Nick Boscia just got back from a two-week honeymoon, and he didn’t check in with his firm once while he was away.
“I was completely able to unplug, and it was such a great feeling,” he told the attendees of the first Summer Workflow Camp session. Better yet, returning to the office wasn’t as painful as he expected: “When I came back, I didn’t have a ton of things waiting for me…because I do have written processes.”
That, in a nutshell, is the promise behind our four-part live series for small and growing accounting firms looking to run smoother, with or without their owners (because honeymoon or not, every firm owner needs a vacation now and then 😎). Nick, who is the managing partner of Boscia & Boscia, served as the “camp counselor” for the July 7 opening session, “The Summer Audit.” There, he led attendees through a live, anonymous, 12-question self-assessment built around one uncomfortable question:
Where are you still the single point of failure in your firm?
By the end of the hour, the polls offered a pretty clear answer. Perhaps the most telling data point: When asked what their firm could not survive losing right now, more than 60% of attendees said the same thing—a specific person. (And if you’re a firm owner, that’s probably you.)
TL;DR
- Over 60% of firm owners say their firm couldn’t survive losing one key person, usually themselves.
- Gap 1: You’re the system. Everything runs through you. Fix it by listing every decision that lands on you and setting client communication rules.
- Gap 2: Knowledge lives in one person’s head. Document the rare edge cases first and build a 30-day onboarding path.
- Gap 3: No plan for urgent situations. Define who handles what, and turn every new fix into a written protocol within 48 hours.
- Plus the poll results on where small firms actually break, and how documented processes let owners truly unplug.
Summer is supposed to feel lighter
Nick opened by referencing the season itself. The days are longer, deadlines are fewer, and “everyone seems to be at the beach taking Fridays off.” But for many firm owners, that summer mentality doesn’t match reality. Because the moment they try to sneak away, it becomes abundantly clear how much of the work they were propping up themselves.
The fix isn’t willpower; it’s workflow. But before building anything new, Nick urged campers to pinpoint exactly what’s broken in their current systems.
“Before we fix anything, today is gonna be determining what’s broken,” he said, adding that the ultimate goal for Summer Workflow Camp is building “a firm that really runs without you, not just survives without you.”
Before the audit exercise began, he established an important ground rule: “Answer the questions with how your firm actually works, not how you want to work.” This instruction set the stage for a totally transparent, brutally honest look at what’s really happening inside small firms.
Get all the links and downloadable resources here.
What the polls revealed
Boscia then hit participants with 12 live poll questions running the gamut from documentation and onboarding to escalation and client communication—and the live results painted a familiar picture of small-firm life.
For example, when Nick asked what would happen if an urgent question came in while the firm owners were unreachable, the leading answer was that it would simply wait until they got back. “Very common,” he said (and exactly the sort of habit that turns a two-week vacation into a two-week backlog).
Asked what breaks first when they step away, about 30% of attendees answered “everything funnels back to me.” On how long a brand-new hire would need before handling a client engagement solo, the most popular answer was about a month—though Nick tipped his hat to the campers who admitted that, the way things are currently set up, the honest answer was “maybe never.” (“That means you’re definitely in the right place,” he said.)
To his credit, Nick completed the audit right alongside everyone else—and he didn’t love all of his own responses. “Even my own firm, just doing this live, I’m thinking there are definitely a couple of processes in my firm that I need to make sure I get documented,” he admitted.
Key Results from the Summer Workflow Audit
Here’s a round-up of top takeaways from our live, interactive audit poll:
- 42% said they only sometimes update a process after something goes wrong (when they remember)
- 60% said they couldn’t survive losing a specific person in the firm
- More than a third said more workflows than they’d like to admit hinge on someone remembering how to handle the exceptions
- 37% said it takes longer than it should to handle urgent client requests when a key team member is out of the office
- 42% said that when something goes wrong with a client, the owner always handles it
- More than half said that while their main workflows are documented, gaps definitely exist
Each answer mapped to one of three workflow gaps on the session’s scoring handout, and by the final poll, every camper had a pretty clear picture of what was holding them back most. As Nick put it: “This is always the hardest part to swallow. It’s identifying your pain points…We’ve got to start there before we decide how we’re going to solve for these problems.”
Gap 1: You are the system
The first gap is common in firms where the owner is the operating system (i.e., the foundational frame holding up the entire business).
The signs are pretty easy to spot: clients call the owner directly, “every decision escalates up, and vacation means checking Slack no matter what,” Nick said.
His fix starts with an inventory: list every decision that currently lands on the owner, and separate what genuinely requires that person from what you’ve just “always done.” Even solo practitioners can start peeling tasks away. (Nick pointed to automating client reminders as a prime example of work that owners keep doing manually out of habit alone.)
From there, define explicit handoff points—who owns what, and what “owned” actually means—and create a client communication protocol “so clients know who to call, and not the owner’s cell.” Nick had a pointed word for anyone still handing out their personal number: “Hopefully at some point you say, you know, no more calling my personal cell phone, so you could actually disconnect from your firm.”
Gap 2: Knowledge is locked in someone’s brain
The second gap happens in firms where essential knowledge resides in individual people, not in a system or repository accessible across the entire firm. “Maybe you have a key employee, and if they leave, you and I both know that a lot of that information, a lot of those important processes, are leaving with them,” Nick said.
This one is personal for Nick. “I actually took over my dad’s firm; he had nothing documented,” he shared. “So me getting up to speed was really difficult.”
His advice for closing this gap starts in a counterintuitive place: document the edge cases first.
From there, identify your firm’s top ten “only this person knows how to handle this” items and write them down. Then, as a longer-term project, work toward building a 30-day onboarding path a new hire could follow without asking anyone a single question.
Gap 3: Protocols for urgent situations are not defined
The third gap describes firms with a capable team but no clear escalation paths. Whenever an urgent client situation pops up, confusion reigns, decisions get made inconsistently, and—as plenty of campers confessed in the polls—process improvement only happens reactively after something goes wrong, not proactively as the firm grows in size and complexity.
Nick’s fix: Catalog your firm’s most common “now what?” moments, then decide:
- Who handles each one,
- What the protocol is, and
- When (and to whom) it escalates, especially if the owner or main decision-maker is unavailable
Just as important: “Define what good judgment looks like, so your team could handle things without asking you,” Nick advised.
Keep in mind that this “rule book” should be a living resource. Going forward, whenever something breaks, turn the solution into a written protocol for the entire team within 48 hours. The trick is that you have to commit to that timeline all the time, not just “sometimes”—which, Nick noted with a laugh, is exactly how a lot of the room answered the question about updating processes after things go wrong.
And to the firms that found evidence of all three gaps in their organizations, Nick had this to say: “Well, congratulations. That’s why we have four sessions.” (If you haven’t already, be sure to register for the remaining camp sessions here!)
Camp is just getting started
To close out the session, Nick re-emphasized the likely disparity between the summer you want and the firm you have today—but, calling back to his own recent experience as a returning honeymooner, he ended on a hopeful note. “Today, you found your gaps,” he said. “Over the next three weeks, we’re gonna close them.”
Then, with the timing of a man who has clearly waited his whole career to say it, he delivered his parting line: “Lights out, campers.”
This was the first of four sessions in the Summer Workflow Camp series. The next one, “Workflow Reset” with Kellie Parks, takes place July 14, followed by Alisa McCabe’s “Out of Office Ready” on July 21 and the Stress Test finals, where a $2,500 team retreat prize is on the line, on July 28.
Register for the remaining sessions (it’s free!) or watch the full recording of the Opening Campfire to score your own Summer Audit. It only takes an hour to find out where your firm breaks without you.
