The Wize Way

Losing a good team member hurts, and it rarely comes out of nowhere. When the work becomes the same thing day in, day out, and nobody is talking with them about where they're heading, they start looking for a firm that will. In this episode, Kristy Fairbairn, senior Wize mentor and CEO of The Business Oasis, breaks down how firm owners can build stronger relationships with their team and keep...

Somewhere between $600,000 and $1 million in fees, a lot of accounting firm owners hit a wall. The clients keep coming, and the team keeps growing, yet every email, phone call, and question still ends up on the owner's desk. Hiring more people helps for a while, until the workload catches up again. In this episode, Jamie Johns, co-founder of Wize Mentoring and CEO of Sky Accountants, breaks d...

Who takes up most of your firm's time? Often it's the clients paying the least. In this episode, Wize mentor Thomas Phabmixay shows accounting and bookkeeping firm owners how to rank their clients from A to D, so the firm's time and attention go to the clients who matter most. He uses the Wizer AI Coach to turn examples of a firm's best and worst clients into a scoring system,...

A new team member's impression of your firm starts well before their first day. If their email isn't set up, the team doesn't know they're arriving, and your SOPs are buried where no one can find them; even a strong hire can start to wonder whether they've made the right move. In this episode, Dani Bray, Head of WizeTalent, and Kristy Fairbairn, Wize mentor, break down wha...

Ed Chan started his firm from a home office with no money for marketing and grew it to around $2.2 million in three years on referrals alone. This is the habit that built it. In this episode of The Wize Way, Ed breaks down how he turned every job into a referral, why the last 20 minutes of the work matters more than the hours before it, and what he built afterwards so the clients kept arriving wit...

Plenty of firm owners walk into their weekly team meeting having prepared the numbers themselves, then spend the hour explaining figures nobody else has looked at. Wize mentor Thomas argues it works better the other way around, with the team bringing the evidence and the owner arriving with fresh eyes and a set of questions. In this episode, Thomas breaks down the weekly team sync for accounting a...

Jamie Johns is in his accounting firm about one day a week, and he still gets a tip out to his clients every week without setting aside hours to write it. He spent close to ten years sending technical newsletters that went almost entirely unanswered, and when he finally changed what he was writing about he found the marketing took less time and gave him far more back. In this episode, Jamie breaks...

A firm can run for twenty years without anyone looking closely at profitability. Revenue grows, the team grows, everyone is busy, and the assumption is that it must all be working. Then a big client leaves, or wages climb, and suddenly the only question that matters is where the money actually goes. In this session, Tim Causbrook works through how to answer that properly, one team at a time. Tim i...

Marketing is the one part of a firm that most owners have already tried and already given up on. They hired an agency, or handed the socials to a junior, or committed to a weekly email that lasted about three weeks. It cost them, the leads never showed, and the conclusion they drew was that marketing doesn't work for firms like theirs. In this episode, Bren Ward pulls apart why that keeps hap...

Have you ever finished a training, felt completely clear on what to do next, and then looked up three months later to find nothing in your firm had actually changed? In this episode, Raul takes us inside the WizeHub for a full walkthrough of the tools built to close that gap. From the Freedom Map steps to the Task Hub, he shows how firm owners turn what they've learned into work that has an o...

Before Tim met Ed Chan in 2019, hiring at his firm worked the way it does in most firms. Someone said "we need more staff," so they threw more bodies at the problem. No structure, no org chart, no way of knowing whether anyone was in the right seat. Then he and Ed spent five hours mapping every person in the firm, strength by strength, weakness by weakness, and placing each one in positi...

Kristy Fairbairn wrote her vision, mission, and values early in her business journey. She pinned them above her desk and told nobody. Not her team, not her clients. For years, they changed nothing about how the firm ran.  In this episode, Kristy walks through what she does differently now, and how those three statements became the filter for who she hires, which clients she takes on, and when she...

Someone once told Ed Chan he should write a checklist. He was working 100 hours a week, so his answer was the obvious one. Where was he supposed to find the time? Everything that eventually got him out looked like that. The checklist. Training the hire. Writing the policy. All of it sat in the pile he would get to once things calmed down, and things never calmed down. Ed explains what changed his...

Have you ever lost a great team member out of nowhere, with no warning signs and no explanation that made sense? In this episode, Raul takes us inside the Wize Hub for a full walkthrough of the tools built to stop that from happening. From the team NPS to the career and energy audits, he shows how firm owners can get a true 360 view of how their people are really feeling, long before a resignation...

Every hire that goes wrong can usually be traced back to one step someone decided to skip. Not because they were careless, but because they were busy and it seemed like the step that mattered least. In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Dani breaks down how to run a proper recruitment process without a recruitment team: working out who you actually need, getting the job ad written in minutes, s...

There is a version of your pipeline where every lead has a clear next step and someone responsible for it. Getting there takes 30 minutes a week. In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Thomas walks through the sales meeting rhythm Wize teaches firm owners to run with their client managers, and why it works better than any CRM or automation your firm could buy. ✅ Why the purpose of a sales pipel...

Somewhere in your firm, there's a desk where every problem ends up. Maybe it's yours. Maybe it's your senior manager's. Either way, the work slows down every time a question lands on it. In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Kristy breaks down the PUB Meeting, the Daily Productivity Unblocker. One structured hour a day where blockages get cleared, questions get answered, and...

Hiring in a panic is one of the most expensive things an accounting firm can do. And most firms do not even realise they are doing it until the damage is already done. In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Dani walks through the hiring mistakes that hurt firms the most, why they keep happening, and the practical prevention strategies that change how you approach every hire from here on. You&apo...

The noise around AI is getting louder, and most firm owners are not sure what to believe. In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Ed Chan draws on 40 years in the industry to cut through the noise and tell you exactly what AI means for your firm, your team, and your client relationships. You'll learn:  ✅ How every major technology shift has played out in accounting and what it means for AI...

How much time would you get back if your meetings actually worked? In this episode, Kristy walks through the daily huddle, the simple meeting Wize teaches firm owners to run with their team every day, so you can build a quick daily touchpoint that keeps your team aligned and nothing slips through the cracks between conversations. You'll learn: ✅ Why the daily huddle is one of the simplest ha...

What does it actually look like to run a meeting system that keeps your firm moving without everything falling through the cracks after every conversation? In this episode, Thomas walks through the full meeting framework Wize teaches firm owners, from the daily huddle to the annual planning meeting, so you can build a clear cadence that keeps your team aligned and your action items from disappeari...

What does it actually look like to run a job interview that tells you whether someone is the right fit for your firm — before you make a decision you can't easily undo? In this episode, Dani and Kristy break down the questions that go beyond the resume and what the answers actually reveal about a candidate, so you can walk into every interview with a clear process and walk out with the inform...

You have tried the ads. You have posted on social media. You have handed it to an agency. And yet here you are, still wondering why the leads aren't coming. In this session, the Wize team breaks down exactly what it takes to build a marketing plan for your accounting firm that doesn't just look good on paper but actually gets executed week after week. ✅ Why 5% of your revenue should be...

When Melanie and her dad started One Stop, everything looked good on paper. But somewhere between the vision and the reality, things started to crack. What came next was a decision that changed everything, and a lesson most firm owners only learn the hard way. ✅ Why the external partnership model was costing them clients and what they did about it  ✅ What it looks like to have a coach who has al...

Somewhere between setting the goal and achieving it, something breaks down. And it's almost never what you think it is. In this conversation, Jamie sits down with Bren Ward for an honest look at what it actually takes to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and why the answer is simpler than most people think. ✅ Why the knowledge gap is the real reason people stay st...