Bonus Ep 5: Ryan Lazanis - The Art of Saying No and Other Productivity Hacks

On today’s episode, we are talking about the art of saying no and other productivity hacks with Ryan Lazanis.

We discuss:

• The shortage of accountants and what to do about it.
• Will AI take over our jobs as accountants or will it not?
• Why Ryan rejects 95% of meeting requests and how he goes about doing it without upsetting people.
• Personal productivity and how Ryan manages his schedule to achieve business success, but still manages to have afternoons for triathlon training, Fridays for golf, and plenty of time for his family.

Our guest for today is Ryan Lazanis, CPA founded Xen Accounting, a 100% cloud-based accounting firm, in 2013. Following its acquisition in 2018, Ryan started Future Firm which provides coaching, community and training to help accountants quickly scale a systematic firm of their own that improves their lifestyle. Ryan currently educates over 7,500 firm leaders globally via his free weekly newsletter and coaches hundreds of successful accounting firms through his Future Firm Accelerate online coaching membership.

We discuss specifically:

[04:43] Why are people not entering into accounting?
[07:52] AI vs human interaction
[11:42] Thought about ‘company of one’ style as managing people was one of his least favorite things to do. One of his early hires was a Director of Operations
[15:46] Building redundancy for peace of mind while sacrificing profits
[17:04] Ability to say no
[26:06] Day-to-day calendar
[26:49] Ryan's default is 15-minute meetings
[31:18] Carving out time for himself
[33:33] Growing his firm through SEO and blogging
[38:03] Favorite type of content to create
[41:18] Skills to develop for accountants