Career advice: Be a Smooth Operator and be “in” with the In-Crowd

Blog post only

Just like any other business, tax advice is a business driven mostly by unit economics. You need to sell something (tax advice) for more than its cost (salaries). You can increase competitiveness and profitability, if you can standardise and scale to create a recurring money making machine.

If you are starting off your career as a tax professional, you are doing mostly grunt work. If you get more senior, you get responsibility for a bit more of the machine. And if you make partner, you get overall responsibility of the whole machine. Ideally, the machine is well-oiled and you don’t need to do much. You just tinker a bit here, a bit there, double check that they didn’t miss anything and help others out if they’re struggling. If the machine is about to break down, you step in and take over the roles of the more junior persons to fix everything yourself. So, you need knowledge to be responsible for the machine. But if you organise things well, the machine will run by itself churning lovely revenue for you with not too much day-to-day effort involved.

How well the machine runs is not purely mechanical. There is a personal side too. You need a team of people that work together smoothly. If there’s hiccups, you can move people around or slot new people into positions. You may need to coach people a bit too. From your perspective, that protects the revenue flow and helps people up, so that they can take over more of your ‘machine managing’ responsibilities, which often means you get to spend more time selling the products of your machines (and your fellow partner’s machines) to customers.

From the junior perspective, it matters what machine you get assigned to. Some are easier to manage, some are more fun to manage, some are more likely to result in other machines to manage and most of all, some are more lucrative to manage. So how do you get on the right machines? Office politics come into play. Ideally, everyone would play nice with “everybody get together” and  try to love another (https://open.spotify.com/track/7CQXyFX44CXmnuq8Bi9Dyc?si=2948de980f874026). But in reality you need more than that. Traditionally, people will tell you to “just do a good job”, be a smooth operator of the machine (https://open.spotify.com/track/7pLuEMFougkSHXrPBtNxTR?si=5ce3208b27164d5d), offer yourself up for work and get more machines. But most of all, you need to be “top of mind” for the people who allocate the projects. So that means you need to be “in with the “In” Crowd” (https://open.spotify.com/track/7m39WxltDLxpW08Yzd5nT5?si=313cf5188bbf4ce5), so you get projects allocated automatically, you keep doing a good job and the revenue from that will propel you upward almost automatically.

The in-crowd has a bad name. For the machine to work smoothly working styles have to align and people naturally gravitate to those they feel a personal alignment with. Some people call this “I’d like you more if you were more like me”. That’s bad for diversity and inclusion, but it also creates blind spots and creates worse results in the long run. Most adviser firms work hard to get their staff to work against their natural tendencies and biases, flex their working style and ensure that opportunities are allocated fairly. This won’t get rid of the “in-crowd”, but might reduce barriers to entering such “in-crowd”.

Usually, at this point in a blog post, I find a way to resolve the underlying tension (in this case between people’s intuitive preference for strongly aligned teams and opportunities afforded by letting outsiders in). But the topic is hard and there’s reasons organisations struggle with it. It may look like the tension is borne by outsiders trying to get ahead, but the onus for avoiding such undiverse and uninclusive outcomes is more on the insiders. So they feel the tension too. Or at least they should.

Obvious disclaimers: this is not advice. These views are my own and do not necessarily represent my employer.