Terrell Turner of the TLTurner Group explains his firm’s unique process for upgrading employee reviews and keeping staff performing at the levels they need.

Transcription:

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio for the authoritative record.

Dan Hood (00:04):

Welcome to On the Air with Accounting. Today, I’m editor-in-chief Dan Hood. Now we’re all aware that the accounting profession has a pipeline problem, but it’s important to remember that it’s not just about getting folks to enter the pipeline. We have to make sure that they don’t leak out at some point along the way. I here to talk about then ways to improve performance at all kinds of points in the talent cycle is Terrell Turner. He’s a co-founder of his own CPA firm, the TLTurner Group, and he’s got some really great thoughts on how to manage that and how to look at different points of the talent cycle and to improve how firms perform. Terrell, thanks for joining us.

Terrell Turner (00:33):

Hey, thanks for having me.

Dan Hood (00:35):

Let’s start, as I mentioned, there’s a lot of focus. I think quite rightly, there’s a lot of focus on the recruiting aspect of the pipeline, whether it’s getting people into the profession or getting people to sign up at firms. Are there other aspects of the talent cycle that firms aren’t focusing enough on?

Terrell Turner (00:50):

Yeah, I tend to look at the talent cycle in three stages. You have the recruiting, it’s just getting people in the front end and then I look in the middle. You have the talent development and that’s where you have a path for people to kind of matriculate through their career or that stops the leaking from happening so much. And then you also have the succession planning where you’re preparing the next level of leadership because not everybody really wants to be a leader, but also within that succession planning, you also have a plan for the people who were in leadership, what are they going to do next? Because if they stay too long, then you’re going to create this traffic jam and it’s just going to create a whole talent cycle issue.

Dan Hood (01:39):

Excellent. And those are really important issues. You may join a firm, but if you look around and go, wow, there’s a bunch of 70 or 80 or 90-year-old guys at the top of this firm, there’s nowhere for me to go. Which sort of brings up an important point, which is the notion that people have to have a sense that there’s a place to go, that there’s a room for them to go and a path for them to follow, to follow whatever their career may be. They may not actually want to be a partner, but they need to know what they can do at the firm. Then you talk about why it’s important to make sure that firm employees or staff have a sense of that, of a career path.

Terrell Turner (02:12):

Yeah, I think that’s very important because whether we like it or not, we live in an age of constant information and it has just changed the way that we think about everything. For me, I started driving when, I guess you can say it was a little old school before GPSs were cheap enough to actually have one in every vehicle to where I had to print out MapQuest directions and you had to learn how to read a map. And one of the first things you learn in reading a map is, okay, where does this road lead? And now that we live in this age of information, people are constantly trying to figure out, okay, where is this going to lead? And there’s so much information about career paths that I think a lot of times accounting and just any company don’t realize if you don’t paint the picture for them, they’re going to go find someone else that’s going to paint the picture and you may not like the image that they paint of your company.

(03:12):

And so I think it’s so important for organizations to paint that picture for people because it’ll help people see how they fit in with the organization. And then I think also even going back to that driving example, you can be on a road, but at some point you may need to make a turn or you may need to make a change. And I think if companies were a bit more open about painting what that career path looks like, people can kind of determine like, okay, how long do I stay in this career path before I need to make an adjustment or a change? Because I think that’s something that’s really hurt the accounting industry is some people I think have stayed at a organization longer than they should have and now they’re a little disgruntled and you start hearing all of these negative things come out about the accounting profession. And I think it’s not necessarily people’s issue with the accounting profession. I think sometimes they stayed in the same job too long because they didn’t know what the options were.

Dan Hood (04:14):

That, I mean, that’s certainly true that if you don’t know where you can go, you can’t get there and you may be stuck, but there’s also, there’s lots of options within the profession and the more people know about that, the more excited they may be about it. I mean, the sort of flip side is, yeah, you don’t want to get people stuck in a job, but also you want to make sure that they know that there’s cool other things they can do even if it doesn’t involve leaving the firm or the company wherever they are.

Terrell Turner (04:36):

Absolutely. And I think people just value clarity a whole lot. I mean, I think because we have access to so much information, people just don’t like being in the unknown. They just don’t like, people tend to feel like, because there’s so much information out there, if you’re not telling me something, that means you’re hiding something from me. And the worst of the worst ideas come when people feel like you’re hiding something from them.

Dan Hood (05:04):

And

Terrell Turner (05:04):

I think it’s just in the best interest of companies as well as the profession as a whole. It’s just like, Hey, let’s help paint that picture clearer for people so they can make the best decision within the information that they have.

Dan Hood (05:20):

Right. If you’re in the dark, what you’re going to imagine around you is the things that are in the dark, which are all monsters and scary. But I’m glad. This is great. I’m glad you brought up clarity. I want to dive down into a specific thing that you do that’s called, I dunno if you call it the age methodology. I know you call it age the golden age, but it’s this methodology used for keeping people specifically informed about their own performance. And I think this is one of those things that for a lot of accounting firm employees run up against the thing where they go to their annual review and they find themselves sort of blindsided by how their manager thinks of their performance. They’re sort of like, whoa, wait, what? I had no idea. And you have this really neat methodology for keeping people, for one, figuring out how to measure people’s success in their individual jobs, but also then for communicating it and keeping it going as a sort of continuous process of informing people of how they’re doing and what they need to do to do better. And this is a long introduction, I should just say tell us all about it, but give us a brief, an overview of it and then we’ll dive into some more specific aspects of it. The golden Age, what do you actually call, do you call it the Golden Age methodology scoring system? Yeah,

Terrell Turner (06:33):

So we call it the golden Age Process.

Dan Hood (06:36):

Process. That’s the word I was looking for. Thank you.

Terrell Turner (06:38):

So the way it came about was probably many people who are in any level of leadership doing annual reviews about almost two years ago now with staff members and let them rate themselves first. And then I come in and I say, okay, all right, here’s what I would rate. And I realized everybody rated themselves all fives. And I was like, oh, that’s not necessarily how I see. I was like, there is a breakdown here, something happened here that we’re not on the same wavelength on this. And as I began to talk to them, one of the things that I started realizing is a lot of times they were rating themselves a five because they were working really hard and they were working really hard at the wrong things or the things that their job didn’t really ask for. And so I realized, all right, we got to create a better way to approach this.

(07:31):

And so when we started really thinking about how do I paint a better picture for them of, hey, for your role, here’s what the priorities are. And then also just if I could give them feedback on a more regular basis, that would be helpful instead of waiting to the end of the year. And so one of the things that we came up with is, alright, I want to give you feedback on a regular basis, but I also want to build in some room to recognize that you’re not going to be a five at all times the entire time of the year, nor do I need you to. And so putting all that together, that’s how we kind came up with this method of just like, alright, so if you’re performing kind of average, here’s what average looks like. If you’re performing good, here’s what good looks like.

(08:20):

And if you’re performing at an excellent level, here’s what that looks like. And I was explaining this to a friend, they were like, oh, that’s like the age. And I was like, age? What do you mean she was average? Good. Excellent. Oh then, so we were just kind of doing some marketing came up, what’s a cool name? And so came up with the name the Golden Age. So it’s really a process is just painting a picture, Hey, here’s what average looks like, here’s what good looks like, here’s what excellent looks like. And then that lays out some very clear metrics for them to where we can have regular conversations with every staff member about, okay, where are you this month? What can I do to help you get to the next level? Or Hey, is this where you need to be because hey, there’s some stuff going on in life, whether you just came back from surgery, I want you to slow down. And just really being able to have the right type of conversations on a monthly basis as opposed to waiting to the end of the year and surprising them with, Hey, well here’s what I think of you. It’s like, let’s just have the conversation throughout the year.

Dan Hood (09:29):

Right. And I love that. I love one the flexibility and I want to talk about that a little bit, but I love the sense of this is a very specific set of almost KPIs for your individual job and what you need to be accomplishing on a regular basis. We’re going to touch base and talk about it. I wonder if you can give a sense of, and I know this is probably easier to do at a chart or a table or something visual, but can you give us a sense of the age targets for a particular role? And I’m just going to grab one that I happen to know, you probably have at Kins, but I’ve seen it in your presentations. But for a bookkeeper, what might be a set of age targets that they would be looking at?

Terrell Turner (10:05):

So when we’re looking at our bookkeepers, one of the things that we want to look at is their capacity. So how many clients are they able to support? And then we also want to look at, okay, are they actually meeting their deadlines? So do they have on time delivery, are they early, are they late? And then the next one we want to look at is there accuracy because hey, it’s great if you’re hitting the deadline, but if all your stuff is wrong, then we got a problem there. So we look at their capacity, their timing, and also their accuracy for a bookkeeper.

Dan Hood (10:40):

And those are measurable things. You’re supporting three clients this week or this month you’re supporting six clients next month you are two days late delivering something, you’re a day early, delivering it next month, that sort of thing. You can tie actual numbers to this. It’s not an impression, it’s an actual measurable metric.

Terrell Turner (10:57):

Absolutely. And that’s where we feel that it really made a big difference for the staff because I’ve gone through working with Fortune 500 companies, I’ve worked for smaller companies, I’ve worked in public accounting, and whenever you got to those annual reviews, it always felt a bit subjective. And one of the things that I was always a bit jealous of when I moved into corporate is like, man, the sales team have very clear objectives. You either hit it or you didn’t. And I always was a little bit jealous that they had so much clarity, whereas in the accounting department it was kind of like depending on how good your relationship was with the person who was giving you your rating. And I’m like, one is that’s not going to help me become a better professional and it’s not going to help the company. And it just makes it very awkward if they had to give me some feedback that wasn’t so friendly. But I’m like being able to utilize clear metrics and definable things. It’s just like I can actually help you go from average to good because we know what the numbers are and let’s just have the conversation.

Dan Hood (12:07):

It’s also the nicest of you started average and obviously people, there will be people who will be below average, but it’s not the same as it just starts and here’s where we need to be. And it’s not about, if you’re below it, we’ll figure that out, but it’s more accurate but also a little bit gentler I think, than a lot of those delivering a negative message in this, I imagine is easier than it might be in a situation where you haven’t talked to them in a year and you come to them and say, well, you just suck. And what are we going to do about that? In terms of the metrics, obviously we gave an example of a bookkeeper. Presumably you have to have a set of metrics for every role. Is that right?

Terrell Turner (12:48):

Yeah, so what we did is we kind of looked at our entire company goals because that was where I was seeing a really big weakness because when I did the reviews of two years ago and everything that the staff was putting down as to why they believed they deserved a five, and I was like, well, that stuff doesn’t actually help the company move to the goals that we have. And that’s where I realized there was misalignment. And so what we started doing is we laid out what are the overall company goals, and then we said, how does each role within the company, how does the finance director, the accounting manager, the senior accountants, the bookkeepers, the marketing team, how does everyone’s role impact the overall company goal? And then that’s how we begin to define what are the metrics that are for the bookkeeper, what are the metrics for the accounting manager? Because what we realize is if the bookkeeper is doing these three things, it is going to help the company move towards this goal. And then we set different targets for our accounting manager. If the accounting manager’s doing this, it’s going to help the organization move in the right direction. And so you are right. We had to set clear goals for each role within the company,

Dan Hood (14:08):

And then the way you set them is by tying them to those larger overarching goals. Which makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot more questions I want to ask and a lot more things I want to dive into, but we’re going to take just a quick break. Alright. And we’re back. We’re talking with Terrell Turner of the TL Turner Group about his golden age process, which is this, I think a really unique way of keeping people apprised of their progress, of letting them know what the things they need to do really are and of keeping them on track for that and also giving them a look ahead into what they need to do to perform successfully. We’ve been talking about the goals and you described how you got the goals from basically starting at what are the company goals or the firm goals and then working down from there to determine how each individual role contributes to those firm goals. I got to be honest though, I’m just going to throw this out. It sounds pretty labor intense and also the reporting dairy, not reporting, but going over these goals with people on a monthly basis or on a more regular basis than annual, it sounds pretty labor intensive. Do you have to build in a lot of extra time for it or were you able to set the goals once and kind of Yep, these goals are going to be good for a while?

Terrell Turner (15:23):

Yeah, so what I will say is on the front end, it was a little labor intensive. One is because we were just figuring out this whole model and the process, but once we set the goals at the beginning of the year doing the monthly reviews, the monthly reviews happen within 45 minutes. So now the finance director can meet with some of the staff and the accounting manager can meet with some of the staff because what we were noticing is that in order to have those healthy career development and those honest conversations, you had to have a lot of people skills, a lot of training. And what we realized is by laying out the golden age, because let’s say a senior accountant, there are three metrics that there are measured on and there’s what average looks like, here’s what good looks like, here’s what excellent, how did you do this month?

(16:20):

And then it makes it a lot easier. So what we noticed is it gave the finance director, it gave the accounting manager the tool that they needed to have a productive conversation in less than 45 minutes. And then I think what it did is it allowed, it gave room for us to be able to have some of those healthier discussions around, Hey, as a company, is there something we are doing as a company that could help you get to the next level of performance? Because that’s what we also notice is that if someone is underperforming expectations, it might be that, hey, the company has a very archaic process, which is slowing them down and preventing them, but we didn’t have a way of exposing that and having that conversation in a healthy way. And so I will say it took time on the front end, but now that the goals were set, and like I said, it is a very simple chart and that makes it so much easier just to have the conversation in less than 45 minutes on a monthly basis.

Dan Hood (17:26):

Sure. I love the fact, I mean, among other things I’m thinking of all the time, it will save managers around the world who are like, geez, I got to go and do a review of this employee. What do I do? What do I even talk about? I think a lot of managers go into those meetings with very little in terms of understanding of what to do. A lot of that has to do with the training that they’re not given. But to have a, this is a simple set, let’s look at these three numbers and say you were good on this one, low below on average on that one, whatever the case may be, that’s got to be a huge help for them. And then from there, it’s easy to say, okay, well you’re not doing well in this area. Let’s figure out why. And as you said, maybe it’s, I spend six days a week inputting a bunch of numbers that maybe they could be scanned or something like that.

(18:08):

It’s an easy way to surface problems, so I love it. That makes a lot of sense. And you can see how once you’ve got it established that it would help speed up the review process on the backend. I did want to talk about, you mentioned a little bit about the flexibility. For instance, if someone’s just had surgery kind of thing, if I was an excellent last month, but it happens, I’m just average this month, what happens? Am I in trouble? Do I get a pay cut? I’m probably fired. I’m fired. I you’re going to fired.

Terrell Turner (18:38):

So one of the things that we do is when we look at, okay, what is your performance this month? And then we’ll just have a conversation on, okay, all right, why did the person’s performance go from excellent down to average? Because usually there’s some reason there, unless the person is just like, Hey, I just decided to slack off, then we’re having a completely different conversation.

Dan Hood (19:02):

That’s a very different number.

Terrell Turner (19:04):

But usually it was, hey, something came up or like, Hey, we introduced this new client and this one had a whole lot more complexity than we’ve seen in the past. And usually it opens the room for it to have a healthy conversation. And sometimes that transition is very intentional. We add some staff members, staff member, he had just gotten married and I told him, I was like, you just got married. I’m married. I’ve been through the stages of being a newlywed. I don’t expect you to be excellent. I need you to do your job. I need you to perform at average level because all of our company goals, if everybody does average, we’re going to achieve our company goals. So if everybody’s doing average, we’re still fine as a company. Now of course, we have employees who want to go above and beyond, which I love.

(19:58):

And so some of that room was, it gave us the ability to have conversations with the staff like, Hey, you just got married. I know that you need to invest time into your marriage right now. I don’t need you staying at work late. Let’s get done what you need to get done. I need you at average level performance and then I need you to go home because this is a new life change for you. You went from being single to being married, focus on that. And I think it gave us a tool, a way to give people feedback because without this, even when I worked in corporate, if you went through a life change, people talk about it all the time about just that pressure to just, I can’t take any time off. I got to get back in there. But this gave us the tool to be able to have that conversation upfront to say, Hey, it’s okay if you scale it back a little bit because we understand we’re planning for this and I can tell you as long as you’re doing average, we’re still going to be good as a team. And then what we didn’t plan for, but what we did start to see is other people on the team with look at that and say, well, hey, this person’s going to be out on surgery. I can step up to be excellent this month to fill in the gap. And I was like, oh, it was a wonderful surprise. I didn’t expect it to play out that way, but I’m like, oh, I guess it works that way too.

Dan Hood (21:20):

That’s awesome. You build in a little extra capacity in the sense of people know that the meter can go back and forth a little bit so they know when to ramp it up or not. That’s great. That’s a neat little ramification. And I love this beat in part because there’s a tendency these with review goals and those sort of things to treat them as this sort of relentless improvement, everything’s got to be constantly always getting better. Now there’s ways in which we expect people to get better to learn new skills and develop new skills and that sort of thing. But on just your average day-to-day performance, we’ve got to recognize that there will be days where it’ll be great and days where I should say in this case, months where it’ll be great months where it’ll be good and months where we just average. And to be able to have some flexibility there is fantastic.

Terrell Turner (22:00):

Absolutely. And a lot of times what we’ll do is when we do the review with a person, and let’s say if the person is that good and we’ll say, okay, all right. If you want to get to excellent, what do you think it would take for you to get to excellent? And that’s where we can start to invite the staff member into their own development journey process. Now they can start thinking like, well, if we had a tool that automated this, I think I could get there. And in many of those cases, we looked at it, we did the research on the tool, we’re like, you know what? That makes sense. Let’s implement it. And it made everybody better to where we can start having those conversations and really start aligning things a bit more. And then that’s it. When we get through the end of the year, we look, we see, okay, all right, where did everybody perform at a consistent basis? And then we reset what the metrics are going to be based on the goals for the new year. So it’s not that, hey, people are going to stay at the same level all the time. As a company, we have to adapt and change. So as we adapt and change everybody’s baseline changes as well.

Dan Hood (23:14):

That makes sense. Let me ask you because that makes perfect sense. If we introduce a whole new system that makes everything twice as fast, we’re going to exchange your goals. You can now do your work twice as fast, but there’s still within the range of average to excellent. Let me ask you though, does this or how does this tie into sort of promotion? I mean, is it just a question of yes, you were excellent, and so that’s part of how we measure you for your next job? Or are there ways that can be built into assessments for moving up?

Terrell Turner (23:46):

Yeah, the way we think about it is, and I explain it to the staff, is average is what you have to do to keep your job. So that’s very baseline good is where you start to see bonuses show up and that’s where you’re doing a little bit more than just the baseline. And then excellent, when it’s time for promotions, we’re going to look at the people who are performing excellent because those are the people who are showing that hey, they can get a good handle on their current role to actually look, how do I either create more capacity or how do I actually improve? And it’s not necessarily just from a, Hey, we only want to pick the people who are just going to push, push, push. But it’s like to get to excellent, you do have to add a little bit of innovation to how you do your job.

(24:38):

And I’m like, innovation is probably what you’re going to need at the next level of performance anyway, because if you’re a senior accountant and you want to go to accounting manager, you got to be fast enough to do your job and be supportive to the accounting team. It’s not going to be, Hey, you’re just going to stay an individual contributor. It’s like you got to be able to find ways to do your job efficiently so that you can create space to do the other things that come with this promotion that you want. And so the way we look at it is that we’re going to look at the people who are consistently performing it excellent first for promotions because those are the people that are exhibiting the traits to be successful at the next level or whatever role they’re in.

Dan Hood (25:24):

Very cool. Makes a lot of sense. I do have one last question. I could talk about the golden Age for a long time. I just think it’s a really neat specific and useful tool that a lot of firms would benefit from. So that’s why I’m talking about it. But I do, I’ve seen you speak a couple of different times at different places and you also talk about a different point on the sort of talent cycle at the very beginning of it, the onboarding process. So you said sort of a tendency to focus on and we just recruit ’em, then we’re all set, but from the minute you recruit them, there’s a bunch of other things you could do to make sure you don’t eventually lose them down the line or lose them to profession down the line. One of them is onboarding. You have a pretty detailed onboarding process. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about that.

Terrell Turner (26:05):

Yeah, so we thought about what made our staff successful and what really helped us as we were scaling. And one of the things that I recognize is if they understood certain things, it would probably set them up for a success and it would also take pressure off of their manager. And so what I started doing is really sitting down how do we develop a 30 40 day onboarding plan to where I know when they start with a company, whatever position they’re in, we map out what do the first 45 days need to look like to make sure that they’re getting the exposure to actually be successful in the role. And one of the things that we started seeing as we talked to other firms, and a lot of firms would tell us, yeah, usually a person gets more self-sufficient around six months on the job.

(27:00):

And I was like, oh, for us, they’re usually self-sufficient around four weeks in. And they were like, how are you doing it? I’m like, we are very intentional about the first 45 days. And usually by the third week we’ve been intentional enough to where they can actually start to figure some stuff out on their own. And a lot of people were just like, man, that’s very different. And I would ask, I’m like, well, how do you onboard people? They were like, well, we get ’em started and we tell ’em to work on this client. And I’m like, yeah, see, we don’t do that. We’re very intentional on the front end

Dan Hood (27:34):

And one of those, it’s 11. But I think that’s very common for, I mean the bad process, the six month process is very common across the profession that you’ll just kind of learn it as you go there. In many of these staffing sort of questions, there isn’t a lot of intentionality, there isn’t a lot of sort thinking of, Hey, what do we really need to do to get someone going up and up and running fast? There’s just not a lot of thinking about it. It just hasn’t been that way for a long time. But as we deal more and more with the pipeline problem, I think more and more firms are going to discover that they absolutely have to think about it the way you guys are thinking about it. They have to think about every process, the onboarding process, the review process, the assessment process, the advancement process, the career development stuff. They have to think about it a lot more intentionally. So that’s one of the reasons I’m glad to be able to share or glad you’re willing to share all this stuff with everybody. Can

Terrell Turner (28:23):

I share one more thing please. Quick on that. So when it comes down to that, when I talked to a lot of other firms, they were very nervous about, man, that’s going to take a lot of time to do. And one of the ways that we sped that up is I met with the people that we hired and I said, Hey, within the first week, what would’ve been helpful for you to know? And we actually got the rest of the team involved with creating kind of that first 45 day process. And even in some of it, I would ask some of the staff, what would’ve been helpful for you to know then that now? And they would tell me, I’m like, Hey, you know what? You should make a Zoom video on that one and just explain it. And what it did is it allowed the current staff to also be part of the development process for the new people.

(29:15):

And so when the new people came on, they weren’t just coming to me asking me questions because they were watching training videos that were created by other staff members. So it gave them more people other than just me to come ask questions to. They can ask questions to their peers because their peers were part of that development process. And I think also just from a psychology standpoint, it gave their peers a vested interest in that person’s success. So it’s like now everybody wants to help this person be successful because we all played a role in bringing them onto the

Dan Hood (29:53):

Team. Right. Oh, that’s awesome. Those are, that’s spectacular. I love that. And again, it goes back to right, the thinking about it is the simple thing of saying, Hey, let’s just ask them what they wish they known or what they wish we taught them. So it’s such a simple thing, but it leads to such great stuff. As I said, we could talk a lot more about this, but any final thoughts before we go?

Terrell Turner (30:14):

Yeah. I would say for any company that’s looking to really look into something like the Golden Age or however they want to approach it for their company, I will say is it seems like a very daunting task on the front end. But once we got into it, one of the things that we realized is a lot of the stuff that we were doing and implementing the Golden Age process, I’m like, we probably should have been doing this already anyway, to where it just allowed us to correct some of the behavior that we had that we were just like, you know what? This really should have been being done already. And I think as people go through it, they’ll start to realize, yeah, this is probably something we should have been doing already.

Dan Hood (31:00):

Excellent. Alright, well let’s hope they get started right now so that the time they have to say that is limited. But Terrell Turner, this is great advice. I appreciate you coming on to share it with everybody. Terrell Turner of the TL Turner Group, thank you so much.

Terrell Turner (31:12):

Hey, thanks for having me.

Dan Hood (31:14):

And thank you all for listening. This episode of On the Air was produced by Accounting Today with audio production by Kelly Maloney. Ready to review us on your favorite podcast platform and see the rest of our content on accounting today.com. Thanks again to our guest and thank you for listening.