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Every tax firm owner says the same thing this time of year as the nice weather starts to give way to the realization that extension season is upon us: I need to delegate more. So we do. We hand returns to staff, push review notes down a level, and assign more of the file work to someone else's desk. And yet the owner is still the last person to sign off on everything, still the one clients call directly, still unable to take a real week off without checking email. Something is not adding up.
Here is the problem. What most firms call delegation is actually task offloading. You are moving work off your desk, but you are keeping every decision that matters. Which position to take on an ambiguous deduction, how to handle a client who pushes back on a fee, whether a judgment call is aggressive or defensible, all of that still runs through you. The tasks moved. The thinking did not.
Real delegation means handing off a decision, not just the labor around it. That is a much scarier thing to do, because it means someone else's judgment call becomes the firm's judgment call, and you have to trust it before you have fully verified it every time. Most owners are not actually afraid of losing time to review; they are afraid of losing control.
So how do you actually get there? Start by building a decision rights list for your firm. Write down the calls that come across your desk in a normal week, and sort them into three categories: decisions only you can make, decisions a senior person could make with a documented framework, and decisions that should already belong to someone else and do not because nobody handed them over on purpose.
Then pick one category from the middle group and hand it off for real. Give the staff member the framework, the reasoning behind past decisions, and the authority to make the call without running it by you first. Review the outcomes weekly for a month, not to override them, but to build your own trust in the process.
By year three, a staff member should own entire categories of review notes outright, not just the mechanical checks but the judgment calls within a defined range. If that is not happening at your firm, the bottleneck to growth is not headcount; it is you.
This is not about working less, although that may follow. It is about building a firm that can function, and even grow, without every decision running through one person. That is the difference between a practice and a job with more people in it.
Dr. Christine Gervais is a licensed CPA, using her skills to help businesses grow and achieve their fullest potential. Christine has a Master’s degree in accounting from Southern New Hampshire University in addition to holding her CPA license for over a decade. Notably, Christine is a nationally recognized speaker providing education to other CPAs on how to best serve clients as well as instruction on a wide variety of topics for business owners on how to maximize success. Christine prides herself on the value she can bring to clients with her extensive tax knowledge and provides strategic, forward-thinking financial strategies to help clients grow. When not behind her desk, you can find Christine spending quality time with her daughter and stepson or tending to the family’s excessively loved farm animals.
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