Book Review: The E-Myth Accountant

I've long been a fan of Michael Gerber's E-Myth book. His concept of working "on" the business rather than "in" the business was a major theme of the Accountant's Boot Camp, developed by my good friends Paul Dunn and Ric Payne.So when I learned that Darren Root co-authored The E-Myth Accountant with Gerber, and especially since I was presenting with Darren at the Sage Summit, I was looking forward to reading their views on what Darren calls The Next Generation Accounting Firm™. The Firm of the Future is a topic near and dear to my, and VeraSage's collective, heart, and I was looking forward to learning another perspective.Areas of AgreementThere is a lot of good advice in this book with which I agree. Here is a bullet point summary of some of their better recommendations, most of which come from the chapters that Darren Root wrote:

• Darren asks a good question: "How did the accounting profession become a mass of technicians and very few business leaders?" David Maister's book, True Professionalism, is necessary reading to overcome this.
• Firms engage in mass client acquisition, whether or not they are a good fit for the firm. We call this the market-share myth, a form of cancer (growth for the sake of growth). It leads to incredibly weak pricing power.
• Same as above with offering too many services, which Darren argues keep CPAs at the technician level as well. The debate between the specialist and generalist is over—the specialist won. This video from the late Paul O'Byrne illustrates this very effectively.
• Darren writes:

  It's time to trust your people, let go, and give yourself the opportunity to work on your practice...not in it.

  Good point. Follow this path to its logical conclusion: it leads to scrapping timesheets and implementing a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE).

• It's hard to disagree with this:

  The old business model has long been to sell billable hours. Instead of selling billable hours, your firm sells complete solutions. If your goal is to get off the proverbial hamster wheel and build a business, it is critical to abandon the billable-hour model and adopt value billing [sic—he means value pricing].

  Darren believes that accountants are finally starting to hear the value pricing message, and I hope he's right. He says that hourly billing doesn't take into account efficiency or new technologies.However, that's not the major weakness of the billable hour. It's Achilles heel is it doesn't take into account customer value, and is based upon an incorrect theory of value.

• In a chapter written by Gerber ("On the Subject of Clients"), he discusses how to deal with client dissatisfaction with a 7-step process. What's missing, though, is the recommendation that firms offer a guarantee to all customers.
• Darren suggests spending a good portion of your marketing budget geared toward strengthening existing client relationships. Indeed. As the AICPA pointed out years ago, it costs eleven times more to acquire a customer than to retain one.

The GapFor as many topics as we agree on above, I'm afraid the chasm that exists between my vision of the Firm of the Future and the one laid out in this book is simply irreconcilable.But as with most disagreements, this is more a conflict of visions rather than a disagreement about facts. I'm reminded of what Blaise Pascal wrote in Pensees:

When we wish to reprove with profit, and show another that he is mistaken, we must observe on what side he looks at the thing, for it is usually true on that side, and to admit to him that truth, but to discover to him the side whereon it is false. He is pleased with this, for he perceives that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to look on all sides.

The side the authors are coming from is to build the McDonald's of professional firms, by laying out a path for creating "a highly efficient money-making practice."Yet a glaring omission from this work is any mention of the knowledge economy, or knowledge workers. This is the dimension the book ignores completely.A professional knowledge firm isn't McDonald's, nor should it be. This example of Gerber's has always irritated me, but it is particularly egregious in a book for professionals.This is where the author's analogies to the importance of systems break down in a knowledge economy. Gerber posits "The People Law: without a systematic way of doing business, people are more often a liability than an asset."This is strange statement, given that 75% of the world's wealth resides in human capital, according to the World Bank.The prominence given to the "system" over people is redolent of Frederick Taylor, who wrote:

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.

Peter Drucker refuted this logic in his 2002 book, Managing in the Next Society:

What made the traditional workforce productive was the system—whether it was Frederick Winslow Taylor's "one best way," Henry Ford's assembly line, or Ed Deming's Total Quality Management. The system embodies the knowledge. The system is productive because it enables individual workers to perform without much knowledge or skill....In a knowledge-based organization, however, it is the individual worker's productivity that makes the system productive. In a traditional workforce, the worker serves the system; in a knowledge workforce the system must serve the worker.

Yes, knowledge workers will create their own systems. That's the point. Two surgeons will not perform an operation the same way. Even two barbers won't cut hair the same way (nor would we want them to).This is why Steve Jobs says:

The system [at Apple] is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have a process.

Sure, there are things that can be turned into a repeatable process, but the value in knowledge work lies in where there is applied judgment, creativity, and wisdom. And you simply can't systemized those virtues. Indeed, if you try—with Six-Sigma, Lean, etc.—you kill them.The better solution is to capture the knowledge that is tacit in those unique ways of doing things so the knowledge can be spread across the firm. Yet any discussion of knowledge management and capture is missing from this book.The authors also seem to think that the systems should only be designed by the firm's owners, rather than its workers—this is a large part of working "on" the business rather than "in" it.But to borrow from Steve Jobs again, does it really make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do? Apple hires smart people so they can tell Apple what to do. Welcome to the knowledge era.The idea that all the intelligence rests with management didn't work in Frederick Taylor's industrial era and it certainly doesn't work in a knowledge economy. Worse, you cannot inspire creative knowledge workers by spouting Taylor's efficiency mantra.Today, knowledge workers are the system, which means they have to have a hand is designing it. Even auto manufacturers understand that those closest to the work are the ones who can improve it the most. See Toyota.Yet the cult of efficiency is worshipped throughout the book, even though Darren quotes Steven Covey:

If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.

Nowhere is the recognition that there's nothing more wasteful than being efficient at doing something that shouldn't be done at all. Or that efficiency—and technology—are mere table stakes, not a competitive advantage, since your competition can easily replicate those gains.Darren even suggests you identify those services you do best, which he defines as being able to perform with a high level of efficiency. But surely you should identify those services that you can perform most effectively—better yet, efficaciously—and that create the highest value.If there's that much efficiency to be gained, they are probably low-value services that should be outsourced (see the Stan Shih Smile Curve).Peak efficiency is a sign of no innovation.The same error is made when he claims the major factor driving realization is the existence of proper systems and processes. But this is incorrect. Price drives profit more than any other factor.Further, he writes that his firm's realization is over 100%, but that just means he's still comparing price to hours x rate; it has nothing whatsoever to do with pricing commensurate with value, as he claims.He also proclaims he's not a proponent of throwing away timesheets, since they can catch scope creep, measure efficiency, benchmark against other firms, and allow him to manage what he can measure.These are weak arguments for timesheets. If you're catching scope creep from timesheets, it's way too late to price it—you're billing and ducking in arrears at that point, and by the hour. Project management is far more effective.And the idea that timesheets measure the efficiency of a knowledge worker has been well destroyed in all of my books. This is illusion of control and one of the seven moral hazards of measurement.This defense of timesheets is particularly amusing when compared to what he writes toward the end of the book:

Remember: Just because you've always done things in a certain way doesn't mean you have to continue that tradition. If it's not working, it's not working. Abandon the old and make way for the new.

Except, of course, when it comes to the ancient tradition of maintaining timesheets.Also, towards the end of the book, Gerber explains that Time is not money; time is life. If true, then why are we dividing a firm's revenues and costs by life?[And even if you still believe the old canard that time is money, all that means is we are dividing cost by cost if we use the hourly metric system].There are other major areas of disagreement with the book. Their concept of a firm's vision is too focused on what and how, not why. It's far more effective to develop your firm's why, letting that drive your what and how, consistent with Simon Sinek's TED talk, and book Start With Why.Gerber posits that there are six types of clients around which your entire marketing strategy must be based. But I find this unconvincing, and it could benefit from Occam's Razor. Asking customers about their expectations would be more effective. Also, innovation is the firm's job, as customers don't innovate, they iterate.Then Darren writes that clients are a firm's greatest assets. But customers are not owned by firms, anymore than human capital is owned. Speaking of them as assets is inhumane and demoralizing.The book does not contain any endnotes, a bibliography, or index. Outside of the few books and authors mentioned, it would be helpful if the authors shared the books that have shaped their thinking.In conclusion, if you read this book, do so with this caveat: the book's gap of not discussing the knowledge economy is simply too wide for me to overcome. It overshadows everything they write, and the logic traps them into the cult of efficiency rather than one of creating value.We no longer live in an industrial economy where the talisman is Frederick Taylor's enigma of efficiency and the "one best way." A PKF is a human relationships-based entity, not a factory.On the positive side, now that I've met Darren, there's an opportunity for ongoing dialogue. If all goes well, we'll get him to trash his timesheets someday.