You’re Not Being Dedicated — You’re Being Expensive

Why the smartest thing you can do this quarter is stop doing half of what you’re currently doing.

Let me ask you something, and I need you to be painfully honest with yourself.

What did you do yesterday?

Not what you planned to do. Not what your calendar said. What did you actually spend your hours on between the time you walked into your office and the time you finally dragged yourself home?

If you’re like most of the tax professionals I coach, your answer includes some combination of the following: preparing a handful of returns, answering client emails, chasing down missing documents, troubleshooting a software glitch, reconciling your bank account, scheduling appointments, formatting engagement letters, scanning paperwork, and maybe — if the stars aligned — doing 45-90 minutes of actual high-level advisory work that only someone with your license, experience, and expertise could do.

Here’s the problem. You billed eight, ten, maybe twelve hours yesterday. But how many of those hours required you? Not a competent staff member. Not a $49-per-month software subscription. You, specifically, with your credentials, your years of experience, and your hard-earned expertise.

I’m going to guess the answer is somewhere between two and four hours.

Which means you spent the rest of your day being the most expensive administrative assistant your firm has ever employed. Read that again. That should hurt you deep. You earned (or saved) $15-50/hr for that time but LOST $150-300/hr. Sound like a fair trade?

The Math That Should Keep You Up Tonight

Let’s do the quick arithmetic behind my last statement, and I promise this won’t feel good.

Say your target effective hourly rate — the rate you need to earn on productive hours to hit your annual income goals after overhead — is $250 per hour. That’s a reasonable number for an experienced tax professional running their own practice. Some of you should be higher. We’ll keep it simple.

Now let’s say you spent three hours yesterday doing tasks that a trained staff member paid at $25 per hour could have handled. Document chasing. Data entry. Scheduling. Filing. Formatting. Basic bookkeeping for your own firm.

You didn’t save $75 by doing it yourself. You lost $750 in potential revenue. Three hours at $250 per hour that you could have spent on work that actually requires your license and your brain, gone forever. You can’t get those hours back. They’re not sitting in a drawer somewhere waiting for you to redeem them next Tuesday.

And here’s what makes it worse — you probably felt productive while you were doing it. That’s the trap. Checking tasks off a list feels like accomplishment. Your brain gives you a little dopamine hit every time you clear an email or finish scanning a document. But productivity without profitability is just expensive busywork.

Multiply that three hours by five days a week, and you’re hemorrhaging $3,750 per week. That’s over $180,000 per year in lost revenue capacity, and you’re doing it to yourself while complaining that you don’t have enough time or that your practice isn’t growing fast enough.

The call is coming from inside the house.

“But Nobody Can Do It Like I Can”

I hear this one constantly, and I say this with genuine respect — it’s nonsense.

Can a staff member prepare a return exactly the way you do on day one? Probably not. Can they do it at 90% of your quality within 60 days if you actually invest the time to train them and build a decent checklist? Absolutely. And that 90% gets reviewed by you anyway, which means the final product going to the client is still at your standard.

Here’s what’s actually happening when you say “nobody can do it like I can.” You’re confusing quality control with task execution. Your job is to ensure quality. It is not your job to personally execute every task that contributes to that quality. A head chef doesn’t peel every potato. A surgeon doesn’t sterilize the instruments. They ensure the work meets their standard, but they don’t personally do work that someone else is perfectly capable of handling.

You went through years of education, passed rigorous exams, built a professional reputation, and accumulated specialized knowledge so that you could… scan documents and send calendar invitations?

Come on. You know better.

The Two Questions That Change Everything

Starting today, I want you to run every single task through a two-question filter before you touch it.

Question one: Does this task require my specific license, expertise, or professional judgment?

If the answer is yes, do it. That’s what you’re here for. Complex resolution strategy. Advisory conversations with high-value clients. Reviewing work product for accuracy. Signing off on positions that carry professional liability. Negotiating with revenue officers or revenue agents. These are YOU tasks. Guard them. Protect the time you spend on them. They’re the reason your practice exists.

Question two: If the answer to question one is no, can a staff member or software handle this at a lower cost?

If yes — and the answer is almost always yes — you need to delegate it, automate it, or eliminate it entirely. Not next quarter. Not when you “find the right person.” Now.

I know what you’re thinking. “But Dan, I’m a solo practitioner. I don’t have staff.” Fair enough. Then your next strategic priority isn’t getting more clients. It’s getting help. A part-time virtual assistant. A seasonal preparer. A bookkeeping service for your own firm’s books. A high school or college intern or even a stay-at-home mom who can work 3-5 hours a day. Something, anything, to get the low-value tasks off your plate so you can function at the level your license and expertise command.

A Practical Starting Point

Here’s an exercise I give every tax professional I work with, and it has never failed to produce an uncomfortable awakening.

For the next five business days, keep a simple log. Every time you switch tasks, jot down what you did and how long it took. At the end of the week, go through the list and mark each task with one of three labels.

“Only me” — tasks that genuinely required your professional license, judgment, or expertise.

“Train and delegate” — tasks that a competent staff member could learn to handle with proper training, documentation, and your review.

“Automate or eliminate” — tasks that software, a template, or a better process could handle without any human being spending time on them at all.

Most practitioners discover that “only me” tasks account for 30-40% of their week. Which means 60-70% of their time is being spent on work that doesn’t require their credentials.

Read that again.

Sixty to seventy percent of your professional working life is being consumed by tasks that don’t require you to be a licensed tax professional. And every one of those hours has an opportunity cost measured against what you could have been doing instead.

The Emotional Resistance Is Real — And It’s Lying to You

I want to acknowledge something here because it matters. The resistance you’re feeling right now is real. It’s not just about logistics or staffing budgets. It’s emotional.

Many of you built your practices from nothing. You answered every call, prepared every return, licked every envelope, and took out your own trash. There’s a deep identity attachment to being the person who does everything. Letting go of tasks feels like letting go of control, and letting go of control feels dangerous when your name is on the door and your license is on the line.

I get it. I respect it. And I’m telling you it’s the single biggest obstacle standing between you and the practice you actually want (and how to win back your time).

Control doesn’t mean doing everything. Control means ensuring everything gets done to your standard. Those are fundamentally different things, and the sooner you internalize that distinction, the sooner your practice starts working for you instead of the other way around.

What Happens When You Actually Make the Shift

The tax professionals I’ve coached through this transition consistently report the same outcomes. They don’t just make more money — although they do. They rediscover why they got into this profession in the first place. When you’re not drowning in administrative tasks, you have the bandwidth to actually think strategically about your clients’ situations. You have time to build relationships instead of just processing paperwork. You have margin in your day to handle the unexpected without everything else falling apart. The best part, you can have a life and get home for dinner by 5:30-6pm or go to church small group or coach that youth sports team (yes, all of these can be done in tax season).

You also become dramatically less stressed, which has a direct impact on the quality of your work and the longevity of your career. Burnout isn’t caused by hard work. Burnout is caused by spending your energy on work that doesn’t align with your skills, your goals, or your value. Nothing will burn you out faster than spending ten hours doing three hours of meaningful work surrounded by seven hours of tasks that didn’t need you in the first place.

Your Assignment This Week

Pick one task. Just one. Something you currently do yourself that doesn’t require your license, your judgment, or your expertise. Maybe it’s scheduling. Maybe it’s document collection follow-up. Maybe it’s reconciling your operating account. Maybe it’s formatting letters that could be templatized once and never touched again.

Pick one, and figure out how to get it off your plate within the next 30 days. Hire someone. Subscribe to a tool. Build a template. Record a training video. Whatever it takes.

Then do it again next month. And the month after that.

Within a year, you’ll have reclaimed hundreds of hours — hours you’re currently spending as the most overqualified, underpaid administrative assistant in your entire office.

Your license is worth more than that. Your time is worth more than that. YOU are worth more than that.

Now stop scanning documents and go do the work that only you can do.

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Want more strategies for building a tax practice that runs on systems instead of your personal heroics? The Tax Resolution Academy® gives you the tools, frameworks, and coaching to make it happen.

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