You are the highest-paid scanner in your building. Read that again. Somewhere this week you personally scanned a document, chased a missing 1099, or sat on hold with the Practitioner Priority Service, and you did it at your full rate, because nobody else was doing it and the task had to get done. That is a licensed professional performing a fifteen-dollar-an-hour task at a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-an-hour cost, and calling it dedication.
Every hour in your practice falls into one of a few buckets, and almost nobody has ever written the buckets down. Once you do, the question of who to hire next stops being a guess and becomes arithmetic.
Two Kinds of Hours Live in Your Practice
Some of your work is worth roughly ten to fifteen dollars an hour on the open market. Scanning. Scheduling. Portal resets. Assembling and mailing returns. Chasing the same missing document for the third time. Nobody needs a license to do any of it well.
Some of your work is worth two hundred fifty dollars an hour or more, because it requires judgment only you can provide. The transcript read that spots the problem nobody else caught. The decision between an installment agreement, an offer, or currently not collectible status. The consult conversation that turns a stranger into a signed engagement.
Most solo practitioners spend their week bouncing between both buckets with no boundary between them, which means the two-hundred-fifty-dollar hours keep getting interrupted by the ten-dollar ones, and the math never gets a chance to work in your favor.
The Math That Decides What Gets Delegated
Here is a rough rule of thumb worth running on your own numbers. Take your annual income and divide it by 2,000, a rough working-hours figure, to get your effective hourly rate. Or better yet, take the annual income you want to have and divide it by 2,000. A practice owner drawing $250,000 a year lands around $125 an hour. Now divide that by four. That gives you roughly $31 an hour. (Example only. Your income and hours will differ, and this is not a promise of what any practice earns.)
Anything you can reliably pay someone less than that number to do, hand it off. The divide-by-four is not arbitrary. It builds in room for training time, mistakes while someone learns your process, and the management attention a new hire needs early on, so the math still works even before the person is fully up to speed.
What Belongs in the $10 to $15 Bucket
Scanning and filing source documents. Scheduling and confirming appointments. Portal invitations and password resets. Chasing missing documents by phone, email, and text. Printing, assembling, and mailing returns. Logging incoming IRS correspondence. Basic transcript pulls that require no interpretation, just the pull itself. None of this needs your license. All of it currently costs you your full rate every time you do it yourself.
What Belongs in the $25 to $100 Bucket
Routine return preparation. Monthly bookkeeping and write-up work. Payroll tax filings. First-draft notice responses that a licensed preparer reviews before it goes out. Mechanical data entry on a financial statement. This work pays real money, and it is also not the ceiling of your practice. A firm owner who personally does all of it fills the whole calendar with work a competent staff member could handle at a third of the cost, and never gets to the work only the owner can do.
What Only You Can Do: the $250+ Hour
Resolution strategy and case positioning. The judgment call between paths on a marginal case. The consult that closes a real engagement. Complex entity and planning conversations. Reading a transcript with enough pattern recognition to catch what a checklist would miss. This is the work that actually pays for the practice, and it deserves the best hours of your day, not whatever time is left after the other two buckets are cleared.
The Hiring Order That Actually Works
Most owners get the sequence backwards. They hire a second preparer first, because prep is where the backlog is visible, and it feels like the obvious fix. It usually is not. The correct first hire is administrative: someone who takes the inbox, the calendar, the document chasing, the scheduling, the portal, the mailing. That single hire clears almost the entire $10 to $15 bucket, and it is what buys back the eight to twelve hours a week you need before anything else can be built.
Only after that hire is in place does a preparer or bookkeeper make sense, because now that hire’s time is spent on the $25 to $100 bucket instead of getting eaten by admin the same way yours was. Skip the order and a delivery hire without an admin hire in place still leaves you doing fifteen-dollar work between client calls. If you have not run the audit that shows exactly which bucket is eating your week right now, start with the calendar audit that shows where your week really goes.
What to Do This Week
Write your own $31-an-hour number, or whatever your own math produces, at the top of a page. Then list every task you did this week, and sort each one into a bucket. Anything below your number gets a name written next to it, the person or the hire who should be doing it instead of you, even if that hire has not happened yet. That list is your hiring plan.
I am on a mission to improve the lives of licensed tax professionals by showing them there are more options in IRS representation, so you can improve client quality, increase revenue, cut the hours, and get your life back. Knowing which hour is worth what is where that starts.
Reply and tell me which bucket is eating the most of your week right now. I read every one.
Example figures. Individual results vary. No income or IRS outcome is guaranteed.
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If you are really ready to make changes in your practice like this above, then you need to come to our annual Tax Pro Profit Maximizer Expo (typically held late Oct to mid-November each year). If you would like to attend this year’s event, then go to register at https://tppme.com/tppme-2026 seats are limited. If you really want to make an improvement to your revenue, your time, and your stress, then you need to be there.
Here’s to working smarter, not harder!
And a brighter future for your tax practice!
If you want to know more consider joining the Tax Resolution Academy® and earn your Certified Taxpayer Representative™ (CTR™) certification.
I hope this helps.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us.
Have a GREAT day,
With Love,
Dan
Dan Henn, CPA, CTR™
Co-Founder, Tax Resolution Academy®
Managing Member
Tax Pro Academy, LLC
P.S. Want to learn more about the Tax Resolution Academy®, go to https://members.taxresolutionacademy.com.
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