out operations and offering newfound efficiency. By adopting cutting-edge tools, you can not only lighten your daily load but also carve out a fortress to shield yourself from the onslaught of burnout. So grab your earbuds and settle in with Michelle and me for a chat brimming with actionable advice and a dose of good cheer, all designed to power up your business journey.

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Transcript

Veronica: 0:40

Welcome to the Veronica Edwards Show, where we have fun financial conversations that everyone listening can apply to their personal and professional life. I'm your host, veronica Edwards, so excited to be back here. Season three on biz radio dot. Us, as always, want to thank the V team for downloading the podcast and listening live. It's been a fun ride. Looking forward to season four in the fall, but before then we want to hit 4000 downloads and one of our most popular segments we're having on right now is our CPA chat with fellow CPA, miss Michelle Trots. How are you, michelle?

Michelle: 1:22

Hi, I am wonderful. Hey, one of the most popular, that's awesome.

Veronica: 1:29

I love it. Yes, and it's growing and I'm asking folks that are listening please send us a direct message, hit a post on our page, let us know some topics that you want to talk about, because, again, I'm always kind of trying to see what are the trends and, just in general, for me and Michelle, having a variety of clients, some of the topics that seem to come up, but we would love for the V team to let us know if there's a topic that we haven't discussed yet in the past few seasons, because we definitely want to talk about it in season three and going forward. So, michelle, how are you doing? We are officially somewhat in spring. The show is going to air in March. How are you feeling?

Michelle: 2:10

I'm good. You know our busy season behind us, which is always a good feeling to get through the dreaded busy season for us, even though we're not tax preparers. But it's still a lot to get all of our clients finalized for the year end and 1099s and all the fun things processed, so it's good. I mean I'm excited, I love spring.

Veronica: 2:35

I love. I think spring and actually winter, surprisingly, are my favorite seasons, like those kind of back to back, and then I just kind of lose my mind in the summer and in the fall.

Veronica: 2:47

But with that being said, I thought this would be the perfect time to talk about small business burnout, because we start off the year either super invigorated or we're still on a slow burn from the end of the prior year and I feel like once you get to the end of Q one so that's that March timeframe for calendar year folks you start to slow down a little bit, you start to fizzle out. So I definitely wanted us to talk today just about some tips that could help offset the burnout as much as possible. Sometimes it's inevitable, it's going to happen. But, michelle, I would love for you to kick us off with some tips that can help with that business burnout.

Michelle: 3:28

Yeah for sure, gosh burnout. You know it happens to the best of us. It really does. You can't, you can't be, you know, at 60 miles an hour nonstop. You know there has to be a point at which you have to slow down or regroup. I think one of the most important things, particularly for small business owners and nonprofits, honestly is to be thinking about delegating your work. And delegate no, no, michelle we never want to delegate.

Michelle: 4:02

It's so it's so important, right? Because you can't as much as you want to. You want to wear all the hats and be all the things to all the people and you can't. So delegating is so, so important. And it's important also when you're in a managerial role or an owner role to make sure you're helping your team members understand how important this is and making sure that you're helping them to delegate tasks appropriately. It will add relief to your plate, for sure.

Michelle: 4:31

So one of the things one of my favorite things to talk about, of course, is delegation in terms of outsourcing. I mean, there are things that you're doing in your business or your nonprofit that, honestly, you shouldn't be doing or someone else should be doing, or there is a much more efficient and economical way of getting it done and that could be through outsourcing. So, again, not to toot our horns, but you know that's kind of that's what we do for our clients is help them understand what can be outsourced, but particularly the accounting. You know it's not something I know we thought about it traditionally, or we think about it traditionally as being something internal throughout organization and only the folks internally can do it. That's not necessarily true.

Michelle: 5:16

It can be done much more efficiently and oftentimes, like I said, with a much more economic, you know positive outflow, that you have someone with more experience and more talent and more know how do it than someone internal to your organization. So I implore the listeners to really think about what is it that you're doing, what can be done by somebody else by delegating, what can you outsource to others so that you can make sure that you're utilizing yourself and your team members most efficiently, focusing on their core competencies and what are they best at, and how are you using their time and their talent most effectively? So it's all about delegating, outsourcing, maybe hiring some new people, looking at better tools to use to even help you with that delegation. You know there's a lot of electronic things you can do as well, so be thinking about that.

Veronica: 6:12

Yeah, and that is really, I know, daunting for small business owners, because most of us, we are the talent, we're the doers of the work, so we're like what do you mean delegate?

Veronica: 6:23

You know, like this is my baby, my business. But to your point, michelle, there's so many aspects of a business that we just don't have the skill set for. It was different when we worked in a corporation and we might have worked in one specific department doing one specific thing, but now, if you're the business owner, you have to wear all of those hats and at least know enough to be dangerous. So, like you said, outsource your accounting. If you're not the best, like myself, where it comes to marketing and advertising, outsource that as well.

Veronica: 6:56

I'm always giving shameless plugs to QuickBooks and Intuit into our own Mailchip. Mailchip is a marketing software that a lot of people use that automates your marketing. Also, intuit has TurboTax, I think, also now Slack. So many things are being integrated to a lot of the systems that we're using. So again, don't be afraid to try it. And also, if it doesn't work the first, second or third time, do not give up, because I think a lot of times people get frustrated like, well, I did what Michelle and Veronica told me to do and this person did. It work out and it's like. That's fine. It's just like if the first t-shirt that you buy doesn't fit, does that mean you're not going to wear t-shirts anymore?

Veronica: 7:43

No you're going to try a different store, You're going to try a different size and you're going to get realistic with yourself and say well, actually I'm a size 10. Or 12. And I'm not a size two. So I think you have to be honest with yourself on what are you best suited to keep in your wheelhouse for your business to be successful and what makes sense to outsource and to delegate For sure yeah, couldn't have said it better myself.

Veronica: 8:07

Yes. So I'm going to move on to the next tip, which is stick to a schedule. And I feel like my brain is in my phone because my phone is my calendar and that's where my schedule lives. So I you know, as business owners and Michelle, I'm sure you can feel the same too I've heard that saying they'll say oh well, you don't work. You know, nine to five, you work all the time. And I'm like well, what do you mean that I work all the time? And it's because it's hard to turn off your home life to work life.

Veronica: 8:43

So it's very important, especially if you're a solo pernuer and you have family, you have friends. You have to decide what are your work hours and stick to it. And I've even schedule out my emails. At times, I hate to admit, but I'll be up, just like this morning, two, three o'clock in the morning working on stuff, but I'll schedule my email to go out seven or eight o'clock in the morning. One, because I don't want people to know how crazy I really am, and two, I want to teach people my hours. I don't want people knowing that I might be working on a Sunday night or a Tuesday morning early. So you have to commit to that schedule. If you say that your hours are from nine to five, then that's when you should be available, but still give yourself grace if there are times where there's going to be some exceptions to the rules. Any tips on this, michelle, when it comes to sticking to a schedule?

Michelle: 9:37

You know, I know, I think that that's super important and I think you have to just find the right balance. And it's about being true to yourself, because you know, when you work for a business, you know that company will take as much as you're willing to give why not? And the same rule applies to us solopreneurs, because you feel like you have to just constantly be on, and as much as you give to your business, it will start to become an expectation of the business and of an expectation you put on yourself.

Michelle: 10:11

So you have to, even from the very beginning, be very, very diligent about being very specific about a schedule and make sure that you balance and that you are holding yourself accountable to that schedule and to that balance. I think it will help a lot of people to avoid that inevitable burnout type thing.

Veronica: 10:33

Absolutely and a lot of these things. Honestly, folks listening, you can apply this to personal and professional, because the next topic we're going to talk about I think about this all the time. I'm like I need this in my personal life. Michelle is building a supportive network. That's so important. That's how I met Michelle is that I was going to CPA networking events with other CPAs. So if you can dive more into that, michelle, why that's so important.

Michelle: 11:01

Yeah, I mean because if we're constantly on that, I'll call it the rat wheel. You're constantly on the carousel of just go, go, go, go go. You lose perspective, and so it's really important to then surround yourself with this network of co-conspirators if you want people of like-minded people in the same industry or even other business owners or business managers, just being in a network where you can sort of relate to one another. And you mentioned the CPA group that we were going to and that that was really helpful. We could all share experiences, help each other with suggestions, recommendations, best practices, that kind of thing, but also just to vent like, oh my gosh, you have a whole tax season that was, or did you all get that notice from the IRS or things like that. So just a way to really just sort of release and vent and have a group of like-minded people.

Michelle: 12:03

I'm also very, very fortunate and I think all of us can say the same thing here in this area there's a lot of local chambers, business chambers that will have various groups that you can join and be a part of and use that also as your social supportive network, and one of those things is something several of the local chambers will offer what's called like a CEO round table, where business owners can use the group as sort of like their own board of directors, where you can share best practices, get advice. Certain people do things differently than you do or have different experiences, and so utilizing that collective information, that collaborative, is just so, so helpful, and it will really go a long way again to preventing burnout for yourself when you can use that group to bounce things off of, to get advice from, and to just really be helpful to one another, really be a supportive network.

Veronica: 13:00

Yeah, and for those that might not be able to physically meet, there's a lot of just like Facebook groups and different groups that also are still meeting virtually. So don't feel like you're like man, well, it's hard for me to get out. And now that it's also depending on the time of the year for folks, they might feel like, yeah, not necessarily there's a lot of germs going around and all that good stuff and that's totally fine. But there's something to be said. Anytime that I'm coaching folks Michelle, you said it right it's good to have like-minded folks, so people that's in your industry. It's also good to just have general business owners that just have experience in that business world and that social aspect.

Veronica: 13:43

Anytime I'm talking with other CPAs, I'm hearing different things oh, I didn't know, this pronouncement came out. Oh, this changed. Now this is electronic filing, all these things that I'm just getting busy with the day-to-day grind it's so important to have, which leads us into the next tip, which is just defining your goals, I think, for me. I'm a to-do list person, michelle. I love to check off. I'm so bad, michelle, I would just put something on my to-do list that I know I can check off.

Michelle: 14:12

Nope, I think I've got you beat. Like I am all about task orientation, so I'll put things on my list and then they'll. Oh, look at all those things I did.

Veronica: 14:21

Yes, yes, it's something about seeing it just like people with these vision boards and all that. It's not like rocket science. It's something about being able to write stuff down, scratch it off and saying that you accomplished it is everything. But it's also good to reevaluate your goals. They might be too broad or they might be unrealistic. So it's just good, when you're starting to feel that burnout or you know that it's coming, to just take the time to appreciate and celebrate the small wins and to pat yourself on the back and really define major goals and milestones and have different metrics.

Veronica: 14:58

You'll be surprised that even if you just say I just want to set like two or three easy goals for myself in each quarter, every three months, you'll be surprised. It starts to become just electric. And then you're finding other ways that, okay, how can I make this more efficient and how can I make this better? Because, like anything, if you just I mean it's true If you take 10 to 15 minutes a day to work on whatever goal you have, if that's a personal goal of losing weight, eating better, reading more, all of these things, it's the same with your business. So, if you just take the time to get that clarity and you're working on something it's gonna get better than if you just ignore it and kind of put your head in the sand.

Michelle: 15:44

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I can't agree more. And we help our clients with this all the time, right, we help them put together budgets. We say let's look at your budgets versus actuals. We need to get back on track over here. Or this has gone a little off to the side here, or maybe we wanna think about your end goal was to be at this point at this time. How do we get there? So always putting and setting goals for yourself is just super important and I think it will help in the burnout in the sense of like you don't feel again like you're on that rat wheel just endlessly, like there is a point at the end. It's an objective that it helps you to kind of refocus and redirect yourself and can really help you again not feel so burnt out. I think yeah cause.

Veronica: 16:27

I think a lot of times we're our worst critic and we think that we didn't accomplish so much, when really it's like, well, you had a big reach. Maybe you didn't hit 5 million, but you still hit 2 million. Or maybe you didn't get how I'm trying to shoot for 4,000 downloads, but I still got 3,500. So it's just, it's a goal, but also remember not to beat yourself up if you fall a little short, because, again, you're not always gonna knock it out of the park all the time, but it's just good to have something that you're striving towards.

Veronica: 17:01

And, michelle, I know we've kind of mentioned it already throughout all the things that we said. But one of the last tips is kind of streamlining streamlining your life to the cloud. I love that tongue twister. So we know that we're doing so much stuff online, but now we're finding that things are really starting to integrate more and more. So if you're paying for different services, you really wanna use it to its fullest ability and see how it speaks maybe to some of the other cloud-based items that you're using in your business.

Michelle: 17:30

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we are all in the cloud in our firm and, I think, the world of that technology, because it's especially when I as much traveling as I do I'm able to quickly get information that I know I have saved somewhere or a document that I'm looking for. It's all right there, no matter where I am. And again, it goes back to just making sure that it's a form of backup, it's a form of security. It's not resident just on this device, it's in the cloud, and so it's so super helpful.

Michelle: 18:05

I'll tell you that things like OneDrive and using the Microsoft Office suite of products has just changed our universe entirely. Our clients have access to portals through the cloud, through our Microsoft Office products. We all in our team have access to all of these tools that use the cloud, even things like using Teams for our meetings, for our video chats. It saves the recorded, either the meeting itself or any of the chats that we have. There's just so much that is out there that the technology exists to help you improve your business, to improve your life in general, and utilizing those things will really help you to control the burnout for sure. I think going to the cloud is just huge.

Veronica: 18:55

And also I find that clients are finding a savings because they might be able to eliminate a full-time person by using some of these efficiencies to your point where we can now use some of the AI to take notes and we can record some of the video conferencing, and now you have systems to where somebody is calling your company. There's all the different prompts and things that you can help streamline somebody that has to be there to pick it up. Even now, most people can remotely open up their office and lock it up.

Veronica: 19:28

And you know all those things where you don't need a body anymore I hate to say it to open up the office, make a pot of coffee. You know all of those things, which is nice to have, but if you are really looking to make your business as efficient as possible and then you're also trying not to burn yourself out, it's definitely worth your while to start looking at some of these resources. We've talked about Slack, square. You mentioned Teams, dropbox, google Drive. There's so many things. Almost everything is cloud-based and, as we talked about in our segment in February about data security, you really want to get to the point where you're not saving anything just on a device that only you have access to. You know, I should be able to do my accounting work if, as long as I have Wi-Fi and a smart device. It shouldn't just be that I have to be at this desktop because all the information is here and God forbid, you know, something happens and it gets completely wiped away.

Michelle: 20:28

Of course, yes, exactly.

Veronica: 20:31

Well, michelle, those are the highlights for business burnout just making sure that we're delegating tasks, you know, sticking to a schedule, having a supportive network, defining goals and, of course, utilizing all these amazing cloud-based systems that we have now. Of course, they do have a small price, but it does allow us to have the freedom to access things wherever we're at with ease. And that's the whole point of going into business for ourselves, not to make our life more complicated, but to make sure that we have all of these things in place. To make you know us. For me, ultimately, the goal was to have a good work-life balance. I'm not sure about you, but I'm trying to be like Michelle one day when I grow up, where I can travel all over and still be able to have time for the Veronica Edwards Show and all of your amazing clients.

Veronica: 21:21

So, michelle, as always, I want to thank you, but also if you can plug your business and if you're still taking clients. I know you're very busy in 2024, but how can folks get in contact with you?

Michelle: 21:32

Well, awesome, well, thank you so much. Yes, so it's wwwmichelletrotscpacom. We work with, of course, small businesses and nonprofits of all sizes, and exactly what we've been talking about helping clients to make the most efficient use of what it is they're doing and avoid the burnout for themselves and for their entire team. So that's what we specialize in, and happy to talk with anyone who would like some suggestions, some advice, or who might be interested in becoming a client of ours.

Veronica: 22:05

Wonderful. Well, thank you as always, michelle, for your expertise, over 30 years of experience, even though you're not a day over 32. But thank you so much for always making the time. And thank you again to all the listeners for tuning into bizradious for the Veronica Edwards Show on Wednesdays across all platforms on Biz Radio and if you miss the live airing, you can listen to all prior shows at VeronicaEdwardsbussproutcom.