At this year's Xero Roadshow, we had the pleasure of being part of the Appy Friday Q&A alongside ChangeGPS, Practice Ignition and FYI Docs, answering questions about Everperform, our Xero integration and running a modern accounting firm with Xero Practice Manager.
The feedback from this session has been overwhelmingly great, and we'd like to thank Xero and the audience for listening to us. If you missed out on the session or weren't at Xero Roadshow, we've written up our Appy Friday Q&A interview with Everperform CEO Daniel Spitty below. If you're a Xero customer, you can also view the video here on Xero Central.
Patrick Frigo (Xero):Tells us a little about Everperform? What drives you?
Daniel Spitty (Everperform):
Everperform helps leaders and their teams achieve high performance by looking after their people. What drives us? Well, let me share a personal story that brings that to life.
I received a phone call on the 8th December last year, it was from a Managing Partner of a mid-sized firm, and a great client of ours. During the call, I asked her how she was and she said:
"Daniel, I am exhausted. I am done. I think my team is exhausted, they are done. But the work keeps coming. Everyone just needs a break"
COVID has certainly challenged many of us and it changed many things and as time went on many were just hanging on to the end of the year. And on this call, three things stuck out for me.
One. She really cares about her people.
Two. She really cares about her clients.
Three. She will work so hard, even when utterly exhausted. We have all been there, but we know deep down that working harder doesn’t necessarily lead to better results.
I am constantly reminded of the saying ‘very few people reflect back on their life and say, I wish I worked more!’
So during the call, we jumped on Everperform and had a look at what the energy and feeling was across her team. This trend line represents the energy and feeling score over time.
And as you can see, there is a sudden shift just before the call we had on December 8. Arming your leaders with these insights on their people is such an advantage to make informed decisions.
Patrick Frigo (Xero): What are the characteristics of the modern accountant?
Daniel Spitty (Everperform):
Everperform is relatively new to the accounting industry, we were born in sport, where measuring the lead indicators and capability of an athlete enables them to perform at their peak on game day.
We are learning that the characteristics of the modern accountant/bookkeeper/advisor are very similar to that of the characteristics of an athlete. You may not have the same visual in your mind, however, give you four parallels out of a long list:
First of all, we are all human. Let’s not forget that.
Secondly, in both industries your ‘fans/clients’ pay good money to watch you perform at your best. Ultimately they pay for the people.
Thirdly, the meaningful interactions between the athlete/employee and the coach/manager are pivotal to their success. In some cases the coaches choose the players, but also there are times when the players choose their coaches.
But lastly, there is a great saying from Peter Drucker which is ‘what gets measured gets managed’.
And just like sport has shown us, if you focus on the input measurements like recovery, training loads, nutrition, trust and confidence, the scoreboard will look after itself.
The measure of a good accountant and bookkeeper is more than just productivity. Performance is underpinned by the combination of wellbeing, relationships and productivity. This applies just as much to sport as it does to this industry.
The good news is that you can start measuring it today. We use smart technology to capture the wellbeing, relationship and productivity data and provide meaningful insights to help your people improve, like you can see here.
People perform at their best in different ways, and when you understand this it is such an advantage. Not only is this possible to do in your firm, but it is easy, quick and backed by proven methods and measures that we have researched and validated so that you don’t need to waste time experimenting for yourself.
Patrick Frigo (Xero): What are some examples of how firms are using Everperform?
Daniel Spitty (Everperform):
By focusing on the lead indicators to performance, firms like Power Tynan are achieving results beyond their expectations. And doing this repeatedly.
By starting to measure the confidence of their people, they improved it by 8% firm-wide within 90 days. In the same time period, they exceeded their expected billings by 18%. This is a classic example of focusing on the input and letting the scoreboard look after itself.
In parallel, the average time a manager was spending with their employees for their regular 1:1s went from 60 minutes down to 11 minutes. And we all know how good it feels to get time back in your day!
This was due to the insights dashboard you saw previously, it gave the conversation focus and meaning. So much so, employee engagement increased by 16% in the same period. And importantly, the resulting impact on increasing the average $ value per client was linked to measuring and increasing the employee focus on preferred/aligned clients.
If we had more time, we would share what they have achieved since!
Patrick Frigo (Xero): What information gets shared between Xero and Everperform? How often?
Daniel Spitty (Everperform):
Many of our modern firms are connecting Everperform to XPM and other practice tools in real-time to provide the correlations between your people’s lead indicators and their performance.
The most common data sets that firms utilise is timesheets, job and billing data. This data is updated from XPM to Everperform for each individual and this is automatically mapped to their performance passport. This is a great tool for managers who not only want to look at the productivity, effectiveness and efficiency of their people and how that is tracking but also how their performance is affected by their lead indicators like mindset, capability, energy etc.
And we are really excited as firms are now extending this into other data categories like communication with integrations into Microsoft Teams and Slack. This helps answer the question that many firms have which is, how do we work smarter, not harder.
Patrick Frigo (Xero): How do firms get started?
Daniel Spitty (Everperform):
As you have seen, the impact within the first 90 days is real. And we have specifically designed the 90-day get started subscription to create this impact within your firm.
We want to look after our Xero Roadshow friends, we are offering a free 15-minute advisory session on what your biggest performance challenges are and how to overcome them for the first 100 firms to get in touch via everperform.com.
So if you are a leader who cares about your people and your clients, and you are facing the same challenges with workloads and burnout, managing your people remotely, retaining and attracting top talent and finding time in your day to develop your people, then you now know there is a way forward.
I hope you have had a great week with the Xero Roadshow sessions, it has been a pleasure to be a part of it. A big thanks for joining us today, and a shout out to Patrick and the team at Xero for having us.
