Law Firm Growth Podcast · Jan Roos - Legal Marketing Expert, Author, and Speaker

Why the Finance Person Gets Hired Last (And Why That's a Massive Mistake) with Adam Beckman

·35 min·2 clips

A bookkeeper codes the restaurant expense; a controller accrues payroll so two spike months don't distort your numbers.

1. The Law Firm Growth Podcast episode "Why the Finance Person Gets Hired Last (And Why That's a Massive Mistake)" covers when law firms should add a bookkeeper, controller, fractional CFO and tax planner. 2. Host Jan Roos interviews Adam Beckman, founder of Financial Synergy, who left public accounting in 2020 to do bookkeeping for a childhood friend's immigration firm in Austin, Texas, and became that firm's fractional CFO. 3. Beckman's thesis is that attorneys "are good at being a lawyer, not necessarily running a business," so finance support should be added in stages, starting with clean books. 4. He ranks bookkeeping first because "garbage in garbage out" applies to every later service, and he singles out the IOLTA account as the firm-level risk that can threaten a bar license, since most bookkeepers lack three-way reconciliation experience. 5. He places controller-level help at roughly $750,000 to $1 million in revenue, where the job adds accruals, payroll and 401(k) compliance checks and basic cash flow forecasting, and places a fractional CFO between $1 million and $2 million depending on growth goals such as reaching 5 million or 20 million. 6. He explains that profit and cash flow diverge because of balance sheet items like a payroll accrual, 401(k) payable and a $30,000 credit card bill not yet due, and that accrual-basis firms can look profitable while billing and collections lag. 7. Beckman describes the CFO's operational role as building dashboards in QuickBooks and Clio that track utilization rate, realization rate, AR aging, WIP and which employees are "A plus players" or need a PIP, and he says his team runs on EOS. 8. He says gamified productivity reports helped family law firms, and he and Roos agree with the line that A players want to know their numbers, with Roos asking whether Michael Jordan avoids the scoreboard. 9. On taxes, Beckman says "I guarantee any single law firm that comes to us, we can save them money," notes that returns can be amended up to three years back for missed items like the QBI deduction, and lists low-hanging fruit such as becoming an S corp, paying your children and using the Augusta rule. 10. Law firm owners and managing partners weighing their first finance hire will get the most from it.

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